I disagree. The officer had to go through the hearing. The public has seen the footage, as well. Those would not have happened. Not okay that he was let off, but…
I would have doubts that my righteous indignation was justified if the camera hadn’t been there.
And cameras are becoming more ubiquitous, and now the President advocates them (as does the head of my State Police!!)
Maybe it takes a couple hundred of these cases to bring about the change? Maybve it takes several tens of thousands more like me who can now really justify our outrage, because we’ve now seen what we’ve only been told about before, or what we had to assume happened.
The outcome for this one case, yes, the outcome was no different. A jury of people who have a lifetime of only being told about this stuff upheld the status quo.
These cameras are going to change the status quo. No one case will be the one. Maybe we will never see an increase of prosecutions… but the cameras have proven time and again to reduce the number of such incidents, and that’s the change we’re looking for.
We don’t need to cops to like us. We don’t need them to be thinking happy thoughts. We need them to behave professionally and within their authority, towards those they serve and protect. We need them to document their own escalatory behaviors so they can be trained out of them as unprofessional.
People are people, they fail to the level of their training. Train them better.
Thanks for explaining, and many thanks to Humbabella, who said pretty much everything in return that I would say (except I would add that in addition to men in discussions of sexism, it’s also a lot of white people who toss in the Tone Argument in discussions of racism).
Dude, you could learn something here: being told in a discussion about race that “it’s not all about race! other things are going on here too, ya know!” is stating something obvious, and something that many people find very frustrating (and condescending) to have to hear, yet again.
Yes. But you have to make us want to drink water. Not turding in the punchbowl helps. re: your example. Some people see ‘taking race’ out of a conversation specifically about police brutality against a minority in city with a history of racial disparities in policing which cause great fear among the citizenry, is a bit of a turd in the punchbowl.
I’m hesitant to speak for @strugglngwriter, but I interpreted the whole of his post to mean
I had the impression that was the idea behind what he was saying. He said that the Garner case implies putting cameras on policemen won’t help the people actually being killed. If you go back and re-read it, is that a wrong interpretation? That’s why I object to removing his opening sentence from the context - I contend that the people who are doing that are actually the ones expressing a rotten idea, and that the original observation was perfectly valid.
I appreciate your kindness towards me and it makes me want to understand and respect your ideas as thoroughly as possible. But there are some traps that I can’t escape - I have declared my gender here, so if there are things males must never say then there are ideas I won’t be able to express. I’m just lucky that so few of my ideas fall into that category, I guess.
Anyway, I’m not insisting that people must conform to my ideas of polite discourse. If somebody wants a conversation, I can do that, if I have time. And if someone just wants to rant and express frustration, I can listen sympathetically… right up until they start seeking out well-meaning people to use as rhetorical punching bags, at which point I will either completely stop listening to them, or else give them a good dose of what they are handing out. I’m one of those idiots who will throw himself into a fight if I think it’s unfair, without regard for whether I win or lose.
In your last line you postscripted
I’m frustrated that I have to revise each of my posts repeatedly in order to minimize the chances that someone will cut out a sentence and start beating me over the head with it, causing my actual point to be lost in the noise. I hope I haven’t done that to you here.
Sensationalism pays, and appealing to fear is part of that. This is bad in itself, however, what’s even worse is that news institutions (in America, at least) usually serve the moneyed interests that make up the establishment.
It’s clear that centralization of power, and abuse of power, is related to the hatred that groups have to each other. Many cities experimented with fairer proportional systems of government in the early 20th century, and then repealed them partly because they actually weren’t ready to have racial minorities serving on their city councils.
Likewise as long as a group of people see others as “thugs” they will continue to support abusive forms of power, because they see the risks to themselves from that power as small.
So, yes, if you want fairer systems of government you must overcome racism because racism has been an essential part of justifying abusive US power structures for centuries. I’d love to have a conversation with the people I grew up with about say, universal health care, without them complaining that this would just benefit those “lazy” people in the “inner city”, and punishing them is even more important than pursuing policies to their own benefit.
@anon50609448 reply was spot on. Race is an important factor, even if it’s not the only factor, but can we please have people saying “but but but it’s not JUST about race!” NO SHIT SHERLOCK.
I cannot change my race, age, gender or upbringing. Although it would be pretty cool if I could; it would make for some interesting adventures.
The “tone argument”, as I understand it, is telling people to calm down, to be rational. In my little world, we’d call that invoking Marcus Aurelius, the famous stoic, who insisted that the rational principle in your mind is divine, and that passion pollutes it and weakens you, taking you further from righteous actions. We used to call that philosophy, back in the day, because it’s debatable, and not provably absolutely true or false in all situations. I personally am not a stoic although I have some tendencies. However it’s a valid lifestyle choice and people often want to share it with others. Happy mutants used to welcome philosophers.
