African-American Asphyxiated by Police in Minneapolis - Page 156 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15106227
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. Do you see any reason why the USA, or any country for that matter should not be able to reduce police killings to the level of Denmark or Switzerland on a per capita basis? If we simplify it by saying that Denmark has one killing a year, then the USA should be able to attain 56 per year, since it has approximately 56 times the population. Is there any reason why the US cannot do that?


I can imagine there may be quite a few differences between both, but yes, the US should try to get to that level in the long run. Right now it's not as bad as Brazil or Venezuela, just a bit better than Uruguay and just a tad worse than Iraq (there's probably some underreporting going on there).

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. So, no, you cannot think of cops that are not being monitored by cops. I have no idea how you can then go on to say that they are “effectively being monitored” after accepting that.


That's because it's a bit of a red herring: The issue is balancing prosecutorial discretion, monitoring is something that is more less straightforward if bodycam footage is stored in 3rd party (e.g. State-owned) servers.

Pants-of-dog wrote:To reiterate:

Cops do not hold cops accountable. In fact, they routinely get rid of cops who try to do so.

Police unions do not hold police accountable. In fact, they openly champion that murderers caught on film be rehired.

DAs do not hold police accountable. Only one DA ever lost his job over racist police brutality in the history of the USA.

Bodycams do not hold police accountable since they are being monitored by cops or DAs. And police can turn them off or “drop” them with impunity.

So, how exactly are police “effectively being monitored”?


I've addressed all those claims already, but just to add: How did we come to find out about George Floyd's killing?
#15106243
Drlee wrote:Typical Trump supporter lies. I guess, Hindsite that you are just not able to read. Get an adult to read to you about Floyd.

I have read all the bullshit about "Big' George Floyd.

Drlee wrote:TBut the some murderers killed him in cold blood and are on trial for it right now.

The police officers are still innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Drlee wrote:Is that what you meant to say? Or do you prefer your disgusting racist lies?

Maybe I am like Biden and prefer truth over facts. :lol:
#15106245
@wat0n

1. So you agree that the current levels of police shootings are totally unnecessary for a developed country. Do you think that the US has such a high number of police killings for a reason?

2. You are making an error: you are argu8ng that police ARE effectively monitored, because they COULD BE monitored by body cam monitored by third parties. But since police are not actually being monitored by body cams reviewed by third parties, they are not being effectively monitored. Note that we already saw that police are not being monitored any other way.

3. We found about Mr, Floyd’s killing because of third party recordings (i.e. recordings that were not done by cops and were never controlled by cops or DAs) that were then put on the internet. In other words, the monitoring was 100% outside the system and only worked because it did not depend on the system. Thank you for providing an opportunity to discuss how the systemic racism and the blue code of silence would have stopped it otherwise.
#15106254
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. So you agree that the current levels of police shootings are totally unnecessary for a developed country. Do you think that the US has such a high number of police killings for a reason?


Unnecessary is not the right term. It is improper however. I think it has mostly to do with the fact that there's quite a bit of guns around and harsh drug laws. There's not much that can be done about the former but the latter can be addressed.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. You are making an error: you are argu8ng that police ARE effectively monitored, because they COULD BE monitored by body cam monitored by third parties. But since police are not actually being monitored by body cams reviewed by third parties, they are not being effectively monitored. Note that we already saw that police are not being monitored any other way.


They are being monitored, somewhat, but it's definitely not enough. Now, bodycams would probably be one of the best options for doing that.

Pants-of-dog wrote:3. We found about Mr, Floyd’s killing because of third party recordings (i.e. recordings that were not done by cops and were never controlled by cops or DAs) that were then put on the internet. In other words, the monitoring was 100% outside the system and only worked because it did not depend on the system. Thank you for providing an opportunity to discuss how the systemic racism and the blue code of silence would have stopped it otherwise.


There are also cases of police brutality that weren't caught in real time, yet society at large was still able to see the bodycam recordings to learn what happened and indeed to put the cops on trial. The obvious example would be the Van Dyke conviction for the second degree murder of Laquan McDonald.

Having civilians filming these incidents is one way of how society learns about these cases, but it's not the only way this happens.
#15106257
@wat0n

1. Do Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries with similarly low levels of police killings have drug laws that are significantly more permissive?

