This seems worse than Rice's murder because it was so slow.
appears that if you're protesting "tyranny" -- a state order to close schools and certain businesses in the midst of a pandemic -- the police will keep cool, but if you protest actual tyranny -- an agent of the state murdering someone in the street -- then here comes the tear gas.
Does taking fine minutes to kill someone make it first degree murder?
Yeah, murder. I don't see any question about it.
I haven't watched the video and I'm not going to, because it just seems to grim and I don't know how watching it is going to do anyone any good. I don't know anything about degrees of murder and manslaughter, when you say "it's definitely murder" are you saying something about what you think the perpetrator's intent was, or you're saying something different?
The phenomenon in 3 is really scary. I don't know how much of the radicalization of police forces is US specific or part of general trends in conservativism worldwide. I was thinking the other week about Hong Kong and how the Hong Kong police have come so firmly down on the side of the central government, even though as I understand it the police force is entirely Hongkongers. In the past you might have thought the Hong Kong police would have commitments to their home of Hong Kong that would be more important than their ideological commitments to authoritarian government. Like in 1956 the Soviet Union had to send Soviet troops to Hungary to repress the revolution, they couldn't just trust Hungarian police to take the side of the communist party over their neighbors.
What I mean by murder is "criminal homicide." Figuring out the precise charge is a variable state law matter that I'd have to do actual work to have an opinion about.
Kind of like when they shot Philando Castile, right? The only time they convicted a cop here, it was a Black immigrant cop who shot a white woman. It will be as usual, except compounded because of the horror of the present and the ever-longer history of police impunity.
On the one hand it's morally better that this stuff is known and discussed, because at least the people it's happening to don't have to feel like they're just going crazy - when I was in my twenties, white people/affluent people just wouldn't believe you about police brutality. On the other it's morally worse, because everyone has heard about it and decided that it's basically acceptable. And we've now seen that the system is totally corrupt and totally broken.
It's like, anytime you see an instance of intolerable horror, that's the real of the world. Letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean is following the herd immunity strategy is the cops murdering people and getting away with it over and over. It's what props the world up, the endless sacrifice of the vulnerable in the most cruel, grotesque and selfish ways.
CBS informs me that "in Minneapolis, kneeling on a suspect's neck is allowed under the department's use-of-force policy for officers who have received training in how to compress a neck without applying direct pressure to the airway." Because of course you would naturally think, "why not train people to safely kneel on someone's neck to restrain them, what could possibly go wrong, it's not like necks are fragile or kneeling on them in the heat of the moment could be a bad idea".
Boy do I have a hard time believing that's true. A neck is not a large body-part, I don't believe there's a trick for kneeling on it without compressing the important bits. I'd like to see that written policy.
In fairness to the police department here -- and as a testament to how blatant the video was -- four cops got fired. That's not usually how they proceed with a coverup. The police union (as far as I now) has limited itself to a call to not to rush to judgment. I assume the killer is going to be charged, and that his accomplices are in serious legal jeopardy, too.
I believe we can acknowledge the facts in 11 and also acknowledge that that wouldn't be much of an obstacle to a police department deeming it acceptable to kneel on someone's neck provided "proper training", which may or may not be complete hogwash.
I'm not worried there won't be charges. I'm worried that the prosecutor will deliberately fail to put forth a good case, like with Rice's murderer.
I tend to believe written policies are unlikely to be absolutely insane, the problem is the behavior that gets accepted as normal regardless of the written policy. If someone actually took responsibility for a document saying you can kneel on someone's neck without hurting them, they're very incautious.
Other things I've read say the policy is about using legs for a neck restraint, not the knee specifically.
Which, to be clear, is not relevant here since it is for someone resisting arrest. Despite lies circulated before more video was found, he wasn't resisting.
14: It's the same DA who oversaw the "no charge" responses to the Jamar Clark and, as Frowner says, Philandro Castille shootings.
In cases like this there are always (at least) two injuries: the murder itself and then the subsequent injustice. The impunity that the perpetrators enjoy and the widespread support for their actions diminish the victims and the larger communities. The injustice is an ongoing harm.
With Clark and Castille, the officers were put on leave instead of being fired. I think the firings are a good sign that governmental solidarity may not be as strong here.
The only time they convicted a cop here, it was a Black immigrant cop who shot a white woman.
I think of this as the "Only Martha Stewart Goes to Jail" phenomenon.
Clark is a wildly different scenario than Castille. Clark grabbed the officer's gun, his DNA was on it.
