We've done this before. We don't seem to have learned a lot that time, and we probably won't this time either. America!
This: https://amp.twimg.com/v/4c2198e1-d51a-44e7-a57b-ce22a00097e2 is heartbreaking. So much risked, again and again and again.
Much as the point of the Mike Brown stuff was never really "this one guy got shot by a cop," the point of the Ferguson stuff in general was never "this one town is super-racist." A national problem indeed, and if there's going to be a solution it'll have to be a national one. It's hard to be optimistic that we're any more likely to solve this problem now than the last couple times around, though.
2: saw that earlier. I am still surprised it didn't end with him getting a nightstick to the head.
ogged is going to lock us in this thread and we can't get out until we solved the problem.
2 looks like its right outside the Convention Center, so probably Saturday rather than Monday. My impression is that Monday's riots were more in the neighborhoods up around North Avenue. In the pictures from Monday, its notable,when you look at the background, that a huge portion of the businesses are check cashing places, pawn shops, and quick-e tax return places. Not much in the way of actual banks.
Boy, the plot of the new Punisher movie sure is different from how I remember the comic.
The underlying story seems unusually brazen even as these things go -- am I right that the closest thing to an official version of what happened to Grey is "He was apparently fine when we arrested him, his spine was mostly severed when we took him out of the police van, but we have no idea what happened to him."
8: Yeah. Over the course of 2 weeks, the PD failed to come up with any remotely plausible and non-damning explanation of what happened. "Um...his spine just sort of broke. We have no idea how or why."
Isn't there a tradition of cops giving suspects rough rides in the back of the police wagon? With Gray cuffed and his leg already injured, he could't brace himself and the jolts could have mortally injured him. I haven't read any of the coverage, so this is pure speculation.
10- Yes, known in Philly at least as "nickel rides". They have admitted that oops, policy says he should have been secured with a seat belt but we forgot.
There still seems like a gap there -- it's either a really bizarre occurrence for a 'rough ride' to literally break someone's neck, or it isn't. If it is, then we've still got an unexplained freak accident -- a tiny bit less unexplained, but still a bizarre random occurrence. If it's not all that odd for it to severely injure someone, but it's a 'tradition', that seems like occasion for firing the entire Baltimore police force and founding a new one with all new officers and no continuity.
The 'nickel ride' explanation seems like it equivocates between 'sure, this was ordinary low level brutality, no big' and 'but of course it's not surprising that it killed him.'
that seems like occasion for firing the entire Baltimore police force
Comity!
11: No link handy but I thought it was less "we forgot" than the standard "we can't always follow policy because it might endanger officers" rule-swallowing exception.
Anyway I don't see the disconnect in 12. Sure it's not an automatic death sentence since that would draw too much attention, but it's a policy that's been prohibited but is still done while everyone looks the other way. Like repeated tasing, or chokeholds, or beatings, it's a way of inflicting pain that causes death with a low but non-zero probability- I wouldn't say his death was bizarre- unlikely but foreseeable that someone would die from it at some point.
On Sunday morning a FOAF posted this long narrative to FB about an experience here. She walked out her door in a moderately crime-ridden/-adjacent part of the city, saw a black kid being chased by cops. She rode her bike to where the arrest was being made and stopped to observe. Cops freak the fuck out on her, including manhandling her. Obviously it was white privilege that led her to expect not to have that happen, except that police are only acceptable as an institution if everyone has the expectation that that won't happen. It was so obvious that the cops have, by and large, decided that we're all the enemy, or potentially so, the moment we don't turn belly-up for them. I can't imagine how to fix it, because it's deeply embedded in the profession*.
On a presumably related note, I woke up with my heart pounding at 5 am due to a dream in which a cop burst into my bedroom and put a gun to my head.
*and I was talking with friends Saturday night and gswift's point about liberals failing to become cops came up. Don't know how to fix that, either.
18 is right. I'm sure we'll hear (maybe already have heard?) a bunch of bullshit about how he must already have had a compromised spine or something (just like there must have been something wrong with Eric Garner if that harmless little chokehold killed him). But if the cops are sadistically violating policy and somebody ends up dead does it really matter precisely what the proximate cause was? The death doesn't have to be super foreseeable for it to be an outrage under those circumstances.
19: Ugh to all of that. I still have some hope for the new chief, but the way he was shut down after such a minor show of empathy was disheartening.
20: I wonder what they'd say if you told them that makes it an ADA violation.
21.last: not so fast. The Supreme Court is currently mulling over what (if any) ADA obligations the police have toward suspects.
22: Thanks, I had no idea. I'll be following that.
Re: the other thread's discussion of how Republicans might win on 'law & order' even with a strong economy... That was basically 1968, right?
I have some friends, though not close ones, among the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court today, but all that I care about is Baltimore. I am so tired and so sad and don't know what to do.
I have been wondering, in a kind of paranoid way, how one would try not to get hurt in that "nickel ride" scenario. Lie down flat on the floor? Curl up in a ball in the corner?
I think it's something like you'd do in an imminent plane crash. Maybe the result from the rioting is they'll include a little safety card in the back of police vans that suggests a couple of appropriate brace positions.
27: Me too. I assume even curling up in a ball isn't going to be that helpful, especially if you've got your hands cuffed behind your back.
Interesting post on interaction between protestors and drunk white sports fans.
I'm thinking sit on the floor with your hands underneath you and brace your legs and upper back against the walls/benches of the wagon. They are narrow enough that you should be able to brace yourself across. Won't help with getting thrown forward or backwards, but should provide some stability against lateral movements.
One of the many things I find horrible about this case is that they stopped the van several times, and Gray asked for medical help at least three times.
It's sadism and torture. No other words for it.
24: I guess the optimistic take on an L&O election is that it would give the Dem the opportunity to tell some hard truths in an extremely high profile setting. The temptation, obviously, is to run to the right on policing, but A. Dems rely so heavily on nonwhite voters that it would almost certainly be counterproductive, and B. a lot of the L&O rhetoric can't withstand even mild exposure to criticism*, such that I think it could be a smart play to stand up to it in a debate/ad war format.
Whether HRC could pull this off, and whether her advisors would be smart enough to play it correctly, is a matter best debated later/elsewhere. It also occurs to me that the protests could throw up a surprise challenger, but I don't know who that would be: there don't seem to be any local leaders gaining nationwide profiles, let alone national leaders gaining more prominence. Could a long, hot summer throw up a candidate of justice come fall?
*most of all the implicit - and often explicit - claim that the victims had it coming to them. There are now so many well-known cases that make a mockery of that that a candidate shouldn't be wrongfooted by such messaging. If a clumsy Republican makes that implicit claim too explicitly, the Dem comes back with Tamir Rice and makes Jeb or Walker look like a monster
Interesting post on interaction between protesters and drunk white sports fans.
I was hoping I could blame it on Red Sox fans who were in town, but no way were Red Sox fans hanging out at Pickles Pub.
