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Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

475 points by Glench 6y ago

Glench 6y ago
Resubmitted as per this comment from a moderator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401418
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- novia 6y ago
  thanks for getting this out there
_red 6y ago
Does this include the property crimes caused by the protesters? If no, why not?
- mdszy 6y ago
  Please explain why you think property is the same importance as human lives being destroyed by people who were sworn to protect them.
  - remlazar 6y ago
    How is destroying businesses not destroying lives? Also you obviously haven't looked at the list of incidents. The incidents include lives being destroyed sure, but it also includes cops defending themselves from communist street gangs.
    - elygre 6y ago
      "Communist Street gangs" -- are there such things in the US?
      - headsupernova 6y ago
        if only
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    I won't go as far as equating property to human lives, but do remember the vast majority of businesses looted or burned were small, already hurting from Covid-19, and a large number of them black owned. Sure, these people's business owners weren't killed, but everything they worked for during their life is pretty much ruined.
    - obiye27 6y ago
      So what
    - alexilliamson 6y ago
      Do you have data supporting the claim that most looted businesses were small?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - uoaei 6y ago
      This is something that's repeated very often on news media with zero citations to the datasets from which they derive their conclusions. Would be interested to see your sources because folks like myself are highly skeptical about unsubstantiated claims, especially when they serve ulterior interests. In this case, small business rhetoric supports mostly the large businesses that want to suppress wages and avoid workplace protection regulations.[1] [1] https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-business-rhetoric-is-used-to-protect-corporate-america https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-bus...
- simongg 6y ago
  Why would a list of police brutality incidents contain information about property crime?
  - _red 6y ago
    Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting... This is my point: The presentation of this list inherently absolves one-side from any misdeeds.
    - phailhaus 6y ago
      The protestors burning and looting are not sanctioned by the state and funded by taxpayers. We already have laws for punishing them. The whole point of this repo is pointing out that the police are held to a completely different set of standards, and are almost always let off the hook. It doesn't matter how much burning and looting happened, the police still cannot engage in indiscriminate brutality.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      That's not been my experience. The police have been the first to escalate in Denver. Then the resulting chaos gives cover for unsavory elements to start tagging/burning/looting.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      > Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting I'm sure that might be the case sometimes, but from the multitude of videos I've seen over the past month or so, it's the police that are doing the escalating - preventing people from their lawful right to protest peacefully, storming into peaceful park protests and dragging people out at random, indiscriminately spraying groups of protestors with pepper spray, shooting numerous people in the chest and face with rubber bullets and lead bean-bags (which should only ever be used at legs), shooting people in the head at point-blank range with flash-bang grenades, firing at several journalists and bystanders, drive-by shootings of bystanders and houses, harassing laywers and others that have called them out, a lot of police obscuring their badge numbers and disabling their bodycams ... Seriously, the sheer quantity of video evidence is absolutely astounding - and it can only be the tip of the iceberg.
- amwelles 6y ago
  That would belong in a git repo of property crimes caused by protestors. It’s an entirely different data set.
remlazar 6y ago
I checked out my city and state on here. The vast majority of the incidents listed are not even close to police brutality. This is clearly put together by someone that has an agenda and doesn't know what they are talking about. Unfortunately this is junk.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Well my city and state has police destroying journalists' equipment, indiscriminately doing drivebys, and exploding a bystander's eye with a rubber bullet not shot according to the manufacturer's recommendations.
- inetknght 6y ago
  It's a git repository which accepts pull requests to crowdsource information. If you've got some ideas to improve it, then do so. This repository is not junk.
  - remlazar 6y ago
    Yeah that's why it's junk.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      There's a certain irony of accusing a crowdsourced repository of being junk because it's crowdsourced, with an anonymous account created seven minutes ago.
      - mtgp1000 6y ago
        What, you think because it's crowdsourced it isn't liable to bias? You think they're going to accept a PR which attempts to remove multiple incidents, for any reason?
        shuntress 6y ago
        Because it is open, the crowd will be able to look over pull requests and judge the reasoning/evidence put forth by the pull request to remove an incident as well as the reasons provided by maintainer for the PR's approval/rejection.
joejoeshabadoo5 6y ago
I wonder if a database similar to this that documented property crimes, or black on white hate crimes would be allowed to stay up?
- theplague42 6y ago