Knee on neck is a known control in BJJ but it's not something you'd do for a prolonged amount of time. It's either to get a tap or to transition to a different submission. In law enforcement it's the kind of thing you'd maybe resort to in a struggle with a large strong guy but only momentarily to get him handcuffed. Kneeling on someone's neck for several minutes is nuts.
On the other it's morally worse, because everyone has heard about it and decided that it's basically acceptable. And we've now seen that the system is totally corrupt and totally broken. It's like, anytime you see an instance of intolerable horror, that's the real of the world. Letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean is following the herd immunity strategy is the cops murdering people and getting away with it over and over.
This is also a huge part of my daily interior monologue, fwiw. I think I said something in 2016 about how I wasn't looking forward to discovering the depths of my own cowardice once Trump took office. Now, looking back, I really do think this profoundly corrupting 4 years have corrupted me as well. Maybe this is always what honest readings from the cowardice-sounding were going to show, but I think it's self-reinforcing too.
22: And of course, Floyd was already handcuffed.
24: Definitely. Really the only quasi "resistance" I've seen so far is that Floyd was refusing to get out of the car. But the security cam footage shows him subsequently cuffed and sitting and being pretty compliant.
23: I feel helpless about all these things and don't even know how to try to be effective in changing them.
Or if that's your thing at least have a safe word.
The Gap Between the PLA and HKPF is an Order to Shoot
There's another riot going on - livestream here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHxeFQtab1s
Cops are outnumbered and have been forced back. (I'm not there - too much coronavirus for our at-risk household, but someone on my twitter has a police scanner.)
This is up by the south MPLS police station about 3/4 mile from my house. You can see big clouds of tear gas. The area has a big, poorly run Target, liquor store, Aldi, some small independent businesses - it's pretty much where poor near south MPLs shades into right far south MPLS.
"Rich far south MPLS", in general pretty left-leaning actually.
This looks like more racially integrated protest than most anti-cop protests in S MPLS that I have seen, which suggests to me that there's more anger than even in the past. Like, when I've been to more integrated and/or Black-led anti-cop protests, they have nearly all been in St. Paul or over north.
It seems like the most authentically riot-ish riot I've ever seen here. Usually in the past people have had more mass marches that block highways, etc rather than the kind where people break windows and loot things.
I cannot overstate how bizarre and SFnal it is to sit here in my house watching this and hearing cops while all around a plague rages. it's horrible, actually. I miss the nineties, everything has been so fucked up here, even more than usual, since about 2010.
I think I hear cop reinforcements driving in.
This dystopia sucks, I want to get off.
Stay safe Frowner (and Natilo)
The Target is apparently being looted and there are people outside it throwing rocks at the cops. A lot of rocks being thrown right now. Presumably all the Target staff have been able to clear out; the only thing you worry about in this kind of situation is fire. OTOH, they've got an up to code fire system.
I wonder how all this is going to play out - I think there's some pretty determined and organized people on the anti-cop side with actual goals about what happens, which is going to make this much harder to contain. Like, I've been on marches where people have either stated (block the highway) or unstated but known to a lot of people goals (effectively engage the cops while blocking the highway to prolong the blockade, use whatever is to hand, etc) but I haven't seen anything where people have physical goals like "do this to a building" or "gain these supplies from the environment to do X". It just occurred to me - I think that the people with the plan are taking a lot of lessons from Hong Kong, that's what I'm getting from the twitter. There were also some anti-tear-gas umbrellas last night.
It's got to be really strange to be in some of the houses right around there - there are a couple of blocks on each side of Lake where you basically would have a clear though distant view if you went out front.
I feel like there are more traffic sounds and slightly off sounds outside right now although the cop sirens have died down.
I hope that people have an exit strategy.
It looks a bit like people are trying to crack open the boarded up liquor store.
I'm really a bit worried that if it proves absolutely hard to contain someone will get killed. It's going to get dark, some people are going to leave, there's going to be a point where people either need to consolidate their gains and hold overnight or else they'll need to get out. The trouble will be if they can't hold on but the cops don't feel that ordinary force will work.
I'm assuming that 27 isn't directed at 26, but it would be great if there were something simple I could refrain from doing.
Police scanner says molotov cocktails. I hope people are a little bit careful, fire gets out of hand. It would not be very good for this area at all if the whole block burned down. I assume by this point everyone has evacuated or is ready to evacuate.
Also you worry that if someone is really effective with the molotovs they'll get shot. I hope people are being thoughtful, I would prefer that no one dies.