Pickles as the epicenter doesn't surprise me, though. That place is basically packed with suburban assholes getting shitty before and after every game.
My instinct would be to lie on the floor, and brace against whatever I could. Minimizing possible falling distance seems as if it would have to help.
The L & O strategy was effective because it targeted fear on the the part of white city dwellers toward their black neighbors who were increasingly asserting their rights. But that demographic has mostly moved to the suburbs, over a generation ago, and today's white city people are far more hipster and less fearful of crime (where "crime", in this case, is largely a substitute expression for "having your daughter go to school with black people"). So, while you can still appeal to racist white people on L & O, that appeal has to go out to the suburbs, which, these days, is simply more isolated from "crime" as a daily concern.
I was listening to a This American Life episode, sometime in the last couple of weeks, described here:
The episodes illuminate why police and their critics often see the same events very differently. For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being's life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail.
I think Gswift may have mentioned the same thing; that malingering is a normal, expected part of an arrest, so it's unsurprising when police disregard it. And that seems like there's got to be a policy fix. I believe the bit about the malingering, it doesn't seem implausible at all. But even if that's the case, there's got to be some kind of procedure that provides for the provision of requested medical care in a way that doesn't disrupt the arrest too much, so that police will actually comply with it. (That is, I got the impression from TAL that police think of there being two options when an arrestee claims to be in distress -- ignore them, or drive them to the hospital and await treatment there, which the police generally won't do if they suspect the claims are faked.) I'm not dead sure what I want: better first-aid training/medical supplies in every cop car? An ER doc doing shifts in some or all police stations, so people could get looked at by a doctor before arrest?
So the police have a tradition of giving nickel rides, and the people have a tradition of setting cop cars on fire. It all balances out.
Is it silly to draw a moral distinction between setting a cop car on fire and looting a CVS? On the one hand, the former is a more targeted attack. On the other hand, a riot is a riot and no one else seems interested in this distinction.
I'm fine with looting a CVS, not not a Walgreens.
It seems to me the claims of needing medical assistance are more credible when you've been given a nickel ride.
I was taken into custody with a broken bone once. I had crashed a car, and when the cops showed up they asked if I wanted an ambulance. I said no, because I hadn't really tried to move yet and didn't realize anything was broken. I realized as soon as I tried to do a field sobriety test that something was wrong, and said so repeatedly over the next several hours. They ignored me. Instead of taking me to the hospital, they cuffed me and put me in the squad car, then cuffed me to a bench for a number of hours. When I did eventually get taken to the hospital, the doctor on staff in the locked ward refused to give me prescription pain medication. In general the thought seemed to be that if I was not faking the injury then the fact that I was stupid enough to be arrested for DUI meant I pretty much deserved what I got, pain-wise. I should note that for all that I'm sure my treatment was far, far better than a POC or frequent flyer would have received.
Couldn't you, like, have a doctor at the police station? If they manage it for high school football games...
They have doctors at football games there?
I... thought so? Maybe I'm wrong about that. Okay, why can't they have doctors (or, like, some trained medical somebody-or-other. An EMT?) at both police stations and high school football games?
We had EMTs. Or at least some guy with the key to the ambulance.
45: The same 2 reasons apply for both places
1) They cost too much.
2) They get in the way
The moral of 42- always ask for the ambulance if offered. You might not even have to pay for it! I recently discovered that if an ambulance comes and they check you out and determine it's nothing that requires an ER, you can tell them to go away and they don't charge you anything. They only charge you if they move with you in the ambulance ($xxxx initial cost plus $yy per mile.)
In the town I grew up in, all the "public safety" personnel were both trained cops and EMTs, and switched roles regularly. That seems fabulous, but there's no actual crime there.
51: Really? Not Fireman and EMTs? 'Cause I thought was a much more common thing. Certainly a ton of cops were getting First Aid/Lifesaver training for a while. Probably interferes with their beating schedules nowadays.
The only way to improve upon that would be to stencil "We swing both ways" on all the police cars and ambulances.
Firemen were separate. This actually isn't past tense; it's still like that.
Bad weird or you want to have sex with it weird?
I'm not apostropher's understudy, dude.
Tell me about your world, ogged- If a male stripper dressed as a policeman shows up to a bachelorette party, do they also typically bring a stethoscope?
Now I know you aren't Sean Young because you didn't say "Tell me of your homeworld, ogged."
Looked it up and apparently they do cop, emt and fire duties. Some number are also certified paramedics. But like I say, almost no crime.
Whether HRC could pull this off
She neither could nor will.
I saw some video of cops throwing rocks at protesters... not exactly doing a great job of deescalating the situation.
Interesting post on interaction between protestors and drunk white sports fans.
Thanks for the link -- nice to see a first hand account.
51: I had rocks thrown at me in that town! It was graduation night of the local high school -- 1991 -- and I and my friends giggled when a drunk Trevian bro tripped over a low chain blocking car access to the lake. Angry bro threw rocks!
WHAT YEAR DID YOU GRADUATE, OGGED???
I refuse to answer. But I was drunk on a different beach post-graduation.
30, 63 - A friend of mine works for the Baltimore City Paper and flagged both that picture and the one mentioned in the link (of a drunk woman confronting a guy who legitimately seems to have been making off with a bottle of vodka) as things that hit Drudge as examples of out-of-control black violence.
What my friends in Baltimore have mostly been noting -- in addition to that they are fine -- is the absolute insanity of canceling public transportation just as school was letting out yesterday. Good work, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
This essay about Baltimore includes a remarkable statistic (starting in the specifics, I had known that Baltimore was highly unequal, but I hadn't realized how large the gap was).
Zip Code 21210 has average income of $92,625,
Zip Code 21217 has average income of $24,735.
the absolute insanity of canceling public transportation just as school was letting out yesterday. Good work, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
This was something of a no-win situation for her. Yes, there needed to be transportation, but also you can't ask city bus drivers to be out in the middle of riots. (And, of course, the Baltimore subway system is worthless, largely for reasons of systemic racism.)
Junior year of high school I used to take the bus every day from 21217 to 21210. Two different cities, basically. Or rather, 21210 is a suburb inside city limits.
I don't know Baltimore, but here's a map.
a suburb inside city limits.
Baltimore is weird that way. A lot of what would be suburbs in other cities are inside the city limits.
John Waters is usually the answer people give for the way in which Baltimore is weird.
Ugh. Right wing media is all over Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's not particularly well phrased statement
We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that"
This was in the context of explaining that the strategy was to contain the rioting and avoid large scale confrontations that might get more people killed, but you can imagine what Rush Limbaugh & Co. are doing with it.
According to the map in 71, 21210 is a bit south of Robert E. Lee Memorial Park. WTF?
Yeah, Cross Keys is the neighborhood immediately west of Roland Park. Lots of upscale condos. (Roland Park is lots of expensive Victorians.)