  Crimes committed by civilians are not the same as crimes committed by agents of the state. Also plenty of crime databases already exist so I can only assume you aren't actually asking a question but instead making a snide comment.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    There is definitely an up tick, it's now cool to beat up white boys, regardless if they are part of the right wing fanatics. I was so appalled to hear a girl tell a guy how cool he was for physically harming another person, despite the dude deserving it. Parent post to yours may have been antagonization, however there is a frustration that much of the conversation is narrow and one sided. There are no easy answers or solutions for this problem, and so it becomes frustrating to people when they are shut down for trying to bring in the larger context. The fact that people who do this are instantly called racists makes it harder for us all.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > would be allowed to stay up? that seems to gp's question. not the one you answered about existence of said data somewhere. If someone just aggregated and filter by criteria gp suggested and created a site with that data, Then it won't be allowed to stay up, is my guess.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  I really dont understand this comment and this attitude? Being a police officer is a job, one can choose to change it at any time, it is not even comparable to a race, gender, etc. If your same comment was written about software engineers or plumbers, would it not seem a bit odd? I don't understand the putting a job on a pedestal, especially a job where someone is given the power to violently assault and kill people and get away with it.
ilikehurdles 6y ago
Well organized and useful resource. Edit: Oh nice, there are backups of videos as well, and there's even an ipfs source.
mjcohen 6y ago
Gonna need terabytes.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you are serious but even millions of events recorded in text would not take up too much space. Bioinformatics datasets that run into the millions of lines still only require a few gigabytes, and they are often compressed into tarballs which can halve their size. Moore's law is on the side of the protesters here, this information can spread easily because it does not require much bandwidth (without video) for anyone to `git pull remote` this whole repository. I hope that helps explain why some people have downvoted you without explanation (for the record, I did not).
thelock85 6y ago
These contributors should partner with https://raheem.ai https://raheem.ai which is trying to make it easier and less intimidating to report instances of police misconduct.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  Are you saying that to use Raheem.ai is to Do the Right Thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6gI4gXYPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6gI4gXYPw (I'll see myself out) edit: lol @ people flagging this
Trias11 6y ago
Can we make a repo of resources listing black people killing, brutalizing and robbing other black people? Unless it's going to push GIT disk space limits of course. Why 10,000's of other black lives are less matter?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TheGrim-888 6y ago
Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true. You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened. Not only are you not given the context, but you're only given one side of the story. I'm sure if you asked the police what happened, their story would be completely different. But you're only being allowed to get the story from one side, and that side is insanely politically motivated to exaggerate, and do everything they can to make the police look bad, because it strengths their political positions.
- gruez 6y ago
  >You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. If only there was some sort of recording device that we can put on police officers, and either they can be trusted not to "accidentally" turn it off when an incident occurs or is always-on.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    I checked my local city, some of the incidents are true, others lack evidence, others seem to lack a brutality component all together (such as firing a pepper all at the ground in front of someone breaking the law. No doubt we have a problem, this is a great start to a collection, but we may want to consider filtering for truth or at least incidents with credible evidence
    - verdverm 6y ago
      I guess people don't like hearing / learning that there are falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims in the data set. Do you know of any data sets that don't have bad data? Or maybe down votes because this is not the comment I thought I attached this too... hmm, let me see if I can at least fix that
throwawaysea 6y ago
From what I saw on Twitter, most of the videos alleging police using force without reason were misleading, and leaving out all the footage preceding police action. In cases where others uploaded longer videos or different angles, it was clear that protesters were acting illegally, or ignoring clear verbal warnings, or refusing lawful orders to disperse, and so on. By leaving those crucial additional bits out, activists were generating outrage online where none was deserved. The same applies here, and I encourage people to take resources like this with a grain of salt.
- amznthrwaway 6y ago
  @dang -- if you have a single fucking gram of integrity in your body you will ban not only the throwaway account above, but you will also ban their real account. They made a throwaway account for the express purpose of breaking HN rules and hurting the community. Dang: borrow some fucking balls and ban a white supremacist for once in your miserable fucking life.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  "Lawful orders to disperse" is there such a thing? You don't hear about "lawful orders to stop speaking" or "lawful orders to stop practicing a religion " And just because a" clear verbal warming " was issued, doesn't mean it had to be followed, nor does it mean excessive force woukd be used. While I agree that some instances of "peaceful protestors" aren't actually peacful, many are. And in some of the cases where the protestors aren't peaceful, the show off force is exessive.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    When your protest becomes a riot, yes, it is lawful to order dispersal. You have a right to expression, not a right to ransack other people's property (public and private), if you commit the latter in the guise of the former, then you are in the wrong.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      And what if the police attack a peaceful protest and create the cover for others to ransack? As I saw with my own eyes occurring.
enriquto 6y ago
There is a similar site for the spanish violence against the catalan referendum of 2017: https://spanishpolice.github.io/ https://spanishpolice.github.io/ In that case, unfortunately, the videos are only stored on youtube and twitter, so you cannot backup them easily just by cloning the repo.
- LyalinDotCom 6y ago
