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Black Lives Matter

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Yesterday Black Lives Matters protesters were shot at by white supremacists in front of a police department in Minneapolis. The protesters, thankfully, have had non-fatal injuries. The protesters were there because of the shooting of a young man named Jamal Clark last week by the Minneapolis police.

 

http://www.citypages.com/news/report-white-supremacists-shoot-five-black-lives-matters-protesters-7855265

I am so disappointed in my city for this. 

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Also yesterday, details of the shooting of LaquanMcDonald, a black kid in Chicago, were made public. The Chicago police maintained, up until yesterday, that he was crazy-on-drugs and a danger and defended their position to shoot him FIFTEEN TIMES. Turns out his toxicity was negative, and the PD lied about the circumstances of what lead to the shooting. The local Burger King district also disclosed to the media that the PD deleted their security footage, which caught everything leading up to the shooting. But the PD failed to delete the footage of them deleting footage. OOPS.

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Tamir Rice, the 12 year old boy shot and killed (murdered) by police, won't see justice. He had a toy gun and was given 2 seconds to comply before being murdered. It was decided that his murderers won't be indicted on any charges.

 

2015 was the year that America's power players stood up proudly to say that the police exist to protect white people and execute anyone else regardless of age. We're being held hostage by racists that control law enforcement and the judicial system.

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Tamir Rice, the 12 year old boy shot and killed (murdered) by police, won't see justice. He had a toy gun and was given 2 seconds to comply before being murdered. It was decided that his murderers won't be indicted on any charges.

 

2015 was the year that America's power players stood up proudly to say that the police exist to protect white people and execute anyone else regardless of age. We're being held hostage by racists that control law enforcement and the judicial system.

 

The Tamir Rice case is particularly shitty, as the video (NSFW) shows the cops nearly run him over before immediately shooting him.  There wasn't even a fucking attempt to arrest, question or do anything remotely resembling police work.  After all the high profile cases in 2015 we need at the very least a moratorium on grand juries in cases involving cops.

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This whole thing was a terrible miscarriage of justice. I get that the person taking the call bungled things (caller said it was probably a kid and the gun was probably a fake weapon prop--dispatch said it was a man with a gun), but man, that officers reacted in the way that they did with no trial resulting speaks to the horrible, horrible bullshit that the police system will do to protect its own at the expense of the public.

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Not only murders them, but gets out scott fucking free!

 

All one has to look at is how we treat white terrorists that do mass shootings or harm against PoC. Do they get killed right away, have some false story of them coming at the cops and get treated as thugs in the media and society? Fuck no. They get a chance and have some story of mental illness.

 

Do we ever talk about the mental illness that afflicting millions of black and brown children in inner-cities? Fuck no. The only time we hear it is when white folks do something

 

Fuck this country. Fuck white people.

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That affluenza kid really makes my fucking blood boil.  It is such an egregious abdication of responsibility by the judge, and has now ended up exactly how anyone would have predicted.  Between shit like this and the people trying to justify the Tamir Rice decision I have absolutely zero faith that our justice system is even capable of reform.

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There's a new sister site to Campaign Zero, Use of Force Project.

http://useofforceproject.org/

 

It outlines data they're gathering on what police departments allow for in their use of force guidelines. There's things going on like Orlando allowing officers to hogtie citizens, Baltimore has guidelines for when it's OK to kill unarmed civilians, that sort of thing. One of the more interesting things to me is that the Houston PD sent their Use of Force Guidelines in with a TON of redactions across it.

https://twitter.com/deray/status/689836936379248640

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There's a new sister site to Campaign Zero, Use of Force Project.

http://useofforceproject.org/

 

It outlines data they're gathering on what police departments allow for in their use of force guidelines. There's things going on like Orlando allowing officers to hogtie citizens, Baltimore has guidelines for when it's OK to kill unarmed civilians, that sort of thing. One of the more interesting things to me is that the Houston PD sent their Use of Force Guidelines in with a TON of redactions across it.

https://twitter.com/deray/status/689836936379248640

 

 

I'm 90% certain i'm paraphrasing a tweet i read but how do cities/states with open carry laws justify shooting unarmed / possibly armed people.

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I'm 90% certain i'm paraphrasing a tweet i read but how do cities/states with open carry laws justify shooting unarmed / possibly armed people.

 

So as to better answer your question, are you referring to law enforcement doing the shooting, or someone legally carrying a firearm?

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So as to better answer your question, are you referring to law enforcement doing the shooting, or someone legally carrying a firearm?

 

To clarify, I was in particular referring to police officers shooting people who they think are holding a gun in places where there are 'open carry' laws. 

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When we did police brutality work at the ACLU (which we did a fair bit of at the offices I worked at - in sf and Boston), much of the talk on solutions emphasized community policing. The idea being - police who actually give a shit about their community will be far more likely to see people as people, instead of generic bad guys. Of course, much of this boils down to racism (and even cops who are POC are not immune to this effect, which is the saddest and most scathing indictment of institutional racism that I can think of).

 

Better training (especially wrt racial bias), more transparency = a better system for everyone. There's good science on this (plug - https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices). Of course, whether or not better policies actually get implemented is a far, far more depressing question.

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Well the sadder thing is that oversight and accountability need to be implemented, and even when they are, they are not enforced. It's weird that people always thought that "who watches the watchmen" had to do with the "big brother" government, and it turns out it is at a much smaller, easier to see level - local. But there's denial about the problems for some reason still. A lot of people don't see any of what's going on as a problem.

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The hardest thing about reform in the US is that we know virtually nothing about the problem. Police departments aren't made to make their arrest and other information public, you must request individual incidents and wait for a response. Even then, there is no standard by which all police departments must fill out their paperwork, so even if you manage to get the information it'll likely be incomplete. It's crazy to me in such a technologically focused world we still don't have any government body who collects, collates and makes available this kind of information nationwide. Look how much good the census has done over the years and not one politician has though to expand that practice to the copious amounts of data we could use elsewhere.

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This comes via some friends in St. Louis, so I have no idea how factual it is as it's a facebook post, but it certainly has the feel of truth to it

 

This was really inspiring. I can only hope I have the courage to do this if I see someone in trouble. Realistically, I know my incredible social anxiety would almost certainly prevent it, but hopefully I find a way.

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"A teenage boy has allegedly been shot by police while holding a broomstick in Salt Lake City, sparking angry protests." The police may have been wearing body cams, I am interested to see how body cams will effect this stuff. Sure hope the footage doesn't get 'lost'.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/salt-lake-city-shooting-teenage-boy-holding-broomstick-shot-by-police-sparking-angry-protests-a6901086.html

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