Minneapolis PD Suffocate Unarmed Black Man Who Later Dies in Hospital

[PeteMoss]

These type of tweets I've seen from so many white sports reporters:
https://twitter.com/SNkylebukauskas/...717422080?s=20

annoy me to no end.

Just shut up and do it without trying to get kudos online about doing the absolute minimum you can do.

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by Crown Royal

I had zero idea that was the origin of that phrase.

I don’t believe it is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade

Urban dictionary is generally an “alternative” phrase meaning. For commonly used old time phrases, you’ll find better reasoning elsewhere.

Pepsi. I'm asking for honesty. That's it. If you say one thing and turn around and say I meant something else, that's not being truthful. People need to be called out when they are "mincing words" then claiming otherwise.

Sent from my HD1905 using Tapatalk

[afc wimbledon]

In the 60's and 70's my black mates used the term spade to indicate a cool black guy, it had overtones of Shaft and the Black Panther Movement, it meant they were talking about a very hip black guy, there was nothing insulting about it, granted that was the UK don't know how it was viewed in N America

[PeteMoss]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

In the 60's and 70's my black mates used the term spade to indicate a cool black guy, it had overtones of Shaft and the Black Panther Movement, it meant they were talking about a very hip black guy, there was nothing insulting about it, granted that was the UK don't know how it was viewed in N America

I once asked someone from the UK if they do any cottaging in the UK during a work event. Now that's a term that has a very different meaning in the UK I learned

[DeluxeMoustache]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

In the 60's and 70's my black mates used the term spade to indicate a cool black guy, it had overtones of Shaft and the Black Panther Movement, it meant they were talking about a very hip black guy, there was nothing insulting about it, granted that was the UK don't know how it was viewed in N America

I notice you mention who used the term. Was it a term you would use?

[GirlySports]

It saddens me that 'we' don't seem to care unless there's a big show-me event. As mentioned Crown Royal above, indigenous people face the same issues and when was there ever a demonstration about that? Or community help? Or donations?

[PeteMoss]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

It saddens me that 'we' don't seem to care unless there's a big show-me event. As mentioned Crown Royal above, indigenous people face the same issues and when was there ever a demonstration about that? Or community help? Or donations?

Different issue, but they did just protest on our railway system and we got to read people begging for the police to come take them away forcefully.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

“Allies” need a way to center themselves in these situations. They, of course, could continue to social distance and instead donate money to one of the more organised initiatives working to make change in the US. But receipts don’t really look as good on the gram. And like... putting money where your mouth is can be expensive.

Not to completely discredit allies though. Many do vote with their hearts, which is a very important thing, I’m just very jaded.

If you are in Vancouver and want to help, donate to Hogan's Alley.
https://www.hogansalleysociety.org/a...alley-society/

[Barnet Flame]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I've yet to see the Globe and Mail, the CBC, the Atlantic, or the Guardian use the word "riot" in this story. And the only time I've seen the New York Times use the word was in an opinion column yesterday. And I go the websites of the above every day.

I checked my G&M app.

Third para of the first article.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

It saddens me that 'we' don't seem to care unless there's a big show-me event. As mentioned Crown Royal above, indigenous people face the same issues and when was there ever a demonstration about that? Or community help? Or donations?

How do you draw the conclusion that they face the same issues? It seems about 2 indigenous people are killed per year by RCMP in Canada. The article doesn't offer any other context to suggest whether these killing were unjustified . It mentions some could be classified as suicide by cop scenarios, and that RCMP police indigenous communities at a disproportionate rate.

About 250 black people are killed in the US/year and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many are likely not justified at all.

[edslunch]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I read four or five mainstream news sources every day. How is that avoiding news reporting?

My point stands. Owing to their tribal allegiances, the news outlets I cited are not using the word ‘riot’. The difference between ‘protests’ and ‘riots’ should be the behaviour of the crowd, not how sympathetic the news source is to their cause. But those are the times we live in.

