Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.
Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. And despite that, each died after police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.
Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.
Also, why is all harm short of killing someone considered acceptable when police do it?
Yup. The average person would be charged, but qualified immunity means these assholes have carte blanche to murder at will.
As always, ACAB.
A lot of statistics about dangers in society seem to be entirely centred around deaths. Which is understandable of course, but underplays the many other harmful outcomes that can occur short of that.
You could argue very convincingly that some non-fatal injuries lead to a fate worse than death.
Even killing someone is only occasionally punished.
The idea is to offload violence from the society to the police (to give lawful monopoly on violence to the police). The alternative is wild west where everyone can do policing/violence as they see fit.
Granted that the policing should always be scrutinized and improved as needed, having completely “defund police” is not something we want to do.The idea is to offload violence from the society to the police
My point is that conferring such enormous authority and power without enormous responsibility and accountability (and careful selection and training) is a mistake.
The alternative is wild west where everyone can do policing/violence as they see fit.
I’m 99% certain there are other possibilities in between the two extremes.
having completely “defund police” is not something we want to do.
As I understand it, the “defund the police” movement is not about abolishing police. (And is a bit off topic, so I’ll save that discussion for another time.)
May be you think “defund police” is actually train police or create additional department of people who can deal with things mentally ill (both of it costs money, the opposite of “defund”) but I bet most of the people do not think so, and treat “defund police” and ACAB exactly as it sounds.
In any case I have answers a very specific question in my previous post.
Daily reminder: ACAB
PEB: Policing Enables Bastards
PEB allows for one (out of 700k cops in the US) or more e.g. trans BIPOC officers to try to be the change from the inside without insulting them in the meantime.
Could be a stupid plan (e.g. if that approach is impossible). But a stupid person isn’t necessarily a bastard.
Also PEB considers it takes a while to fire whistleblower/“good” cops, and similarly doesn’t insult them during their firing process (insult to injury).
…am I being too literal with the word “All”?
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I’ll stop talking when the police stop killing.
We can talk all day about lack of training or inability to de-escalate but at the end of the day those people died because a cop wanted them dead. The problem is the cops.
Grateful to be living in a country where police don’t even carry firearms regularly - New Zealand
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Before edit, the comment to which I was replying was, “Who gives a fuck about New Zealand.” authored by archlinuxforever, an unoriginal troll.
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I do. As an American, I look up to their example.
I hope one day my country will advance to their standards of law enforcement.
The internet has given us the unique experience of “playing with” mentally ill people like archlinuxforever, what a time to be alive.
Born too late to sail the seas, born too early to sail the stars, born just in time to surf troll back hair.
“National reckoning on policing” MY FUCKING ASS. I will never understand people who think just cuz it was on the news more than a week that some great change came of it.
Acab motherfuckers
I watched an execution in Tacoma last summer.
Guy was running from the cops in a truck, flips a bitch, does some light bumper cars off traffic tries to take a corner, right in front of us (standing in a parking lot, just came out of the store), too fast, not buckled and gets thrown out of the truck which careens into a gas station.
Dude is obvs high. Cops pull up, state patrol, non lethal guns out, they’re hiding behind their cars. Dudes sitting in his ass, throws them the finger and tells them to fuck off, rolls like 3 times over and dumps his stash in the storm drain. It’s clear as day what he did.
There’s a girl in the same parking lot screaming, “He’s unarmed!” Over and over and over again.
The local police arrive and they swarm the guy with tasers. We were leaving at that point, I counted 5 cops actively tasing him.
Heart attack. Natural causes according to the police report.
Regardless of the chase, regardless of his indignation, none of that equals lethal force. It’s as if we took all Americas serial killers and put them on payroll.
There is no situation I can imagine where I would call the police. I’ll handle my safety myself, I’m 45min away from the nearest station anyway. There’s no protection they’re offering that is worth the risk they themselves bring to me.
ACAB. Fuck the police. Fuck this entire society, bring the boogaloo. No one would look around and decide this is a society they would create. No one. It’s way past time to stop fighting for it.
