Re:George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
by alkonaut on Monday June 15, 2020 @05:55AM
(#23525628)
That's one in 30 being arrested in the US every year. How does that compare to other countries? Is that something that could be improved? It sounds like a lot.
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Re:George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
by newacct583 on Monday June 15, 2020 @07:13AM
(#23526116)
Exactly. I genuinely don't think US police are individually that much worse than they are in other industrial nations (though obviously they have abusable tools available that many other regimes don't). But the US does an extraordinarily large amount of policing. On average, a US resident is far, far more likely to be confronted by police in routine circumstances where they would be ignored in the rest of the world.
Which at the end of the day is what BLM is about, not so much the individual abuses. All that extra policing isn't distributed fairly. There are some communities in the US where the police are the kind of hands-off/come-only-when-called benefactors people expect, and there are some communities where they act more like a street gang controlling their territory, stopping and confronting anyone who seems likely to challenge their authority.