Minneapolis PD Suffocate Unarmed Black Man Who Later Dies in Hospital

[Looch City]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

No. No one was lumping the opportunistic rioters in with the other protestors, either - the first thing I did in my post (which transplant was agreeing with there) was to point out that difference. Plenty of straw men being hastily built in here. Case in point...

No one has said anything remotely similar to this, either.

Ummm...

Originally Posted by transplant99

Stopping those who are setting fires and looting has to fall to those they are hiding among. Cops certainly cant go in and do anything about it without all hell breaking loose.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

My mistake. I missed that line. I also disagree with that (as should be evident from what I said in my post).

EDIT: I should say that I definitely agree with this.

Originally Posted by octothorp

If this was just about this one death, I don't think there'd be riots and protests given the swift firing and likely impending charges. But it's not just about this death. A lot of people in these communities find themselves in stressful, unnecessary situations with law enforcement on a regular basis, with risk of injury or imprisonment or even death. That's the really ####ty situation that needs to be fixed, and not even swift and thorough convictions of these cops will fix that problem. Until that changes, every highly visible death like this one is going to be a lightning rod for all that justifiable anger.

This is all pretty much inevitable. Everything after the initial killing, that is - that part could obviously have been avoided. But protests in response, including property damage (busted up police cars) was just obviously going to happen. Similarly, the escalation to riots and looting was equally inevitable once those protests started escalating.

I'm not sure it's possible to stop this from happening again, either. A good faith effort could be made to implement systemic, fundamental change in the way that police forces are organized in the USA, training could be augmented to directly address these types of incidents with a view to eliminating them, and at some point, a white officer is still going to kill a black suspect, somewhere. And the same thing will probably happen in response.

They still have to change police culture (whether they actually will, I'm considerably more skeptical about), but it seems naive to think that even honest, well intentioned steps in that direction will prevent this episode from playing out again in the future.

[81MC]

Originally Posted by dammage79

Looters beating and hosing down a woman in a powered wheelchair with a fire extinguisher at a target wasn't the best optics. Yes, the woman was trying to stop the looting and maybe should have stayed the hell out of the way but damn.

Unfortunate consequences of police brutality.

And let's not forget that anything after those cops killed that man is directly tied to their responsibility. That's THEIR fault, not anyone else. Treat a human with compassion and none of this happens. None of it.

Remember Reginald Denny, viciously beaten by 'rioters' in LA? People turn into ####ing animals at any opportunity. I think it's important that blame be placed where it belongs, and that includes 'rioters'.

The savagery inflicted to innocent humans cannot be excused because of another's actions. You may empathize, sympathize, or even understand how it comes to be, but brutality towards innocents in the name of protesting brutality of innocents is not something to be ignored.

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by Iggy City

Ummm...

So...who should stop them?

Where I sit, there are 2 options.

Those on the streets that are there to protest lawfully

or

Police.

Since the entire protest is directed at how the police treat the very people who are protesting, the police going in would cause......what?

Realizing that even the very best cops are still human, they are now going to be on edge and very likely a far thinner line of restraint.

Now if those protesting took an approach like MLK and his followers did in the 60's, which one do you think might see as more likely to see change come from it?

Again, I fully understand the anger and the lashing out. The whole incident is sickening and infuriating.

All that being said, one has to have to look at it from a pragmatic view as well and see quite clearly that rioting and destroying property and more dead innocent people, is not going to help the very goal they are striving for. Period.

I don't know....it's a nearly impossible situation for sure but in no way shape or form is more destruction going to help anyone anywhere.

The Watts riots, King riots, Detroit/NY/DC riots of 68, Washington Heights, Ferguson etc...have all shown that repeatedly.

[FlamesAddiction]

This is why we need more guns on the street.

Instead of just causing property damage and fisty-cuffs, the people could take on the bad guys on an even playing field.

[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I'm not going to come down on you for being racist, but I will say that I am deeply offended that you mixed up "imminently" and "eminently".

And you have every right to be, I'm deeply offended at myself. Someone is going to have to revoke my grammar proficiency card.

[Senator Clay Davis]

#DenzelForPresident

https://twitter.com/user/status/1265764426252038144

[dobbles]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

No. No one was lumping the opportunistic rioters in with the other protestors, either - the first thing I did in my post (which transplant was agreeing with there) was to point out that difference. Plenty of straw men being hastily built in here. Case in point...

No one has said anything remotely similar to this, either.