2. So you concede that police are not being effectively monitored right now.

3. Did you know the cops intentionally erased security footage from the Burger King that recorded Laquan McDonald’s murder? And they refused to release the cam footage until they were forced to by a court. And in that case as well, the DA allowed the cops to get away with it.
#15106265
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. Do Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries with similarly low levels of police killings have drug laws that are significantly more permissive?


Yes. Switzerland for instance allows recreational marijuana use below 1% THC and while higher percentages are illegal there is no penalty for surpassing that threshold. In Denmark, marijuana is illegal but possession only carries a fine. Under US Federal law, it's a misdemeanor with up to 1 year in jail, and in states where it's illegal penalties for mere possession can add up to another year.

But more importantly, gang activity is a substantial part of homicides in the US (around 10-15% of all homicides are gang-related). Certainly this opens up quite a few venues for deadly encounters with the police - and the illegal drug trade is a major reason for why they exist.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. So you concede that police are not being effectively monitored right now.


That much should be evident when I say using bodycams should be compulsory.

Pants-of-dog wrote:3. Did you know the cops intentionally erased security footage from the Burger King that recorded Laquan McDonald’s murder? And they refused to release the cam footage until they were forced to by a court. And in that case as well, the DA allowed the cops to get away with it.


I'm aware, yet in the end the legal system worked. And the conviction was possible thanks to that bodycam's footage (particularly the things he said before even arriving to the scene), as stated by the jurors themselves.
#15106268
Donna wrote:I have no idea how this can be seen as anything other than young African Americans using art mediums to push back against racism and hypocrisy.

Does it also make record companies money? Yes, probably because it's highly authentic in the first place. This doesn't really invalidate the political content of the art though (for the most part, record companies don't give a shit - if black radicalism is hot, they'll try to make money off of it).


I think this is right.

I also think one of the interesting aspects of music and art is when there is an expression that has a political & social element, but it is not even meant to be the main point of it...

When yuo look at the visionary work of guys like Rahsaan roland Kirk, these guys did not actually think that there would be meaningful change or success for them. And that is just wonderful.

It brings a new dimension to the art. It gives it depth.

Victory songs tend to have something hollow about them because they feel... finite in their completion.
#15106309






The brutality of capitalism
Police brutality is part of the brutality of capitalism, both in the domestic and international spheres.

This essay connects police brutality to the brutality of capitalism. Capitalism has long promised a better life for people, a promise that was begrudgingly accepted by elites in the post-WWII age. With the downturn of the 1970s, they introduced a replacement, neoliberalism, that, once dominant, made possible three developments: 1) endless war abroad and police militarization at home; 2) predatory capitalism, at home and abroad; and 3), the promotion of meritocracy to pacify citizens. Two decades into the twenty-first century, exploited citizens do not accept blame for their immiseration.

In the current moment, commentators often discuss police brutality as if it were disconnected from other kinds of injustices. But what many protestors understand is that policing occurs in the context of a prison-industrial complex, decades-long wage stagnation, and diminished prospects for the future. We should expect looting, for example, from citizens who are excluded from economic and political institutions, including property ownership. As the writer Kimberly Jones explained: “We don’t own anything!” American slavery, she reminded, was part of the history of capitalism, instituted to serve business interests: southern agriculture and northern textile work. In short, police brutality is one part of the brutality of capitalism.

Capitalism is marked not only by its considerable violence and inequality, but also its assurances of peace and equality. In his final volume on The Modern World-System, the late Immanuel Wallerstein showed how the capitalist world-economy appealed to hopes for a better life by promising fairness—in politics, in economics, and before the law—even as it went about securing inequality in those domains. The contradiction was partially resolved by the notion of delayed rewards. In the wake of the French Revolution, elites had to accept that publics saw themselves as citizens rather than subjects. Aware of the danger looming below, elites devised a clever strategy. According to Wallerstein, they effectively divided citizens into two categories, active and passive. The upper strata, well-to-do merchants and former nobles, kept the lower strata excluded from the political process. Over the last two centuries, minorities, women, and workers have been forced to separately fight for active citizenship.

The struggle for inclusion also played out on the world stage. The global logic of capitalism was that rich and powerful core nations became rich and powerful in part by keeping poor nations, the periphery, in a state of immiseration, first by colonialism and then by debt. The development of the core was financed by the underdevelopment of the periphery, a process shown by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Excluded groups in the United States were slowly brought into the ranks of active citizens. In the twentieth century, women, Blacks, and workers achieved some successes roughly concurrent with the rise U.S. global hegemony. This extended phase, what we in retrospect call the Long New Deal, lasted from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to roughly 1970. It was not that elites wanted to share the imperial pie, but that rapid economic growth made it harder to justify exclusion.