I'm going to stop live-blogging the live-stream for now though; I should go and do something else and look later.
One thing I'd like to point out about the 3rd Precinct police station: As you walk in the front door, there's a "wall of honor" type display of all the Minneapolis cops who've been killed in the line of duty over the past few decades. Notably absent: the one lesbian cop who got shot a few miles down Lake Street in the late 90s or early 2000s.
Yes, but take care of yourself and stay safe.
I haven't really "been" to a protest in some time -- the last was probably the extremely low-key mass picketing up and down Lake St. a while ago when Trump was doing some big anti-trans thing. But that was zero danger -- don't think I saw a single cop the whole time. (Amusingly, my best frenemy in the local radical scene, who grew up a few blocks from me, went to the same high school, rides the same bus to a call center job downtown just like mine and who I've been to many demos with in the past, had an almost identical sign to the one I made -- I've known him since I was 16, and we've been in some kind of feud or another for about 12 of those years.)
Sadly, my poor health would make me a huge liability at any demo where shit was going to go off. I wasn't much of a runner at the best of times, and now I'd have a heart attack if I went more than a couple of blocks.
Neither Natilo nor I is at the protest. Riots belong to the young...or at least, when they do when there's coronavirus. I mean, in theory there could be enough spillover to reach my house, so that's a very small worry. But it's a crummy house with an overgrown yard and things falling off, so not likely to attract much attention knock on wood, and broadly speaking I would like to trust that everyone has enough politics to focus on capital and the cops, not random malfeasance.
The thing i've always worried about is this kind of protest being attacked by the far right. These past few years I keep worrying that someone will shoot one up.
Here is a better livestream from Unicorn Riot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHmoqQ86uxU
I see some evidence that the boogaloo race war folk are feigning to make common cause with the protestors against police brutality and I just wish for once people would be able to see a transparently bad faith move for what it is.
I've seen very little but warnings against that on my twitters - I don't think the race war people/Nazis are going to get very far with antifa types. If there's any red/brown alliance, I think it will be from elsewhere.
Partly this is structural - the deep roots of antifa are in anti-Nazi organizing, it's a really different set of people with a different history. With the exception of Portland, until recently Nazis found it really difficult to get a foothold in cities and it was because they'd get their asses handed to them when they tried. They're using different tactics now but even so not making much headway.
My worry is less about antifa and BLM, which have excellent bullshit detectors, and more about a. the popular understanding and b. the stated and actual beliefs of the cops themselves, who are both prone to bad faith and wildly credulous in conflating and exaggerating threats against them.
An auto parts and supply place by the police station is burning. I have to say, I have mixed feelings - it's obviously full of a lot of stuff that shouldn't be on fire and is emitting thick black smoke that looks really toxic. I hope nothing explodes. I'm not really sure what the point of setting it on fire was - of all the chain businesses along here it's probably the least shitty in the "providing inferior goods and services because this neighborhood doesn't offer a lot of choice" arena.
~~~
Fire truck is here.
~~
The mayor or the governor ought to call off the cops and speak to the protestors. The government is making the right mouth-noises but if they don't try any new approach no one is going to believe them. Call off the cops, amnesty for anyone, new strategies.
That's kind of a general knowledge question, not a protest one.
Thanks for the updates, Frowner and Natty. That all sounds scary.
47: No, maybe near-beer at some of the bigger ones that are like real grocery stores, but certainly not at the Lake St. Target. If you want to sell groceries & liquor here, you have to have a separate storefront for the liquor (the downtown mpls Target has this). This is partly because of all the blue laws from when Mpls. and the state as a whole were a lot more conservative and anti-semitic, and partly a gentlemen's agreement that severely restricts the number of off-sale licenses granted in south Minneapolis. The liquor store that was looted tonight has probably been there for at least 60 years -- it was there in my childhood, and already old then.
In Nebraska, you can get beer in almost every Target now. Except mostly it isn't cold.
Well, in Nebraska you can get hard liquor at the gas station, so I'm hardly surprised. I should also say that the grocery lobby is constantly trying to get a "wine-with-dinner" bill passed in the legislature, but the liquor store lobby has successfully countered it every time. Until recent liberalizations, the strongest on-sale you could get in a restaurant (outside of downtown and a few other enclaves) was 3.2 beer. Then, over the course of the 80s and 90s, that loosened up to include a lot of neighborhood restaurants getting strong-beer-and-wine licenses. They still make you jump through a lot of hoops to get the full vinous, spiritous and malt liquors license. Another facet of this is the insane laws about what constitutes a convenience store, vs. a grocery store, vs. a liquor store. Convenience stores are limited to a certain amount of dairy products, and pretty much the only non-alcoholic items you can buy at a liquor store are soda pop and other mixers.
