Bjorn

This is from a few days ago, but it's an Al-Jazeera report, and at the end of it they are shooting background footage of abandoned land and a street sign miles from the protests. A cop shows up and starts barking orders at them, threatening to "bust their ass", and threatens to confiscate their footage. I've got some people on Facebook claiming that any reporters who get in trouble only did so because of something they did. Hard to argue with this, when there's literally no one in sight other than the cops, the reporters and a cabbie. On Facebook, I'm focusing on sharing the shit that is happening to journalists for now, because as has been said earlier, if this is how the cops treat reporters on camera, what the fuck has been happening off camera for years.

No, unfortunately not. Most of the non-game casts I listen to are pretty well known stuff in the 30-60 minute range (Common Sense, On the Media, This American Life, RadioLab, Savage Lovecast, Freakonomics, Planet Money, Sex Nerd Sandra). The only new cast I've added as a regular in awhile is Death, Sex and Taxes. Until I just took a good look at my subscription list, I'm not sure I had realized that the four topics I listen to the most on a weekly basis (based on hours listened) are video games, sex, economics/money and the media in general.

This is so far beyond Brown now though. The chief needs to resign, or be removed. Likely a dozen or more cops ought to be fired. The killing just started this, dealing with the cop will not be the end.

Dan Carlin, not David. And I love HH, along with his politics and current events cast Common Sense. He's a really rare media commentator for me. I don't agree with everything he says, but I think he provides a fascinating perspective and does it without being an inflammatory, extremist shithead.

Have you tried Skyward Collapse? I own it, but haven't actually played it yet. Seemed like a great exploration of god game mechanics, where victory is failure and maintaining a perpetual state of religious warfare between diverse peoples is the goal.

Yeah, I'm not comfortable with the NG being called in, but at the same time, I don't know what else they do. The local police forces have to be completely removed from the situation. Who else do you bring in?

Not just a legal right, but a constitutional right to film police doing their jobs in pubic, so long as they are not obstructing or interfering with their work. The few laws preventing this have been steadily collapsing over the last few years thanks to the rise of the smartphone. So far as I know, not a single law prohibiting or restricting filming the police has survived a legal challenge. Though there are still plenty of examples of arrests, trials, illegal confiscations and lawsuits over it. Just a few days before Ferguson, the NYPD reminded its officers that the public has a right to film them, and to stop them is a violation of the constitution.

They got a good 5+ seconds of him before aiming the camera at the ground and being escorted back to the press conference area. He specifically said that he was under orders not to allow any filming in the area that they were shooting (which was literally a 60-90 second walk from where the press conference was being held). Edited to add: To be fair, there are some legal/ethical questions about showing the faces of people who are being arrested, but haven't been charged with anything, without their permission. Before the cop showed up, the Vice reporter asked her camera person to make sure to angle the shot so as not to show the faces of the men being processed (though they still did show a few). I have one friend from journalism school who worked on one of those cop reality shows for awhile (not Cops, but another one), and a chunk of her job was making sure of stuff like that.

Cop is telling the Vice streaming crew to turn off their camera or point it at the ground because they went wandering away a few hundred feet from the official media area (in a Target parking lot many blocks away from where the curfew is in effect) and were filming the cops processing people who had been arrested tonight.

I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, like rubbing salt in a wound. I suspect that most people have never had criminal interactions with the police much more severe than a traffic violation, and so don't even realize the deep truth of that. Being white, particularly if you're at least middle class, is a ridiculous how it changes how the police treat you. Like, if I wasn't a white guy, from a well liked family, I'd have spent some time in jail. Was never even arrested for anything. My brother unquestionably should have done some time as a teenager, but wasn't even arrested for the worst offense he committed, just got brought home from the cops and they had a long talk with our dad. Because he was a good ole boy from a good ole family. This was a small town, so the cops knew our family well, but I know none of the latino/hispanic kids in town ever got that kind of treatment. And the one black family, their kids were two of the straightest arrows I ever met, which they probably had to be. Not to say that white kids in that town got away with everything, there certainly were people who got arrested, fined, jail time, etc. But just like all other privilege, the scales were weighted in their favor, and against the non-white kids.

