But it is also worth to remember that unarmed protestors rarely "just" overrun the barricades and enter the palace (figuratively). Someone with power (police or military) has to decide that they're OK with letting the protests go through, that is the signal of the end.
--
Obviously my opinion, but I was in Tunis, Tunisia during those times.
And there was this rumor that Ben Ali and his close family were "tricked" by the palace guard and the military to leave the country "temporarily" because protestors were going to be closing in (which never happened).
But that is exactly my point, supporters in key power positions decided that it was too much trouble to keep Ben Ali around.
We know how USA has reacted in the past; it carries on as if nothing happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/immolation-wh...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-bu...
I assume there are more examples, that's just first page picks from a cursory google search.
- 40+ Million people are unemployed
- the mental strain of being up indoors
- covid affecting the poorest potion of the population disproportionately
- finally Trump being president and handling the situation in the worst possible way everyday.When you are in the public sphere you do not spew out every thought that comes out unfiltered - whether it is trump or musk it damages what they stand for and works against them.
I would expect a president, 3 years in, to be able to communicate to all his constituents with a measure of forethought and attempt to keep in mind that not all of them apply "critical thought".
Personally I prefer explicit markup attributes. i.e. if I want to mark something as code an markup like ``` or {code} or whatever is clearer than inferring tabs for code formatting, this kind of accidental code blocks could be easily avoided.
On a side note I read on mobile all the time, I understand the frustration, but it not poster's fault HN has some poor formatting choices which are not mobile friendly and no preview options, you should direct their feedback towards HN rather than the poster, most of them do not do this intentionally.
If you want to make a list, there’s nothing wrong with using new lines, they will work just fine.
A code block however stimulates rage.
Cops in the US receive training to protect their own safety at all costs, even if that may endanger the lives of innocent people around them. If their duty is to protect and serve, they should not be trained and equipped like this. We don't need to fix crime, we need to fix police training, and yes, we have to be willing to increase the risk policeman are exposed to as part of their work.
On a different point, you mention "bad apples will happen". The expression is "a bad apple ruins the bunch". That is to say, if you don't eliminate all the bad apples quickly, the bunch is ruined.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/08/the-nu...
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[3] http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html sorry this data is from 2005, hopefully it's not too different from current
It isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
> We don't need to fix crime,
We do, by making less things crimes. "Resisting arrest" should not be a crime, for example. Should a suspect attack police, we have assault laws to cover this; why do we need another law for "was not absolutely passive while being put in handcuffs"? (Genuinely curious here, happy to hear other perspectives).
Gosh, that sounds awful (both the actions of the police, and the decision of the judge). This failure to hold the police to a high standard is what brings about these situations.
Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
Median police response times in the United States are about ten minutes for violent crimes. 90th percentile is something like an hour.
Don't know the breakdowns beyond that, but I would also imagine that there's a sharp wealth divide in response times.
Imagine that a bunch of large, angry men are trying to break into your home to kill you. Set a timer for ten minutes. Wait. As you do, imagine what's happening, for those ten minutes, because that's how long it will take for police to arrive.
> 'a call was dispatched to officers on the street as a "Code 2" assignment, although calls of a crime in progress should be given priority and designated as "Code 1."'
> ' This second call was received at 0642 and recorded merely as "investigate the trouble;" it was never dispatched to any police officers. '
The dispatchers failed twice to notify correctly about the situation.
> Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
I'm not sure what your point is here. For what it's worth, given where I live I don't see how they could break in less than ten minutes (with a key I guess?), and without alerting neighbors in at least 5 adjacent units, who I could ask for help through the window.
My point wasn't that cops gets killed a lot, but that young black men are about 40 times more likely to get killed by criminals then cops. Stronger policing actually makes things safer for dangerous areas.
If you think that crushing a man's neck was a mistake, how many minutes of crushing his neck would turn that mistake into intentional murder? If you think those three policemen guarding the killer were also bad apples, how many policemen would have to stand guard for it to be a systemic issue? If it's not a good time to protest police murders, when should we?
In the US policing doesn’t even make it in the top 20 most dangerous jobs by fatalities [1] or injuries [2].
[1]: https://advisorsmith.com/data/most-dangerous-jobs/ (original source is BLS; this source just did the per-worker math) [2]: https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/snr02_00_2018.xlsx (2018 is the latest data available from BLS)
But the stats aren't really relevant here; the issue is that there is a video going around in which official appears to brutally murder someone in cold blood. And a sneaking suspicion that justice won't be served. And a large population suffering under an uncertain non-economy for around 2 months now.
That is also a factor, but I'm going to interpret this as tell-tale signs of a breakdown under economic stress.