I honestly resent the way that Rube argues about these issues. It's just all emotionally charged hyperbole (the "systemic murder of an entire race of people"), unfair and un-nuanced caricatures of what other people are saying, and accusations of racism and not being concerned with police violence, as if you can't be opposed to two things at once. It's just a rhetorical smokescreen to disguise the fact that he doesn't really have a tenable argument. It's galling that he'll take personal shots at peoples' motivations and try to cast them as uncaring monsters to cover up his own inability to think clearly on these topics. I get that this makes you angry and upset, I can understand that reaction, but it's really no excuse.

I got the impression that Dirac was doing just that in his post. So while you personally may not be saying so, I wouldn't classify it as a strawman or anything.

My life experiences show me that many people are unable to differentiate between legitimate protesters and opportunist looters when both groups happen to be of the same skin color. I honestly don't believe there would be much overlap in the venn diagram of those two groups. But for many in the states, seeing a black man looting invalidates all of the black men protesting. Call it anecdotal, but there is a reason we keep having these same problems....

[icecube]

It's a f'n riot. What do people expect, a bunch of free hugs t-shirts? They get violent. Property is destroyed and set on fire. Things get stolen.

This is the racist systems fault. This is the police's fault. This is white supremacy's fault. This is America's fault.

If you don't like the riots themselves then your anger is misplaced. They are a symptom of the problem. This is suppressed anger from centuries of abuse being released. Direct your anger elsewhere where it is needed.

And these riots do cause change. Probably more change than non violent protests do. Sometimes these big negative events have to happen for people to wake up and get on board and get things changed for the better.

[icecube]

Originally Posted by dobbles

I got the impression that Dirac was doing just that in his post. So while you personally may not be saying so, I wouldn't classify it as a strawman or anything.

My life experiences show me that many people are unable to differentiate between legitimate protesters and opportunist looters when both groups happen to be of the same skin color. I honestly don't believe there would be much overlap in the venn diagram of those two groups. But for many in the states, seeing a black man looting invalidates all of the black men protesting. Call it anecdotal, but there is a reason we keep having these same problems....

Those people are the problem. They are a large part of what upholds white supremacy.

[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by rubecube

I mean if you're more concerned with the destruction and theft of private property and the "reasonableness" of the protesters than you are the systemic brutalizing and murdering of an entire race of people, then I'm not sure what you expect people to think of you. Maybe it's not explicitly racist, but it's inherently lacking in compassion, empathy and humanity.

This is such a conflation dude. I'm not a fan of buildings being burnt down and stores being robbed. I'm also not a fan of police brutality resulting in death. Two things can be true at once, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, etc etc etc. Where's your compassion empathy and humanity for innocent bystanders who have had their property destroyed and stores looted?

You made these exact same arguments in 2014 for Ferguson we argued about this then as well. I'd like to see what was achieved by those riots besides extensive property damage. You can be down with the cause and not give carte blanche to any and all destructive behaviour, it's such a false choice.

[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by dobbles

I got the impression that Dirac was doing just that in his post. So while you personally may not be saying so, I wouldn't classify it as a strawman or anything.

My life experiences show me that many people are unable to differentiate between legitimate protesters and opportunist looters when both groups happen to be of the same skin color. I honestly don't believe there would be much overlap in the venn diagram of those two groups. But for many in the states, seeing a black man looting invalidates all of the black men protesting. Call it anecdotal, but there is a reason we keep having these same problems....

I'm not confusing them though, I respect and would protect people's rights to protest, especially something terrible like this. I'm specifically calling out the rioters and looters though as bad actors. The only blurring happening are the people who are defending both behaviours as just.

[JJolg]

Originally Posted by GreenLantern

What the hell is going on here. Am I in bizzaro world? People are absolved of their actions because of what a cop did to someone else?

Oh lord. Ok. I’m coming over to your house to protest and I’m going to smash out your front window and start your car on fire. But don’t blame me, blame society. I’m just protesting.

That is literally what happened over night. Innocent people who had nothing to do with this incident are having their entire lives turned upside down. And that is just ok? It’s a consequence of police actions? How about if it happened to you? Would you say the same thing?

Nothing here happened overnight, but what you have is a group of people who if they are out in public alone are in fear for their lives, like going for a jog and getting killed in a white community or instead of being detained normally for a traffic stop being choked out by a knee.. you get them together in a group and they are going to push back.. The blind eye America has taken to these way to common incidents is going to boil over much worse if it keeps happening

[AltaGuy]

The rioters and looters are wholly insignificant in this discussion. If you're talking about them, you've lost the plot.