73: Sally's been on a John Waters kick lately, and, apropos of the current events, asked if he'd made a public statement or had been out with the protestors or anything. I told her that, as much of an asset as John Waters is to the nation, I wouldn't really expect him to be directly involved in doing anything much actively public spirited. It just seems kind of out of character.
On the other hand, he was on RuPaul's Drag Race last night.
I wouldn't really expect him to be directly involved in doing anything much actively public spirited.
He encourages movie theater patrons not to smoke!
The guy's undertaking a full-time mission to return dignity and honor to the pencil mustache. He can't be everywhere all the time.
But when I try that for the toothbrush mustache, everybody gets the wrong idea.
77: David Simon is the socially responsible Baltimore auteur.
Sally's been on a John Waters kick lately
Can I just say how many millions of years it would not have occurred to me in to be on a John Waters kick when I was in high school?
The Baltimore Sun home page right now has lots of pictures of National Guard troops surrounding the Inner Harbor.... which is a tourist area, and not really very close to where the unrest has been. I'm wondering if they are just there to be seen on TV.
They live in the future, where all media is immediately available, and I'm neglectful.
Can I just say how many millions of years it would not have occurred to me in to be on a John Waters kick when I was in high school?
Does Hairspray count for these purposes?
Wednesday's Orioles-White Sox game to be closed to the public.
86: Divine version yes, Travolta version no.
87- Today in headlines I was 100% sure were the Onion...
Like, seriously, they're just playing a game in an empty stadium? Isn't that really weird? I mean, for teams besides the Rays and Indians.
I think it's happened in Europe in the aftermath of soccer riots.
If a baseball game is held in a stadium and no one is there to watch it, is it still interminable and boring?
I think it's happened in Europe in the aftermath of soccer riots.
Yeah, it's not uncommon in the case of fan violence or racist abuse of players. Rarer for it to be done because of general societal unrest, though.
I hope they do all the regular fan stuff -- national anthem, take me out to the ballgame, kiss cam -- but with only the players and umps singing/awkwardly kissing.
They should let in 50 or so fans, one per section. It could be like the time Charlie Sheen rented out an entire section and wouldn't let anyone else sit in it because he really wanted to get a home run ball.
If not, I hope the people in the perogi costumes still get paid.
I shouldn't say rented out, but bought the tickets for an entire section.
I assume they'll try to charge all the seats to Sheen and hope he's high as balls.
I haven't read the thread as yet, so forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but the best short introduction to what's going on in Baltimore is this Think Progress piece on economic conditions in that community.
I have a question for gswift:
I have heard that Freddie Gray was pursued by Baltimore police while doing nothing in particular other than being in a sketchy area, after he looked one of them in the eye, and then bolted -- ran. They pursued him at that point and took him into custody, on suspicion of ... running away.
I understand from various discussions (and I'm afraid I can't find a succinct one right now) that in some police jurisdictions, it's established policy that cops are not to aggressively pursue people who are doing nothing more than running away. Apparently in Baltimore this is not established policy. That appears to be part of the problem in Freddie Gray's detention.
Thoughts?
I thought they searched him on suspicion of running away (hooray Stop and Frisk), found a switchblade, and arrested him for that.
84: They were probably just stopping by on their way to the Hustler club.
101: Yes, okay. What I've understood, though, is that aggressively chasing someone simply for running away is not approved procedure in some jurisdictions, and that there have been improvements in community relations in those areas in which that is not done.
This is coming from the Diane Rehm show this morning on the subject: one of the panelists was a police chief, who said that in his jurisdiction, chasing people who run is not to be considered standard procedure. It looks like there's no transcript of his remarks as yet.
I didn't realize Freddy Gray was picked up in Sandtown. I worked for a week on a Habitat for Humanity project in that neighborhood. We took a shell of a burnt out two-bedroom row house, and framed in new walls and subflooring and shit. That was over 20 years ago, so Freddy Gray would have been about the same age as the kid in the family that was moving into that house. That was a sad, sad neighborhood.
100: The US Supreme Court Standard is ILLINOIS v. WARDLOW, which holds that unprovoked flight from the police in a high crime area is grounds to chase and detain that person. The states can't provide less protection than the feds, but they can provide more. So likely in some states the police wouldn't be able to chase. Here we can.
Just to be clear, though, and correct me if I'm wrong, if someone runs (in a high crime area) a cop has the right to pursue and then detain and search, but if the search reveals nothing the cop can't detain further. Which is why it's often a strategy if you actually are dealing or whatever to have one guy run and lead the cops on a chase as a distraction.
which holds that unprovoked flight from the police in a high crime area is grounds to chase and detain that person
Well that is just a delightful precedent. Although, you gotta think, is a high crime area more dispositive than high crime demographics?
106: Yep.
This is a bit speculative without the autopsy, but here's my off the cuff guess as to what happened to Gray. Stopping to shackle his legs was probably because Gray was dicking around in the back, maybe kicking the van or something. They don't buckle him maybe as a rough ride? Maybe so he takes a minor tumble during the normal driving because he's dicking around? Here we don't use transpo vans. All our patrol cars have cages but there's always the guys who twist around and undo the seatbelt despite you telling them not to and sometimes there's a minor brake check so their head whacks the cage to remind them of what the damn seatbelt is for. Or so I hear. But in this case there doesn't appear to be any dispute that the cops didn't buckle Gray despite a written policy that prisoners will be seatbelted in.
The reports of crushed larynx plus the vertebrae makes me think something fairly sudden like moving around, maybe trying to stand and his feet go out from under him and he comes down with his full weight on the opposite bench with the edge catching the larynx and the weight and suddenness being enough to break the vertebrae. Or maybe he loses the footing or is pitched forward due to a rough ride. Either way, a written safety policy was ignored and a man is dead so on its face a manslaughter charge is appropriate. If you can prove an intentional rough ride then maybe more.
Or, of course, someone could have hit him. I mean, probably it was just an accident due to disregarding a safety precaution, people die from sitting in moving vehicles without seatbelts all the time. But intentional violence seems like it might be at least a possibility.
Gswift, in the video of Gray being tossed in the van, at least one of his legs is dangling and a bystander is screaming that his leg is broken. He also isn't resisting. It's possible but unlikely that he was causing much of a ruckus in the van.
sometimes there's a minor brake check so their head whacks the cage to remind them of what the damn seatbelt is for
Sorry, you're talking about people you work with using a car to slam a prisoner's head around so as to remind the prisoner to comply with proper safety precautions? I'm not sure how much you're kidding, but that's disgusting if you actually mean that people you know admit to doing it.
Wait, I learned this today! It's called a "screen test," dating back to when there were screens, not plexiglass, between the back and front seats in cop cars.
I mean, I don't know much about police cars, but I've ridden in cars (less often than most of you, but I'm familiar with them). And stopping suddenly enough that your head hits something, even if you're not wearing your seatbelt, is a really violent, scary event. Making that happen to someone on purpose, for fun, is horrible.
109: Maybe, but that's a hell of a blow. And it's one thing to look the other way on a punch but covering for a buddy stomping a guys throat hard enough to break three vertebrae and sever his spinal cord is a whole other level.
110: At the end it looked like he was standing on his own. I'll rewatch it.
113: About like this. Not exactly a PTSD inducing moment.
They don't buckle him maybe as a rough ride
Let's all be clear that this is not an explanation that inclines one to say, well, in that case, fine!.
I dunno, from what I can recall of the Scott killing at least one cop seemed unbothered by the idea of standing around chatting while the cop who killed Scott planted evidence on his body. And, I guess in fairness, keeping quiet about that didn't really result in any negative consequences for him from what I can see, so he wasn't wrong on that one.
A more severe injury to the leg combined with being handcuffed without a seat belt in the back of a van seems like the sort of thing that could easily lead to a pretty serious injury, especially if the person who was driving was looking to teach someone a lesson and drove accordingly. And it seems to me that there's a decent reason to believe that's exactly what the police officers involved were intending.
In this one he looks like he's standing unaided at the end on the bumper of the van.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YV0EtkWyno
116: Who said otherwise?
117: To me it looked like that second cop on the Scott case didn't notice the taser drop, he was looking at Scott, not what the other cop was doing.
This may turn into a people-who-drive/people-who-don't thread, because that also looks like it would be pretty scary in the cop-car related cases where they wouldn't be hitting a padded foam headrest and have their hands free/general control of their body. And like a lot of comedy slapstick what looks funny really could be genuinely physically dangerous in real life.
119.1 - I'm not sure about that. He looks like he's keeping his weight almost entirely on one leg during the entire video to me, anyway.
Also he may have been looking at Scott, but it's not like he showed up when Slager had the taser near the body. He got there in time to see Slager jog all the way back to get the taser and then return to the guy handcuffed on the ground.
The BPD statement is that the autopsy shows no other injuries to the body or broken limbs. Which is why I suspect it's something like a sudden fall or impact in the van where his chin or his neck catches something like the edge of the bench.
121.2: It really wouldn't be that hard to not notice that kind of thing when you're the second guy on scene. You're not worried about the other officer as a safety issue so it's easy to kind of tunnel vision in on the guy with all the bullet holes in him.
This may turn into a people-who-drive/people-who-don't thread, because that also looks like it would be pretty scary in the cop-car related cases where they wouldn't be hitting a padded foam headrest and have their hands free/general control of their body.
I drive almost every day and count me with team scary. Especially with your hands restrained.
Speaking of people who drive etc, we just got home from watching Bikes vs. Cars. The numbers of new cars predicted to hit the road in third world megacities in the next few years are simply staggering.
And that bike freeway from turn of the century Los Angeles was very cool. Go watch this movie, people.
Way back at 84: "National Guard troops surrounding the Inner Harbor.... which is a tourist area, and not really very close to where the unrest has been."
Given the track record of the National Guard in riots, this may be the smartest thing city leadership has done all week.
Also, too: Back in the summer, I remember someone in my social media feeds saying "I don't want to feel bad for being white!"
That's the needle Democrats have to thread, I think. How to make real and substantive progress on the issues, without the Rs succeeding in framing it for persuadables that "it's all about making you feel bad for being white."
Some people, obvsly, aren't persuadable, and tough titties, they're our political opponents. But some people could tip either way. Figuring out how large that share is, and what can be done to tip them in our direction is a key task for the staffs of big-name Democrats.
115, 120: The effort put into making that comedy bit ok, the sound edit of brakes and thump, the car moving backward, the actor with his hand up, the controlled hit of the top of the head onto padding - kind of underlines this would be indeed fucked up IRL.
remind them of what the damn seatbelt is for
This gives the game away. What the seatbelt is actually for is to prevent injury -- the locking retractor won't trigger if the movement isn't sudden enough to cause injury. So intentionally braking the car hard enough that a seat belt would have helped is just per se trying to cause injury. Now, arguably it's trying to cause a minor injury in an effort to reduce the (minimal) chance of a major injury at some future point but... that's not generally carte blanche for trying to injure people. I imagine that if a cabbie took up this hobby, for instance, it would not be taken well.
I like the idea that I can drive my car in a way to hurt people, as long as it's not "serious", or whatever bullshit. Basically white supremacy is the fucking worst.
In my experience that's just a general rule for cars, unrelated to white supremacy or anything.
Too late! I'm already goose stepping all over this thread!
Off the top of my head the IRL application I've done of this was years ago with my daughter in our Corolla. It went pretty much like 115. She was traumatized for life laughed and put her seat belt on.
Hey, were the pants featured in a photo halfway down this page not featured in a photo linked to from this very blog some weeks ago, with the general consensus being "who the fuck would wear those?"
Now we have our answer.
I would also note that the guy's beer cozy features the word "bacon" in large letters.
I'm finding that Gawker piece linked in 133 kind of annoying -- frankly opportunistic -- chiefly because I'm pretty sure the level of income and lifestyle disparity profiled exists in virtually every greater metropolitan area. It's not as though it's particularly distinctive in Maryland.
I mean, after all, it was recently reported that the White House is launching (presenting?) its new set of china. Plates, that is. As I heard it, the cost is not yet known, but the price tag on the Bush administration's china set was $500,000.
I'm ok with the article, because I know the type so well. Its not distinct to Maryland, no, but it goes deep in Maryland.
Also, the Orioles are playing a hell of a game right now, to an empty stadium.
What is my point. Um, that nastiness with respect to distribution of financial resources is not a Baltimore thing, and I resent that anyone might suggest otherwise.
That is all.
/irritability
I suspect that every place has their own flavor of that nastiness. It is interesting to see that nastiness against the backdrop of Maryland's weird horse culture.
Since this thread is active again, I'll say that when I read Hillary Clinton's speech on criminal justice I was pleasantly surprised.
It isn't really a policy speech, and she doesn't make major promises, but I think it takes seriously the criticisms that are being made.
She starts by naming several familiar names of people who were shot or injured by the police and includes this comment in her closing (emphasis mine).
Twenty-five years ago, in his inaugural address as Mayor, David Dinkins warned of leaving "too many lost amidst the wealth and grandeur that surrounds us."
Today, his words and the emotion behind them ring truer than ever. You don't have to look too far from this magnificent hall to find children still living in poverty or trapped in failing schools. Families who work hard but can't afford the rising prices in their neighborhood.
Mothers and fathers who fear for their sons' safety when they go off to school--or just to go buy a pack of Skittles.
I would have been annoyed with the article if it was just "Look! Rich people were doing rich people stuff while the riot was happening! You should totally be outraged about this and tell all of your social media friends how totally outraged you are!"
