[News] Protests Against Police Violence After Death of George Floyd

Discuss police violence, the victims of police violence (including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor), the Black-led protests against said violence, and related topics.

DC Malleus wrote:

Mayor Bowser? Come on, that's just lazy writing now...

Bowser didn't even try to steal Ivanka....

White male LAPD officer buys a frappuccino at a Starbucks in a Target using his police union debit card. He drank half the drink before finding what he claimed was a tampon.*

LA Sheriff's Department immediately launches an investigation.

The LAPD union screams that "This disgusting assault on a police officer was carried out by someone with hatred in their heart and who lacks human decency. We hope they are publicly exposed, fired, arrested, and prosecuted for their cowardly and repugnant actions.”

Target reviews in-store video from surveillance cameras and says they "have not found any suspicious behavior" and hands the footage over to the Sheriff's Department who are apparently still investigating.

Clearly I need to throw together a pitch deck for what's becoming the hottest restaurant trend of 2020: cop safe food.

* It's also been reported that the officer said that the breasts of his Canadian supermodel girlfriend "feel like a bag of sand" when he touches them.

After Shake Shack being nothing and McDs Karen cop meltdown, have they not figured out this isn't going to work?

I think we all know cops lie at this point. We all saw the 75 year old man pushed down after the police said he tripped. And that was a white man.

OG_slinger wrote:

White male LAPD officer buys a frappuccino at a Starbucks in a Target using his police union debit card. He drank half the drink before finding what he claimed was a tampon.*

LA Sheriff's Department immediately launches an investigation.

The LAPD union screams that "This disgusting assault on a police officer was carried out by someone with hatred in their heart and who lacks human decency. We hope they are publicly exposed, fired, arrested, and prosecuted for their cowardly and repugnant actions.”

Target reviews in-store video from surveillance cameras and says they "have not found any suspicious behavior" and hands the footage over to the Sheriff's Department who are apparently still investigating.

Clearly I need to throw together a pitch deck for what's becoming the hottest restaurant trend of 2020: cop safe food.

* It's also been reported that the officer said that the breasts of his Canadian supermodel girlfriend "feel like a bag of sand" when he touches them.

Looks more like a c*ck and balls to me

OG_slinger wrote:

* It's also been reported that the officer said that the breasts of his Canadian supermodel girlfriend

Their lies get more and more outlandish with each passing week.

OG_slinger wrote:

It's also been reported that the officer said that the breasts of his Canadian supermodel girlfriend "feel like a bag of sand" when he touches them.d

Coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere?

Are the police trying to get everyone to hate them or do they just not know how to interact with people?

Is it getting harder for police to give testimony in court now that we have months of police blatantly telling lies?

Stealthpizza wrote:

Is it getting harder for police to give testimony in court now that we have months of police blatantly telling lies?

I believe Jayhawker has mentioned that a couple times, one of the prosecutors where he lives has refused to try cases for certain cops.

This is an interesting tactic. Protestors in Chicago were looking up the records of cops blockading them and announcing the number of complaints filed against them. At least two of the cops left the blockade and walked away after being called out.

How long before the police union demands that badge numbers should be hidden.

BadKen wrote:

How long before the police union demands that badge numbers should be hidden.

Some departments are already doing that. Protestors here started recording the names of cops during daytime in order to ID them at night when the cops started rioting, after a couple days of that they all started covering their badges.

Stele wrote:

After Shake Shack being nothing and McDs Karen cop meltdown, have they not figured out this isn't going to work?

I think we all know cops lie at this point. We all saw the 75 year old man pushed down after the police said he tripped. And that was a white man.

I think the problem is until now things have have always worked and they are slow to catch on that the tactics are too transparent and people are no longer willing to blindly take an officers word on anything anymore. for instance in past days no one would have bothered to check the tapes.

I think what I find terrifying is that these police are so insecure that they are dreaming up strange incidents involving fast food employees.

When they actually have to do their job what kind of embellishment and fabrication are they coming up with.

Are they deciding the minority they just pulled over is guilty but since their reasoning and evidence is highly suspect why not tilt a couple of factors. Little story change here, little evidence plant there and voila. Criminal.

jowner wrote:

I think what I find terrifying is that these police are so insecure that they are dreaming up strange incidents involving fast food employees.

When they actually have to do their job what kind of embellishment and fabrication are they coming up with.

Are they deciding the minority they just pulled over is guilty but since their reasoning and evidence is highly suspect why not tilt a couple of factors. Little story change here, little evidence plant there and voila. Criminal.

I mean.. duh? That's been obvious for decades. How many cops carry guns and baggies to plant?