Then came the global downturn of the 1970s. Like all great powers before it, U.S. hegemony declined. Seeing an opportunity, the capitalist class, which had always opposed sharing the wealth, proposed that government itself was holding the economy down. Their neoliberal ideology spread fast, becoming part of the public consciousness. Its rise to dominance outpaced that of any counterpart of the previous century, faster than anarchism, socialism, conservatism, even perhaps liberalism itself. No other ideology has become so prevalent that its proponents need not mention it by name. Instead, it portrays unlimited corporate power as the natural condition of human life. Perry Anderson has called it “the most successful ideology in world history.”

Neoliberalism made possible new policies that could never have been attempted during the Long New Deal. Washington chose a threefold strategy, each with domestic and foreign policy components, and each with disastrous consequences.

One, the United States went to war. Its foreign wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the Middle East, have not yielded peaceful or stable nations. Its militarized police forces at home, enforcing “broken windows” policies and mass incarceration, have not yielded peaceful or stable communities. Observers might assume Washington simply misunderstood what was needed in other nations and domestic localities. But in truth its choices were a reversion to the historical norm: elites, worried about their standing, made sure it was the lower strata that bore the weight of the world-economic downturn. Cornel West recently remarked that talking about police brutality without talking about justice is like commenting on drone strikes without a wider conversation on U.S. imperialism. Police aggression in the face of protests, which were themselves sparked by police aggression, is a sign of a government at war with its own citizens.

Two, Washington unleashed predatory capitalism. The term “free trade” implies that companies were simply left alone to pursue their interests. But as David Harvey has clarified, neoliberalism meant extensive government support for corporate interests. For example, one after another, nations signed free trade agreements, which, in addition to harming the lower strata, also included protections for private corporate interests. These clauses, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) agreements, have allowed major Western corporations to wield power over the postcolonial world before international tribunals. At home, the United States relaxed corporate regulations, reduced the power of unions, and allowed wages to remain flat. Over the last four decades, global and American inequality has dramatically increased.

The third choice was rhetorical, which was perhaps necessary to head-off public anger over endless war and predatory capitalism. Rather than simply promise delayed rewards, the former strategy of elites, the new vocabulary promised immediate rewards if only people were shrewd enough to go after them. This was the language of meritocracy, which claimed that the American dream was available to those who, through education and effort, took advantage of the opportunities presented. No longer did elites talk in Rooseveltian language about a “better deal” or a “new deal” for the American worker. In the twenty-first century, rather than make social welfare commitments to the public, all Washington will do is blame folks for their own misery.

Capitalism in the neoliberal age promotes endless war, corporate aggression, and notions of meritocracy. The professional-managerial class may be surprised by protests and looting, but the people in the streets were not the first to break the social contract. The promises of capitalism were never fair. Under neoliberalism, there were no promises whatsoever. Police violence is thus only one element of the violence of capitalism. At a minimum, we should expand active citizenship once again.
https://mronline.org/2020/07/06/the-bru ... apitalism/
#15106346
@wat0n

1. So Switzerland and Denmark do not have significantly different drug laws. The USA also allows medical marijuana with low THC. The gang hypothesis might have some traction; please provide evidence for this claim.

2. Do you think everyone has the money to pursue PDs with lawyers for several years? Because the system did not work until members of the public spent (probably hundreds of) thousands of doallrs forcing police to open up. Also, police deleting security footage from a private establishment with no permission is definitely not legal, so that cannot be an example of the system working. This seems more like an example of justice being served despite many obstacles from the system.
#15106350
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. So Switzerland and Denmark do not have significantly different drug laws. The USA also allows medical marijuana with low THC. The gang hypothesis might have some traction; please provide evidence for this claim.


Medical being a key word there.

As for gang homicide statistics:

National Gang Center wrote:Number of Gang-Related Homicides*

*Because of the many issues surrounding the maintenance and collection of gang-crime data, caution is urged when interpreting the results presented below. For more information regarding this issue, see: www.nationalgangcenter.gov/About/FAQ#q5.

The number of gang-related homicides reported from 2007 to 2012 is displayed by area type and population size.

From 2007 through 2012, a sizeable majority (more than 80 percent) of respondents provided data on gang-related homicides in their jurisdictions.