This might be splitting hairs, but when I think of a riot I think of the majority of the crowd going nuts....rioting....vs a large protest where a smaller subset are causing mayhem.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I've yet to see the Globe and Mail, the CBC, the Atlantic, or the Guardian use the word "riot" in this story. And the only time I've seen the New York Times use the word was in an opinion column yesterday. And I go the websites of the above every day.

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I read four or five mainstream news sources every day. How is that avoiding news reporting?

My point stands. Owing to their tribal allegiances, the news outlets I cited are not using the word ‘riot’. The difference between ‘protests’ and ‘riots’ should be the behaviour of the crowd, not how sympathetic the news source is to their cause. But those are the times we live in.

You're a weird dude, man.

Here's an article from The Globe & Mail from two days ago: Biden staff donate to group that pays bail in riot-torn Minneapolis

Here's an article from The New York Times from 15 hours ago:
Amid Riots and a Pandemic, Church Attendance Resumes in ‘a Very Broken World’

I'm not going to go through all your sources you claim aren't using the term riot, but needless to say, you're wrong.

[peter12]

People still haven't gotten over the fact that we have a problem with police killings in Canada and instead of tackling that issue head-on, they would rather import American political culture and stances.

[Traditional_Ale]

Originally Posted by edslunch

This might be splitting hairs, but when I think of a riot I think of the majority of the crowd going nuts....rioting....vs a large protest where a smaller subset are causing mayhem.

I agree. Vancouver burning their city down over a hockey game (twice ) is a riot. Protesting a very real human issue is not a riot.

[Itse]

Sorry for taking long to answer, not sure if anyone's interested with pages and pages of new stuff, but here goes anyway.

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Clearly the police force. But that doesn't make the looting right, which I think you ultimately conclude as well.

I do think this was inevitable, as I said earlier. But again, it's still not something that should be celebrated or excused, as some are doing.

This isn't how proximate cause works, so I disagree. If you set a building on fire and loot a storefront because you're angry about how the local police treat black suspects, it's not the police's fault for upsetting you. You're committing a crime. The police's criminal behaviour and institutional failings are their fault, your criminal behaviour is yours. There are many reasons to be justifiably angry, but you do not get to go downtown and break a bunch of windows and then claim it was the fault of the people who made you angry in the first place. That's on you.

Individual responsibility is always with the individual, but individual and collective responsibility are not mutually exclusive. So basically what you said goes both ways. Just because an individual rioter is responsible for their individual actions doesn't absolve the police from being collectively responsible for the situation as a whole.

The point I'm making is that in my personal opinion, the question of individual responsibility, or "what should we think about the looters and rioters" isn't a question that can, in this situation, be answered in a collective sense. The protesters, rioters and looters are not an organized collective unit. They're a group of individuals who are each reacting to the situation in their own way. Some are shouting slogans, some are throwing stones, some are looting. Nobody organized the looting and rioting (at least as far as anyone knows), and none of them have control over the actions of others. One protester is generally speaking not responsible for the actions of anyone other than themselves (and maybe some of their friends). I don't expect a civilian to get in the way when someone starts acting violently and breaking things. It's great if they do, but in most situations it's not fair to expect it.

You would have to take an individual rioter, look at what exactly they did, insert the necessary context into the picture (starting from who that person is) and then pass moral judgment if you so desire. BTW I'm with you in the sense that I don't agree with the people who claim that rioting was strictly necessary, nor do I agree that rioters should be cheered on as people who are doing something necessary. Although I'll get back to this.

IMO another reason why these types protests tend to dissolve into violence is that they are poorly organized and lack goals/mechanisms that would vent the frustration of the crowd in a more constructive manner. This isn't anyone's fault as such, you can't blame anyone for not being a better organizer, but it is a problem in general. (I think there's an interesting speculation to be had on why protests in the US seems generally to be less organized than their European counterparts, but that is another discussion completely.)

(That said, a big reason the protests around racialized issues often dissolve into violence because the US police is so f***ing racist and very often actively work to escalate the situation so they get to bash some heads. It's very hard to organize against deliberate police provocations.)