  I really worry about videos being lost, almost feels like someone should do an archive every so often and put it up as torrents that many people can help backup. Just a thought
  - trickstra 6y ago
    https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
downandout 6y ago
As a person that makes decisions based on data, rather than emotions, it would be interesting to see a comparison of the volume of such incidents on both sides. Is there a similar repo of the looting and violence committed by protesters? I think that would give a more accurate picture of all of this. We would then know if the police brutality incidents paled in comparison to violence/looting by the public, or vice versa.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > both sides On one side you have police brutalizing journalists and shooting people in the face. On the other side you have not people getting brutalized by the police. Fair and balanced, I'm sure. Or do you think that shooting people in the face is the appropriate police response to property damage?
  - downandout 6y ago
    Is this repo limited to police violence against journalists? I didn't pick up on that if it is.
    - ebg13 6y ago
      > Is this repo limited to police violence against journalists? No, but it does _include_ it. Is it your opinion that only journalists should not be shot in the face? What are your feelings re: knees on necks for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with hands in pockets looking around like nothing's wrong even though the guy with the neck went completely unresponsive minutes before the knee moved? Maybe we should ask how many police necks George Floyd put his knee on.
      - downandout 6y ago
        I don't think any human, regardless of who they are, should be committing violence against any other human. You, and whoever else is downvoting this, are acting is if my comment is pro-police. It is not. It is pro-data. How can any reasonably intelligent person be against fact-based decision making?
tedunangst 6y ago
If you think there's missing context, submit a pull request with a link? Here in philly, police insisted they tear gassed protestors because they were in imminent danger. Two weeks later, they failed to find any evidence to support that, despite many camera angles. Finally issued an apology. Turns out the other side of the story was actually the same as the protestors' side; they just didn't want to admit it.
- downandout 6y ago
  Missing context implies that their failure to provide it was an oversight. There was not even an attempt at providing context here, because doing so would be unpopular.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    With cops wearing body cams, that evidence should be abundant. Its absence is telling. Collecting evidence is pretty much job #1 for the police. Without that, they can't establish guilt of the accused. When dozens of cops were involved in a beatdown and not a single one can produce a shred of evidence, we assume that the protesters were innocent.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      > Collecting evidence is pretty much job #1 for the police. Excellent point. If denial / lack of evidence is the SoP for any Police Department, what are they even doing? Defense Lawyers would barely have to work for their pay.
    - WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
      It's just called "spoliation of evidence." The evidence is contrary to police claims, so they are destroying it. It's fine. We the people have backups for them now. No hiding it now.
    - downandout 6y ago
      I was referring to the lack of mention of data on violent acts committed by protestors.
zaroth 6y ago
I think at the very least the title should be Git Repo of Alleged Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests. Like another commenter downthread, I spent some time looking through incident reports in my own State, and found some of them to either be simply unsubstantiated claims, or videos of police reasonably appearing to be doing the very dangerous job of managing a riot. There are valid concerns of the validity and objectivity of many of these alleged incident reports. By commingling the few truly reprehensible actions with objectively necessary riot control, the site loses its objectivity and fairness, and does harm to its intended goal. In Reddit parlance, it becomes a circle jerk. I think the fundamental problem with many of these incidents is that the provocation of rioting has been used, not in all cases but certainly in many, to incite a police response which is then filmed and condemned as if unprovoked or unnecessary. The vast majority of police are heroes. And every community depends on their police to provide a mission critical service. The ability of police to provide this service in cities like Minneapolis and NYC has been dramatically curtailed by a violent political uprising which has damaged billions of dollars of property and driven homicide rates up nearly 100% year over year. IMO the fatal flaw in the response to protests against police is to send police to stand in front of them and take the abuse. You don’t put protesters and counter-protests next to each other to face off. It seems to me particularly unfair and indignant to have black police officers on the line being screamed at by white protesters about Black Lives Matter, to stand silently while they are verbally denigrated and abused for doing their job, which can lawfully include using force to disperse a riot. If the target of a large protest is the police themselves, the National Guard should be called in to provide crowd control and defend life and property if needed. This has the double benefit of not providing a standing target for the protesters ire, and not creating a self-fulfilling prophecy / feedback loop of aggression.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > The vast majority of police are heroes. Define "hero". As has been noted many, many times across HN these past few weeks, "police officer" isn't even among the top 15 most dangerous professions in America. And even then police aren't legally required to do their job[1]. Most police are never called upon to do anything heroic, so we can't say if they are heroes or not. This type of blind veneration for police is weird and unhealthy. If you tell a child, or even an adult, they are great and perfect just for who they are, they're going to turn out spoiled rotten. Why do you think this is any different? Police are regular people. Some good, some bad, but mostly mixed. The systems they work in allow the bad police to get away with horrific crimes and punish the good police who try to do anything about it. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
