I have now. Thanks for pointing it out (though next time maybe include a link?).
Dox? Attack? Inconvenience? The historical weight of lynch is too great and specific to use in this context. It’s not the same type of crime in the least. We’re having protests in almost every major American city over a man being lynched last week by the police. George Floyd is dead and it’s a bit disrespectful to compare his murder to someone (even entirely unfairly sometimes) who gets attacked online.
It does, so I think we can find a different language to discuss this issue that doesn’t downplay the deaths of thousands of black americans (primarily) over the years.
I mean that why you tell the police, despite the understandable lack of trust folks have in them at the moment. They won’t be blasting the wrong name all over the place causing innocents to be harassed.
Not standard. I’ve been riding seriously for a few decades now and the thought of using any of my several (I know…) bikes as a weapon seems so foreign. That stands out to me as a learned technique, similar to police work I’ve seen in recent videos.
My 15-year old son is associated with a bike shop in Bethesda on this trail, he frequently rides it. These kids are pissed and doing what they can to figure out who this person is. I’m worried about backlash that might interfere with his safety but he and his friends are not going to let this go.The posters that this idiot was pissed off about basically said if you are white and not protesting that you are consenting to racism. Perhaps the posters are correct. I think it is time to join the protests because it is the right thing to do but also to introduce said idiot to the Streisand effect.
This long twitter thread (Montgomery County Park Police asking for help IDing the suspect) appears to have a reasonably firm ID of the individual. I won’t provide a name here but, yes, he’s a cop. A cop with a history. A history that one would hope would have driven from policing years back. But no.
As of this moment the Park Police haven’t followed up with any dozens of tweets naming the former cop. Here’s hoping for progress.
ETA: Now proven wrong. Somebody else turned themselves in. Save yourself the twitter rabbit hole.
I’m pretty sure he is. I’ve heard chatter that it’s a cop, seen pictures of this particular cop, and tend to agree. But AFAICT nobody has been officially IDed so I can’t say for a fact who it is.
For starters, they looked completely different and were riding on different days at different times of day, and probably had different gear as well. But let’s not let that stop the Twitter detectives who think matching a Twitter account to a Strava account proves anything.
Yep. That definitely caught my attention. Where would he have learned to do that? It wouldn’t have occurred to me at all. Then again, it wouldn’t occur to me to assault someone over flyers no matter what was on the flyers.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree that this is definitely not a lynching and shouldn’t be called one. But this could potentially cause more than a little inconvenience. There’s a reason we don’t dox. I have no tolerance for online bullying and harassment, even if it’s nowhere near in the same league as lynching.
Apparently a second person has also been the victim of virtual mob vigilantism. This time it was a police officer who bore a slight resemblance to the fellow.
The man in question may actually be the man who did it, in which case, I hope that the twitter mob is the least of his difficulties, but I wish that it would have just been handled through legal channels.
Many thanks for this. Got to agree with others - it’s a shock he’s not a cop. Maybe retired? In any case, he looks a lot less like the assailant in the original video than the actual cop putatively identified by the twitterverse. Weird.
But you know… an actual lynching is a death. Somethings are more important than a white person being inconvenienced.
and since I spent about 80% of my childhood being bullied, I have little patience for people with all of the privilege trying to compare it to murder, the ending of a life. I would never compare what I had to go through with the realities of systemic racism and lynching. It’s not remotely the same thing at all. No matter how bad my youthful experiences were, it’s nothing compared to systemic racism that others experienced. I want my experiences validated, but I will NOT do that at the expense of people of color.
I also said that this wasn’t a lynching or anything even remotely close to one. We’re absolutely in agreement there.
What I’m worried about is the impact this has on innocent people. There was already a lesbian couple who had been harassed about this even though they had nothing to do with any of it, because whoever doxxed the cop said their address was the cop’s. This is more than LOL white people getting mildly inconvenienced. It’s more like unstable randos going to people’s houses because some internet vigilante told them to, and God knows what will happen when they get there. People are adding fuel to an already volatile situation just because they want to play Twitter junior detective.
