The Murder of George Floyd and the Response To It

[Túrin Turambar]

Túrin, has it made news in Australia that an Australian news team was attacked by DC police?

Not that I can see - it's being reported that Australian journalists were assaulted by protestors in London, but I've heard nothing about DC.

[RoseMorninStar]

There are several different videos, I believe. This is obviously not the only news crew they've attacked.

Here's another:

[Túrin Turambar]

Just found it now - apparently the officers have been placed on administrative duties.

[elengil]

I really hope the Australian government takes the US to task for this!

[RoseMorninStar]

Not far from here there is the worlds largest free-flying American flag. Due to a storm that went through last night it is in tatters. If that is not an ominous omen in these turbulent times!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/acuit ... r-BB14X6ly

[Impenitent]

It was reported on ABC news - and live on Ch 7 - two days ago, but I haven't seen an official statement or response fron govt.

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk

[Dave_LF]

I'm surprised no one out there has commented on the morbid irony of a crowd of people lying prone chanting "I can't breathe" while giving each other COVID.

Every night since Saturday, there has been a significant riot with vandalism and looting in a different mid-sized Michigan city near me. Grand Rapids on Saturday, Lansing on Sunday, Kalamazoo on Monday. It's anyone's guess whose turn it will be tonight.

The answer for Tuesday is that it was Kalamazoo again, but to a lesser extent. However, in an unnerving development, five houses there burned down in two separate "suspicious" fires Tuesday night. No evidence of a connection to the unrest at this point, but the temporal and geographic proximity are suggestive.

Wednesday night (last night) appears to have been fairly quiet statewide. A number of protests occurred, but none escalated into violence. The National Guard stayed home. Curfews were either lifted or cities announced they would not be enforced as long as no one started trouble. That strategy appears to have helped deescalate the situation, but I don't know what you do if a group shows up specifically with the goal of making trouble. I tuned into the Grand Rapids police scanner and spent a couple stressful hours listening as they kept an eye on a group of about 200 who went on a long (more than 6 miles) march through the city without giving any indication of where they were going or what they intended. It was an informative experience on a bunch of levels*. Seemed to be handled pretty well; the approach was clearly to leave them alone and tolerate minor moving violations as long as they weren't endangering anyone, but also to be ready to move in if anyone got violent. The most tense moment was when they approached an intersection near the jail/county police department, and orders were given to start making "strategic arrests" if they headed in that direction. But they went the other way. Later, someone said that a member of the crowd had been identified as one of the rioters from Saturday night and authorized his arrest, but I didn't hear whether that actually happened or not. Once it got dark, the group stopped in a square, talked for a while with each other and the police, and then disbanded.

*Also learned a lot about the level of plain old banal badness that goes on all the time in a city of any size. You don't want brutal police, but you don't want no police either.

[elengil]

but I don't know what you do if a group shows up specifically with the goal of making trouble.

I have been heartened several times now watching the peaceful crowd very firmly preventing a devolution into violence, whether by those so frustrated that they begin to slip or by deliberate agitators aiming to derail their protest.

[Sunsilver]

Yes, saw a video on YouTube today where a white guy was removing bricks from the sidewalk, and (mostly black) protesters pounced on him and took him over to the police to be arrested! YESS!!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Piers Morgan, who has been a strong supporter of Mr. Trump until he recently criticized Trump's handling of the pandemic, to Rudy Giuliani in response to Giuliani's defense of Trump's use of the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts":

"You sound completely barking mad," Morgan said. "You've lost the plot."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... tp#image=1

[Dave_LF]

V (or anyone), any thoughts on what the likely timeline is here for the trial? Both for when it will begin, and how long it's likely to last?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Oh boy. Likely timeline? Long. I'm guessing that the officers will get out on bail and then drag things out as long as they can. I don't think the trial itself should be all that long; it just not that complicated a case, though there will be a lot of procedural issues that will take a while. Weeks rather than months, I would guess. But I'm not all that confident that I know what I am talking about here. And I don't know how they will possibly find 12 jurors plus alternates who are "impartial". That's part of why these cases tend to be so hard to get a conviction; the people that end up getting on the juries tend to be them most uninformed people, and therefore easily swayed by a well-done defense argument.

[elengil]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... d-protests

Goldbloom said he was tear-gassed while protesting earlier that day, but that the 12 to 15 police officers patrolling a main thoroughfare in Fishtown did little to reign in the armed men. “These guys who were obviously looking for some trouble weren’t being policed at all,” he said, even as they converged in front of the local police precinct.

Peaceful protesters attacked by police, while the heavily armed problem children are given carte blanche.