mothsonasloth 6y ago
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I will watch this repository, but I think it will be another showman piece which will join the many other repositories that are forgotten about and left to go stale on Github. Why? Well if you look at some of the contributors, they all have new accounts generated around June, and some have a history of creating fad'ish repositories, probably to massage their ego online. This repository has some good content but also a lot of "weak" to "non-existent" examples.
- cvlasdkv 6y ago
  Ultimately there is enough evidence to make a decision already--the case of police brutality is nothing as invisible or insidious as something like the sexual assault or harassment revealed by the #MeToo movement. I am not sure this repository accomplishes anything, especially as reports do not seem to be well vetted, but it would be nice if cleaned up to have a list of examples.
- tdeck 6y ago
  So the implication is what - people created this to get stars on GitHub? I expect it's more likely people just used GitHub because it's an easy way to compile and host content. As for the new accounts, it makes sense that the audience of potential contributors to this would be larger than the audience of people who already have a GitHub account.
Koshkin 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Gonna_Git_You_Sucka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Gonna_Git_You_Sucka
throwvid19 6y ago
The number of comments in here that ask for additional/richer data and are being flagged is supremely concerning. I understand that this is a hot issue with very polarized sides, but in what kinds of circumstances is having more data bad, except to intentionally support bias? Please understand that my question is only to understand why, in the context of accumulating data, is trying to obtain more/better data NOT a good thing? I do not wish to debate what is already being said in the many comments already, so if it helps to change the context of the data in question in order to discuss, that sounds like a good idea to me.
- SauciestGNU 6y ago
  I think context is good and we should be wary of videos that have been edited to remove critical information. However, there is such a large corpus of evidence against the police in these protests, I have to wonder if the people asking for more context are doing so in good faith, or rather to argue for the innocence of the police. Having been personally on the receiving end of police violence during these protests, it bothers me that anyone could look at this wealth of videos and see anything other than a clear pattern of institutional violence being wielded against those who are in opposition to just such violence.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    One thing that comes to my mind (note: I do not support this view) but I am trying to put myself into the opposite party's shoes: - Listing videos of police brutality during protests without also listing videos of protestors brutally attacking the police perhaps creates a dissonance to the counter party? I think there have been a few incidents were cops were attacked but they are far and few between, but listing those would help clear the accussation of hypocrisy. Furthermore, I personally think that we should separate police brutality videos in normal civic life (before the protests began) to gather evidence of systemic violence vs. the enraged/emotionally outraged protests that both sides were not willing to concede. I categorize them as different.
    - SauciestGNU 6y ago
heavyset_go 6y ago
Is there a torrent going?
readme 6y ago
The problem here is that police are not infallible but everyone wants them to be. If there is violence in humanity you would be naive to think police would be exempted from it. That is why I don't like coverage like this: why not also catalog some of the good things police do? That wouldn't further your point, so why would you do it?
- seth_tr 6y ago
  The police don't acknowledge that these were mistake[1][2][3]. They think this is the system working. They act in bad faith and so please don't run around grant them good faith in arguments. We want the systems that enable this brutality changed. This is like saying "Facebook does some good things so let's ignore the systematic problems it causes" or "Facebook is staffed by people so we have to accept an amount of them stalking their exes with internal tools" [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-shove-protester-unrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-shove-p... "Fifty-seven officers resigned from the department’s Emergency Response Team in solidarity with the two who were suspended." [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8436929/Atlanta-cops-no-work-today-city-claims-handle-911-calls.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8436929/Atlanta-cop... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/us/why-police-rally-around-each-other-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/us/why-police-rally-around-ea...
  - readme 6y ago
    Why not go find me three links to instances where the police did acknowledge their mistakes?
    - seth_tr 6y ago
      I searched google for "police acknowledgement mistake" and several variations. The closest I could find was people calling for the police to acknowledge their mistakes. I can't find the police doing it themselves.
      - readme 6y ago
schaefer 6y ago
Las Vegas: - the police shot a man. - a man shot the police. neither incident appear in this data set.
overfl0w 6y ago
Now all we need is a similar repo for the looting and memorial vandalism.
- goto11 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be a job for the police? Their job is (lest we forget it) to prevent crime and enforce the law.
  - overfl0w 6y ago
    Sure but they are not in a public git repo and I think the public has the right to see the full story. The police are the easiest target right now but those people who take advantage on the riots to loot are kind of left out of sight.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
Every link in that repo needs to also be archived as a video file into that repo, to protect against link rot.
- TouchyJoe 6y ago
  how can this amount of video footage be backed up?
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    Is it really that much?

