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It shouldn't be shocking for anyone who was paying attention. There is a good book about related issues by Radley Balco called Rise of the Warrior Cop. Publishe

It shouldn't be shocking for anyone who was paying attention. There is a good book about related issues by Radley Balco called Rise of the Warrior Cop. Published in 2013. Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. It is a sober and factual analysis of how American police became what it is right now. It's not an easy read, but it's a must-read for anyone who wants to have a reasonable picture of the problem. The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well. Edit: There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.

zucker42 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, I understand police violence is a continuing problem, but that doesn't make this instance of it less shocking. As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.
- jfengel 6y ago
  The problem is that people are already desensitized. They've watched X come and go and they act shocked every time. Then they continue to push it down their list of priorities when they vote. By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change. So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".
- roenxi 6y ago
  There are a lot of different people out there who get shocked over different things. And writing for the 10-30% of people who think that incentives matter more than innate character - we don't need people to be sensitised and spring loaded to be shocked. These growth of these problems has been a visible trend for my entire lifetime and longer if you buy arguments like those presented in, say, The Rise of the Warrior Cop. Anyone who gets shocked by trends that have been around for that long is either very new to this, or part of the problem. The solution is less shock, more reform to promote basic principles of equality, freedom and prosperity.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- noobermin 6y ago
  I'm also tired of the "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time." While I think some people mean it to highlight how prevalent a problem is, it often comes across (or is in fact intended to be) a way to both virtue signal and put down people who are less informed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
nsajko 6y ago
Off topic, but > self-referential post-modernist bullshit Umm, what? What contaminations exactly are you thinking about? I just can't place self-referentiality into this topic. Are you suggesting there is a comparable analysis that does include self-referential motifs? Also, why is self-referentiality or postmodernism bullshit?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Yes, there is a lot of self-referential nonsense out there. A huge number of overwrought social media posts by [mostly white, mostly upper-class] people not directly affected by police violence are basically an exercise in centering themselves and their own feelings. They are not sincere efforts to grapple with a complex systemic problem.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    Still not clear what is being discussed as "self-referential". No offence, but maybe you are confused between self-referential and self-centered?
    - malandrew 6y ago
      Self-referentialism can happen when a small group of authors cite one another to establish legitimacy to an idea that has no foundation in what came before. It doesn't by default mean something is bullshit, but it greatly increases the likelihood that a small group of people is able to propagate bullshit. Think of the foundation as all human knowledge and people keep building upon that knowledge. Legitimacy is conferred when you make references to prior knowledge in your effort to establish your new idea as legitimate. More recently, citations in the earliest papers proposing an idea have expanded such that the references are often leaf nodes, much of those leaf nodes often have no citations and end up being "like, uh, your opinion, man", but you get enough of these papers with bullshit leaf nodes referencing one another and you end up with a cluster of papers with tenuous or possible no connection to any prior work in a field. It's a cluster of papers referring to one another and look legitimate because there are citations. They may only be a few hops deep before you get to the "like, uh, your opinion, man" nodes, but no one ever looks that deep and notices. I'll give you one such example that I personally know the origin of on Wikipedia. The person who made this edit doesn't know when they originally heard it, but they said they once heard in passing that this-is-known-as-kebab-case. When someone questioned them about it they went to the wikipedia article and casing and it wasn't mentioned, so they looked around for prior references to this casing name. They said they found one reference but it wasn't a good reference, but it was a reference and so they edited Wikipedia to make the change. They change was accepted and stuck. Within the next year or two lo-dash or possibly underscore.js came on the scene and this person convinced them to add the casing conversion function and name it kebab case because that is what was in the wikipedia article because they added it. Getting this in a major library now made it a legitimate name. At that point, the wikipedia article was updated with another reference, this time to lo-dash. And that is the story of how self-reference was used to make kebab-case a legitimate reference in wikipedia. https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.kebabcase https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.kebabcase One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own. Some entire post-modernist fields like grievance studies are such bullshit that things like this well orchestrated hoax was wildly successful in getting multiple papers published: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-... If you've never read about the James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian hoax papers, it's super interesting.
ianleeclark 6y ago
> Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.
- tristor 6y ago