Woke up and checked the livestream - it's 4:30am. everything chain commercial around that area looks smashed (except the grocery store?), there's a big fire in the center of the street, people are going in and out of the cell phone store (the others have been ransacked?). There aren't a lot of people left on the scene. A lot of graffiti on everything, much of it very sentence-y rather than just "fuck 12", which suggests that people had a lot of time to write it.
The mayor has requested the national guard which I think is a huge mistake. All along, the real thing is about refusing to give anything to protesters. But when I think about it, what could they really give? The courts are corrupt and they'll let the cops off, this isn't in the mayor's hands. People are hungry and miserable and vulnerable to eviction, the mayor can't do very much about that either; he is left liberal but by no means that left-liberal and besides easily brought to heel by the cops/rich people as his past actions have shown. Basically what's going on is just society writ small - control and exploit and if necessary kill the people at the bottom, use any force necessary to avoid giving anything up. It's just that people are angrier and more desperate. Is this the start of a riot wave or a one- or two-off?
Matters should not have gotten to this point, but you wonder how much it was locked in by the time Philando Castile was killed - if you can murder an innocent, by all accounts widely beloved and gentle man while he's trying to keep himself safe and is in his own car with his partner and kid, and then you get away with it, where do you go from there?
There's been a bunch of violence and maybe some property damage elsewhere in the city, but too difficult to sort out rumors from chatter.
I really wonder what today is going to bring.
As far as I can tell, the library down the street looks fine, I assume the left-leaning bookstore is fine and so is the bike co-op. I hope the grocery stores are okay; a lot of people depend on those and now wouldn't be a great time to have more crowded stores. My worry is that if there's another night of this or anything really chaotic, those things will get smashed in the general chaos.
Another big fire or more tear gas, can't tell.
Lots of rumors - the cops were trying to mobilize metro transit for mass arrests but the bus drivers pushed back and then of course this ceased to be a mass arrest scenario.
Another worrying thing: looks like a of the white people have left, which means less restraint if the guard comes. It's so dumb to introduce more violence into this. There are a lot of bad choices here, but the mayor ought to call the cops back, stop them antagonizing people and let this calm down on its own. It's not like everything isn't already smashed. People will get tired and hungry. This could still be de-escalated if they were really smart, but everything will go totally off the rails if there's real guns involved.
Speaking of guns, a plausible rumor that there were white nationalists the night before last night and one of them was disarmed by the protesters. There seem to be one or two here tonight per the streams.
Not going to lie, this is a scary situation and I hope it stays 3/4 mile away, but it's the fault of the whole system of the city and people are responding as they're going to respond if they're pushed hard enough. If you don't want people rioting and burning down a commercial district which is the site of so much exploitation and suffering, perhaps don't have the suffering.
(You have to understand just how bleak a lot of this area is. It's a weird nexus - it has a newish library and several small lefty businesses (not so much "activist" ones, more like restaurants that donate food and money to causes) but a lot of it is just bleak parking lots and ugly, dirty area, and the light rail overpass goes through. The misery under and around the light rail is terrible to see - lots of homeless people, addicts, another small liquor store, lots of security architecture, there's always drunk and fighty people there. It's a horribly designed and dangerous intersection between Lake (the big crosstown street) and the highway. I just hate going through there, which of course I do all the time. The whole area is sordid. The bar parking lot where CeCe MacDonald was attacked and where she stabbed the guy in self defense is literally right here, across from the Target.
It's a high-traffic part of the city where poor people (and lower middle class people like me) go - I mean, prior to the pandemic I was literally there a couple of times a week either for the Cub/Target or the bike shop, etc, and that's my light rail stop - and it's just ugly, heavily policed and yet also dirty and neglected. It's only gotten worse and more depressing over the years.
Perversely, if you go a block or so further south, there's fancy new condos. There are even fancy new condos over by where the shooting happened. All that is going nowhere because of the pandemic now but people have been being displaced.
You just can't but feel that breaking into these places is a deserved revenge. They're horrible and dirty and carceral at the best of times, and I know because I have, eg, been to a lot of Targets around the metro. This one is dirty and tends to be badly stocked because it's the poor people one, but if you drive a couple of miles in pretty much any direction, you get to the huge fancy ones. People are treated so badly. I really hate going to that shopping complex and although I love the light rail, I hate that stop and TBH dread getting on and off there.