To get back on topic, I can't find it in me to pass moral judgment on people I don't really know, individually or even as a collective really, especially in a situation where I am too aware that I can't truly relate to their situation. (Legal judgment is something I refuse to do because I'm not part of the US legal system. I'm also of the opinion that moral and legal judgment can go opposite ways. It can be necessary for something to be legally wrong even when it's morally right or at least excusable.)

We'll leave aside the fact that I question if many of these guys are doing what they're doing exclusively out of anger at systemic racism, because I think many of them are just young dudes who are taking the opportunity to break some things and get some free stuff. If they can justify it to themselves as being part of "fighting back against the system", more the better.

While I agree, I'm also of the opinion that it probably not possible to draw a clear line between "a person venting his anger at a system he feels is fundamentally unfair/broken/rigged" and "a young dude who really feels like breaking stuff would be fun". The people, typically young men, who have trouble even understanding what it is that makes them want to burn down a store are likely the kinds of people who are like that because of deep systematic problems in the country he lives in.

I agree. However, in at least some of these instances, I think it's probably impossible to prevent this without taking very aggressive steps that I suspect we both would prefer they not take. If the alternative leads to more people getting injured or killed by police in attempting to quell the rioting, the rioting is pretty clearly the lesser evil.

While you're absolutely right, to me this is the ultimate condemnation of the police. When the police has through decades of violent and/or racist behavior put themselves in a position where they are unable to do their job because they are so hated and/or feared by a portion of the population, you can't really excuse them for not being able to do their job.

This isn't what happened, though. The officers were almost immediately suspended, and shortly afterwards, fired. The mayor's office immediately decried the abuse and called for charges. Those charges were laid, again, quite quickly. The normal time it takes for these processes to take place were abridged here.

Again, I think it's revisionist history to suggest that this was a case where the response from those in power was half-measures, it was actually surprising how hard they came down on the officers involved, given how these things have gone in the recent past. I don't really see how you could expect a better process.

IDK, I think we were reading different messages here, and reading them differently... But. I was thinking whether I can defend my position my giving an example of what kind of realistic behavior might have prevented the protests, and honestly I couldn't really think of it.

A major issue here though is the systematic problem. An officer in the line of duty is protected by law in the US to such an extent that it's borderline impossible to treat these situations with the gravity they deserve. Someone like the mayor really can't do much on a short notice, and the charges you can usually make legally stick just aren't what the public would consider a proportional punishment.

That said, since the police have themselves lobbied for the laws to be that way, it's still kind of their fault for taking part in building a system where there's just not enough accountability.

As I said earlier, I think this is a brilliant strategy, but I also think it's naive to suggest that if every police force tried this, it would work in every case and no rioting or looting would have happened.

You are of course right. Again though, I would suggest that it very likely works in places where the police behave more like they should on an everyday basis, have better public relations to begin with and as a result have a community where such a riot is a lot less likely to break out.

I still think it's important to talk about, just as a reminder that there is no fundamental reason why in the US the relationship between the police and the public should be so terrible.

(It's also kind of unfortunate that we have to talk of the US in general here even though there are just massive differences from state to state and city to city.)

I agree with this too. My whole thing was not that it's not understandable, or that it's surprising that it's happening. I'm not the least bit surprised. My objection is to people suggesting that it's excusable, or unimportant, or even laudable (I have read a bunch of cheerleading, though not so much in this thread), or that even being interested in it at all somehow suggests that you're trying to distract from the central issue about police overreach and brutality. It is, as you say, not okay, it's fairly harmful to people who don't deserve it, and it's not ultimately productive.

I agree with that last part maybe like 50%.

As many have IMO correctly pointed out, rioting unfortunately does bring attention in a way that peaceful protests just don't. I think it has helped to bring out the true disgustingly violent colors of many police forces in the US right now, in a way that just hasn't been the case before. Not by design, but it still happened. A month ago many people here would simply have not believed that this is really what some police forces in the US have devolved into.

The rioting has helped in part in creating what right now seems likely to be a memorable moment in US history that will affect public perception for a long time, even if nothing concrete comes out of it right now.

On top of that. Being on the right side of the issue is still right, even if you end up on the losing side. To me it's a bit cheap to say rioting doesn't help, when nothing else has so far helped.