Reporter for MSNBC was threatened with mace, also apparently threatened while on air? Haven't found the video for that yet.

AH, I just hit that. The feed is really choppy for me, apparently every time it pauses, I'm slipping a little bit further back in time, so I'm not seeing it as quickly as other people. Jesus, my heart started racing for that guy during that moment. Just fuck. Fuck fuck.

Got links? I'm watching the livestream that blambo linked above, but it's been mostly just the back of the police for awhile.

:tup: I was going to type up something to try and give you an ego boost, but it looks like you and everyone else here has done a pretty good job. Chill the fuck out (as best you can) and have a great evening!

I just want to highlight this quote from that article: "In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified." It's 20-fucking-14 and states are just getting around to deciding that police homicides should be independently investigated. There were a dozen police watching, about half of which were watching from bicycles. Huh, weird how differently the police react to white people protesting.

I'm with everything Merus said, plus I love the themes of media and subversion that run through it. Ultimately you are fighting a propaganda war, trying to reveal what the occupying force is doing while the occupying force is trying to obscure what they are doing. You're putting your life on the line to be a citizen journalist. That's powerful territory for a game explore.

There was a designated "reporter" zone in a parking lot that journalists weren't allowed to leave once the curfew time hit. I didn't see anything about weapons being pointed at them though.

I was going to go to bed an hour ago, but watching #ferguson is...mesmerizing? Horrifying? Some combination of that.

Yeah, it's because the protestors were afraid of what the police would do, which is terrible, but that does seem to be what played out with part of the looting last night.

I'm catching up on the new news, but to be fair here, it sounds like some of the protest organizers didn't want the police to try and stop the looting, for fear of an even greater escalation of violence.

This was the way it was supposed to be set up though. SWAT Teams were intended to be a police force that used military grade equipment and training to respond to extraordinary situations. These forces are now deployed hundreds of times a week nationwide (some estimate it as much as 100 times a day). And the origin of SWAT is tied into the suppression of protesting farm workers in California. And look where we are almost 50 years later.

I actually wonder what the variety of non-lethal tools has done to the psychology of police interactions (both on police and civilian sides). Non-lethal devices are still violent uses of force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, dogs, pepper spray, bean bags, batons, etc. A cop 30 years ago had a limited to non-existent supply of non-lethal tools. Thus, the options were limited to de-escalate, hit someone with a baton or pull a gun. But once you're trained to immediately fall back to violent, if non-lethal, tools, then you've been trained to go to violence much earlier than if the dominant options were de-escalation and death. I'm not arguing that non-lethal tools are bad, I would generally believe they are massively important. But I wonder if there has been a cultural unintended consequence of the wide proliferation of them. Police don't just have a hammer, they have a tool box full of a bunch of different colors of hammers.

On the thing about 8-year-olds installing mods, I love the line from Corey Doctorow's book Little Brother. "Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." Looking back on some of the stuff I did as a kid, I realize how accurate that statement is.

I'm just going to substitute "baby babble" for "jargon" from now on. Thanks! This has to be a fairly accurate representation of some corporate meetings:

Thanks for your thoughts from a military perspective on this, it's not a viewpoint that is widely accessible around here. I've known my share of cops over the years (for some reason I've had multiple cop neighbors), and my perception is that 20-30 years ago, pulling a gun was a BIG FUCKING DEAL. But in the last 10-15 years, it feels like unholstering a gun has become a very common response. I don't have data to back that up, but the attitude and expectation certainly seems to be changing. And this is fucking nuts. We do not know how many people US police kill a year. Like, we don't have a clue. Only 5 percent of law enforcement agencies report to a voluntary FBI database on "justifiable homicides", and for that 5 percent, an average of 400 killings a year are reported. The report doesn't say what percentage of that population that the 5 percent covers (if it's mostly made up of large, metro agencies, it could easily be 50 percent of the population). White police officers average killing almost a 100 black people a year, of which 18 percent are under 21.