The police do not have rights. They have responsibilities.
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If you donāt like this behavior by the police defund and deauthorized them. Follow that will layoffs and improve hiring criteria and training. Change the law. Take their power and protections.
We do have the power to change everything. If youāre so pissed off, do something about it.
If you do not see the difference between jaywalking and an armed standoff with federal agents, you are not to be reasoned with.
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Well yes, obviously.
You Americans are lucky you have jaywalking rules, over here in the UK there are so many dead bodies piled up in the roads from pedestrians who tried to cross that cars have to drive on the pavements.
Actually it turns out that people are quite capable of crossing roads without running in front of cars, and drivers are quite capable of avoiding the the ones who do jump out most of the time.
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Woah there. Youāre talking about your average American here. We have Honey Boo Boo on The Learning Channel.
Funny, the fact that Iām made of meat and that cars are made of metal is exactly why I use crosswalks and wait my turn.
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Thatās what I thought, and so I should be tased, beaten and thrown in solitary.
This sounds like a terrible title.
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Are you wearing a hoodie?
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You may be underestimating the road conditions in most of the US outside the dense cores of certain major cities, which does not include Austin or e.g. Los Angeles (which is much larger than Austin). Things are spread out to the point of utter ridiculousness in many cases. The US is big:
Even in university areas, in most cities the design of the roads is 100% car-centric and is meant to allow as many cars as possible to be on the road at as high a speed as possible. This simultaneously encourages jaywalking due to extreme distance between crosswalks, or lack of crosswalks entirely, and is particularly dangerous for those who do jaywalk due to relatively high speed and drivers not expecting to see pedestrians in their path (even at actual crosswalks and intersections).
I havenāt been to Austin but Iāve been to many other cities of similar size (as well as many larger ones). And Iāve also been to London - which I didnāt quite find to be the pedestrianās utopia you describe, but certainly not terrible - and as an extreme example Iāve also been to several cities in Thailand, where road rules are essentially non-existent and crosswalks (nevermind safe crosswalks) are a luxury you basically see only in the downtown core of Bangkok. Elsewhere you just take your chances and cross, waiting in the middle of the road if necessary. Drivers expect it so itās reasonably safe. Because drivers in the US donāt expect to ever see pedestrians, most of the US I would consider worse for pedestrians.
Am I to understand you want to believe it was some kind of police assault, and not a child who acted somewhat childish?
I wouldnāt know, the video doesnāt show it and all I can hear is a woman screaming.
and not a child who acted somewhat childish? It is of course your privilege to point at the sky and insist itās greenā¦
So, you saw and heard what you wanted to see and hear in the video, no?
As a native Austinite and former UT student, let me open by saying I have no particular love for the APD, but especially not Art Acevedo. (Only police chief Iām aware of to actually fire people via Twitterā¦ ironically, in response to an event sort-of like this where thereās documented proof of police misconduct.)
I say āsort-ofā like this because this is one time I donāt think police are in the wrong. The jaywalker is arrested just off of UT campus, over by the Kismet cafe. That street is relatively busy two-lane-each-way street that basically dead-ends at the end of the block at the ridiculously busy Guadalupe Street (the drag). On one side of the drag is the start of the original 40 acre campus, and on the other are row of small shops which separate campus from student apartments. College kids cross wherever they feel like, and it does make the area a slow, dangerous place to drive. (Student cyclists are even worse and Dean Keaton remains the only place where Iāve ever seen a cyclist pulled over for blowing past a red light.)
This woman wasnāt even arrested for jaywalking. She was arrested to failing to acknowledge that a cop had caught her jaywalking, and trying to walk away without identifying herself. If she didnāt have a prodigious talent for screaming (and werenāt a relatively attractive, white woman), I donāt think anyone would care one way or the other.
This is all just by way of reminder on the original incident, of course. Art Acevedo is still low on class, and this recent press conference seems to have been very poorly thought-out, even by his usual standards.
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Read the articles, watch and listen to the video, make up your own mind then Cow. There were people watching the entire incident who have been interviewed, a video of reasonable quality, as well as the APD chief speaking for his officers. All accounts point to a young woman who freaked out a little - childish behavior from a child, not mind boggling.
The single instance of someone claiming police violence in this case comes from your speculation. Not from the people watching, not from the young woman in question.
Seems important to you to make sure everyone knows that the sky is green for some reason.
There were people watching the entire incident who have been interviewed ā¦
Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts
Eyewitness testimony is fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate
Read the articles, watch and listen to the video, make up your own mind then Cow.
Iām not sure thereās enough evidence to make up my mind. But, apparently thereās enough for you, yes? She acted like a child and the cops did nothing wrong; That appears to be your final verdict.
What evidence do you have that the cops did nothing wrong? Keep in mind, that unlike you, I donāt think thereās enough evidence to make up my mind. But, you have now claimed thereās sufficient evidence to reach a final verdict.
The question still stands. What evidence do you have that the cops did nothing wrong?
Itās find it interesting that you think eyewitness testimony is important, yet you discount eyewitnesses that say the police were too rough with her and thatās what freaked her out in the first place.
Your bias is showing.
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A āmonopoly on the application of violenceā implies you think everyone should have the right to be violent and punish people. So, with Bundy as your example, then jay walkers should pull out a gun and say ādonāt even think about it!ā when they get a ticket? Or itās the duty of every citizen to be an armed vigilante? If you think a local cop handing out a jay walking ticket is actually evidence of Washington DC sending out a long tentacle and squeezing US citizens, then you are desperate to trace all evils back to Washington. Even Clive Bundy says he respects NV state laws and his local sheriff.
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@Cowicide and @Thecorrectline The time has come for you two to stop replying to each other.
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Interesting. I grew up in Montreal and jaywalk as a matter of course: most of the main thoroughfares in Montreal are one way streets, and itās easier to see the cars coming at you when you cross halfway up the block when the light changes. The reason you want to do this that the cars beside or behind you at an intersection donāt bother waiting for the crosswalk to clear before turning into the cross-street (especially the cabbies!). Itās safer jaywalking.
Of course, the standing joke is that there are only two kinds of pedestrians in Montreal, the quick and the dead.
Ironically, what with the Metro and all, Montreal is very much a pedestrianās city - lots of them on the sidewalks. It sort of encapsulates the entire controversy: downtown has been made accessible to cars, and Montreal drivers tend to be aggressive. Periodically the cops go on a jaywalking crackdown - it doesnāt change much because the jaywalkers have pretty good reason to jaywalk.
However, Montreal is an island city - there is limited room to expand arterial streets - and the transit system can be quite a bit faster than driving in. I used to live in one of the West Island suburbs and take the CPR train (now run by the transit authority) to Windsor Station (downtown), about 25 minutes vs about 40 minutes on Autoroute 20 by car. At a later date, I used to work across town in the northeastern part of the city (Pie IX and Grandes Prairies), about 40 minutes during rush hour by bus/Metro/bus vsā¦ well, longer - rush hour on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway is nothing to sneeze at.
Part of why there are so many pedestrians in the downtown core is that it is possible to accomplish a lot downtown by foot and Metro - the stations are fairly closely spaced and there is an extensive āunderground cityā appended to them, so there is not a lot of incentive to take the car out of the parking garage at work to do some shopping downtown. Itās easier to grab the Metro to the nearest station and walk.
So, on the one hand, you have the conditions that lead to the āmortal sinā of jaywalking: heavy traffic, aggressive drivers, coupled with a multitude of pedestrians. On the other hand, the city presents rather strong hints about how to make a city for pedestrians. I think itās long past due that we start looking at accomplishing the latter.
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