Where can I donate to this cop’s retirement fund? He is one awesomely brave/intelligent cop. After seeing this video, I feel like there is hope. Is there a go fund me site yet?
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I’m impressed with those people in the background just calmly walking away from the scene. Here in the States they’d be running for cover, as worried about getting shot by the police as by a suspect.
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I’ve never lived in Canada. Would it make a difference if the suspect was black, as it seems to matter in the U.S.?
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Where I live this behavior is expected from police officers and considered normal. He did his job and he did it the right way none the less.
That it’s seen a something special shows whats wrong in the US with attitude to violence in general and police violence in particular.
That the US public accepts that their LEOs act like the henchman of a medieval lord, killing and maiming people without justification and consequences, is baffling especially when you consider that it happens in the self-proclaimed “land of the free”. On the one hand you have the national narrative of “Freedom, Constitutional rights, Independence, Self reliance blabla” on the other hand you have government officials trampling over these rights with abandon and the public is cheering them on. The conscious disconnect is mind blowing.
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Not for the first time.
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Toronto’s police do have a lot to answer for. I grew up in a nearby city and visited often. I still have family in the area. The fix for them, as I stated in the post isn’t going to happen overnight or in a year. It might take a decade. Perhaps more. But I have hope that, with police officers like this one, it’ll be a law enforcement service that the city can once again be proud of.
I’ve lived in a lot of different parts of the world. No one has it figured out. Every country is screwed up in it’s own special way. You’ve got to take wins, like a cop brining a suspect in, instead of shooting him, where you can get them.
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This is true.
how hard is it for a white dude to suicide by cop?
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The " conscious disconnect" might be related to the fact that the US has never been a dictatorship, so Americans (or at least white Americans) have not experienced a historical association between thuggish, authoritarian, unaccountable officialdom and the loss of political rights.
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Max Planck:
This experience gave me also an opportunity to learn a fact-a remarkable one, in my opinion: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Later paraphrased by Paul A. Samuelson as:
As the great Max Planck, himself the originator of the quantum theory in physics, has said, science makes progress funeral by funeral: the old are never converted by the new doctrines, they simply are replaced by a new generation.
If Planck and Samuelson can be written off as “hav[ing] little of use to contribute” then I am privileged to be counted with them.
While I certainly applaud the professional conduct of Constable Lam in apprehending Mr Minassian, it’s a false narrative to portray Canada as the shining counter-example to the US. Canada has no shortage of police using excessive force.
It may be that the recent police training in reaction to one of the better publicized cases of Toronto police using excessive force, contributed to Officer x’s conduct. That would be heartening.
On the other hand, it may be that Mr Minassian’s not being black, or brown, or First Nations, contributed. Because in addition to using excessive force, our police have faced many many accusations of racial profiling in the severity of their responses.
So, yay that Cont. Lam did a fine job – but let’s not conclude that everything is just fine with Canadian policing as a result. It’s not.
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I agree, but when you’re 2.9 times more likely to be killed in an interaction with US police, Canadian policing looks a lot better with regard to outcomes.
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Have any of the news articles reported on exactly what that doohickey was that the attacker was waving around? He was definitely holding something. It may also be worth considering that one of the first things he said was “I have a gun in my pocket”, as if to suggest that he already knew that the officer knew he was not pointing a gun.
Of course, people have been shot before for waving around things that obviously weren’t guns and it’s still very impressive that the officer kept his cool.
I reckon a younger man lacking both sexual experience and knowledge of wonderful stuff in this world would have a rather different perspective. Just sayin’.
… dude, don’t set the bar so high!
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Just because Max Planck said it, and its sort of funny, doesn’t mean it is true or should be celebrated; in point of fact, despite the fact that science is ruled by pigheaded patriarchs it evolves new ideas without pause. My own field overturns its thinking about every ten years - if anything it is a little TOO hasty.
Also: you don’t have to double down on this, you CAN acknowledge that this idea is wrong, and we don’t have to wait for you to shuffle off.
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Bleh!
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It’s quite possible for the idea to be both right and regrettable.
I was a toddler at the time of Brown and in primary grades at the time of the Voting rights Act [1]. I’m now retired, and systematic racial vote suppression is still a major force in the United States. So far, Planck seems to be winning the debate.
[1] Please consider that by then every single veteran of the Civil War had died – it was a century past Appomattox.
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Actually the likelihood of my being killed is less – being (fairly) white and female. Which is a big part of the problem. But of course I would agree that the situation is better here. It’s just a poor measure of comparison, unfortunately.
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The issue is that there is an insular online culture where people constantly mutually reinforce their shame and disappointment, convince themselves they are utterly unlovable, and encourage one another to be angry.
Obviously in this specific instance we can’t know. I don’t have any reason to think that this particular police officer would have behaved any differently. But if you are asking whether, in general, people of colour have more to fear from Toronto cops than white people, the answer is that yes, they most certainly do.
I definitely think this example should be what is expected, not exceptional. But since it isn’t, I’m sure glad we’re heaping praise on it. To make a possibly-offensive-to-police analogy, I sure have heaped a lot of praise on children for using the toilet in a totally ordinary way.
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