But when I think about it, what could they really give?
Arresting those cops and charging them with murder and accessory to murder would be a start, no?
I saw another video of the murder of George Floyd taken from another angle, the guy had two other cops on his back and legs too.
But the point is (and then I have to go to sleep for a bit) the mayor can't arrest them; the police have to arrest them. The police won't. The courts won't convict. They'll just sit around and collect hundreds of thousands in gofundmes from the far right, like usual. The state doesn't have the power (or the will, which is why it doesn't have the power) to make real, lasting positive changes in people's lives. Rogue elements within the state do edge-case stuff to help people, but look, there is enough housing to house everyone, there's enough food to feed everyone - but who in Minnesota has the actual power to house the homeless and feed the hungry? That power is sequestered to the highest reaches of the federal government precisely to insure that it will never be used. The way to cool out this kind of riot is to flatten inequality, broadly speaking, and no one with power wants that to happen.
Same. I'd hate it if you got hurt in this.
55: link? Though I won't be able to watch The whole thing.
Infamously, the one-time city council member for a big chunk of working class East Lake St. suggested bulldozing several miles of it -- at least he was being honest about how most of the people in power feel about the area.
My whole life has been organized around Lake St - 5 yrs of elementary school 3 blocks south of Lake, all 4 years of HS 2 blocks south of it. My grandparents house was about 50 ft north of Lake. I've lived within half a mile of it for 18 of the 40 years I've spent in south Minneapolis. I've worked on Lake St, had first dates on Lake, gone to dozens of protests, waited eons for the bus, seen some amazing theater and film, gotten drunk, made a fool of myself quite a few times, bought my first Crass album and my first athletic supporter (though not at the same store) hung out at the two main SF&F bookstores, shoplifted, voted, eaten way too much Taco Bell and Arby's, saw my friend who od'd for the last time, went to her funeral, gotten hit by a car, walked and walked -- my life is basically a Lake St life, and I'm not sorry to see some looting going on. The big institutions on Lake have cruelly exploited so many people, brutalized my friends, and sucked huge, gargantuan amounts of money out of the community while putting hardly anything back. I've shopped at that Target store for virtually my whole life and seen how they treat people and the neighborhood. Looting = Life as a t-shirt one of my friends made just off Lake St had it. I don't make any distinction between breaking a police car window and breaking a Target window, it's the same wrath in response to the same injustice.
Anyway, nobody cares what I think, but there are plenty of others who feel the same way, and sometimes, we do something about it.
(And pretty soon I have to log in and rob some poor widder wimmin and orphans, so I'd better get up and eat breakfast.)
Both Natilo and I are home with every intent to stay there. We both have conditions that put us at greater risk for coronavirus.
I imagine I could have seen the glow of the fires if I'd been awake when they were really going.
Apparently people were smashing at least some windows all down Lake Street. Lake Street is the big east-west cross-town street that near my house. Ingebretson's, the long-time Swedish goods store, got smashed, which is the kind of unjustified thing that happens in riots and I wish it hadn't - they're a perfectly ordinary small business as far as I know, without any dubious history of eg calling the cops on people. The photo I saw made it look like they hadn't had anything meaningful taken, hopefully that's still true. But I also hope this doesn't shut them down for good.
I don't know if people steered clear of the Mexican businesses along there, although I hope so.
It's silly to pretend, as some people are on Twitter, that knocking out the Dollar Tree and at least for a while shutting down the Target (and the trains; nothing is running along that route, not even extra buses) won't have a bad effect on the neighborhood. It's going to make stuff harder and it's possible some of those businesses won't come back.
The point is that it's just eating the seed corn to let things get the way they have in Minneapolis (and the country, of course). If you let everything get terrible, more terrible things are going to happen. If you have grotesquely unjust policing including a bunch of high-profile acquittals of cops year after year, you're setting your society up for riots. The time to prevent this riot was, oh, I don't know, but absolutely no later than 2015. That doesn't make the things that happen okay, it just makes them sort of inevitable. If you have a large enough critical mass of people who are being neglected and sickened and brutalized, some of them are going to do something, and it probably won't be "send a petition to the city council".
I've got to say, I'm feeling pretty scared and depressed, between this and the virus. I'm not sorry that there have been riots, I'm just scared about the national guard, the problems if the Target and Cub are shut down for too long, the possible virus spike from this, etc etc.
