What does it say when law enforcement can act this badly knowing they’re on video? Nuts
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Emotions get the better of people. It happens all the time. What they needed was a superior commander to come in and order them to stop. This was the lesson learned with Rodney King in Los angeles so many years ago. It's a true shame that the same mistakes get repeated over and over again.
Not like this.
If you are mad at somebody at work and you hit them a little bit that is egregious and completely unacceptable behavior that should end your career and is an actual crime. Even just hitting somebody a little bit is wildly off base for ordinary and healthy human interaction when angry.
Beating somebody to death is many levels of escalation beyond that. You don't need a superior to tell you not to do that. I am extremely confident that there will be exactly zero situations in my entire life where I am so angry at somebody that I even want to beat them this badly, let alone actually act on it.
This is about police institutionally seeing the populace as inhuman worms who deserve to suffer. This is not about emotions running wild.
> If you are mad at somebody at work and you hit them a little bit that is egregious and completely unacceptable behavior
The difference is that under no circumstances does an office job require violent interaction where as for a police officer, their job does sometimes require violent interaction. And in that sense, what these officers did is even worse and should be punished worse than if an office worker used the same violence: we empower police officers to use violence to intervene when necessary. We give them weapons and leeway to use force. To take advantage of that power could arguably be considered worse that if a civilian does it.
A police officer's job only very rarely requires a violent interaction. A reckless driving stop doesn't require that. Even a suspect fleeing from the police doesn't require that. The only time a violent interaction is required is if somebody is actively and imminently threatening other people.
I absolutely agree with you that we grant absolutely immense power to the police and they must use it with the most extreme possible care. Instead, we've created a system where cops see regular people as enemies to be crushed and where they can solve every one of their problems with extreme violence.
Tyre was viciously beaten to death for running, for aggravating the cops.
I've never understood why they even chase these people. They have their damned car and are able to identify them. Just go to their house afterwards and pick them up? They can run but they can't hide, and using violence like if they get away they are gone forever is just ridiculous.
I also don't understand it. I can only imagine that cops have internalized this sort of action as an ordinary expectation for them. I don't know if that is caused by their own training and culture - but I wouldn't be surprised if media plays a role. How often does a cop dramatically chase down a criminal in a TV show? All the time. And they are always considered right to do so in those stories.
> Emotions get the better of people.
It's culture. Everyone has "emotions" but, at least in my country, police officers don't regular beat/choke/shoot hundreds of people to death each year.
Most countries (of which I am aware) have similar issues, in proportion to their population, and its diversity. What makes the USA stand out is that it has a large population, high level of cultural/economic diversity, and very sensationalistic, highly funded media.
This is just untrue.
US Population: 331.9 million (2021)
UK Population: 67.33 million (2021)
In 2021 ( in the USofA ), there were 1,055 fatal police shootings, and in 2020 there were 1,020 fatal shootings. [1]
Est UK Police Killings ~~ 67.33 / 331.9 * 1020 = 206.9 per annum.
21 Annual deaths during or following police contact (in the UK) 2020-21 [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[2] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/research-and-learning/stati...
The US also has around 6x the intentional homicides per capita, compared to the UK. That should probably be taken into account, since a more violent population means police have to use lethal force more frequently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
So .. you're saying that the US population is more intrinsically violent than the UK population with a few thousand years of clan warfare and civil unrest, more violent than the New Zealand population of Maori warriors and colonizing invaders, more violent than the Australian population of criminals, soldiers, and aboriginals, etc?
It's pretty basic.
More violent policing leads to a violent population.
Lack of social support leads to a more violent populations.
Stop making excuses and look to root causes - why are there so many intentional homicides in the US? Perhaps predatory capitalism extending a slave economy isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I think they intrinsically have more guns, and that's about the extent of the difference.
Maybe you should check again, the US has around 28 police killings per 10m people. Far more than any other 1st world country. For example the UK has 0.5 / 10m.
But if your main argument is saying that police everywhere are terrible Id agree.
Ya this is utterly untrue. The US has orders of magnitude more police violence than most other developed nations. British cops don't even have guns ffs.
