[Andorion]

Look I dont live in America, so I dont have on-the-ground knowledge, only what I read on the Web, but are you guys reading what you post? its ok for a police officer to shoot a kid who has a toy gun? Really? Is this how they are trained? To just go ahead shooting? So what if the kid didn't follow orders? He is a kid. Kids do silly things. Thats the point. If the default reaction is to just kill everything, then whats the point of having a so-called police force? Might as well put them in stormtrooper helmets.

Also I never understand this thing about people not being registered on the voter rolls. Here, where I live, it is compulsory for everybody to have a special photo ID called a voter ID to vote. And everybody has it, including the poorest. They have it because the government runs voter registration camps, go door-to-door with voter lists, tally them against family members and ask the unregistered (mostly newly 18+) to come to the camps and get registered. The camps are usually pretty close. And this system works. So if it works in India, why can't it in America which is supposed to be the wealthiest country in the world? And we have three times the population to register.

[amphibian]

I've some sympathy for police officers who basically have to undergo crash training to get a working knowledge of subjects that take years to really get a handle on.

Knowing the elements of crime?

Paperwork?

Walking/riding/driving safely everywhere?

Forensic evidence preservation? Chain of custody?

Dispute resolution/mediation?

Physically handling people of varying condition, sizes and aggressiveness?

Using/firing weapons safely and smoothly?

All of that takes years to really learn and they do it haphazardly. Most police forces take college degrees + 3/4 months of police academy + exams and a short apprenticeship/partnership on the job. The rest after passing the yearly certification exams is up to the officer - and some just don't improve much on their own over the years.

I know how to do the physical handling of people and some of the legal stuff - as in I can teach other people this and I have a state bar license. It took me six plus years for the first and three and a half for the latter and I'm just barely able to do them to a degree my teachers would call "satisfactory".

These are the education standards for the people we're elevating to a status of possessing the enforcement powers all the way up to killing without punishment.

Basically, I trust Nicodimas with a gun more than I do the average cop on the street.

[Silencer]

Andorion, on 26 November 2014 - 02:04 AM, said:

Look I dont live in America, so I dont have on-the-ground knowledge, only what I read on the Web, but are you guys reading what you post? its ok for a police officer to shoot a kid who has a toy gun? Really? Is this how they are trained? To just go ahead shooting? So what if the kid didn't follow orders? He is a kid. Kids do silly things. Thats the point. If the default reaction is to just kill everything, then whats the point of having a so-called police force? Might as well put them in stormtrooper helmets.

Also I never understand this thing about people not being registered on the voter rolls. Here, where I live, it is compulsory for everybody to have a special photo ID called a voter ID to vote. And everybody has it, including the poorest. They have it because the government runs voter registration camps, go door-to-door with voter lists, tally them against family members and ask the unregistered (mostly newly 18+) to come to the camps and get registered. The camps are usually pretty close. And this system works. So if it works in India, why can't it in America which is supposed to be the wealthiest country in the world? And we have three times the population to register.

OK, I want to be clear here: "toy gun" is NOT the correct way to think of an airsoft gun.

Down here in NZ, we don't even have the requirement to have orange tips. I have a few airsoft guns and frankly; they are 1:1 PERFECT REPLICAS of real weapons. Half of them you can basically use to learn field-stripping of the real things with. There is NO WAY you could EVER tell an airsoft gun from a real gun unless it was being fired, or you were literally holding it close enough that you can see 1) the 6mm inner barrel or 2) the markings on the side that specify it's a BB gun firing 6mm, rather than what most of these weapons actually fire.

....that second point? You can buy ones which have legit markings, licensed from the actual manufacturers on them, instead of those ones which make it clear its an airsoft gun.


Heck, I have one (only one, mind, the others are all much quieter) which I could actually understand someone unfamiliar with real firearms mistaking for being a legit gun from the NOISE it makes. It's LOUD. Not as loud as the real thing, but loud enough for confusion. And it fires fully auto.


There is no way for a police officer to tell from any distance at all that an airsoft gun is not a real gun. End of. Especially if they expect them to have orange safety tips and that's been taken off (irresponsible as fuck, I guess, but kids hate guns that look less than real, so...).