The trouble is that there's no resiliency/redundancy in the system - we have the problem of the virus, and there's no social or governmental bandwith for anything else. That's what makes me afraid.
I mean, it's an illustration of how bad things are that, eg, the Dollar Tree and the cell phone store are important resources while also being parasitical exploiters. It's no use pretending that they'll rapidly be replaced by the People's Free Store, etc, although I know that efforts will be made in that direction. It's just that even the best, most well-organized mutual aid distribution project can't match capital; change has to come at the systemic level, by stopping the larger actions of capital. People will try; they always try, and there will no doubt be valiant results, but scale is the problem.
I could give a shit about Target or the other exploitative stores that are not truly part of the community but I'll admit to worrying about the optics of it.
I mean, I'm not worried about it in the sense of "oh poor Target, that Target could have been someone's child!!!", but the fact about this area is that it is densely populated and it's difficult/expensive/impossible for a lot of people to get out of the area to shop. There are a lot of people here for whom a couple of bucks of bus fare somewhere else is a meaningful expense, and of course Target has the busiest pharmacy in town. My assumption so far is that Target itself wasn't actually on fire and will be open again pretty quick, so people won't miss prescriptions - but it's literally true that transit expenses make people give up getting prescriptions.
This is the fault of the city and the police, and there are sound tactical reasons for burning things down when you have absolutely no other leverage. It's just that I'm also a bit worried about the situation in coming weeks when so much stuff that people rely on is out of commission. There's another dollar store about a mile from the Dollar Tree; I guess they'll be doing a lot of business.
Also, let me tell you, it's constant sirens and constant helicopters this morning.
I was vaguely wondering how people felt about Target there where it's headquartered as opposed to anywhere else where it's an out-of-town chain. Not any better, sounds like?
70 I saw a tweet by a local saying that it was widely hated since company HQ is there and they try out new surveillance tech on the customers there and it's awful but I don't know how much stock to place in that.
71: You should place a lot of stock in it, because it's true. I wouldn't say that people literally hate it the way they hate pawn shops, but you can't shop there without being aware that it is, first off, dirty and poorly stocked compared to all the other ones, second always being changed around which makes it hard to shop and third hypersurveilled with both long-term and temporary methods. In the nineties/early 2000s it was more like a low-grade version of your average Target; I feel like they really amped things up in the past decade.
Everyone knows that it's badly run and horrible because it's in a poor part of town. You can literally drive two or three miles and get to a fancy one, however the buses aren't great.
72.last Thanks. The same tweet noted that and pointed out that other Targets are never located in poor areas.
I'm just catching up on this Boogaloo infodump... "submitted without comment," I guess.
Here's my list of grievances about Target as a lifelong shopper there:
1. When Target was a subsidiary of the Dayton-Hudson corporation, all Target employees got a 10% discount on the nice stuff at Dayton's.
2. Target and Dayton's then had a very liberal return policy, which is now rationalized to be similar to other big box stores.
3. This is hardly uncommon, but Target used to stock much nicer house brand stuff and the quality is not much better than Walmart at this point.
4. They will only fund small arts organizations if they have an employee of Target on the board. (When our HQ Target employee dropped off the board of my former org. to have kids, the funding dried up immediately.)
5. Again, this is hardly unique to Target, but they're very anti-union, and hide behind outside contractors to be able to exploit the non-union, mostly recent immigrant cleaners that work overnight shifts.
Specific to the Lake St Target:
1. They maintain a huge parking lot in the front of the store which means a whole block of Lake is smooshed up against the parking lot fence.
2. They maintain an ugly, somewhat dangerous brownfield area behind the store, fronting directly on the railroad tracks and contributing to the danger and ugliness of the blocks around the light rail station.
3. When the pharmacy was still owned by Target, they refused to stock opiates because it was easier not to deal with the hassle.
4. They traumatized my sister when she shoplifted some little piece of junk jewelry at age 11, and I believe they always prosecute shoplifters.
Somebody on my a Facebook that I really don't know is saying that he teaches at the school that got trashed.
Apparently a bunch of daylight window smashing (and maybe looting/expropriating/whatever?) over in St. Paul. I cannot imagine that being poor and losing work due to the virus isn't a big piece driving this, just because I've never seen so much store smashing in all my days of seeing protests. There seems to be a bunch of small protests going on around the city, and last night there were window-smashings and taking stuff in various parts of S MPLS - lots of stuff smashed over in Uptown, which is one of the fancy shopping areas, so never say that people didn't take this to the wealthy.