475 points by Glench 6y ago

Resubmitted as per this comment from a moderator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401418

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
novia 6y ago
thanks for getting this out there

_red 6y ago

Does this include the property crimes caused by the protesters? If no, why not?

mdszy 6y ago
Please explain why you think property is the same importance as human lives being destroyed by people who were sworn to protect them.
- remlazar 6y ago
  How is destroying businesses not destroying lives? Also you obviously haven't looked at the list of incidents. The incidents include lives being destroyed sure, but it also includes cops defending themselves from communist street gangs.
  - elygre 6y ago
    "Communist Street gangs" -- are there such things in the US?
    - headsupernova 6y ago
      if only
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago
  I won't go as far as equating property to human lives, but do remember the vast majority of businesses looted or burned were small, already hurting from Covid-19, and a large number of them black owned. Sure, these people's business owners weren't killed, but everything they worked for during their life is pretty much ruined.
  - obiye27 6y ago
    So what
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    Do you have data supporting the claim that most looted businesses were small?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - uoaei 6y ago
    This is something that's repeated very often on news media with zero citations to the datasets from which they derive their conclusions. Would be interested to see your sources because folks like myself are highly skeptical about unsubstantiated claims, especially when they serve ulterior interests. In this case, small business rhetoric supports mostly the large businesses that want to suppress wages and avoid workplace protection regulations.[1] [1] https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-business-rhetoric-is-used-to-protect-corporate-america https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-bus...
simongg 6y ago
Why would a list of police brutality incidents contain information about property crime?
- _red 6y ago
  Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting... This is my point: The presentation of this list inherently absolves one-side from any misdeeds.
  - phailhaus 6y ago
    The protestors burning and looting are not sanctioned by the state and funded by taxpayers. We already have laws for punishing them. The whole point of this repo is pointing out that the police are held to a completely different set of standards, and are almost always let off the hook. It doesn't matter how much burning and looting happened, the police still cannot engage in indiscriminate brutality.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    That's not been my experience. The police have been the first to escalate in Denver. Then the resulting chaos gives cover for unsavory elements to start tagging/burning/looting.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    > Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting I'm sure that might be the case sometimes, but from the multitude of videos I've seen over the past month or so, it's the police that are doing the escalating - preventing people from their lawful right to protest peacefully, storming into peaceful park protests and dragging people out at random, indiscriminately spraying groups of protestors with pepper spray, shooting numerous people in the chest and face with rubber bullets and lead bean-bags (which should only ever be used at legs), shooting people in the head at point-blank range with flash-bang grenades, firing at several journalists and bystanders, drive-by shootings of bystanders and houses, harassing laywers and others that have called them out, a lot of police obscuring their badge numbers and disabling their bodycams ... Seriously, the sheer quantity of video evidence is absolutely astounding - and it can only be the tip of the iceberg.
amwelles 6y ago
That would belong in a git repo of property crimes caused by protestors. It’s an entirely different data set.

remlazar 6y ago

I checked out my city and state on here. The vast majority of the incidents listed are not even close to police brutality. This is clearly put together by someone that has an agenda and doesn't know what they are talking about. Unfortunately this is junk.

monocasa 6y ago
Well my city and state has police destroying journalists' equipment, indiscriminately doing drivebys, and exploding a bystander's eye with a rubber bullet not shot according to the manufacturer's recommendations.
inetknght 6y ago
It's a git repository which accepts pull requests to crowdsource information. If you've got some ideas to improve it, then do so. This repository is not junk.
- remlazar 6y ago
  Yeah that's why it's junk.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    There's a certain irony of accusing a crowdsourced repository of being junk because it's crowdsourced, with an anonymous account created seven minutes ago.
    - mtgp1000 6y ago
      What, you think because it's crowdsourced it isn't liable to bias? You think they're going to accept a PR which attempts to remove multiple incidents, for any reason?
      - shuntress 6y ago
        Because it is open, the crowd will be able to look over pull requests and judge the reasoning/evidence put forth by the pull request to remove an incident as well as the reasons provided by maintainer for the PR's approval/rejection.

joejoeshabadoo5 6y ago

I wonder if a database similar to this that documented property crimes, or black on white hate crimes would be allowed to stay up?

