7 ms·

A lot of this eventually reflects American society itself. I am generalizing here but Americans in general are pretty insensitive to anyone who is claimed to be

A lot of this eventually reflects American society itself. I am generalizing here but Americans in general are pretty insensitive to anyone who is claimed to be a criminal. I have seen people argue that rights of someone like George Floyd do not matter as in past he had committed some crime. There is a huge support for taking away rights of people who are convicted of crimes irrespective of those crimes. When we talk about the bad conditions in our jails, people are quick to say "who cares how those evil folks are treated"? The law enforcement understands this and uses it to profit from this public support.

javajosh 5y ago
Yes, but you don't have to be convicted. An arrest, with or without charge, is a black mark to many, many people. (This attitude is at its worst when considering prison conditions. No-one is dehumanized more than a prison inmate in this country.)
- adventured 5y ago
  Sure, consider the human rights abuse that is the online mug shots industry in the US for example. There's no sympathy for those people, the assumption is guilt. The superficial tough on crime types revel in the notion that those people get publicly humiliated (and it fulfills the deranged lust for snooping, nosing into other people's business). Mug shots don't tell the story of whether someone is innocent or guilty and yet your photo might end up on the Internet regardless.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > the human rights abuse that is the online mug shots industry The way we treat people with a mug shot is horrendous. But mug shots per se serve a vital purpose: they are a public record of persons the state is holding. That makes “disappearing” them later on harder.
    - adventured 5y ago
      I certainly agree. I think it makes sense to photograph anyone arrested, for numerous logical reasons (not least of which is because I don't trust the authorities; the photos should also be protected from tampering by the same authorities). My contention is of course that mass posting them online is a human rights abuse. I think it's a form of cruel and unusual punishment, where someone has not necessarily been found guilty of any crime and they're being assaulted by the state (their image, reputation). My opinion is that online mug shots rather blatantly violate the eighth amendment.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > mass posting them online is a human rights abuse Where would you prefer they be posted? Would you be prohibited from photographing them? The core problem is how we treat people accused--not even convicted--of crimes. Socially. But also legally. That's a better place to address the issue than trying to gerrymander the Eighth Amendment.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      The way mug shots are handled goes back to this shitty attitude that police have regarding citizens' rights. Any time they are legally forced to do something, they try to make it as humiliating as possible as an additional punishment. Any sane government would find a way to both protect the identity of the accused while also ensuring the the appropriate family members can get access to this information if necessary. While we're at it, the way normal people get arrested is fucking horrible too. It's not like in the movies where they lightly cuff your hands together. The police have specifically designed their handcuff procedures to be as painful as possible and to make it look like you're resisting, when in fact, you're just responding to pain and trying to maintain balance.
    - tomp 5y ago
      Not sure this is a good argument. If I were an oppressive state, I'd make sure to publish mugshots of most people, to create a "public trail" of "we don't disappear people" but only actually disappear those few that I really wanted to disappear.
  - tlrobinson 5y ago
    We should start a trend of posting fake mugshots of ourselves online for plausible deniability. Call it #mugshotchallenge.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I think the worst of it is in jail conditions. Most people in jail haven't been convicted of a crime (although jails do double duty for short term sentences, which is another wtf.) Jails should be a comfortable as dorm rooms, and have internet and phone. You're put in jail so you don't leave; the rationale isn't supposed to be to punish, but somehow it still is.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Jails ARE absolutely supposed to punish people kept inside. They aren't called penitentiary for nothing, literally meaning "a place for punishment" [1] [1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/penitentiary https://www.etymonline.com/word/penitentiary
    - drdec 5y ago
      I believe the GP was making a distinction between jail and prison. Jail is where you are held until your trial or you make bail. Prison is where you are sent after you are convicted. A penitentiary would be a prison, not a jail.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        If he was talking about it in this sense, I agree. However in my native language these terms are used interchangeably, both meaning "prison".
        drdec 5y ago
        To be fair, it is not unusual for native English speakers to conflate the two words as well.
      - javajosh 5y ago
        Even prison should be without "cruel and unusual punishment", with emphasis on "cruel". For example, letting prisoners die in extreme heat is cruelty on its face. John Oliver had a thing on this recently[1]. Looks like Texas has done the minimal thing, which is effectively nothing [2]. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94 2 - https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/14/texas-prison-air-conditioning-legislature/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/14/texas-prison-air-con...
erosenbe0 5y ago