Tanglebones wrote:
jowner wrote:

I think what I find terrifying is that these police are so insecure that they are dreaming up strange incidents involving fast food employees.

When they actually have to do their job what kind of embellishment and fabrication are they coming up with.

Are they deciding the minority they just pulled over is guilty but since their reasoning and evidence is highly suspect why not tilt a couple of factors. Little story change here, little evidence plant there and voila. Criminal.

I mean.. duh? That's been obvious for decades. How many cops carry guns and baggies to plant?

language warning

That clip has not aged particularly well - at least, although I can recognize that it was funny at the time, it's really hard to laugh with it now.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

That clip has not aged particularly well - at least, although I can recognize that it was funny at the time, it's really hard to laugh with it now.

I'm curious why you think it hasn't aged well? It was just as true 20 years ago as it is today. If anything it seems even more potent and on point today, and still funny.

If it's painful to laugh now maybe it's because we haven't made meaningful progress on this issue of black people dying during police contact at disproportionately and outrageously higher rates than white people. It should have been a painful truth to acknowledge 20 years ago. If anything, re-watching this clip reminds us these wounds have not been healing but have instead been festering.

It was always a funny clip to me, but in that incisive and cutting way that the best comedians are. They take a horrific situation and make fun of it, in part to shine a light on a raw or taboo topic. Not to celebrate awful behavior but to open it up for examination.

To me, a comedy clip not aging well would be e.g. something homophobic or transphobic that wasn't ultimately making fun of a bigot. Chapelle has some of those, but he's always been on point about race as far as I can recall.

Zwickle wrote:

To me, a comedy clip not aging well would be e.g. something homophobic or transphobic that wasn't ultimately making fun of a bigot. Chapelle has some of those, but he's always been on point about race as far as I can recall.

Chappelle's not really in the mood to joke about police behavior these days. He's rightly angry af.

Zwickle wrote:

If it's painful to laugh now maybe it's because we haven't made meaningful progress on this issue of black people dying during police contact at disproportionately and outrageously higher rates than white people. It should have been a painful truth to acknowledge 20 years ago. If anything, re-watching this clip reminds us these wounds have not been healing but have instead been festering.

It was always a funny clip to me, but in that incisive and cutting way that the best comedians are. They take a horrific situation and make fun of it, in part to shine a light on a raw or taboo topic. Not to celebrate awful behavior but to open it up for examination.

For me, comedy is around exaggeration or unexpected juxtaposition. I found that clip funny back in the day because it seemed like comedic exaggeration. Discovering that it’s not exaggerated, that it is remarkably close to real life, takes the humour out of it for me.

How cops are talking about George Floyd's killing and the protests sweeping America (Slate):

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...

The Slate article was interesting, but it relied on responses from police who were "disproportionately people of color, women, and/or LGBTQ."

Sadly it feels like the reality of policing is tracks more closely with this article.

WaPo wrote:

Sitting in his patrol car in Wilmington, N.C., Officer Michael “Kevin” Piner predicted Black Lives Matter protests would soon lead to civil war. “I’m ready,” Piner told another officer, adding that he planned to buy an assault rifle.

“We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them f------ n------,” he said.

The shocking threat came amid extended, openly racist conversations between Piner, 44, and two other police officers, 50-year-old Cpl. Jesse E. Moore II, and 48-year-old Officer James “Brian” Gilmore. In the discussions, taped by accident on a patrol car camera and released Wednesday by the department, the men freely drop racial slurs, suggest killing black residents and deride protesters.

“Wipe 'em off the f------ map,” Piner said of African Americans. “That’ll put 'em back about four or five generations.”

All three officers were fired Wednesday, with new Wilmington Police Chief Donny Williams, who is black, calling the conversations “brutally offensive.”

“This is the most exceptional and difficult case I have encountered in my career,” said Williams, who was just hired as chief on Tuesday. “We must establish new reforms for policing here at home and throughout this country.”

The officers’ vile discussions came to light purely by chance. On June 4, a sergeant was conducting routine video reviews when she found a nearly two-hour long clip from Piner’s cruiser created by an “accidental activation,” according to a department report. After listening to the racist discussion, she alerted a superior who started an internal investigation.

Piner, a Wilmington police officer since 1998, began the recording by expressing his fury about the ongoing protests against police brutality and racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Speaking to Gilmore, who had apparently pulled his cruiser up alongside Piner’s car, he complained that local police only cared about “kneeling down with the black folks.”

Gilmore, hired by the department in 1997, said that whites were now “worshiping blacks,” adding he’d seen a video of a “fine looking white girl and this little punk pretty boy bowing down and kissing their toes.”

