Our Police State

[Chicks]

Buffalo police officers plead not guilty to assaulting 75-year-old man at demonstration

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/bu...man/index.html

Multiple videos clearly show that they assaulted the man, yet they are protected by FAR too many rules. This needs to change. Cops in this country need to be held accountable for their actions, just as you and I are (unless we're wealthy and white).

[Chicks]

How to reform American police, according to experts

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/1/2127701...m-george-floyd

Miles Davis, beaten by a cop for helping a white woman into a cab outside of Birdland, where he had just performed for a Voice of America broadcast. Nothing has changed since then.

[Chicks]

This movement is not anarchy. It could push America to be a better nation.
By Editorial Board

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...482_story.html

It seems to us many Americans are seeing, and beginning to understand. Not everyone may have internalized terms such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism,” but they see the inequity. They see it not only in criminal justice — the Minneapolis police use force against black Americans at seven times the rate as against whites — but throughout American life. They see that the novel coronavirus is killing blacks at 2.4 times the rate it kills whites, and that the economic burden — the job losses, the shuttering of small businesses — is weighing more heavily on blacks as well, though undoubtedly there is plenty of suffering to go around.

Many Americans, in other words, are seeing, and understanding, that racism was not solved by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It was not solved by the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The election of a black president in 2008 did not solve it, either.

It is a problem still with us, and in us.

[Oerets]

This will be a clue as where the country is heading.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Kt...A#action=share

[bobabode]

https://abcnews.go.com/US/buffalo-po...ry?id=71106787

Mr. Gugino, 75, could easily be my 89 year old friend who fought in Korea as a navigator in a B-24, Bronze Star. A frail elder who is flat out disgusted with the traitorous antics of 'Deadbeat' Donnie and his gang of criminals and isn't shy about telling anyone about it. He would be a blast to hit the streets with if it weren't for this pandemic that the coward in chief screwed the pooch on.

I miss shooting the breeze with my old friend. He's just been diagnosed with liver cancer and it's spread to his pancreas. He's very hard of hearing so standing at a safe distance and trying to converse doesn't work. I wonder if we will ever get together again for a meal and a beer. I sure hope so.

At this point in time anyone who still supports T'Rumpf must have rocks in their head or worse. It's going to be a pleasure voting these scumbags out of office this November. I just hope that my friend is still above ground to cast his vote. I think I'll get him one of those Cup o' Joe coffee mugs. He'd like that.

[Chicks]

Protests about police brutality are met with wave of police brutality across US
Use of teargas, batons, pepper spray, fists, feet and vehicles against protesters sparks lawsuits and international condemnation

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...s-george-floyd

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by Chicks

Protests about police brutality are met with wave of police brutality across US
Use of teargas, batons, pepper spray, fists, feet and vehicles against protesters sparks lawsuits and international condemnation

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...s-george-floyd

The police have gotten very bad.

[Oerets]

Been reading and hearing statements locally in the vain of, "if you are doing nothing wrong or illegal, have nothing to fear from the police!"

What country are they from?

There is a fine edge the officers are on everyday. They see a side of society most only experience from afar. This must effect a seeing life in general. Harden the approach taken when confronting the unknown. No one wants any officer to be hurt in the line of duty.

So what is the answers?
Better training for one and all. Body cams. Independent citizen oversight and controls. Neighborhood outreach programs. Education and funding for non lethal forms of policing.

Being smarter not harder.

[RickeyM]

Originally Posted by Chicks

Buffalo police officers plead not guilty to assaulting 75-year-old man at demonstration

No honor at all in these men. I might have a scintilla of respect for these men if they admitted what they did and accepted their punishment. Trying to roll the dice on a verdict, banking on a jury of their peers refusing to convict them they are going to use the judicial system in a manner they criticize of letting the guilty go free. Then there is the issue of their "supporters" that showed up and cheered their not guilty plea. Zero respect for them either.

The kicker about the Buffalo cops that pushed the 75 year old that resulted in his fall to the ground is that he was trying to return a helmet to the riot gear garbed police.

[Chicks]

If you’re surprised by how the police are acting, you don’t understand US history

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...nce-oppression

Local and state policing budgets have nearly tripled since 1977, despite declining crime rates. Even people unfamiliar with the police and prison abolitionist movement are starting, rightly, to envision that public spending could be used in more socially responsible ways.

But beyond the fiscal argument is an ethical one: policing in America cannot be reformed because it is designed for violence. The oppression is a feature, not a bug.

police were never created to protect and serve the masses, and our legislative and judicial systems – from Congress to the courts to prosecutors – have made this clear. Congress’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, incentivized law enforcement officials to capture Africans suspected of running away from slavery, paying officials more money to return them to slave owners than to free them.

Modern court rulings have steadily eroded civil liberties to give police more power and permit racially discriminatory policing, convictions and sentencing. This entrenched history of violent white supremacy is a lot to attempt to reform. So just as 19th-century abolitionists set the terms of their fight beyond incremental improvements to slavery, abolitionists today assert that policing and incarceration must move past modest proposals that fundamentally maintain the system.