Somewhere around half of American men have an arrest record. Not sure about convictions. Certainly half of the Black men, particularly those who grew up in a large city, have been arrested. Not sure about convictions. The other half seems to live in ignorance.
- doitLP 5y ago
  Source? I see 1/3rd but that depends on your definition. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuomo/yes-one-three-us-adults-have-criminal-record/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    "The FBI only counts those with a misdemeanor if a state agency asks the bureau to keep it on file." In other words, it's significantly higher than the numbers the FBI claims.
fallingknife 5y ago
The worst part of that argument is that it's completely irrelevant. Even if the police had video of George Floyd killing people, it would still be completely illegal for them to kill him during the arrest.
- adventured 5y ago
  And had Floyd been some manner of criminal kingpin or mass murderer, it would have been even more important to bring him to justice by correctly arresting him (not killing him before a trial can occur). To say nothing of that such criminals often reveal further important details of their crimes after they're arrested, and or convicted.
  - KorematsuFredt 5y ago
    That fact that we have to even make this argument is sad. This should be super obvious. Demands to hold police accountable for their actions as absolutely nothing to do with how evil George Floyd might have been.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nostrademons 5y ago
That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings. I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
- ksdale 5y ago
  I think as far as pop culture glorifying it, there's an element of people not really understanding what it means to be on the side of the outlaw. A lot of people think of themselves as on the side of outlaws in general without ever realizing that they have never once taken the side of anyone accused of being a criminal. So yeah, it's glorified in media, but I'm not sure it translates in practice. I think your real life examples are great, though!
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    I'm not sure I really agree with that either. A lot of people would never consider ratting out their neighbors or classmates for smoking weed, for example. Lots of CA suburbanites make it a point not to ask the immigration status of their domestic help, and will do what they can to help out people they know who are at risk of being deported. I had one college dormmate with reported ties to the mafia; I made a mental note not to get on his bad side, but he was a nice guy so I was still friends with him. I had another college classmate whose aunt ran a famous Hollwood prostitution ring and had served time in federal prison; he was a douchebag so I didn't like hanging out with him much, but what his aunt did is her own business. Thomas Watson Sr. still managed to found IBM after being sentenced to a year in jail for anti-trust violations as an NCR salesperson. Chesa Boudin got elected as San Francisco DA even though his parents were sentenced to prison for the felony murders of two police officers. Hell, he's a good example of someone who takes the side of criminals accused of petty theft or small-scale drug crimes. I think there's some small subset of Americans who are Law & Order at all costs, but most people tend to have their own moral judgments about which are just and unjust laws, and they don't judge people harshly (or at all) for being accused of breaking unjust laws. Most people wouldn't take the side of a murderer or child predator. But a drug user or illegal immigrant? Lots of people take their side, even if they aren't one themselves.
mediaman 5y ago
A lot of this "we don't care about criminals" attitude is cover for many Americans' feelings around race. Despite being only 12% of the American population, there are more black people in prison than whites (though this ratio is improving). Incarcerating black people has a long history going back to the post-Civil War environment when some states created a web of laws designed to incarcerate black people, because they were no longer allowed to own them as slave property. So when you hear people say "well, Floyd committed a crime previously," it's the long shadow of the past of (1) criminalizing them and then (2) dehumanizing them, in order to treat them as low value chattel - justifying killings or other mistreatment.
- theranosifty 5y ago
  Despite being 12% of the population they commit 50% of the murders, so why would you expect that there would be an equal percentage of black and white people in prison?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  There's also a lot of cultural propaganda that promotes the idea that the justice system is fair and unbiased. People instilled to think of themselves as the collective embodiment of perfection can't accept anything less than that. Hence if you've entered the meat grinder of the system you must have done something to deserve it because the system is designed to protect our Freedom™.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    There has to be though, no? If the popular perception of how order is kept is that it is a random draw of minorities from a hat then it would no longer serve the purpose of being a disincentive to do crime. You can probably draw a very clear line between 'perception of fairness in the criminal justice system's and 'likelyhood to commit crime'.
  - autoliteInline 5y ago
    >cultural propaganda that promotes the idea that the justice system is fair and unbiased. I'll take what you might think of as a third track. It's not so much that it's biased, but that it's arbitrary. Especially at the Federal level, the disparity in sentencing is remarkable..and it isn't just the difference in lawyer quality depending on wealth.
theranosifty 5y ago
Why do you think police were on the scene when Floyd died? Was it because had committed "some crime" in the past?

