CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE MIKE BROWN/ERIC GARNER/ETC SITUATION?

In all honesty, I don't know what there is to discuss. I don't even mean that in like...idk, i'm not slamming on you for bringing it up. Despite the fact that it feels like i only pop out of the woodwork to holler about social ills, rmn isn't my first choice of places to do that when it doesn't directly intersect with video games.

I think other people have talked about this in way more articulate ways than me. Personally? It honest-to-goodness brings me to tears that it's taken so much death before some folks are willing to possibly, maybe, almost begin to consider the barest possibility that, just perhaps, institutionalized racism is still a thing.

hell, there's a lot of folks who still refuse to think about that. It's horrible, it's uncomfortable, a lotta people don't want to engage.

I really just go back to wonder, what is there to discuss? I'm glad more folks are paying attention to cases like these. There's no shortage of them. Wish there wasn't as much misinformation floating around.

What would you like me to say? Should we talk about the rioters? Should we talk about the peaceful protesters? Should we talk about the police that got caught pretending to be protesters to incite a riot (Yes, this actually happened)?

And why Michael Brown? There was more than enough evidence to indict, but grand juries don't indict police. This is fully established and well known. Anyway, there was reasonable doubt. With Eric Garner, there was no reasonable doubt. His murder is there for the world to see in glorious Technicolor. What about the officer that murdered a sleeping 7-year-old girl? Why isn't anyone talking about him?

What about Ex-Marine Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., whose murder White Plains police justified by saying he had a knife, suppressing the Life Alert recording. Cops spent two hours outside his door calling him n***** and telling him he was going to die, describing all the ways they were going to kill him. On the recording, he begs, BEGS for his life. Ruling: police were justified. How about Kelly Thomas (TRIGGER WARNING: this is the video of his death), who begged for his life while the police beat him to death?

Or maybe we should talk about laws. Did you know that in the State of Missouri, if the murderer was a police officer, on duty, in uniform, who encountered the victim in the capacity of a police officer in any way, murder 1, 2 and voluntary manslaughter cannot be legally considered as charges; only involuntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter can only be considered if the suspect didn't know that his actions would lead to death. If a police officer pulls you over for speeding, then decides to kill you just to find out what it's like to kill someone, he can't be charged.

But here's a good one. In Indiana, killing a police officer in self-defense is perfectly legal. Indiana passed that law earlier this year UNANIMOUSLY, feeling that police violence had become so endemic that the problem couldn't be solved except to put the power in the hands of the citizen. Now, guess what the effect was on violent crime. It went down by nearly 80 percent. You see, the way it is now, police are literally above the law. They can get drunk on duty and start shooting people at random and if you act to stop them, you're charged with a crime. Now, don't get this law wrong. It's not open season on cops. You can still get arrested in Indiana for killing a cop: it's just a revision to the Castle Act that lets you use deadly force against a police officer for JUSTIFIABLE REASONS. Power mad police officers are already complaining about this law "a lot of cops will be killed because of this law". Bullshit. It just takes the police out of their Nazi SS position of power.

In Nashville, Tennessee, the police chief refused to mobilize police for Ferguson protesters because he believed that the Constitution granted them a right to protest and that MOBILIZING POLICE FOR PEOPLE EXERCISING CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS IS IMPROPER! Guess how much rioting there's been in Nashville over the Ferguson protest. If you guessed "none", take a gold star. SOMEBODY SHAKE THAT POLICE CHIEF'S HAND! Can't find the specific article about this but here's another good one about Nashville police who do it right.

So, what should we talk about? Obviously, this is a complex subject, and there's much more to it than race, but if you think that police are trying to turn blacks against the community, I'd agree with you.

Edit:

author=Max McGee
I don't have an unbiased opinion on this. As a quasi-anarchist subversive punk radical, I am seriously fucking racist against blue people. (It's kind of wrong to suggest that pigs belong to their own ethnic group. Really, they're not even the same species.)

Fucking A. Non-blue power!

Honestly, I think there was certainly enough evidence to indict Darren Wilson and see his day in court, but I don't actually think I would have convicted him of homicide...at least based on the eyewitness testimony I have been able access through admittedly fairly cursory research.

Fucking A. Non-blue power!

Yeah I am immediately feeling trepidation about the shit I posted two minutes ago. I guess we're about to find out if we've got any cops on RMN lol amirite.

author=Zachary_Braun
It's bad for the police to have too much power, but, it seems like it would be equally bad if they have too little power.

I'm sorry, but this is a fucking bullshit argument because cops in America are so clearly in the "WAY WAY TOO MUCH FUCKING POWER, NO MEANINGFUL OVERSIGHT AT ALL" camp that this is like saying "well, it's bad for women in Muslim countries to have so little power, but it seems like it would be equally bad if they had too much power", i.e. there is already an obvious imbalance at play here.