  It's not anti-intellectual to reject a philosophy that is based in the rejection of the very concept of truth and reality. Post-modernism itself is anti-intellectual, as it's a philosophy that individualizes experience while dis-individualizing responsibility. It rejects both empiricism and rationalism to choose the unhappy middle between the both, elevating anecdote above experiment, emotions above rationality. "Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven. Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Don't make posts about post-modernism or critical theory on HN. They are always, inevitably down-voted regardless of position and will earn you the ire of the mods.
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      I find these claims of the HN mods getting angry at people for posting certain viewpoints baffling. I've been browsing this site for a while and I've never seen that happen, and the only mod actions I've seen are against people who were deliberately trolling, flame-baiting or insulting other users. If your experience of posting about post modernism involves mods getting angry at you, it is far more likely that those posts involved those things than any kind of ideological censorship.
lovegoblin 6y ago
> contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. What do you mean by this?
thephyber 6y ago
> When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things. "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}. We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.
elipsey 6y ago
>> hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit Edit: Please see HN comment guidelines.
falcrist 6y ago
One of the most poignant comments on police militarization I've heard seems to have come from a television show. "There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica) Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?
- felipemnoa 6y ago
  Small nitpick, you mean commander Adama?
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    I bet that was a spellchecker or autocomplete typo.
    - falcrist 6y ago
      You are correct.
- dave7 6y ago
  Clip of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwrSlzZC31w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwrSlzZC31w
- mellow2020 6y ago
  > If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror. - Hannah Arendt > This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay the point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood now, do it? - Howard "Bunny" Colvin in "The Wire"
op00to 6y ago
I know not to beat the shit out of press. So, no not good people.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Your edit is just a long way of saying "Nuremburg Defense" which at least in the West, we've decided is wrong. Hell, soldiers are trained to kill, but even they have ROE to follow and are held accountable for bad shoots. I'm not sure why police officers always seem to get a pass.
philipov 6y ago
Shocking does not mean surprising. You can be paying attention and still find things shocking. If something is no longer shocking, it means you've allowed yourself to become desensitized and accept it as an acceptable compromise of society. No one should find this kind of behavior acceptable.
- glenstein 6y ago
  Right. For some reason, you always have a few commenters who want dismiss shocking events by saying the shocking event is not 'surprising' or that it 'has always been happening' or was in some sense 'already known'. As if that should make it less morally outrageous. I've never understood what purpose that debate was supposed to serve.
  - philipov 6y ago
    Clearly these people are not outraged. They're annoyed that we are, and the purpose of their debate is to dismiss us.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I like to think I've been paying attention - I'm a person of color who grew up with some financial privilege, I'm a quiet, introverted nerd, and it was obvious from highschool onward that police treated me much differently than my white friends. When I was 17, I got pulled over at 1am on a small unlit backroad, but the cop didn't get out of his car. He stayed in his car, told me via the megaphone to exit my vehicle, put my hands behind my head, walk backwards, put my hands on the trunk, while he frisked me, then put me in the back of the cop car and searched my vehicle, then let me go, telling me "it's a dangerous area and I shouldn't be out this late". Speeding tickets were always aggressive encounters. That stuff sticks with you. That said, I still found the attacks on the press this week absolutely shocking. Police treating people of color differently than white people is absolutely nothing new. Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.
- incompatible 6y ago
  Apparently violating the Fourth Amendment, I suppose it's not worth much in practice.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    It would be worth more if there were more accessible consequences for police officers and departments who violate it.
- CaptainZapp 6y ago
  > Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America. You can thank your president, who labelled the press as "The enemy of the people" for that too. Words have consequences.
  - mellow2020 6y ago
    That's not even "I was just following orders". Actions have consequences, too, and people are responsible for their actions.
soraminazuki 6y ago
Bad policing has been going on for a very long time in America, and as you say, this didn't just happen overnight. It's precisely for this reason that protests are happening. However, the police deliberately targeting journalists who clearly identified themselves is something we haven't seen before in America. And yes, many of these cases were deliberate as you can see in the video embedded in the article. Just in a week, there were over 120 confirmed cases, many of which were live on camera. This is an attack on the free press, and takes police brutality to a whole new level.
yibg 6y ago
I think the other part of this particular episode that got people more upset is the helplessness of it all. I certainly felt helpless and frustrated watching the video, even though I wasn't there. Interaction with police is one of the rare cases where self defence doesn't cut it. In fact, defending yourself just gives more justification for law enforcement to apply more violence. Imagine if you were George Floyd, and you knew you were going to get killed. What do you do? If you don't resist you die. If you do resist you might still die or at least be assaulted, then charged with resisting arrest and will have "deserved" the violence by resisting at the end of it. On the bystander side too. Everyone watching knew it was wrong, but there is no good way to intervene. You either put yourself in harms way, and probably won't effect the outcome, or intervening action will be used to justify whatever violence was used, or likely both.