But the people there seem to have voluntarily provided some pretty awful quotes. The writer might have been predetermined to paint them as douchebags, but they certainly made it easy.
Speaking as somebody whose mother took ballroom dancing classes with William Zantzinger, while that kind of lifestyle and resource disparity is, indeed, not unique to Maryland, it, uh, it's definitely a thing that there is there.
Predictable likely media reaction to Hillary's speech: ZOMG she referenced Dinkins, he was suuuuch a loooser!
(Leaving aside the fact that it was an event in his honor...)
I would have been annoyed with the article if it was just "Look! Rich people were doing rich people stuff while the riot was happening! You should totally be outraged about this and tell all of your social media friends how totally outraged you are!"
I kinda thought that was the point of the article. The quotes seemed to be mostly moronic statements by teenagers, which were indeed moronic but didn't trigger my OUTRAGE button, except for the one older guy who said that Baltimore was a shithole. Honestly I doubt that any of these guys are that much of a problem because they're likely not all that rich, just unusually willing (as I guess is Maryland preppy culture generally) to dress like Wainscotting Q. "Wince" Pinkypants III.
they certainly made it easy
That they did. I'm somewhat familiar with the type as well -- my workplace is located in that area -- and the preciousness, when encountered, is proving increasingly difficult to handle.
But why does it seem to go particularly deep in Maryland? It's old money, right? So there is old money up and down the east coast, in Boston and New York and Philadelphia, and for all I know, Savannah, as well. We all know this. Isn't Alameida from that sort of thing?
Anyway, with respect to the Gawker thing: sure, fine, okay, provide a profile to the wider world about what this looks like. Okay. Fair enough. I concede. Just don't make it sound as though Maryland is especially egregious.
I went to high school for a couple years in Silver Spring, but was fucking up academically, so my parents sent me, for the last two years, to what was probably the least egregious of the Baltimore prep schools. That was night and day in terms of being surrounded by privilege. I can't speak to old money culture elsewhere in the east, but let me tell you, that Baltimore prep culture is some insular, insular shit.
Don't get me wrong. I friggin' love Maryland. Its the best state. But our douchebags are also, well, they are pretty special too.
A different explanation for the Baltimore riot --
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-role-the-police-played-in-sparking-the-baltimore-violence
It's not as though it's particularly distinctive in Maryland.
Maryland does, however, have the highest median income of all 50 states.
I wouldn't be surprised if Maryland preppie-dialed-up-to-11 culture is related to the whole "hunt country" phenomenon. Someone here might know more about it than I do, but AFAIK hunt country is a vague swath that encompasses parts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, and is home to a tribe of weirdly anglophile rich people.
150: The majority of the incomes jacking up the median are located just north of D.C., and are, for all practical purposes, part of D.C. Measuring median incomes at the level of state boundaries, rather than, say, county level, is an exercise in .. oh, look, there's a squirrel!
It is completely true that state resources aren't sufficiently distributed to the rest of the (non-D.C.) state.
home to a tribe of weirdly anglophile rich people.
Are you suggesting that jousting is somehow an odd choice for a state sport?
My sense of Maryland money has always been that being an urbanized border state doesn't sit well with them, so they try to be more southern than southern. My maternal grandfather was inordinately (yuckily) proud of his Virginia Cavalier-ish ancestry.
When the casinos wanted to move into Maryland, they got the preppies on their side by selling it as a plan to save the horse racing industry. Slot machines were to be placed at race tracks, which would be used to provide bigger purses to winners, which would have all sorts of wonderful effects in preserving Maryland horse country.
Of course, once the casino plan went through, maybe one of the new casinos is located at a horse track (and a minor one at that). The other horse tracks do not host slots. Yet somehow, the state still "funnels a portion of the slots proceeds to benefit horse racing purses and capital improvements at the tracks."
They did put one of the new casinos in southwest Baltimore, though. It seems the plan is, folks from the city play the slots, and a chunk of the profits go to subsidize people who own horses.
They did put one of the new casinos in southwest Baltimore, though. It seems the plan is, folks from the city play the slots, and a chunk of the profits go to subsidize people who own horses.
And the Casino in Question is named The Horseshoe.
Horse racing brings two great groups of Americans together: old, drunk rich people and old, drunk poor people.
I went to Laurel Park one time. I forget why. That place was a dump.
Also southern Pennsylvania.
Like Main Line? I'd call that SE, since southern PA goes from Philly to Lancaster (Amish) to a whole lot of Appalachia.
I was checking this thread to see if the speech in 140 had been mentioned. Somebody here, just a couple days ago, said HRC would absolutely never be the kind of Dem who'd stand up to a backlash against the protesters.
So if this anonymous informant story, "He injured himself in the wagon, and we've never heard the terms 'rough ride', 'nickel ride', or 'the bounce'," prevents an indictment, more shit's gonna burn?
164: The new witness story reminded me of jailhouse snitch cases, where the defendant is locked up pre-trial and all of a sudden there's a fellow inmate who emerges with a story of the defendant's confession to whatever the charged crime is. And then six months after conviction, lo and behold, the snitch gets a definitely completely unrelated sentence reduction.
So if this anonymous informant story, "He injured himself in the wagon, and we've never heard the terms 'rough ride', 'nickel ride', or 'the bounce'," prevents an indictment, more shit's gonna burn?
Maybe so. But this "he was deliberately injuring himself in the wagon" story doesn't hold water, as reported by a number of news outlets debunking it -- as I'm sure everyone has heard by now. Some of the mainstream media is really fucking up in their reporting (I'm looking at you, Washington Post).
As for whether an indictment is called for, it's just too soon to tell. I want to know what the officers' story is.
Have you read this?
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish?
Heard about it, haven't read it yet, will do so now.
There's a lot of stuff in that piece that I'd like to look up. I don't doubt that Baltimore in the early 2000s adopted a broken windows policy, and I don't doubt that it was as nasty here as it was, and is, everywhere else it's employed.
Meanwhile, this really surprises me:
And, hey, if he's [Martin O'Malley] the Democratic nominee, I'm going to end up voting for him.
I noticed that too.
New vocabulary: Humbles; The Bounce.
The piece makes some reasonably plausible-to-me claims about both cooking the stats and the effect of combining zero-tolerance nonsense with compstat stuff. Still, those are some really serious allegations -- and aren't really about broken windows policing either, at least as it was supposed to work (and has worked).
They are really serious allegations: I'd like to see some other reporting on it. Not because I'm shocked, shocked to consider that it might be true, but because it needs backup. There may well already be other reporting already out there on it -- hence the need to look some things up. I haven't yet looked at the ACLU thing Simon mentions, for example.
I just don't have time right now: it's time for some down time.