theplague42 6y ago
Crimes committed by civilians are not the same as crimes committed by agents of the state. Also plenty of crime databases already exist so I can only assume you aren't actually asking a question but instead making a snide comment.
- verdverm 6y ago
  There is definitely an up tick, it's now cool to beat up white boys, regardless if they are part of the right wing fanatics. I was so appalled to hear a girl tell a guy how cool he was for physically harming another person, despite the dude deserving it. Parent post to yours may have been antagonization, however there is a frustration that much of the conversation is narrow and one sided. There are no easy answers or solutions for this problem, and so it becomes frustrating to people when they are shut down for trying to bring in the larger context. The fact that people who do this are instantly called racists makes it harder for us all.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > would be allowed to stay up? that seems to gp's question. not the one you answered about existence of said data somewhere. If someone just aggregated and filter by criteria gp suggested and created a site with that data, Then it won't be allowed to stay up, is my guess.
wonderwonder 6y ago
I really dont understand this comment and this attitude? Being a police officer is a job, one can choose to change it at any time, it is not even comparable to a race, gender, etc. If your same comment was written about software engineers or plumbers, would it not seem a bit odd? I don't understand the putting a job on a pedestal, especially a job where someone is given the power to violently assault and kill people and get away with it.

ilikehurdles 6y ago

Well organized and useful resource. Edit: Oh nice, there are backups of videos as well, and there's even an ipfs source.

mjcohen 6y ago

Gonna need terabytes.

ImaCake 6y ago
I'm not sure if you are serious but even millions of events recorded in text would not take up too much space. Bioinformatics datasets that run into the millions of lines still only require a few gigabytes, and they are often compressed into tarballs which can halve their size. Moore's law is on the side of the protesters here, this information can spread easily because it does not require much bandwidth (without video) for anyone to `git pull remote` this whole repository. I hope that helps explain why some people have downvoted you without explanation (for the record, I did not).

thelock85 6y ago

These contributors should partner with https://raheem.ai https://raheem.ai which is trying to make it easier and less intimidating to report instances of police misconduct.

dfxm12 6y ago
Are you saying that to use Raheem.ai is to Do the Right Thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6gI4gXYPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6gI4gXYPw (I'll see myself out) edit: lol @ people flagging this

Trias11 6y ago

Can we make a repo of resources listing black people killing, brutalizing and robbing other black people? Unless it's going to push GIT disk space limits of course. Why 10,000's of other black lives are less matter?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

TheGrim-888 6y ago

Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true. You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened. Not only are you not given the context, but you're only given one side of the story. I'm sure if you asked the police what happened, their story would be completely different. But you're only being allowed to get the story from one side, and that side is insanely politically motivated to exaggerate, and do everything they can to make the police look bad, because it strengths their political positions.

gruez 6y ago
>You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. If only there was some sort of recording device that we can put on police officers, and either they can be trusted not to "accidentally" turn it off when an incident occurs or is always-on.
- verdverm 6y ago
  I checked my local city, some of the incidents are true, others lack evidence, others seem to lack a brutality component all together (such as firing a pepper all at the ground in front of someone breaking the law. No doubt we have a problem, this is a great start to a collection, but we may want to consider filtering for truth or at least incidents with credible evidence
  - verdverm 6y ago
    I guess people don't like hearing / learning that there are falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims in the data set. Do you know of any data sets that don't have bad data? Or maybe down votes because this is not the comment I thought I attached this too... hmm, let me see if I can at least fix that

throwawaysea 6y ago

From what I saw on Twitter, most of the videos alleging police using force without reason were misleading, and leaving out all the footage preceding police action. In cases where others uploaded longer videos or different angles, it was clear that protesters were acting illegally, or ignoring clear verbal warnings, or refusing lawful orders to disperse, and so on. By leaving those crucial additional bits out, activists were generating outrage online where none was deserved. The same applies here, and I encourage people to take resources like this with a grain of salt.

amznthrwaway 6y ago
@dang -- if you have a single fucking gram of integrity in your body you will ban not only the throwaway account above, but you will also ban their real account. They made a throwaway account for the express purpose of breaking HN rules and hurting the community. Dang: borrow some fucking balls and ban a white supremacist for once in your miserable fucking life.
chrismcb 6y ago
"Lawful orders to disperse" is there such a thing? You don't hear about "lawful orders to stop speaking" or "lawful orders to stop practicing a religion " And just because a" clear verbal warming " was issued, doesn't mean it had to be followed, nor does it mean excessive force woukd be used. While I agree that some instances of "peaceful protestors" aren't actually peacful, many are. And in some of the cases where the protestors aren't peaceful, the show off force is exessive.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  When your protest becomes a riot, yes, it is lawful to order dispersal. You have a right to expression, not a right to ransack other people's property (public and private), if you commit the latter in the guise of the former, then you are in the wrong.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    And what if the police attack a peaceful protest and create the cover for others to ransack? As I saw with my own eyes occurring.

enriquto 6y ago

There is a similar site for the spanish violence against the catalan referendum of 2017: https://spanishpolice.github.io/ https://spanishpolice.github.io/ In that case, unfortunately, the videos are only stored on youtube and twitter, so you cannot backup them easily just by cloning the repo.