Around 90% of adult African Americans have had an unpleasant experience with police that they believed was tied to race. That's over 40 million people. Many many more if you include other ethnicities as well.

That's the issue.

All this other crap critiquing the form of protest, or individuals looting or rioting or whatever - you've lost the plot. This is a massive problem, and attention should be placed on the actual problem. Who cares about certain individuals misbehaving on the fringes?

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by transplant99

Are these not riot cops?

Wait did you know the below before you posted this?

Originally Posted by DownInFlames

Those are unionized workers protesting “right to work” legislation eight years ago. They’re not armed and they’re not storming anything.

[troutman]

Insurers will compensate these businesses, but these men murdered by police are never coming back.

I wish civil disobedience would make a difference, but I understand how many feel this is not resulting in any progress.

It is too bad some opportunists take advantage of the chaos to loot.

[dammage79]

And looting is also part of the systemic oppression as well. I can't imagine that if a persons quality of living was good enough they'd risk going to steal literally anything. Sure we see TVs and electronics but if you look close enough you see all the food is gone too. Think about that for a second. Clothes...

Again, and I've been saying this so much over the past couple of weeks spanning Akim Aliu
To other things, I cannot fathom dealing with that level of hate in your daily existence. Its madenning even trying to comprehend it or why its that way in the first place.

[PeteMoss]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

My mistake. I missed that line. I also disagree with that (as should be evident from what I said in my post).

EDIT: I should say that I definitely agree with this.

This is all pretty much inevitable. Everything after the initial killing, that is - that part could obviously have been avoided. But protests in response, including property damage (busted up police cars) was just obviously going to happen. Similarly, the escalation to riots and looting was equally inevitable once those protests started escalating.

I'm not sure it's possible to stop this from happening again, either. A good faith effort could be made to implement systemic, fundamental change in the way that police forces are organized in the USA, training could be augmented to directly address these types of incidents with a view to eliminating them, and at some point, a white officer is still going to kill a black suspect, somewhere. And the same thing will probably happen in response.

They still have to change police culture (whether they actually will, I'm considerably more skeptical about), but it seems naive to think that even honest, well intentioned steps in that direction will prevent this episode from playing out again in the future.

There has been 1252 black people killed by police since 2015 in the US. We can safely assume that most of those shootings were done by white cops - lets say 1000.

We can pretty safely also assume there hasn't been 1000 violent protests about police shootings since 2015. So I'm pretty confident that a white police officer killing a black guy in justifiable situation isn't going to cause violent riots in most cases.

You could probably correlate violent protests with shootings where the police did something unnecessarily AND there was video of the incident.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...ings-database/

[icecube]

Originally Posted by dammage79

And looting is also part of the systemic oppression as well. I can't imagine that if a persons quality of living was good enough they'd risk going to steal literally anything. Sure we see TVs and electronics but if you look close enough you see all the food is gone too. Think about that for a second. Clothes...

Again, and I've been saying this so much over the past couple of weeks spanning Akim Aliu
To other things, I cannot fathom dealing with that level of hate in your daily existence. Its madenning even trying to comprehend it or why its that way in the first place

A good time to remind people that are finger pointing at America that the level of racism against Indigenous people in Canada both individual and systemic is willfully ignored and tolerated by huge proportion of our population. We are a very racist country too.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PeteMoss

So I'm pretty confident that a white police officer killing a black guy in justifiable situation isn't going to cause violent riots in most cases.

In most cases, sure. My point was that this is going to keep happening, no matter what the authorities do to try to fix policing (if they actually even do anything beyond the superficial). They should still try to fix the problem, of course. But if the logic is that rioting sends the message "fix the problem or things like this will keep happening", well, they're going to keep happening regardless, even if appropriate steps are taken immediately. I don't really see a way around it.

This is just an unsatisfactory answer, to me:

Originally Posted by Troutman

I wish civil disobedience would make a difference, but I understand how many feel this is not resulting in any progress.

This sort of thing won't either, and has the unfortunate side effect of hurting entirely the wrong people. Yeah, I'm sure they're mostly insured, but that's only half of the issue.

Again, I also understand why people would feel that way. I think it's inevitable that things escalated to rioting. It's just really sad that some people seem to think it's justified or good that this happened because not being violent hadn't solved the problem.