I can't see a train of thought that starts with a century of injustice and ends with "therefore I should loot Target". I can very easily see a link from "I can't afford stuff because my job just vanished" to the burning and looting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Cities_protests#Day_3:_Ma...
But in particular I don't believe that the protestors are worried about police vs forestry fatality statistics.
It might be possible that the quarantine and economic hardships are a factor at play, but the ultimate causative factor is that non-white Americans are tired of both the veiled and bald faced racism and mistreatment that is a daily issue.
The protests aren’t just about cops killing black men; they’re about every single aspect of daily life being made more difficult because of constant racism and abuse.
What information are the people angry about the current situation missing?
> It's not about the reality of the situation; it seems like more of a tribal thing.
This seems needlessly dismissive. The “reality of the situation” is that police brutality needlessly kills people frequently, most of the people who are killed are black, the police involved are rarely held accountable, and nothing has seemed to change for years.
Only about 25% of the people killed by police are black; about 50% are white non-Hispanic.
There's definitely a tribal aspect, and unfortunately most people don't know or don't care about most victims.
That said, if changes inspired by concern for black victims improve the situation for everyone, that would be a good thing. And that seems to be happening, leading to changes like body cameras and perhaps cracks in the blue wall, as more officers seem to be speaking out against it now.
And in the US population, around 12% of people are black and 70% are white, so black people are overrepresented in police killings.
I disagree, I think it's historical context. The KKK used to infiltrate the police throughout the south. The police aided and abetted domestic terrorism against black people. There are people still living who remember this. It's not tribalism to point out that you are being targeted based on your race and being sensitive to that threat. If you want to call out tribalism, call out the group that is targeting others based on race. They are the tribal ones.
The historical context may justify the tribalism in some eyes, but it may also blind those eyes to the larger problem that affects everyone.
It isn’t just police brutality. It’s the constant mistrust, passive aggressive behavior, assumptions that you’re poor, dumb, hooked on drugs, stealing, out and out racism, and that you’re a threat that either needs to be avoided or needs to be handled with threats and 911 calls.
You should educate yourself. This comment is just shameful.
I think we are in this current presidential situation bc Hillary Clinton called people "deploarables".
"the victim was either a stain on ordered society" is particularly egregious trolling. You can't do that here, and adding a diversionary word like 'either' doesn't help.
Yeah, after the single bloodiest war in American history.
"Get over" is a funny way to describe a war that was bloodier for the United States than WWII was for any Allied power. Please don't lump everyone in with the southern states.
World War Two, USSR: at least 20 million in a population of 205 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...), or close to 10%.
World War Two, Poland: about 6 million deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_Pol...) in a population of about 35 million (http://countrystudies.us/poland/27.htm) or over 17%.
The US civil war was bloody for the USA, but not bloodier than WWII for any Allied power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_... has many more countries with a death rate over 2½%.
1) There's record unemployment in the US and there's an active pandemic. People are unhappy and the country is a powder keg ready to go off.
2) The footage this time is especially graphic. You can see the officer strangling George Floyd with his knee. You can see the unnervingly satisfied look on his face. You can hear George call out multiple times that he can't breathe. Then, after he stops moving you can watch the officer continue to strangle him for four minutes. You can also see three police officers that stood by and let it happen in the background. There's not much wiggle room here.
And how he is dead. People are rallying, people are protesting. He is still dead. For a bad check.
>When a man yells for his mother, in duress and pain, and she is dead, he is essentially yelling "please God, don't let it happen to me." [0]
I don't know if I'm just so tired and desensitized at this point that the situation didn't register the first time I saw the picture and transcript (I won't watch the video). And I think that's awful.
I think this is a very common story among soldiers who've seen a comrade get killed. People cry out for comfort in their last minutes.
> the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia
Strangulation: "Forensics The act of suffocating a person by constricting the trachea or upper airways"[1]
Traumatic asphyxia: "Cyanotic asphyxia due to trauma; the extravasation of blood into the skin and conjunctivae, produced by a sudden mechanical increase in venous pressure, analogous to the Rumpel-Leede test; common in those who have been hanged and seen occasionally in crush injuries."[2]
So what that initial statement says is that the knee did not directly suffocate him by blocking blood or air flow, nor was Flody's chest crushed.
Keep in mind that breathing when you're face down on the ground can be difficult in itself, especially if you're not thin. And it is made a lot harder by having the upper part of your chest pinned to the ground.
But even if the officer did not pin him to the ground with the knee, and just left him on the ground facing down, they should have checked on him when he said he couldn't breathe and that he was dying. Not doing so would be highly negligent.