LyalinDotCom 6y ago
I really worry about videos being lost, almost feels like someone should do an archive every so often and put it up as torrents that many people can help backup. Just a thought
- trickstra 6y ago
  https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/

downandout 6y ago

As a person that makes decisions based on data, rather than emotions, it would be interesting to see a comparison of the volume of such incidents on both sides. Is there a similar repo of the looting and violence committed by protesters? I think that would give a more accurate picture of all of this. We would then know if the police brutality incidents paled in comparison to violence/looting by the public, or vice versa.

ebg13 6y ago
> both sides On one side you have police brutalizing journalists and shooting people in the face. On the other side you have not people getting brutalized by the police. Fair and balanced, I'm sure. Or do you think that shooting people in the face is the appropriate police response to property damage?
- downandout 6y ago
  Is this repo limited to police violence against journalists? I didn't pick up on that if it is.
  - ebg13 6y ago
    > Is this repo limited to police violence against journalists? No, but it does _include_ it. Is it your opinion that only journalists should not be shot in the face? What are your feelings re: knees on necks for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with hands in pockets looking around like nothing's wrong even though the guy with the neck went completely unresponsive minutes before the knee moved? Maybe we should ask how many police necks George Floyd put his knee on.
    - downandout 6y ago
      I don't think any human, regardless of who they are, should be committing violence against any other human. You, and whoever else is downvoting this, are acting is if my comment is pro-police. It is not. It is pro-data. How can any reasonably intelligent person be against fact-based decision making?

tedunangst 6y ago

If you think there's missing context, submit a pull request with a link? Here in philly, police insisted they tear gassed protestors because they were in imminent danger. Two weeks later, they failed to find any evidence to support that, despite many camera angles. Finally issued an apology. Turns out the other side of the story was actually the same as the protestors' side; they just didn't want to admit it.

downandout 6y ago
Missing context implies that their failure to provide it was an oversight. There was not even an attempt at providing context here, because doing so would be unpopular.
- klyrs 6y ago
  With cops wearing body cams, that evidence should be abundant. Its absence is telling. Collecting evidence is pretty much job #1 for the police. Without that, they can't establish guilt of the accused. When dozens of cops were involved in a beatdown and not a single one can produce a shred of evidence, we assume that the protesters were innocent.
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    > Collecting evidence is pretty much job #1 for the police. Excellent point. If denial / lack of evidence is the SoP for any Police Department, what are they even doing? Defense Lawyers would barely have to work for their pay.
  - WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
    It's just called "spoliation of evidence." The evidence is contrary to police claims, so they are destroying it. It's fine. We the people have backups for them now. No hiding it now.
  - downandout 6y ago
    I was referring to the lack of mention of data on violent acts committed by protestors.

zaroth 6y ago

I think at the very least the title should be Git Repo of Alleged Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests. Like another commenter downthread, I spent some time looking through incident reports in my own State, and found some of them to either be simply unsubstantiated claims, or videos of police reasonably appearing to be doing the very dangerous job of managing a riot. There are valid concerns of the validity and objectivity of many of these alleged incident reports. By commingling the few truly reprehensible actions with objectively necessary riot control, the site loses its objectivity and fairness, and does harm to its intended goal. In Reddit parlance, it becomes a circle jerk. I think the fundamental problem with many of these incidents is that the provocation of rioting has been used, not in all cases but certainly in many, to incite a police response which is then filmed and condemned as if unprovoked or unnecessary. The vast majority of police are heroes. And every community depends on their police to provide a mission critical service. The ability of police to provide this service in cities like Minneapolis and NYC has been dramatically curtailed by a violent political uprising which has damaged billions of dollars of property and driven homicide rates up nearly 100% year over year. IMO the fatal flaw in the response to protests against police is to send police to stand in front of them and take the abuse. You don’t put protesters and counter-protests next to each other to face off. It seems to me particularly unfair and indignant to have black police officers on the line being screamed at by white protesters about Black Lives Matter, to stand silently while they are verbally denigrated and abused for doing their job, which can lawfully include using force to disperse a riot. If the target of a large protest is the police themselves, the National Guard should be called in to provide crowd control and defend life and property if needed. This has the double benefit of not providing a standing target for the protesters ire, and not creating a self-fulfilling prophecy / feedback loop of aggression.