javajosh 5y ago

Yes, but you don't have to be convicted. An arrest, with or without charge, is a black mark to many, many people. (This attitude is at its worst when considering prison conditions. No-one is dehumanized more than a prison inmate in this country.)

adventured 5y ago
Sure, consider the human rights abuse that is the online mug shots industry in the US for example. There's no sympathy for those people, the assumption is guilt. The superficial tough on crime types revel in the notion that those people get publicly humiliated (and it fulfills the deranged lust for snooping, nosing into other people's business). Mug shots don't tell the story of whether someone is innocent or guilty and yet your photo might end up on the Internet regardless.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > the human rights abuse that is the online mug shots industry The way we treat people with a mug shot is horrendous. But mug shots per se serve a vital purpose: they are a public record of persons the state is holding. That makes “disappearing” them later on harder.
  - adventured 5y ago
    I certainly agree. I think it makes sense to photograph anyone arrested, for numerous logical reasons (not least of which is because I don't trust the authorities; the photos should also be protected from tampering by the same authorities). My contention is of course that mass posting them online is a human rights abuse. I think it's a form of cruel and unusual punishment, where someone has not necessarily been found guilty of any crime and they're being assaulted by the state (their image, reputation). My opinion is that online mug shots rather blatantly violate the eighth amendment.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > mass posting them online is a human rights abuse Where would you prefer they be posted? Would you be prohibited from photographing them? The core problem is how we treat people accused--not even convicted--of crimes. Socially. But also legally. That's a better place to address the issue than trying to gerrymander the Eighth Amendment.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    The way mug shots are handled goes back to this shitty attitude that police have regarding citizens' rights. Any time they are legally forced to do something, they try to make it as humiliating as possible as an additional punishment. Any sane government would find a way to both protect the identity of the accused while also ensuring the the appropriate family members can get access to this information if necessary. While we're at it, the way normal people get arrested is fucking horrible too. It's not like in the movies where they lightly cuff your hands together. The police have specifically designed their handcuff procedures to be as painful as possible and to make it look like you're resisting, when in fact, you're just responding to pain and trying to maintain balance.
  - tomp 5y ago
    Not sure this is a good argument. If I were an oppressive state, I'd make sure to publish mugshots of most people, to create a "public trail" of "we don't disappear people" but only actually disappear those few that I really wanted to disappear.
- tlrobinson 5y ago
  We should start a trend of posting fake mugshots of ourselves online for plausible deniability. Call it #mugshotchallenge.
pessimizer 5y ago
I think the worst of it is in jail conditions. Most people in jail haven't been convicted of a crime (although jails do double duty for short term sentences, which is another wtf.) Jails should be a comfortable as dorm rooms, and have internet and phone. You're put in jail so you don't leave; the rationale isn't supposed to be to punish, but somehow it still is.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Jails ARE absolutely supposed to punish people kept inside. They aren't called penitentiary for nothing, literally meaning "a place for punishment" [1] [1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/penitentiary https://www.etymonline.com/word/penitentiary
  - drdec 5y ago
    I believe the GP was making a distinction between jail and prison. Jail is where you are held until your trial or you make bail. Prison is where you are sent after you are convicted. A penitentiary would be a prison, not a jail.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      If he was talking about it in this sense, I agree. However in my native language these terms are used interchangeably, both meaning "prison".
      - drdec 5y ago
        To be fair, it is not unusual for native English speakers to conflate the two words as well.
    - javajosh 5y ago
      Even prison should be without "cruel and unusual punishment", with emphasis on "cruel". For example, letting prisoners die in extreme heat is cruelty on its face. John Oliver had a thing on this recently[1]. Looks like Texas has done the minimal thing, which is effectively nothing [2]. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94 2 - https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/14/texas-prison-air-conditioning-legislature/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/14/texas-prison-air-con...

erosenbe0 5y ago

Somewhere around half of American men have an arrest record. Not sure about convictions. Certainly half of the Black men, particularly those who grew up in a large city, have been arrested. Not sure about convictions. The other half seems to live in ignorance.

doitLP 5y ago
Source? I see 1/3rd but that depends on your definition. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuomo/yes-one-three-us-adults-have-criminal-record/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  "The FBI only counts those with a misdemeanor if a state agency asks the bureau to keep it on file." In other words, it's significantly higher than the numbers the FBI claims.

fallingknife 5y ago

The worst part of that argument is that it's completely irrelevant. Even if the police had video of George Floyd killing people, it would still be completely illegal for them to kill him during the arrest.

adventured 5y ago
And had Floyd been some manner of criminal kingpin or mass murderer, it would have been even more important to bring him to justice by correctly arresting him (not killing him before a trial can occur). To say nothing of that such criminals often reveal further important details of their crimes after they're arrested, and or convicted.
- KorematsuFredt 5y ago
  That fact that we have to even make this argument is sad. This should be super obvious. Demands to hold police accountable for their actions as absolutely nothing to do with how evil George Floyd might have been.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nostrademons 5y ago

That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings. I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.

ksdale 5y ago
I think as far as pop culture glorifying it, there's an element of people not really understanding what it means to be on the side of the outlaw. A lot of people think of themselves as on the side of outlaws in general without ever realizing that they have never once taken the side of anyone accused of being a criminal. So yeah, it's glorified in media, but I'm not sure it translates in practice. I think your real life examples are great, though!
- nostrademons 5y ago
  I'm not sure I really agree with that either. A lot of people would never consider ratting out their neighbors or classmates for smoking weed, for example. Lots of CA suburbanites make it a point not to ask the immigration status of their domestic help, and will do what they can to help out people they know who are at risk of being deported. I had one college dormmate with reported ties to the mafia; I made a mental note not to get on his bad side, but he was a nice guy so I was still friends with him. I had another college classmate whose aunt ran a famous Hollwood prostitution ring and had served time in federal prison; he was a douchebag so I didn't like hanging out with him much, but what his aunt did is her own business. Thomas Watson Sr. still managed to found IBM after being sentenced to a year in jail for anti-trust violations as an NCR salesperson. Chesa Boudin got elected as San Francisco DA even though his parents were sentenced to prison for the felony murders of two police officers. Hell, he's a good example of someone who takes the side of criminals accused of petty theft or small-scale drug crimes. I think there's some small subset of Americans who are Law & Order at all costs, but most people tend to have their own moral judgments about which are just and unjust laws, and they don't judge people harshly (or at all) for being accused of breaking unjust laws. Most people wouldn't take the side of a murderer or child predator. But a drug user or illegal immigrant? Lots of people take their side, even if they aren't one themselves.

mediaman 5y ago

A lot of this "we don't care about criminals" attitude is cover for many Americans' feelings around race. Despite being only 12% of the American population, there are more black people in prison than whites (though this ratio is improving). Incarcerating black people has a long history going back to the post-Civil War environment when some states created a web of laws designed to incarcerate black people, because they were no longer allowed to own them as slave property. So when you hear people say "well, Floyd committed a crime previously," it's the long shadow of the past of (1) criminalizing them and then (2) dehumanizing them, in order to treat them as low value chattel - justifying killings or other mistreatment.

theranosifty 5y ago
Despite being 12% of the population they commit 50% of the murders, so why would you expect that there would be an equal percentage of black and white people in prison?
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
There's also a lot of cultural propaganda that promotes the idea that the justice system is fair and unbiased. People instilled to think of themselves as the collective embodiment of perfection can't accept anything less than that. Hence if you've entered the meat grinder of the system you must have done something to deserve it because the system is designed to protect our Freedom™.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  There has to be though, no? If the popular perception of how order is kept is that it is a random draw of minorities from a hat then it would no longer serve the purpose of being a disincentive to do crime. You can probably draw a very clear line between 'perception of fairness in the criminal justice system's and 'likelyhood to commit crime'.
- autoliteInline 5y ago
  >cultural propaganda that promotes the idea that the justice system is fair and unbiased. I'll take what you might think of as a third track. It's not so much that it's biased, but that it's arbitrary. Especially at the Federal level, the disparity in sentencing is remarkable..and it isn't just the difference in lawyer quality depending on wealth.

theranosifty 5y ago

Why do you think police were on the scene when Floyd died? Was it because had committed "some crime" in the past?