Or to put it another way, there's logically no fair criteria to judge whether or not rioting is more or less effective than peaceful protesting in this particular situation. Just because you lost doesn't prove that you didn't use the most effective method available to you.

EDIT:
I need to add that the police on the other hand IMO need to be judged primarily on a collective basis, because it's the duty of every individual police to guard the public and to help create a livable community with a functioning police force. It's literally part of their job to protect the population from corrupt, racist and violent policing.

Even if you're not out there bashing heads and shooting rubber bullets at will, letting your colleague behave like that without trying to arrest them is dereliction of duty. When your colleagues are behaving like thugs, either you find a moral spine and step up against them, or you're morally just as guilty.

If you don't think that's fair, you shouldn't be a cop.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by Titan

You really sure that is the phrase you want to use in this?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spade

This reminds me of the first season of The Apprentice when Omarosa called someone racist for using the phrase "the pot calling the kettle black."

You've got too much time on your hands if you're looking to take a 2000 year old idiom with no racial undertones and trying to make it racist.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by DeluxeMoustache

I notice you mention who used the term. Was it a term you would use?

I would guess at times, although I cant remember it specifically or think of a context I would have, we tended to think less in terms of colour as geography in the UK, my mates weren't black they were West Indian, Jamaican or Bajian

[Yamer]

Originally Posted by Sliver

You're a weird dude, man.

Here's an article from The Globe & Mail from two days ago: Biden staff donate to group that pays bail in riot-torn Minneapolis

Here's an article from The New York Times from 15 hours ago:
Amid Riots and a Pandemic, Church Attendance Resumes in ‘a Very Broken World’

I'm not going to go through all your sources you claim aren't using the term riot, but needless to say, you're wrong.

CBC - posted 12:44 a.m., May 28:

There are calls for peace and justice in Minneapolis after two nights of protests and rioting following the death of George Floyd while in police custody

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/minnea...eath-1.5587872

Globe & Mail - posted May 31:

During the weekend, protests took over streets from coast to coast, rioters torched buildings and cars, and officers cracked down with rubber bullets and tear gas. The protests were some of the largest in the country’s long history of caustic race relations, rivalling in size the civil-rights demonstrations that took down segregation laws in the 1960s.

In New York, police arrested hundreds of people after several protests and riots across the city. In one incident, video showed police driving two SUVs into groups of demonstrators and knocking people down. In Minneapolis, officers were seen firing paintballs at people standing on their porches in a residential neighbourhood. In Louisville, Ky., police pepper-sprayed a television news reporter during a live broadcast, and one protester broke the hand off a statue of Louis XVI.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/worl...iolence-grows/

The Guardian - news feed reports over the past 1-2 days

Authorities in Minneapolis deployed the National Guard on Saturday to deal with protests and riots in the city, determined to avoid the scenes of looting and destruction from the night before. Their tactics were aggressive, as this video below shows, with guardsmen marching through residential neighbourhoods ordering people to go inside their homes – and firing non-lethal rounds at them if they failed to comply.

Rioting appears to be ongoing and intense in the Californian city of La Mesa, close to San Diego. A curfew has been imposed but at least two banks and a fire truck have now been set on fire, local media is reporting, with unverified footage on social media indicating the damage may be far more extensive.

One among the many disturbing features of the unrest of recent days has been attacks on journalists covering the protests and riots. The latest to surface is from Oakland, California, where reporter and photographer Sarah Belle Lin was shot with a paintball round as she was filming protesters running from police.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...looting-police


The Atlantic is paywalled so I can't do thorough research on the language of their articles over the past week.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Yamer

CBC - posted 12:44 a.m., May 28:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/minnea...eath-1.5587872

Globe & Mail - posted May 31:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/worl...iolence-grows/

The Guardian - news feed reports over the past 1-2 days

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...looting-police

The Atlantic is paywalled so I can't do thorough research on the language of their articles over the past week.

lol, but what about the "tRiBaL aLlEgIaNcEs" of the MSM not using the word "riot"?