Further: a twelve year old. Now, a lot of you are treating them like they're six. They're not. They're twelve. By the time you're twelve, you sure as hell better know the difference between "playing" and being actually told by a cop to put your hands up. Twelve-year-olds aren't complete idiots with no distinction between someone messing around and someone being serious.
When you're twelve you're basically a young adult, for all intents and purposes. While you may not be very mature, you're not some kid living in the land of make-believe any more, either. So while I don't think the cop should have been on "shoot first" alertness, I don't think we can totally dismiss the fact that at 12, the kid should have known better also. Entirely viable for a 12 year old to shoot you with a real gun. Heck, a ten year old can fire a 9mm if they're so inclined.


Now, I firmly think there is no way in hell a cop should shoot anyone anywhere near that age unless they're SERIOUSLY a threat. As noted, non-lethal methods exist and should definitely be the go-to option before lethal force is used no matter what in the case of kids. I also think that cops shouldn't be on a hair-trigger as a general rule. Way too many cops go for the gun option in the states, from what I understand, than really need to. That means either cops are not being properly evaluated for that tendency or they are being trained incorrectly. Or both. Probably both.



But, as noted, if this wasn't a kid? You'd have every reason to suspect that gun was real. (The one mentioned upthread where someone was actually firing it? No way could a cop mistake that for a real gun...come on.)

[Gnaw]

Obdigore, on 25 November 2014 - 12:31 PM, said:

<snip>
They are trained to protect themselves first
<snip>

That is the root of many of these incidents.


Protect and Serve. Peace officer.

Two concepts that seem to have been misplaced these days.

[EmperorMagus]

I don't know what to think.

[Terez]

Officer Darren Wilson's story is unbelievable. Literally.

by Ezra Klein

[worry]

It's not clear yet that the officer even had Tamir's attention, though of course they claim they did (as they did in the John Crawford case, even though the video clearly shows them shooting him as they swarm him through the door out of nowhere from his POV -- that's the guy, also from Ohio, who was relaxedly carrying a Walmart product inside a Walmart store while browsing and talking to his girlfriend on the phone btw). Either way, the police initially refused to release the Tamir Rice video but the Rice family demanded it, and it's going to be published tomorrow (meaning our Wednesday, for non-US). So we'll see what happened.

[amphibian]

Sombra, on 25 November 2014 - 10:46 PM, said:

Not being facetious here, but how is it more difficult for black people to register to vote?

I knew about the felony thing - that came out of documentaries about how Bush et al stole the 2000 election, especially in Florida.

Leaving aside the unequal enforcement of drug laws upon the black and Hispanic communities, there's been active suppression/devaluing of voting by black and Hispanic people by white people (usually of righter wing political parties/organizations). The how of this gets really, really varied, but what they do is make it harder to vote by moving around district lines, voting places (farther away from bus or train lines), requiring photo IDs (which not everyone has), trying to cut short early voting/registration time periods and more. The voting apathy of the public at large doesn't help either. It's not required to vote and often, only 30 to 40% of a district's eligible voters will turn out to vote on stuff. The percentage rises for Presidential elections, but it's not anywhere near the levels many other countries experience.

http://en.wikipedia....e_United_States

The gerrymandering in the US is particularly bad. All political parties involved in government engage in gerrymandering (rigging election districts to produce dramatic majorities for one party above the other). They try to rig things their way, but by and large, the Republicans have won the local and state levels often enough that the lines really favor Republicans to win local and state level elections by slicing the voting districts to skew white in the in-between-city-and-country areas and concentrate minority votes in purely city districts as often as possible. The skill in gerrymandering lies mostly in the manipulation of the not-sure-fire-for-one-party district lines.

Let's say we have 50,000 minority people in Area A (has 5 districts that send one gov't representative each to State Gov't) who usually vote for Working Party or Democratic out of 150,000 , they have more of a voice in gov't representation if they're spread out across 5 different districts, rather than if they're all in the same one or if 2,000 are left in one district, 1,500 in two, 5,000 in one and 40,000 in another. If evenly spread out across the 5 districts, the 10,000 minority voters in each of the 5 districts have to be paid attention to by more gov't representatives. They're a big enough voting group that they have to be paid attention to. If they're all squeezed into the one, then the other four gov't representatives can completely ignore them and cater harder to the 100,000 non-minority voters. In a pure population comparison, 100k > 50k, but that's a third of the population being purposely marginalized. If there's a shaping of district that isn't obviously racist, yet manipulates the voting in such a way that marginalizes the minority vote, you can bet that the lines will closely resemble that.