But anyway, I’m not currently making a tone argument. I’m bitching about people who see a total focus on some specific race as being the only valid response to racism - as if Morris Dees should have named the Southern Poverty Law Center the Black Center, and invited Louis Farrakhan to be a founding member - because I see that sort of behavior as divisive and damaging (and quite often racist as well). And I’m bitching about people taking other people’s words out of context, and with the least charitable interpretation possible, on purpose, so that they can rant and rave with a human target - specifically with a well-meaning target who would prefer to be the ranter’s ally. I am expressing my frustration with those people, who annoy the crap out of me.
I gotta go work now, spent too much time here already.
I don’t know what kind of life you lead (…aaaaand don’t really want to) but implicit bias is definitely real life. Front and center if you’ve ever experienced it.
Do you think that the issue of police brutality is really getting lost here when we’re literally discussing police brutality against minorities? It’s literally part of the actual subject. It’s not getting lost. This is LITERALLY about police brutality against minorities. Police brutality is actually the subject. It’s the people who say “but but what about police brutality, it’s not just about race!” who are the ones separating race from the subject of police brutality, not those of us who are actually talking about police brutality against minorities.
However it’s a valid lifestyle choice and people often want to share it with others.
This shit cracked me up. You’re giving people way too much credit here. First, the people you refer to probably have no idea what philosophy you speak of, abstractly or specifically
No, a person trying to police the tone of a discussion isn’t trying to “share” anything. They are trying to FORCE their ideals on to other people. There is no sharing. It’s a demand. A condescending, derailing, miss-the-point, and often sexist demand.
And this demand often changes depending on how THEY feel a subject should go. Their own emotion is often allowed (their frustration about the tone of a discussion is, in fact, an emotion they clearly think they have a right to, for example), but they lecture anyone else who dares show even an iota of emotion that they don’t approve of. It has to do with “approval” and how a discussion makes THEM feel, not a philosophy of life.
“Sharing” implies give and take, and TELLING someone how to respond or how their tone should be is in, fact, not sharing. It’s demanding.
Right, and I guess I didn’t make myself clear (I just woke up from a nap and I’m super foggy). So many people want to pretend this is just a theoretical or philosophical discussion, when it’s really not.
I don’t see how this makes sense. Do you live in a world where we have to be reminded that it would still be a problem that someone was dead even if they weren’t black because black lives are held in such high esteem that people don’t tend to even think of dead non-black people as a bad thing?
Or maybe the issue is that we know that the country is full of racists (not us, of course, but other people) and so we have to talk about dead ‘people’ instead of dead ‘black men’ because otherwise those racists (not us) won’t listen?
No one starts any comments with ‘Let’s set the fact that he was named Eric aside.’ We all know he was a human being even though he was named Eric. Why do we have to set race aside?
If you can pay attention to the fact that this man was murdered without paying attention to the colour of his skin then you should know that is a luxury that some people can’t afford.
But there isn’t a single person out there, not even one, who is concerned about racist cops who is not concerned about police brutality. No one is losing sight of police brutality because of racial issues.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
Martin Luther King put it first on his list of what needs to be done. That was more than 50 years ago and no one has lost sight of it. The idea that people could lose sight of police brutality because of racial issues strikes me as too absurd to contemplate.
No, I entirely worry that is the case. That’s kind of the problem. Take that first bit about ‘putting race aside’ out and the comment stands - I think - as an expression of what a lot of people are now worried about. Apparently those police cameras are just going to give us a really good look at the people police are killing.
Normally people behave differently when they know they are being recorded, but that is because we have this part of our brain that tells us we don’t want to be socially punished for our actions. However, enough reminders that police are immune to punishment, enough building that idea into our society, and we could create a police culture that just doesn’t care, like Conrad Black giving the finger to the security camera while illegally removing documents from his offices. People who have enough experience with immunity to consequences may lose that little ‘someone is watching’ part of their thinking.
And also, fuck the Scots.
Wait, what was that last bit? If someone replied to my comment, would it be fair for them to say, “What do you have against Scottish people?” rather than adding something meaningful about police cameras or human psychology? That’s not exactly picking a fight with a well meaning person, it’s taking someone to task for something they said that was offensive.
I don’t think that ‘let’s leave race out of this’ is equivalent to ‘fuck black people,’ because I don’t think it expresses actual malice. But I think it’s a bad take on things and it’s hurtful in a way that probably wasn’t intended. All the more reason to point it out.
I’ve got nothing against mindfulness or stoicism. I am against against telling other people that it’s the one way to get things done as a way of deflecting their point of view. Philosophy could pretty much be renamed ‘How entitled men think’ without losing much.
@strugglngwriter: Apologies for all this back and forth about what you said that doesn’t include you, I don’t mean to use you as a ball in someone else’s game. ‘Putting race aside’ (or something like that) becomes the focus of half+ the comments in all of these threads.