triceratops 6y ago
> The vast majority of police are heroes. Define "hero". As has been noted many, many times across HN these past few weeks, "police officer" isn't even among the top 15 most dangerous professions in America. And even then police aren't legally required to do their job[1]. Most police are never called upon to do anything heroic, so we can't say if they are heroes or not. This type of blind veneration for police is weird and unhealthy. If you tell a child, or even an adult, they are great and perfect just for who they are, they're going to turn out spoiled rotten. Why do you think this is any different? Police are regular people. Some good, some bad, but mostly mixed. The systems they work in allow the bad police to get away with horrific crimes and punish the good police who try to do anything about it. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

mothsonasloth 6y ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I will watch this repository, but I think it will be another showman piece which will join the many other repositories that are forgotten about and left to go stale on Github. Why? Well if you look at some of the contributors, they all have new accounts generated around June, and some have a history of creating fad'ish repositories, probably to massage their ego online. This repository has some good content but also a lot of "weak" to "non-existent" examples.

cvlasdkv 6y ago
Ultimately there is enough evidence to make a decision already--the case of police brutality is nothing as invisible or insidious as something like the sexual assault or harassment revealed by the #MeToo movement. I am not sure this repository accomplishes anything, especially as reports do not seem to be well vetted, but it would be nice if cleaned up to have a list of examples.
tdeck 6y ago
So the implication is what - people created this to get stars on GitHub? I expect it's more likely people just used GitHub because it's an easy way to compile and host content. As for the new accounts, it makes sense that the audience of potential contributors to this would be larger than the audience of people who already have a GitHub account.

Koshkin 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Gonna_Git_You_Sucka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Gonna_Git_You_Sucka

throwvid19 6y ago

The number of comments in here that ask for additional/richer data and are being flagged is supremely concerning. I understand that this is a hot issue with very polarized sides, but in what kinds of circumstances is having more data bad, except to intentionally support bias? Please understand that my question is only to understand why, in the context of accumulating data, is trying to obtain more/better data NOT a good thing? I do not wish to debate what is already being said in the many comments already, so if it helps to change the context of the data in question in order to discuss, that sounds like a good idea to me.

SauciestGNU 6y ago
I think context is good and we should be wary of videos that have been edited to remove critical information. However, there is such a large corpus of evidence against the police in these protests, I have to wonder if the people asking for more context are doing so in good faith, or rather to argue for the innocence of the police. Having been personally on the receiving end of police violence during these protests, it bothers me that anyone could look at this wealth of videos and see anything other than a clear pattern of institutional violence being wielded against those who are in opposition to just such violence.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  One thing that comes to my mind (note: I do not support this view) but I am trying to put myself into the opposite party's shoes: - Listing videos of police brutality during protests without also listing videos of protestors brutally attacking the police perhaps creates a dissonance to the counter party? I think there have been a few incidents were cops were attacked but they are far and few between, but listing those would help clear the accussation of hypocrisy. Furthermore, I personally think that we should separate police brutality videos in normal civic life (before the protests began) to gather evidence of systemic violence vs. the enraged/emotionally outraged protests that both sides were not willing to concede. I categorize them as different.
  - SauciestGNU 6y ago

heavyset_go 6y ago

Is there a torrent going?

readme 6y ago

The problem here is that police are not infallible but everyone wants them to be. If there is violence in humanity you would be naive to think police would be exempted from it. That is why I don't like coverage like this: why not also catalog some of the good things police do? That wouldn't further your point, so why would you do it?

seth_tr 6y ago
The police don't acknowledge that these were mistake[1][2][3]. They think this is the system working. They act in bad faith and so please don't run around grant them good faith in arguments. We want the systems that enable this brutality changed. This is like saying "Facebook does some good things so let's ignore the systematic problems it causes" or "Facebook is staffed by people so we have to accept an amount of them stalking their exes with internal tools" [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-shove-protester-unrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-shove-p... "Fifty-seven officers resigned from the department’s Emergency Response Team in solidarity with the two who were suspended." [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8436929/Atlanta-cops-no-work-today-city-claims-handle-911-calls.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8436929/Atlanta-cop... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/us/why-police-rally-around-each-other-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/us/why-police-rally-around-ea...
- readme 6y ago
  Why not go find me three links to instances where the police did acknowledge their mistakes?
  - seth_tr 6y ago
    I searched google for "police acknowledgement mistake" and several variations. The closest I could find was people calling for the police to acknowledge their mistakes. I can't find the police doing it themselves.
    - readme 6y ago

schaefer 6y ago

Las Vegas: - the police shot a man. - a man shot the police. neither incident appear in this data set.

overfl0w 6y ago

Now all we need is a similar repo for the looting and memorial vandalism.

goto11 6y ago
Wouldn't that be a job for the police? Their job is (lest we forget it) to prevent crime and enforce the law.
- overfl0w 6y ago
  Sure but they are not in a public git repo and I think the public has the right to see the full story. The police are the easiest target right now but those people who take advantage on the riots to loot are kind of left out of sight.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Every link in that repo needs to also be archived as a video file into that repo, to protect against link rot.

TouchyJoe 6y ago
how can this amount of video footage be backed up?
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Is it really that much?