Then add in the voter suppression stuff from above - specifically targeted to discourage minority voters - and make it worse as you go back in time. That shows a system that changed significantly after the Civil War and the liberation of slaves, but things like Jim Crow laws, subtle systemic bias in bank lending for home/business loans, federal/state housing acts, GI education bill benefits, confining of Native Americans to awful schools on awful land for farming/cities and more show that the system didn't magically clean itself up post-1865. There's been a long, long slant against minorities in government that carries on in diminished form today and a purposeful enrichment of white people. The voter suppression stuff is coming back in bits and piece as important judicial decisions like the Supreme Court spiking parts of the Voting Rights Act and state legislatures controlled by Tea Party/Republican party pass laws that make it harder for individual people to vote in the interests of prohibiting infinitesimally rare cases of voting fraud.

Yeah, the immigrants after the Civil War didn't build the system, have slaves or want particularly to oppress minorities - but they benefited from it all and not many worked to unfuck the system while more yet actively worked to enshrine oppression into the legislative/judicial/economic systems (thinking of J. Edgar Hoover, who made the FBI/police a very, very troubling mega-organization to better carry out his own biases against minorities of all kinds). Heck, I benefit from all this in many ways today and I was born in Nepal.

It's kind of amazing how the US minorities haven't burnt everything down for their abysmal treatment at the hands of those who've run the country on the local, state and federal levels.

[worry]

When The Daily Show was in Texas they did a wonderful piece on the gerrymandering of Austin...the largest city in America that doesn't pin down a voting district. It's divided by five different districts that bend over backwards in shape and size to accommodate Republicans: http://youtu.be/OzGzdEDjXR4?t=2m51s

[Terez]

As far as registration goes, stuff like this is not uncommon:

http://www.democracy...sing_in_georgia

There was a similar problem in Florida in 2012. Aside from registrations being thrown away, there are also voter purges, championed by Republicans who claim that dead people or illegal aliens are voting. Every election year, there are thousands of legitimate voters who are kicked off the rolls by Republican election officials. And they almost always get away with it.

[worry]

And an antidote to the Wilson interview:

[melonhead]

Terez, on 26 November 2014 - 06:26 AM, said:

Officer Darren Wilson's story is unbelievable. Literally.

by Ezra Klein

Wilsons story is just so bizarre. Johnsons is so much more believable. It just does not make sense for a man who had just robbed a store to then aggravate a police officer to the point of shooting. I mean, in Wilsons story Brown is running towards Wilson while putting his hand down his waistband. HE WAS NOT ARMED. Why would a man who had no gun on his person make a gesture like that?
There is also a lot of inaccuracies in Johnsons story as well. I don't know if we will ever hear the truth. Especially with no trial happening.

[Tsundoku]

Terez, on 26 November 2014 - 07:38 AM, said:

As far as registration goes, stuff like this is not uncommon:

http://www.democracy...sing_in_georgia

There was a similar problem in Florida in 2012. Aside from registrations being thrown away, there are also voter purges, championed by Republicans who claim that dead people or illegal aliens are voting. Every election year, there are thousands of legitimate voters who are kicked off the rolls by Republican election officials. And they almost always get away with it.

You'd think the Dems at least would have learned and attaempted to change things after the 2000 Presidential election, but I guess with having Reps controlling the vast majority of USA equivalents of our AEC (Australian Electoral Commission), plus the company/ies that supply the electronic voting doohickies, it's not likely anytime soon.

I'd say the Reps are shitting themselves when they look at the projections of the proportions of blacks and hispanics in the general population over the next 20, 30, 50+ years. They're going to have to do some fancy footwork to negate those numbers. Or simply make them not want to vote, which I'd say is probably more likely. I do find it grimly amusing how some of the most rusted-on Rep voters are those who are most disadvantaged by Rep policies when you take a halfway decent look at them. I genuinely have no idea why anyone who isn't a one-percenter would vote for the GOP, but somehow they manage. probably has something to do with them and their mates owning pretty much all the media, finance, industrial corporations etc and their skill at muddying the political waters. Will that change with the rise of the tech giants with their supposedly more liberal tendencies? Or will these new rich get co-opted into the Republican fold?

