Care to peruse social media - at all? Right now they'll put fellow minorities on blast if they're not dark-skinned enough. It's a shitshow. I don't use them as examples of rational beliefs - I use them for the limited purposes of demonstrating ultimately irrational ones.

Or hell, watch CNN. Don Lemon is all about telling white folks that they're ALL the cause of this and absolving the AA blame. And the worst is white commentators who start every sentence before they genuflect with "I can never understand what you're going through..."

Fucking numbuts over in the DC forum (the usual suspects) are all about criticizing white folks who aren't just bowing at the alter of the movement because they "have never been victims of police brutality so they can't understand what black people are saying..." How you think the transitive property applies to that one bud?

Or hey, people on a march who huck blocks into white people's apartments even when they support them? I'm sure it wasn't just because they were white people so they're just part of the problem...

Is this just some Donger shit? Are you really gonna roll with this one?
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It’s really sad. Also, what was the old guy grabbing for before they pushed him? It kinda looks like he was grabbing at the officers waist, but it’s hard to tell.

I’m a 42 year old white guy and if I were to grab towards an officers waist, I’d expect some kind of unpleasant reaction.

This whole situation is terrible.
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I think he was pointing. Looked like he had a phone in that hand.
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The way they just kept walking as if nothing happened is incredibly sad.
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Yeah I can see that now after enlarging it.

Incredibly sad how they just kept walking after blood immediately runs out the mans ear.
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I think too many people continue to presume that officers aren't trained to hell and back or that there's not a few people who, regardless of training, simply do not get it. Every one of us in positions have management have had those people. Some are just dumb, but most just aren't quite wired for the job. ANY jobs has that problem and for the people that cause the most problems, there's just no amount of training that will plow this through their skulls. If it's not innate, it'll always be forced and in high-stress situations, it'll fail.

To use a football analogy - Tebow looked like a normal human being throwing a football in warmups after he spent a full year being coached up on it. As soon as real bullets were flying and the adrenaline ramped up - he looked like he was throwing with the wrong hand again.

Officers go through extensive training. And departments try to vet them as well they can. But ultimately sometimes there just isn't much cream in the bucket and they need officers. And sometimes those sorts are guys you can get to be facially competent but are always going to be prone to making the wrong move and you won't be able to separate those folks as well as you'd like until it happens.

The lack of empathy is the worst part for me, I'd agree. But now you really do have people who were put there for a particular purpose with a job to do. Remember, that was the 'crowd control' division of that unit and yes, when that's your unit there are going to be situations where people get hurt. What I wonder if specialized units such as those aren't MORE prone to that sort of stuff.

What I find interesting is that is a unit that is mobilized on the fly from existing officers rather than a standing unit. When there's no use for crowd control, they have 'regular' jobs within the department. I do like that idea in that it should keep them largely in a 'community policing' mindset. But I also wonder if maybe being dropped from a relatively unique environment into a suddenly very high stress one doesn't create some level of system shock. I don't believe for a second those guys go around shoving old folks while just walking the beat in their usual job.
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I'm watching on a 27" LED monitor and it appears that he's pointing at something with his phone.

No audio makes it difficult to ascertain exactly what led to the push but the police behavior before and after the push was completely unacceptable.
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The 2 cops were actually being calm/patient until the others in the back started chanting “push”. They clearly reacted to that and it was a BAD move.
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Yes, I'm going to roll with this and I appreciate you that you provided a specific example of Don Lemon "telling white folk that only minorities are victims of excessive force." I'll see if I can find the specific quote.
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My understanding was he was trying to give them a helmet back.

Like the Floyd incident that sparked it, it sure looks like a shit deal at surface level. Probably is.

But I also see an answer as to how it could've happened. I gotta believe these guys are at the ragged edge at this point. They're spending hours a day a little scared and definitely feeling attacked and pursued. You've shoved months worth of police interactions in 6-8 days and are doing so at a time when they're feeling disrespected and harried in a big way. This is unquestionably a powder keg. Officers are getting hit with thrown objects and flat out punched in the face right now and it's only posted as a Meme or for a laugh.

They're in a real un-fucking-fair position right now. Is that part of the job? I mean maybe, but if you drop into my office and give me 2 months of work to do in a week while I'll be working w/ an extremely hostile client and in the light of a very hostile national audience for as many hours/week as it takes to get the job done - I'm gonna say this isn't really what I signed up for.
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This one upset me more than the rest I've seen in the last few days. Your in full riot gear and your worried about a 75 year old man that looks like he weighs 75 lbs? Beyond pushing down an elderly man is a POS move, then he is on the ground bleeding from a head wound and out of his ear, no one checks on him.



Even the one cop who started to check on him was stopped by a supervisor. Then they all walk past him without hesitation. If I see an elderly man on the ground bleeding from a head wound and out of his ear, I'd stop and check on him just like 99.9% on here would.


And without the video we wouldn't know. Because they lied in a press release that he tripped and fell on his own. Their first reaction is to lie and cover up. We can assume that this isn't the first time they lied to cover up actions of their officers.


And now 57 officers have resigned for suspending the two officers. WTF? You screw up at your job, you get disciplined. Is there some exception for police officers?
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I have no idea how police officers are trained in this country but I do know that certain things are "allowed" in some municipalities while others are not. For example, Los Angeles banned the use of the chokehold used on Mr. Floyd after the Rodney King incident, whereas it's still legal in Minnesota.

And while I really hate to quote a "celebrity", Chris Rock pretty much nailed it, IMO.

"And you get what you pay for. Here’s the thing, man. Whenever the cops gun down an innocent black man, they always say the same thing: 'Well, it’s not most cops. It’s just a few bad apples. It’s just a few bad apples.'"

Rock continued: "Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I know being a cop is hard. I know that shit’s dangerous. I know it is, okay? But some jobs can’t have bad apples."

"Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'"
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Yeah, it was WAY out of left field. Everyone seemed to be roughly on the same page and just talking through something before something set the thing off.

If there aren't a thousand people yelling at them and many of their fellow officers starting to get spooked behind them, do you still think that happens?

The Floyd killing has no such justification - just shitty shitty work. But this sort of stuff, you don't like it but there are certainly ways to understand it. We just have to stop dehumanizing officers.

Alex Murphy isn't back online just yet.
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I think he was trying to return a helmet to them. At least that's the account I read from someone who claimed to have been there at the time.
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And y'know what? Planes still crash due to pilot error.

It's a throwaway line from a comedian. It's simply not possible.

Every industry, every profession, has someone who just barely cleared the bar of baseline competence and if put in the right (wrong) situation will buckle under.

We tell our staff "this is a law firm and you guys have to get everything right" but y'know what, if we take in 1000 cases that go through 10 different people with 20 different tasks each and they make, say, 20 errors in there - that's 1,000 cases w/ a 99.8% accuracy rate. Man, even Mozart missed a note here and there.

You cannot expect perfection from any profession - it is a wholly unreasonable ask.
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