Damn, dude, you literally could not be more wrong. I suggest that you are very much unaware and owe it to yourself to become much, much more aware. It’s pretty easy, too: there’s this thing called “the internet” that you can use to self-educate.
If it takes a superior officer telling 5 others to stop beating someone who poses no threat to anyone we’re way too far gone.
If an employee at a store steals a bunch of merchandise do you say “what was needed was a supervisor to come in and order them to stop”? No, it’s understood that stealing is bad and employees shouldn’t do it.
For some reason some folks think cops are like feral dogs and should not have any moral compass of their own or be held to any particular moral standards. It’s a ridiculous take.
>It's a true shame that the same mistakes get repeated over and over again.
When the same mistakes get repeated over and over again like this, and get defended by the system, they aren't mistakes, they're policy.
It's this. The only reason why they're not getting away with this murder is because they got filmed in such an unambiguous way that barely anyone can defend their actions. There is no 'remaining context' or 'he was asking for it' wriggle room for neither the police organizations or their defenders.
The fact that it wasn't just one cop but an entire group of them should also indicate that this isn't just one guy going rogue. It's a systemic problem.
Yep. Imagine they beat Tyre only 20% as badly. He didn't die, but it was still a brutal beating. Would anything have come of it? The only punishment comes when cops go many levels beyond what is already grossly unacceptable behavior, and even then this punishment is far from guaranteed.
We’ll see if they go to jail: the la riots were the result of a jury saying that Rodney king deserved his beating.
Personally I think the most effective step would be to make funds for civil payouts come out of police retirement and overtime budgets. Relying on policing of the police stopping anything is unlikely: just last year a group of police murdered the officer who was investigating them, and had no meaningful consequences.
Most effective would be to remove the USSC policy of qualified immunity, which USSC basically made up in the 1970s. It makes it ridiculously difficult to successfully sue for damages.
The States could start to change this, but that would require activists to stop the racial arguments and go after the State laws.
What’s absurd is not only was QI completely invented, but that police apparently successfully argue “I didn’t know that I wasn’t allowed to break the law”, “I thought the law says being a police officer means you can beat people to death”, etc
Yeah meanwhile for everyone else “ignorance of the law is not an excuse…”, etc.
If we can't train police officers without turning them into rabid attack dogs that need to be leashed at all times, then you've just made the best argument that I've ever heard of for abolishing the police. Try to guess again.
Law enforcement is one of, if not the most, riskiest professions in the world - moreso than loggers, fishermen and even pilots. The stress that comes with that job is unpalatable - we should be saluting our community's law enforcement rather than scrutinizing them. Try to guess again.
loggers: 135.9 annual deaths per 100k
fishermen: 86.0 annual deaths per 100k
pilots: 55.5 annual deaths per 100k
pizza delivery: 24.7 annual deaths per 100k
police: 14.6 annual deaths per 100k
Also more dangerous than being a cop: roofers, garbage collectors, iron and steel workers, truck drivers, farmers/agricultural, construction/extraction, grounds maintenance, mechanics/installers/repairers.
That's objectively not true, in all rankings of things such as total deaths, fatal injury per 100k workers etc police officers as a whole don't even breach the top 20. #1 is logging, and #2 is aircraft pilot / engineer. You need to realign with the reality of the job.
That’s not true at all, especially in countries outside the USA.
There’s a lot of fetishised, institutionalised propaganda out there regarding the noble policeman, putting themselves in supreme danger every day to hold back the tides of evil that threaten to destroy society.
Reality is quite different
Sounds about right. There seems to be an underlying belief by many police that they have some right to mete out their own perceived justice— human nature not curbed by training or supervising or even body cams
Oh no, there is training. Specifically there are courses that tell police that every interaction may be their last and they should be ready to shoot anyone immediately.
I’m afraid it’s worse than that.
https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-tra...
Oh I know, I just didn’t want to have to search for sufficient citations as you did - I assumed in the absence of such id have a bunch of pro police at all cost assholes saying I was making shit up :-: