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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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If the police did their jobs , events like 2020 would have not happened at all (probably blame the media, lawyers, and politicians for that).

Over 200 black people are killed by police each year in the US. (Though they seem to have stopped recording race recently.) It follows that George Floyd-style protests aren't actually caused by cops killing black people. There would be several riots per week.

The media are much more of a causative factor here. They're the ones who decide when and onto what to focus attention.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another. There isn't the desire for that many, so cutting the police violence by 7/8ths would probably not change the frequency of large scale protests/riots at all.

The idea that "the media" manufactured the George Floyd protests is putting the cart before the horse. Protests were already kicking off in the twin cities by the time major media coverage started - that is what drew media coverage in the first place. They might've been able to discourage the spread of protests from the twin cities by refusing to cover it (but then, maybe not - virality is a powerful force), but they're not able to conjure conflict from nothing.

The crucial factors in the George Floyd protests were:

  1. Poor police-community relations. In places where there's high levels of trust between the police and the community, the police get given the benefit of the doubt when they fuck up (even when they probably shouldn't). I'm not from Minneapolis, so I'm forced to rely on the opinions of acquaintances who are, and they're pretty much uniformly negative on the police department and especially the police union. See also: the Ferguson and Baltimore protests in 2014/15, where community relations were also terrible. It isn't just that one guy got killed, it's that the local police had a pattern of harassing and abusing people to the point where malice was simply assumed.

  2. An (apparently) egregious incident. At lot of people who get killed by police either clearly deserve or at least there's enough ambiguity that people aren't going to get up in arms and the media will describe it as an 'officer involved shooting'. The absolute best you could say about Derek Chauvin is that he did nothing while a man in his custody died, and there was widely viewed footage of him doing it. It didn't help that during subsequent protests the police kept vindicating their critics.

  3. Covid - you had a bunch of stressed out people and a larger than usual share of people not working. Without this there probably would have been protests, but nowhere near the magnitude that we actually had.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

Better policing will raise trust in police, which will a) make people more willing to cooperate with the police b) make them more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt when something happens. (To a large degree this already happens - the vast majority of instances of the police misconduct pass without evoking protests and many pass without comment beyond a sanitized blurb in the local news).

They stopped recording this? I haven't heard that. Do you have a source? That's awful, I hope it isn't true/there's still a way to know moving forward

You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another.

You'd mostly have more Ricardo Munoz or Makhia Bryant (see if youtube will show you the bodycam footage) type killings.

It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.

I think police on average do a good job but the handful of incidents get inordinate media coverage , yet the media hardly makes a fuss when other people do their jobs poorly . But the use of lethal force is something which needs careful consideration .

The idea that protests/riots are correlated with the police violence rate any more than very tenuously is, imo, obviously untrue. Protests/riots are a result of media coverage, not policing.

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