The two then complained about black officers on the force, calling one a “piece of s---” and complaining that another was “sitting on his a--” during the protests. “Let’s see how his boys take care of him when s--- gets rough, see if they don’t put a bullet in his head,” Piner said.

Piner soon left to check out an alarm, investigators found. Later, Moore, who also was hired in 1997, called him to describe a recent arrest of a black woman, repeatedly calling her a racial slur.

“She needed a bullet in the head right then and move on,” Moore said of the woman. “Let’s move the body out of the way and keep going.”

Later, while complaining about a black judge whom Moore called a “f------ negro magistrate,” Moore added, “It’s bad man because not all black people are like that.”

“Most of 'em,” Piner responded.

“90 percent of 'em, Kevin, 90 f------ percent of 'em,” Moore said.

Soon, Piner turned the conversation to his belief that a civil war was imminent and his intention to buy high-powered weaponry. After saying he was ready to “slaughter” black people, he added, “God I can’t wait."

“You’re crazy,” Moore responded, before the recording shut off.

On June 9, Internal Affairs investigators confronted the men with the recording. They admitted to having the conversations, but the officers each characterized it as “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement,” investigators wrote.

Moore and Gilmore argued they were “not racist,” with Moore adding he “doesn’t normally speak like that but was feeding off Officer Piner,” according to the investigators. Piner, meanwhile, said the tape was “embarrassing” and suggested concerns for his family’s safety had led him to a “breaking point.”

That makes sense, because when I’m stressed, I also engage in long, exceptionally racist conversations and include my plans to purchase heavy weaponry for the express purpose of killing black folk. FFS.

Horrifying and completely unsurprising, like so much recently.

Another article on the same cops: 3 North Carolina police officers fired over racist rants

A NYT Video on the Philadelphia protesters who the police trapped on the side of the highway.

On June 1, SWAT teams turned a protest march in Philadelphia into chaos. We went to the site, interviewed witnesses and analyzed dozens of videos to reconstruct what happened.

I'm quite surprised, and maybe even a little heartened, that the three cops there were fired based on the department's own initiative, rather than being forced to do so by public discovery and clamor.

If more police departments were like that, we'd be in much better shape.

Has anyone here brought up the shootings in the Seattle Autonomous Zone a few days ago?

That seems like a pretty major failure of the people organizing that protest area, and it has become a lightning rod for racist criticism.

I’d wonder what the average rate of shootings is across either the same area or the same number of people in Seattle.

If you want an inside look at things, here's a perspective:

https://medium.com/@jordan.s.lyon

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I’d wonder what the average rate of shootings is across either the same area or the same number of people in Seattle.

This.

Shootings on Cap Hill aren't that rare. "Firework or gun?" is a common game to play.

I don't know the details of the shooting but there were white supremacists with guns trying to cause conflict.

My thoughts, from a distance:

- CHOP was entirely unplanned from the beginning, and is likely to be temporary unless enough people are invested in it as a cause. Which, while not impossible, is unlikely because it's separate from the core BLM demands. No one was trying to create an autonomous zone in Capitol Hill, it just happened when the police ran away.

- This Twitter thread goes into the timeline, particularly that the SPD prevented the fire department medics from responding to the scene, but didn't show up until after the street medics had already taken the victims to the hospital. (911 dispatch in Seattle is apparently controlled by the police department, so they control if it gets forwarded to the paramedics or not. Plus they were discouraging the fire department to enter the zone without police presence.)

- Having shootings happen is bad. Therefore shootings in the police-free zone is bad. Though I doubt police presence would have done anything to prevent it, because historically shootings happen whether or not the police are around.

- The only thing the police could have done for the victim was to protect the fire department paramedics as they worked. The protesters/occupiers seem to generally be of the opinion that the fire department would be safer without the police. I'm not sure that they're wrong. (The police can also investigate the crime scene after the fact, but that wouldn't have saved any lives.)

- The shootings clearly and understandably lost the project a lot of support.

- From what I understand right now, the shootings weren't connected with the occupation and would probably have lead to deaths even without it, but it's a bad look and something that was hard for the fledgling community to survive.

- There's a lot of conflicting stuff going on in terms of organization, with what from the outside seems to be relatively weak consensus building and too much de-centering of Black voices.

- The homeless population of Seattle have been showing up at the zone because the services offered there (mental health counseling, food, hygiene supplies, medical care) are better than the official shelters. I don't think it has much bearing on the shootings, but highlights that there's a lot of different things intersecting with what is going on there.

- From what I've been seeing online, the city of Seattle will likely be trying to clear CHOP out today.

- It's inspired a bunch of other occupations around the country, including in Portland, DC, and New York, though none of them have gotten the same degree of traction. (Possibly because it's hard to top cops running away from their own precinct.)