[elengil]

[Sunsilver]

Putting this out here for your thoughts. George Floyd was high on Fentanyl at the time of his arrest, had a baggie of drugs in his possession, and had done several stretches in prison. So, not the hero/martyr people would like him to be.

I found the statistics she presents on black crime vs. white interesting and unexpected, and wonder if they're accurate.

Some have suggested she's a known Trump supporter, and is doing this to pander to his far right base. But as jarring as what she says is, there's definitely truth there. Inequalities in employment and lack of opportunity means many black communities ARE riddled with crime and drugs, and a disproportionate number of people are arrested. This is not going to be fixed without dismantling the whole system.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

George Floyd did not die because he has used drugs in the past, or was high on anything at the time he was murdered (which no one knows for sure because the full tox screen is not back yet). He did not die because he had a minor record. He also didn't die because he had a long and very positive record of community service.

He died because he is black, and four police officers treated him like he was not a human being.

Frankly, Sunny, I find that post very disappointing

[elengil]

Putting this out here for your thoughts. George Floyd was high on Fentanyl at the time of his arrest, had a baggie of drugs in his possession, and had done several stretches in prison. So, not the hero/martyr people would like him to be.

I don't think anyone has actually made him into a martyr. No matter if he was high, no matter if he had drugs, no matter if he had been in prison before, none of those things warranted nor justified his deliberate murder by police.

The protests aren't about him needing to have been a perfect role model. The protests are that he still shouldn't have been murdered by police. Police take violent suspects into custody all the time - police managed to peacefully take a man who had just murdered 9 people in cold blood in a church into custody without harming one little hair on his head. They couldn't manage to arrest Mr. Floyd without kneeling on him for 9 minutes until he was dead? He wasn't resisting, he wasn't moving, he wasn't fighting.

George Floyd himself is actually irrelevant to the protest - his murder is the problem, the murder of other unarmed black men and women is the problem, the police brutality is the problem.

I understand you are sharing the video of someone else's thoughts and looking for feedback, but I think it's dangerous to start down a path of trying to retroactively justify the unjustifiable.

[River]

I see we have reached the smearing the victim stage. Took a week. They're getting slow.

Whoever Floyd was and whatever he did...did he deserve to be killed without trial in the street by three policemen while he was handcuffed? Was justice in any way served?

[Sunsilver]

Oh, believe me, the video bothered me - a LOT. Rather than listening to it all the way through, I was tempted to turn it off and forget it existed. But she's not saying Floyd deserved to die. She's challenging the narrative that blacks die more often at the hands of police, and gives statistics to back up what she's saying. If what she's saying is true, it's actually the reverse - whites are more likely to die. She's also saying blacks are the only ethnic group that commits crimes, gets thrown in jail, then complains about being treated unfairly.

What made me stop and think about her words is this: we all agree that it's unfair for a person to be treated more harshly by the justice system because of their colour.

Isn't it equally unfair for them to be treated more leniently by the system because of their colour? Because people say, 'he/she's a poor, disadvantaged black person, and they didn't have any choice, so go easy on them'? I think that sums up what she's saying, and I've actually heard it suggested by blacks that they should be treated more leniently when they commit crimes.

I'm putting this out here because I've heard it suggested over the last couple of days that cities with police departments where racism is deeply entrenched need to get rid of the police force completely, and go to a different type of law enforcement. They cite as an example a city where crime actually WENT DOWN when the police force went on strike!

When you watch how the police are behaving out there during the riots, it's certainly a tempting idea!

It's late at night - hope I'm making sense!

Edited to add: there's also the possibility that she's a paid shill for the Trump government, spouting fabricated statistics, in which case, I'm going to feel like an idiot for falling for it...

[Túrin Turambar]

People arrested by police are those suspected of crimes, who are disproportionately people who have been accused of or convicted of crimes in the past. So a discussion on George Floyd’s personal history seems like a bit of a red herring to me – the issue was always that Americans should be able to reasonably expect four police officers to arrest an unarmed suspect for a non-violent offence without killing him regardless of who the suspect is.

I have never found Candace Owens to be a particularly good commentator, and the fact that she’s gone and apparently made a video to rebut something that isn’t important to the actual issue hasn’t shifted my opinion – she actually says over and over again that he shouldn’t have been killed and the officers responsible should be charged.

Actually determining whether police are more likely to kill black than white suspects is probably impossible because of the factors involved. No two arrests are identical, and it’s impossible to say when a black suspect is killed by a white officer whether a) a white suspect would have been stopped by police in the same circumstances, b) the white suspect would have been arrested, and c) the white suspect would also have been killed. There was a recent study by Roland Fryer suggesting police were more likely to shoot white suspects, others have been sceptical of it. Even with the racial questions aside, it's fair to say, at this point, that America has problems with police use of force in general.