[1]: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/strangulati...
[2]: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/traumatic+a...
> Floyd was then told to step out of the car and handcuffed, and "actively resisted being handcuffed", according to body cam footage obtained the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
When we have video evidence that suggests quite the contrary from a shop nearby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Tqs06YN_A
edit: yes, I know that maybe he resisted in invisible ways. And yes, I saw him fall over when he was getting in the cop car way up at the top of the screen at the end of the video (partly hidden by the 'watch next!' videos); but is that really sufficient 'active resistance' if you can call it that?
Even if someone WAS "actively resisting" - which was obviously not what happened in this case as seen in the above video evidence - intentionally strangling someone for 8+ minutes after they they are on the ground under the control of multiple officers is still murder!
Some people seem to believe that "resisting arrest" is a capital offense that the police can punish immediately as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. The police say someone (usually black) "resisted", so fsck due process and execute them? -sigh-
That's just it, though. According to the coroner's report, he wasn't strangled.
I'm not an expert on medical terminology; there may be a more accurate term to use to describe the cause of death. I'm only using the term in the colloquial sense, which (in my opinion) is a good description of what happened according to the video evidence.
But again, so what? Even if the death was technically caused by some other mechanism, it's still patently manslaughter when someone uses their knee to crush someone's neck for ~4 minutes until they stop moving. When that person continues using their knee to crush someone's neck for an additional ~4 minutes while ignoring the please from multiple bystanders to at least check for a pulse after he stopped moving, that demonstrates the intent and mens rea necessary to upgrade the charge of manslaughter to intentional murder.
The technicalities of a medical report are not relevant. If this was some sort of freak accident, the officer should have stopped what he was doing and checked vital signs. If he didn't intend to kill, the officer should have been very surprised and/or concerned when the person under his knee stopped moving and calling for help.
And your video doesn't show what happened up until the time where the cop had his knees one him. There was actually 3 cops on him at that point. How do you think they ended up that way?
George Floyd seemed to be alive and walking around before he had his airway closed off.
( not a doctor... been reading a loooot of Reddit )
It is puzzling why the society still allows police to apply chockhold, neck pressure, etc. - such actions affecting breathing and circulation are naturally causing involuntary convulsions which police happily interprets as "resisting", and thus they get and use their right to escalate the pressure/hold until the "resisting", ie. the convulsions, stop which frequently means death.
That isn't what the autopsy report said.
The ME also claimed that the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Correct, he didn't die of strangulation or asphyxia. Someone who can't breathe can't say things like, "I can't breathe." Instead, Floyd died of circulatory insufficiency, subsequent to having a knee pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The medical details are completely irrelevant when it comes to determining responsibility for the outcome. [1] The officer is equally responsible regardless.
According to the top post on this Reddit thread, written by a self-proclaimed restraint trainer and the major replies to them, this is absolutely, positively not the case:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/gsdwky/if_you_...
Apparently this is an old saying and is completely wrong.
edit: to visualize this. One of the steps in death via a python is suffocation. During that process, you could speak many times, all the way until your lungs are out of air, but you'll never get air in your lungs again.
Is having your ability to breathe severely reduced (say 10-20% capacity. Enough to exhale out words) not accurate enough for "I can't breathe" to be true?
Point being, it doesn't matter in the least what the autopsy report says. He died of having a knee pressed down on his neck.
Agreed. I was making a bit of a side comment about something I've learned through this whole story because I also thought that being able to speak means you're not choking (for example), when apparently that is not true.
Video taken by a bystander,
now seen around the world,
shows a police officer
kneeling on Floyd’s neck
for approximately five
minutes as he struggles,
telling officers he can’t
breathe.
You have forty million people unemployed, many of which overlap directly with the demographics most impacted by wealth inequality and police brutality. It's pretty clear that this is going to be more intense than in 2012.
It was pretty intense at the time.
but that wasn't a campaign year, nor was there a pandemic raging in parallel where at least 100000 people will have died, the majority of them from minorities.
And as a sidenote:
Trump is literally activating terrorist cells in your country -- his tweet was explicitly quoted by this self-ascribed paramilitary goon when coming out with his machinegun to terrorize folks: https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266509747169005569
Was this happening in 2013? Pretty sure it wasn't.
George Floyd was arrested and handcuffed by four real cops, calmly complied with every request recorded on video, and still died pleading for his life because one cop strangled him for no reason and the other three did nothing. It's a perfect storm: you can say "no matter how compliant you are, the police will still kill you if you're not white enough" and pro-blue opinion leaders can't counter you with anything except "but look at the looters".
Trump was on the ropes politically, but I think this might change the voting calculus.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.