zucker42 6y ago

Don't get me wrong, I understand police violence is a continuing problem, but that doesn't make this instance of it less shocking. As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.

jfengel 6y ago
The problem is that people are already desensitized. They've watched X come and go and they act shocked every time. Then they continue to push it down their list of priorities when they vote. By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change. So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".
roenxi 6y ago
There are a lot of different people out there who get shocked over different things. And writing for the 10-30% of people who think that incentives matter more than innate character - we don't need people to be sensitised and spring loaded to be shocked. These growth of these problems has been a visible trend for my entire lifetime and longer if you buy arguments like those presented in, say, The Rise of the Warrior Cop. Anyone who gets shocked by trends that have been around for that long is either very new to this, or part of the problem. The solution is less shock, more reform to promote basic principles of equality, freedom and prosperity.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
noobermin 6y ago
I'm also tired of the "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time." While I think some people mean it to highlight how prevalent a problem is, it often comes across (or is in fact intended to be) a way to both virtue signal and put down people who are less informed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

nsajko 6y ago

Off topic, but > self-referential post-modernist bullshit Umm, what? What contaminations exactly are you thinking about? I just can't place self-referentiality into this topic. Are you suggesting there is a comparable analysis that does include self-referential motifs? Also, why is self-referentiality or postmodernism bullshit?

ForHackernews 6y ago
Yes, there is a lot of self-referential nonsense out there. A huge number of overwrought social media posts by [mostly white, mostly upper-class] people not directly affected by police violence are basically an exercise in centering themselves and their own feelings. They are not sincere efforts to grapple with a complex systemic problem.
- nsajko 6y ago
  Still not clear what is being discussed as "self-referential". No offence, but maybe you are confused between self-referential and self-centered?
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Self-referentialism can happen when a small group of authors cite one another to establish legitimacy to an idea that has no foundation in what came before. It doesn't by default mean something is bullshit, but it greatly increases the likelihood that a small group of people is able to propagate bullshit. Think of the foundation as all human knowledge and people keep building upon that knowledge. Legitimacy is conferred when you make references to prior knowledge in your effort to establish your new idea as legitimate. More recently, citations in the earliest papers proposing an idea have expanded such that the references are often leaf nodes, much of those leaf nodes often have no citations and end up being "like, uh, your opinion, man", but you get enough of these papers with bullshit leaf nodes referencing one another and you end up with a cluster of papers with tenuous or possible no connection to any prior work in a field. It's a cluster of papers referring to one another and look legitimate because there are citations. They may only be a few hops deep before you get to the "like, uh, your opinion, man" nodes, but no one ever looks that deep and notices. I'll give you one such example that I personally know the origin of on Wikipedia. The person who made this edit doesn't know when they originally heard it, but they said they once heard in passing that this-is-known-as-kebab-case. When someone questioned them about it they went to the wikipedia article and casing and it wasn't mentioned, so they looked around for prior references to this casing name. They said they found one reference but it wasn't a good reference, but it was a reference and so they edited Wikipedia to make the change. They change was accepted and stuck. Within the next year or two lo-dash or possibly underscore.js came on the scene and this person convinced them to add the casing conversion function and name it kebab case because that is what was in the wikipedia article because they added it. Getting this in a major library now made it a legitimate name. At that point, the wikipedia article was updated with another reference, this time to lo-dash. And that is the story of how self-reference was used to make kebab-case a legitimate reference in wikipedia. https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.kebabcase https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.kebabcase One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own. Some entire post-modernist fields like grievance studies are such bullshit that things like this well orchestrated hoax was wildly successful in getting multiple papers published: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-... If you've never read about the James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian hoax papers, it's super interesting.

ianleeclark 6y ago

> Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.

tristor 6y ago
It's not anti-intellectual to reject a philosophy that is based in the rejection of the very concept of truth and reality. Post-modernism itself is anti-intellectual, as it's a philosophy that individualizes experience while dis-individualizing responsibility. It rejects both empiricism and rationalism to choose the unhappy middle between the both, elevating anecdote above experiment, emotions above rationality. "Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven. Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Don't make posts about post-modernism or critical theory on HN. They are always, inevitably down-voted regardless of position and will earn you the ire of the mods.
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    I find these claims of the HN mods getting angry at people for posting certain viewpoints baffling. I've been browsing this site for a while and I've never seen that happen, and the only mod actions I've seen are against people who were deliberately trolling, flame-baiting or insulting other users. If your experience of posting about post modernism involves mods getting angry at you, it is far more likely that those posts involved those things than any kind of ideological censorship.