The total number of gang homicides reported by respondents in the NYGS sample averaged nearly 2,000 annually from 2007 to 2012. During roughly the same time period (2007 to 2011), the FBI estimated, on average, more than 15,500 homicides across the United States (www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in- ... es/table-1). These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually.

Highly populated areas accounted for the vast majority of gang homicides: nearly 67 percent occurred in cities with populations over 100,000, and 17 percent occurred in suburban counties in 2012.

The number of gang-related homicides decreased 2 percent from 2010 to 2011 and then increased by 28 percent from 2011 to 2012 in cities with populations over 100,000.

In a typical year in the so-called “gang capitals” of Chicago and Los Angeles, around half of all homicides are gang-related; these two cities alone accounted for approximately one in four gang homicides recorded in the NYGS from 2011 to 2012.

Among agencies serving rural counties and smaller cities that reported gang activity, around 75 percent reported zero gang-related homicides. Five percent or less of all gang homicides occurred in these areas annually.

Overall, these results demonstrate conclusively that gang violence is greatly concentrated in the largest cities across the United States.


As for police killings, I'm not sure if there are statistics on gang-related ones, but the vast majority of those killed were seemingly armed.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. Do you think everyone has the money to pursue PDs with lawyers for several years? Because the system did not work until members of the public spent (probably hundreds of) thousands of doallrs forcing police to open up. Also, police deleting security footage from a private establishment with no permission is definitely not legal, so that cannot be an example of the system working. This seems more like an example of justice being served despite many obstacles from the system.


Indeed, financial constraints seem to be a real issue. As for the deletion of the video in that Burger King branch, it seems that the footage was not tampered with. It would be kind of weird for cops to tamper with that but not with the dashcam video.
#15106367
@wat0n

1. Switzerland, according to you, also only alows medical marijuana; i.e. marijuana with a THC content at 1% or lower. Denamrk does not even allow that. So US drug kaws are actually more permissive than Denmark. Obviously m this is not the reason for the incredibly high number of police killings. The evidence for gangs being a cause of police kilkings does not seem to exist. Would you care to try another hypothesis? Systemic racism, perhaps?

2. The manager claims it was tampered with.The fact that federal cops did not find that suggests that federal cops also protect local cops.
#15106370
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. Switzerland, according to you, also only alows medical marijuana; i.e. marijuana with a THC content at 1% or lower. Denamrk does not even allow that. So US drug kaws are actually more permissive than Denmark. Obviously m this is not the reason for the incredibly high number of police killings. The evidence for gangs being a cause of police kilkings does not seem to exist. Would you care to try another hypothesis? Systemic racism, perhaps?


Switzerland doesn't jail or even fine people for using that marijuana for recreational ends. Denmark only fines people for doing so, which reduces the need to enforce the law. And gangs, being a major source of violent crime, are of course part of the reason of why the neighborhoods they operate in have to deal with all sorts of violent crime.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. The manager claims it was tampered with.The fact that federal cops did not find that suggests that federal cops also protect local cops.


Oh yes, it's a vast conspiracy right? :lol:
#15106389
@wat0n

As far as I can tell, you are discussing minute differences between marijuana laws among three countries, and musing about gangs in some indirect way, and accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist.

Ideally, you would now show how any of this has to do with racism and police brutality in the USA, and provide some sort of evidence to support said claim.

Or I can guess what your argument is.
#15106395
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

As far as I can tell, you are discussing minute differences between marijuana laws among three countries, and musing about gangs in some indirect way, and accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist.

Ideally, you would now show how any of this has to do with racism and police brutality in the USA, and provide some sort of evidence to support said claim.

Or I can guess what your argument is.


Who's more likely to resist arrest, someone who would only have to pay a fine if he were arrested or someone who is risking jail time?
#15106405
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, Laquan McDonald, and many others were not resisting arrest.

But my answer is that I do not know because I can imagine many other factors affecting that decision.


And yet many, many more people were killed by the police in the context of resisting arrest and generally speaking violent incidents. People naturally don't care as much about them, but they do count among those 1200 or so killed a year by the police. Indeed, unarmed people killed by the police only represent around 10% of those killed by police action over time, and the figure has been trending down since 2015.

Just as importantly, addressing the underlying causes would allow cities to spend less in policing at little cost. In the largest ones, gang violence represents half of all homicides so maybe that has something to do with police killings and indeed policing in general.
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