But this "he was deliberately injuring himself in the wagon" story doesn't hold water
We don't actually know that yet, and people do that kind of thing all the damn time. They ram their head into the ground, the cage in the car, the window, etc. I think the most gusto I've ever seen was a meth'd out skinny white girl who rolled into a downtown motel in a stolen car. Starts ramming her head into the cage of the car after she's in cuffs. We pull her out and put her on the ground to put leg restraints on and she raises her head up and rams her head into the ground with just a sickening amount of force. A sergeant had to hold her head off the ground with both hands to keep her from trying again. The caged unit takes her to jail and shortly after arriving calls out that he's transporting her to the hospital. We pulled up his taser cam footage later. He'd called to have the jail guys carry her into the jail what with the leg restraints. As one of the jail guards open the back of the car she manages to launch herself head first out of the back of the car and lands, again, on her head.
She didn't suffer a traumatic injury the way Gray did but she also probably didn't weigh over 100 pounds and landed more on the side of her head. It's not hard to imagine a determined male with more strength and body weight doing something similar and landing it on his chin or larynx with enough force to fracture his neck.
He asked for medical assistance at a stop prior to the reported witness being added to the wagon. So we're supposed to believe he asked for help and when they wouldn't give it to him he said, Fuck it, I'm going to really injure myself to show them!
I've seen it. And sometimes ramming your head into things goes really wrong. In the 90's a Serbian basketball player paralyzed himself headbutting pole after fouling out in a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyRy04Hn_-k
..with his hands cuffed behind his back and an injured leg in a confined space hard enough to nearly sever his spinal column.
Come on here, I think it's pretty futile to suggest that he intentionally did it to himself even if a surprise ok-not-so-much-a-witness-but-nearby says that he totally did, in a story inconsistent with other things we know about the case.
I've seen it.
You've seen medical aid requested, and medical aid denied, and a deliberate and fatal self-inflicted injury as a result of the unjust denial?
Not fatal, but I've seen people in cuffs pretty enthusiastically ram their head into stuff when they don't get what they want, or to try and avoid jail, or out of simple rage and frustration. One guy who did it was already in the jail. He realized my partner and I had talked him into enough admissions for a stolen car charge and, with his hands shackled at the waist, started headbutting the concrete wall.
And to 177.1, what's trickling out of BPD is that the autopsy says his limbs didn't have injuries. But of course I'd very much like to see the actual autopsy report. Also, it's a transport van, and if he's the only one in that partitioned area it's typically designed to hold multiple people so he would likely have some room to move around in there.
A friend of mine was an EMT for years, generally on the rough side of town. He had many many stories of patients attempting to harm themselves and others and equipment but gotvthem to the hospital intact anyhow. Didn't exactly pride himself on it; thought of it as the job.
Not impossible, but Gray doesn't seem high or enraged, and he asks for medical care. Hard to believe that after all that he bashes himself hard enough to sever his spine. Also, even if he did, that doesn't relieve the cops of their duty to care for him. Apparently there's video of the van picking up a second prisoner and when they open the doors, Gray is unresponsive. Did they give him medical care then? Nope. Maybe 99% of the time "I can't breathe" and "I need help" are bullshit, but I hope you're never in the frame the one time it's not.
But even if Gray inflicted the damage on himself (recklessly or intentionally) presumably that's part of why you have a policy that arrestees are restrained, right? Like the best construction you can put on this is that the cops fucked up and someone died, so there's got to be some kind of comeback from that.
183 gets it right. Maybe Gray did it to himself, which is best case scenario for no criminal liability for the cops. Not impossible. But the cops still fucked up big time -- once the guy's in custody, he's the department's responsibility, and if he shows up dead from a back injury he didn't have before he got into the van that's on the department, not him, and I think the department will (and obviously should) be paying out big time to the family and disciplining the officers. Paddy Wagon driver, you have one job!
Gray doesn't seem high or enraged
That girl above calmed down enough to be taken out of cuffs. I gave her a smoke, and she talked with me nice and friendly, enough to really nail down the case against her. Then she went back into handcuffs and when she heard she was going to jail that's when she went totally bananas.
All that aside, Gray's injuries are suspicious as hell and there should be a full investigation. And even if he's trying to injure himself of course you have to restrain the guy. He's your prisoner, and you have a responsibility to take appropriate measures. If someone's determined enough then maybe they pull it off anyways but you better be sure you tried. In this case it sounds like they didn't follow the basic policies for restraining him and now a prisoner is dead and there should be consequences for that.
But there's a lot of Ezra style "this is literally unbelievable" nonsense floating around the intertubes from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
which is best case scenario for no criminal liability for the cops
Even if he does it to himself, we still might be in manslaughter territory. If there's a dept policy about restraining a prisoner that's willfully disregarded I imagine it's not hard, at least in theory, to get to the negligence required for a manslaughter charge.
In fact presumably it's worse (from the point of view of a manslaughter charge) if this is a routine thing that people in custody do - it should be something a reasonable police officer was aware of and took steps to mitigate (quite apart from the presumable department policies.)
185.last: of all of the things to worry about wrt to this case, that seems pretty fucking low down the list. Somehow I'm not terribly worried that the cops who were responsible for Freddie Gray are going to get railroaded one way or the other.
Sometimes I like to indulge in little fantasies like "facts matter".
189: worrying about the facts in this case is missing the forest for the trees.
Whatever he was doing, current information doesn't make it look like he was ramming his head into things -- no reported head injuries. I don't believe in someone flinging themselves throat-first at an object to hurt themselves.
Someone interviewed the other prisoner in the van:
"All I did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging like he was banging his head," he said.
He tells WJZ he's angry about an internal police report published in The Washington Post. "
"And they trying to make it seem like I told them that, I made it like Freddie Gray did that to hisself (sic)," Allen said. "Why the [expletive] would he do that to hisself (sic)?"
"banging his head" is pure speculation on his part, since they couldn't see each other. And Gray was unresponsive when Allen was picked up, so some people are speculating that he was having seizures, not banging his head.
But really, who cares? Way too many black dudes (and not just black dudes) are killed or treated roughly by cops all over this country (except in Utah, when gswift is working).
189: You know, there's "facts matter", and there's "facts don't matter where they can be explained away by any means that's remotely possible, no matter how unlikely." The facts are that the Baltimore police arrested a living man with an intact spine, put him in a van, and brought out a man with a broken spine and injuries that would kill him quickly. Those are "facts". Wacky stories about his becoming suicidal in the van and deliberately flinging himself larynx-first against a bench aren't "facts", they're speculation, and the facts that we know don't go away until every whacked-out exculpatory fantasy is disproven.
We need to consider the possibility that activists staged a daring heist-movie-style operation to surreptitiously switch out the still-living Freddie Gray with an exact simulacrum in order to make a point about police violence.
The emerging facts of the Purge story are kind of interesting.
How could they have been sure? Spontaneous van-death is totally a thing.
199: Indeed. I remember that issue of Omni.
Buncha gracious argument-winners up in here.