lovegoblin 6y ago

> contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. What do you mean by this?

thephyber 6y ago

> When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things. "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}. We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.

elipsey 6y ago

>> hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit Edit: Please see HN comment guidelines.

falcrist 6y ago

One of the most poignant comments on police militarization I've heard seems to have come from a television show. "There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica) Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?

felipemnoa 6y ago
Small nitpick, you mean commander Adama?
- lallysingh 6y ago
  I bet that was a spellchecker or autocomplete typo.
  - falcrist 6y ago
    You are correct.
dave7 6y ago
Clip of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwrSlzZC31w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwrSlzZC31w
mellow2020 6y ago
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror. - Hannah Arendt > This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay the point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood now, do it? - Howard "Bunny" Colvin in "The Wire"

op00to 6y ago

I know not to beat the shit out of press. So, no not good people.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

Your edit is just a long way of saying "Nuremburg Defense" which at least in the West, we've decided is wrong. Hell, soldiers are trained to kill, but even they have ROE to follow and are held accountable for bad shoots. I'm not sure why police officers always seem to get a pass.

philipov 6y ago

Shocking does not mean surprising. You can be paying attention and still find things shocking. If something is no longer shocking, it means you've allowed yourself to become desensitized and accept it as an acceptable compromise of society. No one should find this kind of behavior acceptable.

glenstein 6y ago
Right. For some reason, you always have a few commenters who want dismiss shocking events by saying the shocking event is not 'surprising' or that it 'has always been happening' or was in some sense 'already known'. As if that should make it less morally outrageous. I've never understood what purpose that debate was supposed to serve.
- philipov 6y ago
  Clearly these people are not outraged. They're annoyed that we are, and the purpose of their debate is to dismiss us.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

I like to think I've been paying attention - I'm a person of color who grew up with some financial privilege, I'm a quiet, introverted nerd, and it was obvious from highschool onward that police treated me much differently than my white friends. When I was 17, I got pulled over at 1am on a small unlit backroad, but the cop didn't get out of his car. He stayed in his car, told me via the megaphone to exit my vehicle, put my hands behind my head, walk backwards, put my hands on the trunk, while he frisked me, then put me in the back of the cop car and searched my vehicle, then let me go, telling me "it's a dangerous area and I shouldn't be out this late". Speeding tickets were always aggressive encounters. That stuff sticks with you. That said, I still found the attacks on the press this week absolutely shocking. Police treating people of color differently than white people is absolutely nothing new. Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.

incompatible 6y ago
Apparently violating the Fourth Amendment, I suppose it's not worth much in practice.
- totalZero 6y ago
  It would be worth more if there were more accessible consequences for police officers and departments who violate it.
CaptainZapp 6y ago
> Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America. You can thank your president, who labelled the press as "The enemy of the people" for that too. Words have consequences.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  That's not even "I was just following orders". Actions have consequences, too, and people are responsible for their actions.

soraminazuki 6y ago

Bad policing has been going on for a very long time in America, and as you say, this didn't just happen overnight. It's precisely for this reason that protests are happening. However, the police deliberately targeting journalists who clearly identified themselves is something we haven't seen before in America. And yes, many of these cases were deliberate as you can see in the video embedded in the article. Just in a week, there were over 120 confirmed cases, many of which were live on camera. This is an attack on the free press, and takes police brutality to a whole new level.

yibg 6y ago

I think the other part of this particular episode that got people more upset is the helplessness of it all. I certainly felt helpless and frustrated watching the video, even though I wasn't there. Interaction with police is one of the rare cases where self defence doesn't cut it. In fact, defending yourself just gives more justification for law enforcement to apply more violence. Imagine if you were George Floyd, and you knew you were going to get killed. What do you do? If you don't resist you die. If you do resist you might still die or at least be assaulted, then charged with resisting arrest and will have "deserved" the violence by resisting at the end of it. On the bystander side too. Everyone watching knew it was wrong, but there is no good way to intervene. You either put yourself in harms way, and probably won't effect the outcome, or intervening action will be used to justify whatever violence was used, or likely both.