Won't someone think of the Menard's?
What a difference thirty years makes: back in the 90s, the administration at my high school never said anything about Black people getting killed or the LA riots or anything like that. Now, the official school FB page is hosting virtual teach-ins and sending out activism resources. We, the students, were always pretty political -- having walk-outs and stuff, but it's surprising to see the grown-ups joining in.
It's probably the same people, given that we're now old.
Thanks to both Natilo and Frowner for sharing the local perspective/news. Very much appreciated.
What a difference thirty years makes: back in the 90s, the administration at my high school never said anything about Black people getting killed or the LA riots or anything like that. Now, the official school FB page is hosting virtual teach-ins and sending out activism resources.
I saw this story last night, and it seemed like a big deal to me -- is this something that will matter to people in Minnesota?
Two days after a black man in Minnesota died after being pinned by police, the University of Minnesota announced that it will limit its relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department.
School president Joan Gabel made the announcement Wednesday in a letter that was sent to students, faculty and staff members, writing that the university no longer will use local officers to assist at major events, including Golden Gophers football games.
Well, I'll believe it when I see it. But I think it's a sign of something on the part of the university, let's hope they don't get pressured to recant.
Gabel seems not incredibly bad as UMN presidents go. She fought us on the union contract, but as far as I could tell not as hard or as dirty as other presidents have, and I think she's done a reasonable job with the COVID response (as long as we don't open the campus in fall like a bunch of idiots). I've got to say that coming on board in the fall and dealing with a worldwide plague before you've been there six months has got to be a hell of a thing.
It's silly to pretend, as some people are on Twitter, that knocking out the Dollar Tree and at least for a while shutting down the Target (and the trains; nothing is running along that route, not even extra buses) won't have a bad effect on the neighborhood. It's going to make stuff harder and it's possible some of those businesses won't come back.
Your former NAACP president agrees.
https://twitter.com/rljourno/status/1266081371388350464
Same lady, cracking me up. "These motherfuckers need to go home."
https://twitter.com/rljourno/status/1266079467744702466
Natilo's First Rule of Revolution: Don't disarm the proletariat
Natilo's Second Rule of Revolution: You can always find a shill
I appreciated this from Erik Loomis at LGM.
Once again, yesterday demonstrated that white people are far more concerned with the property of wealthy corporations than they are with the lives of black people. We see this over and over again during rebellions against police violence going all the way back to the media narrative around Watts over a half-century ago. We saw it again last night, not so much in the Times/Post media, which didn't cover it much, but certainly on Twitter, local papers, and of course right-wing media, ranging from racebaiting to just that condemnation that "these corporations aren't responsible for the death of that person!" As Martin Luther King said, "a riot is the language of the unheard" and it would be nice if whites would even begin to try and see that. But they don't. Let's face it, they know Target better than they know black folks. And they like it better too.
Did a middle aged white dude just call this lady a shill? Good stuff.
http://spokesman-recorder.com/2017/03/07/naacp-st-paul-branch-president-reflects-life-activism/
83: But it's not like I think there's a really good alternative to rioting at this point - neither in terms of policy, because we've seen over and over that we elect left liberals here and they do fuck-all about the police, nor in terms of just stochastic response. If you have a big population of brutalized, poor people for whom things are only getting obviously and quickly worse, they're either going to riot or they're going to be brutalized further until they're afraid to riot.
OTOH, someone on twitter was saying that if people rioted and looted every time the police murdered someone, the police would probably stop. It's the police who make this happen. The cops in other rich countries don't murder people at the rate that the US does. They do it because there is no incentive not to do it. If the state won't provide incentive through, eg, serious anti-violence training, higher standards for cops, demilitarizing the police and being willing to charge and convict killer cops, people get pushed into trying to create an incentive by making it difficult and dangerous for the cops to contain protests. This is very far from ideal, obviously, because there's pretty good odds that it will just be a kind of arms race, but if you leave people no other choice - !
I cannot overstress how badly the killing of Philando Castile and the acquittal of his killer damaged things here. That was the crowning cruelty, I think. I swear I will never forget when I was at the big vigil after the acquittal and I had to hear his friend crying during his speech. It was the worst. If some demiurge had given me the power to end the world at that moment I would have done it convulsively because the horror and sorrow seemed to set everything else about humanity at naught.
