Take the knee lads
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That’s more like an m o youd see in Thurles
VID-20200605-WA0004
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Nah - it’s clearly deeper than that. The entire culture of policing in the States seems to fetishise military behaviour and is overly aggressive - often escalating situations with violence. The sheer amount of “one-off” fuck ups in the last week is testament to that. How the policing seen in multiple videos doesn’t fill every American with a deep unease is a mystery.
A third of people who’ve been killed by a stranger in the US are actually killed by a police officer.
One in eleven homicides in California is by a cop.
What a fucking country
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What makes you think Americans are not concerned? There are lots of things that fill Americans with unease. Cops getting shot, thugs rioting and looting, the insane levels of violence and murder in many cities, it’s a long list. No question there have been many instances of police overreaction, and they need to be addressed.
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If you respresent any sort of common thinking in America then I don’t think people are too concerned.
I think at almost every stage you have tried to obfuscate and justify issues of police brutality while occasionally throwing in a sop of a comment.
Your post above - where when musing about police violence you immediately pivot to issue of looting etc is a classic of the genre.
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A significant piece of news released today. In the past five years Minneapolis cops have used arm or leg neck restraint (choke holds) 237 times and rendered 44 people unconscious. The argument that what was done to George Floyd was against police rules is now on thin ice.
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The looting and rioting has also filled a lot of Americans with serious unease . There was pretty brutal policing in France and Spain over the last year as well but hey that’s in Europe and we are civilised .
. To be honest as long as guns are as freely available and there is huge poverty n USA there will be heavy handed policing . Until that core problem is sorted there will be more such event in the USA .
One other thing I wonder are many cops there on some powder on duty ??
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It is possible to consider more things than one at the same time, a facility a good few posters here seem to lack, including yourself. These things are all related, the overall level of violence in American society which is much higher than Europe, the staggering levels of violence and murder in some communities, the environment cops work in, their lack of training to deal with protests, the line between legal protesting and illegal protesting, etc.
I would say my views are fairly typical here, excessive force by the police is an issue that needs to be resolved, crime and in particular violent crime is an issue that has to be tackled.
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Did you see this survey in the Bari Weiss tweets above
Is it possible to hold two views, that police over stepping should definitely be dealt with and that more education and probably pre hire screening is needed, and also to believe that people looting need to be stopped.
I don’t know as much about America as labane and lads up here but I know enough to see its at least two completely different societies. If you are in the well off burbs in a well paid job its probably as comfortable a life as anywhere on earth, and not only will you not own a gun you might never have seen one bar on a cops hip or even heard one shot.
The other America is a wild place, poor and violent to an extent way past anywhere in Europe.
Where in Europe is this normal?
Its just a different society that people are comparing to their own norms.
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That will never be sorted as in those guns will never be removed. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand the different strands of the American psyche.
Many fear for their safety at home, they will never give up their guns. I remember drinking with two nurses from Florida in temple bar before. Both really laid back and democrat voters. When I asked what they thought of guns, both admitted having revolvers and said they would shoot any intruder immediately.
Radicals don’t trust the government and believe their guns are the only bulwark against government interference (Waco etc) they believe any attempt to confiscate them is the step towards the loss of their liberties.
Black men, who often can’t trust the police, will use guns for their own protection. You think they’ll give that up?
And then there are many other hunters, sports shooters etc. It’s the most natural thing in the world for an American to get a rifle off his grandad who teaches him to use it. The thought they might go to a dingy bar and drink beer with them would seem truly bizarre.
So the guns aren’t going anywhere, but that effects every police interaction. So not an easy fix. Plus the police constantly being on edge like that leads to guaranteed PTSD, a cause of lot of these incidents i think.
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That’s a very good point on Democrats. It’s not just Republicans who care about law and order, and this is an issue where Democrats could lose a lot of support quickly. You have absolute loons calling for huge cuts in police budgets or even abolishing the police. New York talking about a $1billion cut. That’s a recipe to go back to the 1980s when New York was an absolute hellhole.
Of course, ultimately everything in a society is interdependent - but while acknowledging that to be true it’s possible to focus on one issue too.
Why do you believe American society to be excessively violent vs other western comparators?
This defunding call is insane. That would lead to less policing in crime hotspots, so businesses would leave there and never come back, as would normal residents to get away, so the tax base evaporates, and they turn into ghettos
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I can appreciate how looting and rioting would scare people. I’ve no issue with the full force of the law being applied there. It would seem that legitimate protests though have been smeared with the label of looting and the policing has been fairly indiscriminate.
I suspect that if the policing had been managed correctly the protests would have fizzled out days earlier.
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What would you have done to manage it correctly?
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You’re looking at it through the lens of the media, which is largely focused on police brutality and not so much on the amount of rioting and looting. (CNN and MSNBC in particular). It’s actually the opposite of what you claim, the worst rioting by far was in the first few nights, things have calmed down considerably as the week has gone on. You could argue that is due to the police crackdown, or it fizzling out naturally.
It’s so naïve to expect the cops, who aren’t well trained to begin with, to handle themselves impeccably during peaceful protest and then get tough when things get violent. You do understand that these lines are blurred right, peaceful protest and criminal protest mixed together, or quickly transitioning from peaceful to violent.
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You are living in fairy land.
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