Aurora is 43% white, 18% black. I’m guessing there’s not comparable instances of this happening to white families.
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This story and the OP just breaks my heart. It appears to me that police and the Secret Service are actively looking for ways to terrorize African Americans.
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Go to hell and take your defense of your department’s incompetent racist brutality with you, you terrorist.
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No offense, but what’s the weather like on your planet? Here on Earth the legalized gangs that are US cops are doubling down like there’s no tomorrow.
Stupidity doesn’t adequately explain 400 years of systemic racism.
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Yes, in every state I’ve been to / gotten bike plates in. A quick check on the CO DMV site shows they have a very similar appearance (they generally do) aside from size, so I could see a digital recognition system making the mistake. If the recognition system was loaded with numbers only to save memory (or programmer effort) once the cops get a “hit” they would need to manually look up the registration… which is an awful system designed to allow false positives, but that seems to be SOP for police work (witness vague descriptions in a “suspect wanted” call, for example).
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Watching that video left me literally shaking with rage. No human with an atom of compassion or a shred of conscience could hear that child shrieking in terror and not be moved to comfort them.
So, which of the three characteristics, humanity, compassion, or conscience did all five of the cops lack? I’m going with all three.
I hate that it’s taken me over half a century to figure out just how fucked up this country is. I hate the privilege that allowed me to maintain my ignorance for so long.
I want to make this country better for everyone, and that needs to start with the people who are in most distress now. One of the best ways to start that process seems to be.
Abolish the police!!!
Too bent and twisted and filled with rot and malice to fix.
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Generally^^, I believe the intent is not to excuse or giving a voice to those who should remain silent, but to understand how something happened in order to prevent (or minimise) it happening again.
It’s the flipside of the “thoughts and prayers” proforma after each firearms massacre. When you refuse to engage with a problem, it will just keep reoccurring. Standing around admiring the problem certainly won’t change things.
^ these two sentences are combined from separate posts.
^^ assuming good faith. I do acknowledge that it can be used as an elaborate way to ignore a problem - “We will form a committee!” is a great way to ensure nothing will ever happen.
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The thing is is much as I would love to abolish the police because I see them as an occupying force driving around and harassing people, I’m not saying we need our current police but we need some kind of actual good police.
I hate the police personally more intensely than I can possibly describe and I can’t explain in detail why. Let’s just say they’ve traumatized me a great deal.
I am for cutting their budgets and even firing entire forces.
But, we need good, smart, sane people with actual brains and compassion as cops- who really do protect and serve us. Not a militant tactical equipped bunch of racist authoritarian shitheel good ol boys we currently have that have a cult of hero worship followers with this thin blue line shit.
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Our parking meters recognize the difference between states’ license plates as well as the differences between motorcycles and cars.
Their police notification system is less sophisticated than a parking meter? We’re really supposed to buy that excuse?
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We have both here. Thinking the car was stolen from the numbers on the plates alone is stupidity. How they treated a mother and four children was malice.
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I assume that they’ve been advised by PR that “they all look the same” is something you can imply; but not say in so many words.
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Imagine you’re a teacher. You have two children. One is punching the other in the head.
You gasp and say, “Why are you doing that?!?!?”
The child says, “Well, he was looking at me funny and I felt threatened!”, and continues to punch the other child in the head.
You say, “That isn’t a good enough reason!”
The child informs you that last week the victim punched HIM in the head, and if want that to stop, you have to punch them back with regularity, to make sure they are afraid of you. The punching in the head continues as you talk.
You say, “That isn’t nearly a good enough reason. No recess for you!”
The child replies, “Well, I am used to that, people always blame me, but I am really just stopping bullies and keeping people like you safe.”
As you walk away, the child is still being punched in the head. You shake your own head and ruminate over the child’s arguments, trying to find a way to defeat them with logic, and reason. Maybe you will think of something tomorrow.
O_o
That’s your response? Ok then.
“Four wheels good, two wheels bad!”
I’ve seen more than one history educator state that their modern Black students are baffled by the uproar over the Rodney King beating. “What’s the big deal? This happens every day. They didn’t even kill the guy…”.
Injustice and brutality are just the expected background noise.
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It’s notable that pretty much none of the noteworthy abolitionists are calling for the complete abolition of all functions of police.
What they are saying is that:
a) Most of what US police do is unnecessary,
b) Of the bits that are necessary, most of it would be better done by people who are not at all cops,
c) Even for the most cop-like bits of what still needs to be done (e.g. acute crisis response), the history and structure of US police departments renders them irredeemably unsuitable for this job.
Even the most hardcore anarchists usually recognise the need for some sort of community peacekeeper role. But they don’t need to be called police, and they definitely don’t need to be just cops with a new name.
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Read some Terry Pratchett then?
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Yes, because while we are standing around in a facetious debate with a broken, racist system, people are dying. The “debate” has been going on for decades, another day is too much “debate”. Eventually you just have to stop caring about the kid’s motivation and just stop him from punching the other kid in the head by force.
Take their unions away, make the entire police internal affairs process completely transparent, and start prosecuting “complaints” as the crimes they are. No one demands we understand killers before we stop them. It’s no different for state-sponsored ones.
Why on earth would you imagine this isn’t a why not both situation?
Because there really isn’t anyone involved on the police side whose perspective is valid or trustworthy enough to base a model on.
It’s dangerous to entertain the perspective of hateful, racist, irrational fascists. They will have a logical reason for everything they do. Look at the US at present. If you give people even a rational SOUNDING excuse for choking a Black man to death on the street, they will eat it up and nothing will change.
We just have to criminalize the behavior, and make police officers so afraid of these outcomes that their excuses don’t have any weight in their decision making. Then we’ll have the leisure to ruminate.
There’s a scene in the sci-fi series The Expanse wherein they are trying to stop a team of rogue scientists doing experiments on humans. They finally get the lead scientist and he starts to monologue, and from the side someone shoots him in the head.
They ask, “Why did you do that?!?!” He replies, “Because he was starting to make sense.”
Obviously the excuses the police departments give are “good enough” for most of the voting public. That’s a hurdle we just have to knock down and get it out of the way.
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