Probable cause for charges and everything. This should be interesting.
Anyone who's seen The Exorcist knows what happened in the back of that van.
Six officers charged including one count of murder 2.
I'm surprised by the second degree murder charge. I mean, not in the cynical "cops get away with shit" way, but in the "what haven't we seen because that looked like manslaughter to me" way.
Also the prosecutor says that the knife they found on him wasn't a switchblade at all, which makes the whole thing even more sordid.
The big question is will they turn on each other or will the "no snitching" ethos prevail?
Some former police officer on NPR this morning said that murder 2 requires intent and doing something like deliberately braking hard while knowing he was not restrained properly would get you past that bar.
murder 2 requires intent
intent to injure or intent to kill?
And later today we get charges announced in Bridgegate- unlikely against Christie, but can you say unindicted co-conspirator?
208 - I guess that would make sense of the fact that only one officer was charged with it, as compared to the manslaughter charges (being, I assume, the one driving the van).
209: I think just injure. That you're doing something to deliberately hurt someone rather than accidentally or negligently doing so. But IANAL and I'm extra dopey right now.
Spontaneous van-death
I thought that was a Korean thing.
212: Yes, I suppose if there's intent to kill that's 1st degree.
What's the TL;DR version on the non-switchblade? I keep seeing references, but not the actual info. Was it just a typical jackknife type thing with a legal length* blade?
*3"? I have no idea what that law would be outside a TSA checkpoint.
Apparently the knife he had could be opened with one hand because it had a sort of button on the blade itself, and a spring to assist the opening. An actual switchblade has a button on the handle that opens the knife. The Village Voice had a column about how knife laws in New York and Baltimore are a bit ambiguous as to whether the knife he had is illegal, so police end up arresting people for them.
IIRC "assisted-open" knives are in a different class from switchblades proper, though I suppose the laws vary from state to state.
Being able to be opened with one hand isn't a very interesting property of a knife, though; I used to have one of these (which I remember as being less expensive, but I bought it long ago) and not only is it intended to be openable with one hand, with the thumb guy up near the blade (which is not a button and not connected to a spring, mind), you don't even need to use that to open it; there's a wrist-flicking motion that's not too hard to learn that opens it reliably. (Or you can just start pushing the blade out with the thumb guy and then wrist-flick it the rest of the way open.)
Huh per here "Switch blades are generally defined as knives that look like folding knives but lack the above elements. (thumb stud, bias toward the closed position etc). They include spring blades, snap blades, gravity knives or any knife which can be opened automatically. Automatically, meaning by a mechanism, spring, gravity, flick of the wrist etc." That seems like it would greatly expand the number of things are switchblades.
Let's look at the penal code!
Now I'm really curious as to what's in that autopsy and case file. And wtf, is all east coast law written vague as hell? Check out Maryland code for murder, especially second degree and manslaughter. Is it the way out there to just broad stroke it and then rely on a ton of court precedent? Out here the laws tend to be fairly explicit.
"As used in this part, "switchblade knife" means a knife having the appearance of a pocketknife and includes a spring-blade knife, snap-blade knife, gravity knife, or any other similar type knife, the blade or blades of which are two or more inches in length and which can be released automatically by a flick of a button, pressure on the handle, flip of the wrist or other mechanical device, or is released by the weight of the blade or by any type of mechanism whatsoever. "Switchblade knife" does not include a knife that opens with one hand utilizing thumb pressure applied solely to the blade of the knife or a thumb stud attached to the blade, provided that the knife has a detent or other mechanism that provides resistance that must be overcome in opening the blade, or that biases the blade back toward its closed position."
Guess I was carrying around a switchblade. Huh.
217: Least expected nosflow comment of all time?
A pretty hefty percentage (plausibly even a majority) of pocket knives out there are ones that can be opened one handed. (Swiss Army knives, and really old fashioned pocket knives are the exceptions, but most of the people I know who carry around knives don't use those.) It's hard to believe that a cop wouldn't be able to distinguish the two, and since the Baltimore PD seems to have a history of arresting people for charges that get quickly dismissed I'm guessing that the intention was to arrest him and then release him quickly in order to teach him a lesson about something or other.
The Baltimore code is pretty broad on knives.
http://baltimorecode.org/19/59/59-22/
It shall be unlawful for any person to sell, carry, or possess any knife with an automatic spring or
other device for opening and/or closing the blade, commonly known as a switch-blade knife.
It's stupid, but arresting someone under that code for a spring assisted folder doesn't strike me as an illegal arrest at all.
Aggressive letter from Baltimore police union lodge to DA Mosby. (Hooray for independent special prosecutors [when the DA decides to prosecute]!)
(Swiss Army knives, and really old fashioned pocket knives are the exceptions, but most of the people I know who carry around knives don't use those.)
I can never keep up with all the ways I'm out of date.
The police report said it was spring assisted, but given the response of the prosecutor (who has presumably seen the actual knife and said the arrest was unwarranted) I'm guessing that bit might not actually be true. If there was an intention to use the arrest as basically a way to hassle Gray then "close enough" could probably have worked as a pretext for the arrest (with the assumption that nothing would happen afterwards, or if it did "well it really looked like one and it's not like we go around opening up people's knives to see when we're restraining them on the ground" would probably go far enough as a defense).
Also now that I've seen the video of the prosecutor I'm willing to believe she's pretty serious about prosecuting those officers. She sounded pretty unhappy with the police department's behavior overall*, and especially those officers.
*I'm thinking of the bit where she addressed the department as a whole and told them to stop leaking evidence to the public in, strongly implied, an attempt to influence the case.
228: The quote I keep seeing from her is that the knife was illegal under Maryland law. But often cities have and are allowed to have more restrictive codes than the state on weapons. Time will tell I guess.
Time is a river, rolling on to more information about the typology of knives.
How do knife restrictions exist when the climate is toward absurdly broad readings of the 2nd amendment and that amendment says "arms" not "guns".
For hardcore fans of The Wire, it's worth noting that the Gray family lawyer is Billy Murphy, the same guy who (playing himself) was Clay Davis' defense lawyer when Clay Davis went to trial. And that the FOP's argument for having a special prosecutor is that Billy Murphy is too close to the Baltimore (black) political establishment. Art imitates life then life is like art, or something.
229 - But saying it was an illegal arrest kind of covers those possibilities, right?
(Also, "illegal under Maryland law" is a typo, right? That threw me for a little bit because I remembered her saying the opposite.)
God, if people only knew the clusterfuck that is the DA's screening team vs the trial guys, the interaction with detectives, etc. It's not a rare occurrence for them to not file the obvious charge we have, file a charge we didn't even request, etc. An actual recent interaction I've had with one of our attorneys just before a prelim hearing.
Me: Dude, I don't know why the screeners tacked on the vehicle charge. I didn't request it. We have her dead to rights on the forgeries but the car charge? No.
Him: Eh, are you sure?
