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Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases fro

Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified. I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.

kingofpandora 6y ago
> Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified. 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  I agree that there are more than 400, we know that just by the number of people getting shot. Now, how many are unjustified? That's the important question.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.
    - commoner 6y ago
      Those figures are for fatal police shootings, not for all police shootings. Police shootings and police brutality do not necessarily result in death.
      - bufferoverflow 6y ago
        You keep avoiding the question. How many are unjustified?
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Ignoring the land mine that is defining "unjustified," why is somebody else obligated to answer your question?
        danShumway 6y ago
        You're looking at a giant list of videos that people think are unjustified. You can go through and weed out videos that you think don't belong there. You can even submit pull requests to more organized compilations to remove unsubstantiated claims. Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again. All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point. https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues
    - nl 6y ago
      > Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack. This is wrong. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015. I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).
  - esperent 6y ago
    An important question, and a simple answer: all cases of police misconduct and brutality are unjustified.
    - bufferoverflow 6y ago
      That's blatantly false. How do you stop someone pointing a gun at the police officer without brutality? How do you stop someone attacking a police officer? How do you stop someone going for their gun? How do you stop someone going around shooting innocent people? etc, etc, etc.
      - esperent 6y ago
        Is there a term for the type of response that, instead of furthering the discussion, just tries to overwhelm you with questions?
        bilegeek 6y ago
        Gish gallop[1]? Although that includes arguments, not just questions. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
        commoner 6y ago
        "Gish gallop" is the correct term, but "buffer overflow" would also work in this case.
        bufferoverflow 6y ago
        So you can't answer 4 simple questions. So you pretend to be overwhelmed. Got it.
        esperent 6y ago
        The answer to your questions is that those are not examples of police brutality, so long as the police respond with reasonable force. Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > unjustified Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts. The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions. So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      The number of distinct police forces might already be a problem in itself. Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction) France has two, Police national and Gendamerie. Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality. And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.
danShumway 6y ago
> All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks. That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units. I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for. "Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!" And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
- prawn 6y ago
  And not just in recent weeks, also with cameras trained on them and during a protest specifically trying to draw awareness in part to police brutality. My jaw dropped at so many of them.
- vegai_ 6y ago
  >These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks. But... aren't there riots everywhere right now? This isn't exactly a normal situation.
techolic 6y ago
Just imagine you or a beloved one is the victim of police brutality in one of these cases. Take a second to think about it, and see if you're still on the same ground.

kingofpandora 6y ago

> Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified. 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.

bufferoverflow 6y ago
I agree that there are more than 400, we know that just by the number of people getting shot. Now, how many are unjustified? That's the important question.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.
  - commoner 6y ago
    Those figures are for fatal police shootings, not for all police shootings. Police shootings and police brutality do not necessarily result in death.
    - bufferoverflow 6y ago
      You keep avoiding the question. How many are unjustified?
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Ignoring the land mine that is defining "unjustified," why is somebody else obligated to answer your question?
      - danShumway 6y ago
        You're looking at a giant list of videos that people think are unjustified. You can go through and weed out videos that you think don't belong there. You can even submit pull requests to more organized compilations to remove unsubstantiated claims. Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again. All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point. https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues
  - nl 6y ago
    > Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack. This is wrong. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015. I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).
- esperent 6y ago
  An important question, and a simple answer: all cases of police misconduct and brutality are unjustified.
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    That's blatantly false. How do you stop someone pointing a gun at the police officer without brutality? How do you stop someone attacking a police officer? How do you stop someone going for their gun? How do you stop someone going around shooting innocent people? etc, etc, etc.
    - esperent 6y ago
      Is there a term for the type of response that, instead of furthering the discussion, just tries to overwhelm you with questions?
      - bilegeek 6y ago
        Gish gallop[1]? Although that includes arguments, not just questions. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
        commoner 6y ago
        "Gish gallop" is the correct term, but "buffer overflow" would also work in this case.
      - bufferoverflow 6y ago
        So you can't answer 4 simple questions. So you pretend to be overwhelmed. Got it.
        esperent 6y ago
        The answer to your questions is that those are not examples of police brutality, so long as the police respond with reasonable force. Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
- vmception 6y ago
  > unjustified Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts. The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions. So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    The number of distinct police forces might already be a problem in itself. Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction) France has two, Police national and Gendamerie. Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
ardy42 6y ago
> 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality. And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.

danShumway 6y ago

> All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks. That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units. I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for. "Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!" And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.

prawn 6y ago
And not just in recent weeks, also with cameras trained on them and during a protest specifically trying to draw awareness in part to police brutality. My jaw dropped at so many of them.
vegai_ 6y ago
>These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks. But... aren't there riots everywhere right now? This isn't exactly a normal situation.

techolic 6y ago

Just imagine you or a beloved one is the victim of police brutality in one of these cases. Take a second to think about it, and see if you're still on the same ground.