The problem with a grand jury is that there's no judge, no obligation to even listen to them, and no oversight for the prosecutor, who has a vested interest in getting the charges against a police officer dropped.

Yeah I heard...somewheres...that the prosecutor had the power to indict Brown without a grand jury, but didn't (because he's a racist white dude and/or sockpuppet of the popo obviously).

I feel like him deciding on a grand jury in the first place is the fucking legal equivalent of the 'maybe' that is inevitably actually a no.

What about Ex-Marine Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., whose murder White Plains police justified by saying he had a knife, suppressing the Life Alert recording. Cops spent two hours outside his door calling him n***** and telling him he was going to die, describing all the ways they were going to kill him. On the recording, he begs, BEGS for his life. Ruling: police were justified.

Wait, what the FUCK? I literally basically LIVE in White Plains (like ten minutes away, I go there every other date night) and how the fuck have I never heard about this?

It was 2012, White Plains, New York, in case you're wondering and in case you think I'm citing a different White Plains (there's several across the country).

White Plains, NY is the one I live 15 minutes from.

EDIT:

So I just completely ruined my night by ACTUALLY WATCHING TO AND LISTENING TO all the video and audio from this incident for hours and hours. I'm not going to ruin anyone else's night by linking to it but it's very findable. Having done that, I need to make a correction, though.

Cops spent two hours outside his door calling him n***** and telling him he was going to die, describing all the ways they were going to kill him. On the recording, he begs, BEGS for his life.

This is completely untrue. It is actually Chamberlain who predicts--completely accurately, in spite of his mental health problems--that the cops are going to break down his door and kill him, and describes at some length and accurately the weapons they are going to use to do it. Most audible police dialogue on the recording is them trying to convince him, increasingly fruitlessly and with continuously mounting frustration, to open the door.

Bob McCullogh is a worthless piece of shit. When I was a kid, a construction worker tried to kill me and my mom and my dad shot him in the arm. After Dan Devereaux got the conviction, McCullogh walked right up to my dad, shook his hand, told him that the only reason they prosecuted him was because they knew they could convict him and it would look good on their records, and thanked him. Devareaux said, "Next time, shoot him in the head. You'll get off." Devareaux's a Circuit Judge in St. Louis now.

Holy. Fucking. Shit. That is like the craziest thing I have ever heard.

The dog whistles got turned up to full blown air raid horns. It'd be sad if it wasn't so tragic and another symptom of how fucked up modern society is.

Also please don't forget about Tamir, a 12 year old black kid shot by police for the crime of having a toy gun without an orange plastic tip *, or Kalief Browder, a 17 year old kid locked up for three years without trial or conviction on a shaky accusation that he stole a backpack *.

* and being black


Or


And

author=GreatRedSpirit
The dog whistles got turned up to full blown air raid horns. It'd be sad if it wasn't so tragic and another symptom of how fucked up modern society is.

Also please don't forget about Tamir, a 12 year old black kid shot by police for the crime of having a toy gun without an orange plastic tip *, or Kalief Browder, a 17 year old kid locked up for three years without trial or conviction on a shaky accusation that he stole a backpack *.

* and being black


Or

And

The litany of horrors is too much to think of all of the victims as people rather than statistics--the mind buckles. Mine does, at least. Like...I'm not a very empathic person. I ordinarily don't give a shit about stuff that doesn't effect me directly. I'm not proud of it, but it is a fact.

But man...I stayed up until 9AM "last night" because of reading and learning about all this shit. My cognitive faculties broke down completely and I was unable to think or say anything but "world bad, people inherently bad, brain poisoned with human badness, must die, world must die".

I was only able to lull myself to sleep with probably excessive amounts of weed and Xenosaga.

Maybe the most fucked up part is that body cameras won't act as a deterrent at all. The half hour leading up to Kenneth Chamberlain Sr.'s murder in his own home was recorded by the "TASERCAM" on one of the cop's Tasers. Motherfucker still wasn't even charged.

I live in New York. I'm white. I'm not going into the city any fucking time soon. I am definitely on the side of the protesters and they are definitely keeping things peaceful according to the news, but I don't want to go anywhere near that shit. Being around a protest is a good way to get straight arrested, and as a dude with conspicuously long hair, as far as cops are concerned, my default whitey privileges are suspended. Look at the scoreboard and long-haired white dudes seem to be the one type it's okay for the police to fucking murder.

That law allowing self-defense against them is very interesting - how could one go about helping stuff like that be passed?

