Why do you assume that we still live in a free society where questioning authority will not be met with arrest at best and violence at worse?
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Doesn’t even have to be an arrest to make someone’s life miserable. Women have been complaining about abuse of authority committed by stalker cops for decades. Of course, if folks had been paying attention to the concerns raised by marginalized groups about police we probably wouldn’t be here now. 
I have to wonder how much longer we’ll have to wait before the mainstream majority decides to join in the fight for change. So far, they’ve shown their attention span for protest is about one year. Maybe this time they’ll do better. 
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Defending the indefensible is never easy, but this guy isn’t even trying.
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Even in places where the protests were every day for over a year, only minor changes were accomplished, and TPTB tried to reverse them the moment the protests let up.
Change is hard. But the alternative is worse; much worse.
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Absolutely, I’m hoping to see more protests that show we’ve learned some lessons from the ones that weren’t successful. They’ve gamed the legislature, the courts, and law enforcement against us, so the battle is more challenging every time. I’d love to see a strategy that hits them in the wallet and undermines the tactic of throwing these issues to the courts. Laws can easily be changed with enough pressure, but those judges and their precedents are tough!
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A women got put in handcuffs for trying to get her kids out. Got out of the handcuffs, ran in and got her two kids out while the dudes just sat there.
I’m going to assume your “c***s” stands for cocks.
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@anon52120741 's suggestion would have been thought paranoid way back in the day. Not. Any. More. You may opt to contact your mayor or congressmember and have them make the inquires.
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I’d be worried for you; if I believed you.
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I hope you have good medical insurance.
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ACAB&SC!
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They know they have the law (US Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that LEOs have no legal responsibility to protect citizens), their FOP (who will protect their qualified immunity beyond all possible reason) and the NRA and their blindly loyal pack of ammosexuals on their side.
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(source) NYT
By German Lopez
Good morning. Families and loved ones are leaning on each other to cope with the Texas school shooting.
Relatives of Alexandria Rubio, a victim of the Uvalde shooting, at a memorial in town.Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
A shattered town
My colleague Jack Healy is in Uvalde, Texas, reporting on the school shooting that killed 19 children and two adults. He has talked to victims’ families about their grief and anger over police handling of the shooting.
I wanted to give you a sense of how people in Uvalde are processing the violence. So I called Jack.
What did you see when you first got to Uvalde?
Stunned grief.
I got here the morning after, and I started driving to the houses of the parents and grandparents of the kids who had perished.
This is a predominantly Latino town. A lot of the kids lived in multigenerational households, with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. These kids lived next door or around the corner from family members, who often took them to school.
The day after, these family members were starting to gather to parse through what had happened — not even to make sense of it, but try to come to grips with the reality that 10-year-old kids had been taken from them.
There is no making sense of it.
Yeah. For many of them, it was like coming to terms with the fact that the last day hadn’t been some sort of horrible dream.
The process of getting the news was traumatic, too. Some families didn’t find out for almost 12 hours. They were getting conflicting information from social media, from people in the community.
There were two girls named Eliana — one spelled Eliahana — who were killed. There’s name confusion between the two for a minute that made them wonder which one was theirs or whether theirs really had been killed. It was chaos.
How was everyday life disrupted?
This shooting came a couple days before what would have been the end of the school year. These kids were on the glide path toward summer vacation. That day, they had an honor roll ceremony, and parents had been there, taking pictures of their kids who were overjoyed to get their certificates.
The shooting abruptly ended the school year. High school graduation ceremonies were postponed.
People were also gearing up for Memorial Day weekend. This is beautiful, hill-and-river country. People were making plans for barbecues or floats down the river or going to a cabin or camping.
Victor M. Cabrales, the grandfather of Eliahana Torres.Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
You’ve probably heard things that will stick with you for years.
Man, yeah.
I talked with the grandpa of one of the girls who was killed, Eliahana Cruz Torres. He was her stepgrandpa. He and his wife, Eliahana’s biological grandma, had raised her since she was four. After she moved in with them, Eliahana frequently slept between grandma and grandpa because she didn’t want to sleep alone. She was squirmy in bed and would ask him to tickle her feet. She would say, “I love you, Grandpa.”
He said he broke down when she first called him Grandpa. It was one of the most touching and important things anyone had ever said to him.
There are 21 families across town telling stories like that now.
Regina Ivy, a Ulvade resident, had tattooed on her arm an outline of Texas with a heart in the location of Uvalde and the shooting date.Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
What are people doing to support each other?
Unfortunately, there is an established playbook for charities when mass shootings happen. The Red Cross is here. Southern Baptist volunteers have been praying on street corners. Starbucks in San Antonio sent workers because so many Starbucks employees here had been affected and had to be with their families.
There have also been smaller acts of kindness: family members bringing bottled water and toilet paper and food to people’s houses. Everyone knows they can’t fix this. But they do what they can. Frequently, that is just being present.
You wrote about the gun debate in Uvalde. In past shootings, survivors and others affected got involved in gun-control activism. Has that happened there?
That is a complicated question here. This is rural, southern Texas. Guns are woven into the politics and culture. Some people in town support the reflexive Republican position of needing more “good guys with guns,” despite the many problems with the police response. A lot of families are fed up and think that it’s unconscionable that an 18-year-old was able to buy two assault rifles. But it’s a quiet conversation.
Even from afar, covering these stories is difficult. Just looking at photos of these kids breaks my heart. How do you approach your reporting on the ground?
We don’t think enough as journalists, collectively, about what we do to these communities.
The school’s neighborhood is packed with television trucks and S.U.V.s and cars rented by journalists. There are blocks outside the school crammed with tents where TV reporters are doing their thing. It looks like a political convention.
Families have been getting constant calls and door knocks. A lot of them do want to share their stories and think it’s important that the world sees who their children were and what made them special. The first couple of times, people appreciate it. But after the 20th person knocks on your door, it can become another wound.
I don’t know what the solution is. There’s a lot of important journalism to do about these issues, about these families and these kids and the failings in response to the shooting. It’s really important to tell these stories.
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The only difference being that American small town police departments have much better and better maintained war materiel than the Russian army.
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FTFY. Those of us without children aren’t empathy free monsters, you know.
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Good. I hope they find out the truth and there are extreme consequences for those cops
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I imagine that some kind of action at the federal level was inevitable because Border Patrol officers were involved.
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Childless by choice here, and I’ve barely been able to get through the work week, between having to run outside so no one sees me crying at my desk and running outside so I don’t go off on the staff gun nut.
I’ve been told I have too much empathy, but I think that’s just bullshirt. Right now I’m not good, though. Trying not to drink into oblivion but I feel like this is the bad place and we’re all forked.
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