You guys really need to clean up your voting systems - it's a fucking mess. Not only do states have different systems, but counties within those states as well? Madness. Just go back to a piece of paper with "Do you vote for A, B, C, or D" and a tickbox next to each. Make it preferential or first past the post, whatever floats your boat. Hard(er) to screw that up.

This post has been edited by Sombra: 26 November 2014 - 08:24 AM

[melonhead]

Sombra, on 26 November 2014 - 08:12 AM, said:

You guys really ned to clean up your voting systems - it's a fucking mess. Not only do states have different systems, but counties within those states as well? Madness. Just go back to a piece of paper with "Do you vote for A, B, C, or D" and a tickbox next to each. Make it preferential or first past the post, whatever floats your boat. Hard(er) to screw that up.

I'd say they have all these different systems because it then makes it easier for the powers that be to rig it. If its just a straightforward, across the board, A, B, or C, that will make it a lot harder to scam.

[Terez]

Sombra, on 26 November 2014 - 08:12 AM, said:

I'd say the Reps are shitting themselves when they look at the projections of the proportions of blacks and hispanics in the general population over the next 20, 30, 50+ years.

That's a big part of why we're seeing something like a resurgence of the civil rights era now. It isn't that these issues haven't been around all this time; it's just that, for the first time since MLK was shot for leading a non-violent movement, people of color are approaching real political power. That's scary as shit for white conservatives, especially with this whole "black culture" renaissance which has become global to an extent.

That has happened before, and some of the most influential and celebrated musicians of the 20th century, in popular culture and academic culture, were playing distinctly African-American music. Jazz is a thing now in music schools around the world, and it influenced nearly every genre of popular music today; it was hugely important, and helped bring about the civil rights movement in the US, but it wasn't enough for human status in the eyes of many. So now we get rap, because hey, we asked for it.

The sad thing is, once that minority political power is achieved, and the race issue is finally aside to an appreciable extent, we'll become more conservative, because there are a whole hell of a lot of conservatives of color who vote for Democrats mostly because of the GOP's terrible approach to race. It will be a complex shift, though; it's difficult to express how much turbulence that will cause in our politics, which have been polarized around race issues since the Civil War.

Sombra, on 26 November 2014 - 08:12 AM, said:

I do find it grimly amusing how some of the most rusted-on Rep voters are those who are most disadvantaged by Rep policies when you take a halfway decent look at them. I genuinely have no idea why anyone who isn't a one-percenter would vote for the GOP, but somehow they manage...

It's mostly because there are so many issues, and they're all bundled together, and there are only two choices, which defies logic. It's often not a pragmatic choice made on the part of voters but rather a tendency to form one's opinion around the party platform which represents their opinions on various key issues.

But again, the race issue. The reason poor and struggling middle class white voters are able to stomach the policies that affect them negatively is because they see themselves as the hard-working tax-paying segment of the population, and the Others as the moochers living off their hard-earned dime, so they like the Republicans because they're all about lowering taxes. For the most part they're oblivious to the fact that GOP policies benefit rich people rather than themselves. There are many, however, who are keen to that and they tend to vote libertarian when given the opportunity, or at least they sympathize with libertarians. But then, they don't get that libertarian policies also benefit the rich, because when you take away the regulatory power of the government, you allow the monied interests to take control, and then your vote really doesn't matter. But libertarians tend to hold to their beliefs strongly and I learned a long time ago never to argue with them, because however the conversation starts, you'll end up talking about the Federal Reserve and/or the Gold Standard, which no one sane wants to do.

[worry]

+

http://spp.sagepub.c...553642.abstract

[Illuyankas]

Turns out the prosecutor has not only found the last four cops he prosecuted for shooting an unarmed person before this innocent of all wrongdoing, but was also the president of an organization that raised $432k for Darren Wilson's defense! Yaaaaay justice!

This post has been edited by Illuyankas: 27 November 2014 - 08:41 PM

[Terez]

His father was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty by a black man.

[Cause]

Illuyankas, on 26 November 2014 - 10:09 AM, said:

Turns out the prosecutor has not only found the last four cops he prosecuted for shooting an unarmed person before this innocent of all wrongdoing, but was also the president of an organization that raised $432k for Darren Wilson's defense! Yaaaaay justice!

So surely this means there will be a redo?

[Tiste Simeon]

Can anyone au fait with the US justice system tell me if that is allowed? Seems to me like a ref in a game coming on wearing one of the emblems of the teams playing.