This is a total non-solution. You will never, ever "win" in a context of force and violence with the police. The only way you ever would win is if you are a bad person that probably deserves to be murdered by cops anyway, A LA THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.

N.B. I edited this post like ten times, refresh for the latest version:

You, as someone who is white, do note have to worry about police brutality in the same ways folks who aren't white, especially black folks, have to.

Quoted for being bullshit.

Dude, I don't want to spend my whole day looking at youtube videos of police brutality and excessive force just so I can find hundreds of hours of footage of police brutalizing white people to refute you, although I totally could if I was at all willing to wade into that toilet of human misery again.

In the mean time here is a video already linked in this very thread of a bunch of cops (one is a minority) beating Kelly Thomas to death for no reason. He was white. He had long hair. He was also a homeless schizophrenic but personally I'm like 80% sure they didn't even KNOW those last ones. They sure didn't care, in any case. Anyway his "white privilege" did not help him as he was screaming in agony and terror as the police murdered him.

Here is a video of a white woman whose face is destroyed by a cop because he fucking felt like it WHILE SHE WAS IN JAIL AND THE WHOLE THING WAS BEING RECORDED.

Not gonna share his personal details but my brother--who like me is a white person that comes from absolute poverty--has not had a fucking walk in the park in his experiences of "criming while white". As far as me it's a moot point. I've got an anxiety disorder, a health condition, and too much of a fucking police record for my liking anyway. I'm not going out "criming" any time soon. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to do all my "criming" in, thank you very much, in my cozy cop free apartment.

Police brutality is not something that happens only to black people. Saying so is frankly disgusting.

This isn't a "humanity" question, these are SPECIFIC GROUPS of people COPS who are shooting, tasing, suffocating -- and all the rest -- human beings.

Fixed. Literally the first thing I said in this thread was basically fuck the police. I am aware of the specific group of people in question. They are called pigs. Fuck them. I hold them in the highest level of contempt imaginable.

The difference between how the police-industrial-prison complex treats poor people and how they treat rich people is even bigger than the difference in how they treat people based on race. But an even bigger deal is the total lack of any accountability of these fucking SS gestapo animal scumbags in murdering American citizens regardless of race. There's a "white" and "black" issue but it's almost certainly ancillary to the larger "blue" and "human" issue.

It's absolutely soul-crushing to become aware of all the lives snuffed out thru this kind of police brutality. But I've seen people come together to try and DO SOMETHING about it, even if that means getting arrested or beaten or killed, and that brings a tear to my eye for way more positive reasons.

And like, free "help your mental health" tips: approaching any problem or situation in aggregate, as one huge nasty blob of awfulness, is a pretty good way to feel overwhelmed. Practice problem solving. Break it down into manageable chunks.

Yeah, unfortunately, this is where we run into an unpleasant disconnect between ideology and reality. Because there is literally nothing I can do that will have any effect on the greater societal problems, and pretty much anything I might attempt to that effect has a much higher chance of destroying my life than actually accomplishing any kind of societal change, even in aggregate as part of a larger movement. I respect activists--the ones I think are actually good guys, anyway--but largely I also pity them because their struggle really is futile.

Nonviolent resistance at least is going to change absolutely nothing. That leaves the fucking scary kind. And it's only a matter of time. But on the other hand...time is the only factor on the side of the good here. Since 1939 or so in America the needle of America's moral compass has been slowly, slowly, slowly moving in the right direction, inching towards public acceptance of racism that is actually going down over time. Is it still at a horrifying level? Sure. Watch the comments on any Youtube video and you will see the amazing prevalence of blatant, unapologetic racism in the American national dialogue. But perhaps the only solace in this is that over time, even if agonizingly slowly, the needle of America's moral compass is moving in the right direction. That's the most optimistic way I can look at it, anyway.

Max, when people regularly refuse to even acknowledge your extrajudicial murder as something that merits an investigation, let alone a trial, then you can play the 'I'm just as oppressed as this group I haven't made an attempt to understand or empathize with because sometimes bad things happen to white people too' card.

when a group equivalent to the KKK (which, hey, go figure, no such group exists in the US against white people) shows up and starts parading around to celebrate that decision and encourage the further murder of young white people, then you can pretend your insipid 'colourblind' rhetoric has any kind of merit.

police brutality is not something that happens exclusively to black people -- we're all aware of this, and it's a horrid abuse of the system no matter the victim. when you pretend that the system isn't disproportionately violent against racial minorities to a massive degree, though, you aren't being 'objective' -- you're just using your own ignorance, your own lack of context and experience, to try and bury a problem that racist institutions are already trying their best to bury.

there are multiple axes of oppression. the existence of class-based oppression and ableist oppression does not somehow render racism an axis that doesn't also bear discussion.