Me: Seriously, we don't have enough.
Him: Aargh, could you quit saying that so loud? (like that's what's going to mess up this charge) I'm meeting with the defense in a minute to discuss a plea...(comes out of that meeting) Wow, we totally don't have enough for that stolen vehicle charge.
Me: NO SHIT.
233: Oh, yeah, "legal". But them looking at the state law vs the city law to make their illegal arrest determination seems like an obvious mistake to avoid but wouldn't surprise me one bit.
I've got a non-assisted folding knife with a thumb stud for one-handed opening (a Sanrenmu 605, which is a really nice knife for $10), but assisted folders are absurdly common and I think almost all designed to not run afoul of (specifically) New York's switchblade laws.
I'm going to start a new thread at the top of the page, for the charges. So sit tight, everyone.
Oh man, this is hours old. I read the knife subthread but didn't get all the way backwards up to the charges.
As long as we're opening new threads, surely it's incumbent on Unfogged to discuss this complaint (guy who was the target of the carry-the-mattress-around Columbia student art project files extremely detailed complaint in lawsuit against Columbia, under, of all things Title IX).
240: so basically the dudebro meant to go to Dartmouth?
240: Doing those under Title IX are the way that happens if you're going to file that sort of lawsuit, in my thankfully not-IRL experience.
God, if people only knew the clusterfuck that is the DA's screening team vs the trial guys, the interaction with detectives, etc. It's not a rare occurrence for them to not file the obvious charge we have, file a charge we didn't even request, etc.
Is this just typical bureaucratic* incompetence, or is there something inherent to the relationships? Do the screeners not want to listen to the peon detectives, do the DAs want to go for sexier/higher leverage charges, etc?
*meaning any large office, not particular to gov't
I don't know if this should go here, or in the new thread, but Brad DeLong just linked to a good rant about the way people talk and think about rioting (emphasis in the original):
Politically motivated riots are a form of altruistic punishment. Look it up. Altruistic punishment is a "puzzle" to the sort of economist who thinks of homo economicus maximizing her utility, and a no-brainer to the game theorist who understands humans could never have survived if we actually were the kind of creature who succumbed to every prisoners' dilemma. Altruistic punishment is behavior that imposes costs on third parties with no benefit to the punisher, often even at great cost to the punisher. To the idiot economist, it is a lose/lose situation, such a puzzle. For the record, I'm a fan of the phenomenon.
Does that mean I'm a fan of these riots, that I condone the burning of my own hometown? Fuck you and your tendentious entrapment games and Manichean choices, your my-team "ridiculing" of people you can claim support destruction. Altruistic punishment is essential to human affairs but it is hard. It is mixed, it is complicated, it is shades of gray. It is punishment first and foremost, and punishment hurts people, that's its point. Altruistic punishment hurts the punisher too, that's why it's "altruistic". It can't be evaluated from the perspective of winners or losers within a direct and local context....
So you want to evaluate riots, then, as tactic. Surely these rioters can't imagine that this -- this -- will reduce the severity of policing, bring jobs to the inner city, diminish the carceral state. By the way, have I told you, fuck you? Altruistic punishment is generally not tactical. Altruistic punishment is emotional. The altruism in altruistic punishment is not pure, not saintly. The soldier takes pleasure even as he takes wounds exacting revenge for a fallen comrade on another human who was not, as an individual, his friend's killer. The looter takes a pair of shoes, because why the fuck not? If you perceive the essence of the riots in the shoes you are an idiot. Altrustic punishment is not tactical, it is emotional, and it is sometimes but not always functional.
Here's another way of saying what Brad's saying, from blog favorite Edmund Burke.
http://www.samefacts.com/2015/04/governance-2/on-baltimore-imprudent-protests-and-real-grievances/
It's a pretty good complaint, actually. Who knows what the facts really are, and there are a bunch of interesting legal issues involved, but it is sure an interesting read.
Re ambulances. I haven't read this thread yet, but my insurance covered 100% of one of the ambulances I had. That was a rip off, because it was just transporting me from one hospital to the building across the street which was still part of the same hospital.
My nose was bleeding so badly once that I pulled over and got out of my car. Someone called 911 on my behalf despite my protests that I was fine. The firemen EMTs came. They worked for the town, and we got a notice saying that they contracted out billing but wouldn't charge if your insurance refused to pay up. In the end, we never got a bill. We did, however, get a survey about how we felt about their billing process.
TRO, is the fb-message stuff relevant to the complaint (against Columbia) or is including that just a way of publicizing the information? I was puzzled why the complaint had to say more than "...and he was found not responsible," then describe CU's actions supporting ES.
244: Waldman really is fantastic. My only problem with him is that he doesn't post often enough for me to habitually check his blog.
72: The mega city of Toronto is like that too.
248 -- relevant, yes. Strictly necessary to the pleading, probably not. But, presumably one of Columbia's arguments will be "well yes we found him not responsible but that doesn't mean that it wasn't reasonable for us to think that he'd actually done it." And, of course, (a) whether or not people believe he was actually innocent will completely shade how people view the lawsuit and (b) the real point of the lawsuit is presumably to clear his name, so if I was his lawyer I would have advised putting in as much of his story as possible into the complaint, which is what they did.
Here's another way of saying what Brad's saying, from blog favorite Edmund Burke.
That's similar, but not quite the same. I've seen various people talk about rioting as a symptom of long-term grievances (which makes complete sense), but the use of the specific term, "altruistic punishment" was one that I hadn't seen before, and which caught my attention.
My first thought, when I read that, was of the ultimatum game (which wasn't entirely accurate), and that made me think about the difference between, "I am reacting because you have wronged me (or people I care about)" and, "I am reacting because you have behaved inhumanely."
251: That's helpful, thanks. I think the not-responsible finding was by preponderance of evidence, which bears on the reasonability point.
I missed jumping in on this last night, but...
To 173: Delurking to say that this is definitely a real thing. In my more depressive past, I had episodes of self-flagellation that often involved slamming my fist into my head or head-butting a wall, post, etc. Just frustration, embarrassment, self-loathing, and such that manifested as inward-directed rage. Scary stuff and sometimes arose seemingly out of nowhere. But I would feel "better" or relieved afterward.
Happier times now, but I likely could have been that basketball player in 175 on a couple of occasions, and watching that video has made me feel physically ill.
OTOH, a directed blow to the neck like Gray sounds much more difficult/unlikely, I never bought the leaked story, and I'm glad to hear about the charges. But folks surely are capable of some irrational and destructive shit, even if they haven't been poisoned with lead from birth.
209: Depraved indifference maybe?
Or shorter 254:
gswift - not full of shit! But probably too credulous here.
Hey you stubborn commenters, there's a new higher Baltimore thread.
There's no corollary to the 40 comment derailing rule that says you can't post a new thread on the same topic until the previous one is causing DB problems on the site?