Every time there's been a chance to fix things, the city won't go up against the police union, partly out of laziness, partly out of careerism, partly because the establishment is almost all white and they are either afraid of poor BIPOC or they just don't care. Every time there's been one of these horrible killings they've had the chance to change and they never do. Now that people are broke and scared of the virus, there's no slack in the system and no trust in the state.
The mayor and the governor are calling out the national guard, which is either going to be very ugly and violent or else is going to kick the can about ten feet down the road, until something else happens - which won't be long in the present political-economic-health climate. It's just going to be more riots and more violence until either the state brutalizes people enough to suppress them or decides to take actual action, which they won't.
One law for whoever has power in a situation and another for whoever doesn't, and no one cares as long as they have the whip hand.
I don't see any reason to think it wasn't the police's actions who turned a protest into a riot by shooting tear gas at it.
Frowner, I don't know if this will help, or even if "helping" is the right impulse for me to have right now. I fully agree with your analysis.
But I still want to tell you about this, so I guess I will?
Here in CA water, there's a group down in the worst of the unequal agricultural lands called the Community Water Center. I myself disregarded them for their first decade, and then I couldn't believe that they could ever win. They're steadily organizing the local poor (Hispanic and black) communities on water issues, and have won a ton of victories around clean drinking water. Now, after fifteen years of work, the original organizers have been appointed to powerful state positions and if you want to do work in the area, you need their buy-in. That's all pretty well known.
But it is their next phase of work that is blowing my mind. They've decided on an electoral strategy for taking over water districts. If the rich district won't connect to their poor towns, they're going to get elected to the district board and change policy. They are training candidates up from scratch, on both water and campaigning. They think they can turn the vote out. I've never seen the like; it is at least a ten year effort. I couldn't have imagined it, because 1. no one ever fucking runs for water board elections and 2. I just thought water district boards were inexorably white male farmers and engineers who first got elected in the 80s. It never occurred to me that the boards could be different. But it occurred to the CWC and they've got (umc, white, progressive women) funders for the strategy based on their previous wins. I don't think there's any pushback or counter-campaigning yet, because who could imagine water districts not being old and dominant and white? Frankly I think the same strategy would work for water districts in major cities.
Honestly, if it works, I halfway expect that the landowners/growers would dissolve the districts or refuse to pay fees or I don't even know rather than be in districts that are run for non-farming poor communities. But I think we'll find out, because I think the CWC is gonna win this too.
I'm not sure what my point is. I don't mean to be all "glimmer of hope!!!!!!" Maybe that there are long grinding strategies that aren't dead ends? That people more brilliant than I am found and created unforeseeable leverage (that isn't rioting)?
I'm so sorry that it all genuinely sucks.
But it's not like I think there's a really good alternative to rioting at this point
Just stop it. Of course there is. Talk to the older folks in the civil rights movement, how much of their progress was via looting? They made huge strides decades ago in a much whiter more conservative America and it wasn't by burning their own neighborhoods.
There's been a ton of progress and that can continue but it won't be via riots and looting. Police shootings are down like 90 percent since the 70's. For christ's sakes pre 1982 the cops could justifiably shoot a felony suspect in the back just for running away. Your biggest three city departments in the country are minority white. Departments in places like Memphis and DC are majority black. On this current death a black police chief immediately fired the officers, your mayor is calling for criminal charges, and a billionaire nutjob president is openly calling for a federal investigation. I know more cops than all of you combined and every one of them regardless of political leaning is saying these guys are going to catch a charge. It's not 1960, quit making excuses for worthless people who don't actually give a shit about anything but taking advantage of the situation.
A large amount of progress in the civil right movement involved breaking various laws during protests. Without training and experienced leadership, you aren't going to have a protest that meets tear gas and clubs and doesn't get out of hand. Close to nobody is naturally that patient and anybody for any reason can drive to Minneapolis if they want to be there. The protestors are somehow expected to have more control over a demonstration than the city of Minneapolis is supposed to have over its police force.
It's all well and good for various leaders to plead for calm, but I don't see how anybody can say there shouldn't be protests and I don't see how a protest could develop without a risk of blowing up. The people responsible for maintaining public order are very deservedly not trusted, benefit from the situation getting out of hand because it makes them needed more, and have the ability to goad the protestors into blowing up by shooting tear gas at them with impunity.
The riots are bad and they are a failure of police and government.
I don't live there now, but I lived for 8 months between the site of the murder and the precinct buildin at the start of my divorce 5 years ago. The pictures and videos are horrifying.
I am immersed in work stress, moving preparation, and child care sitting in a suburb less than 10 miles away feeling frustrated and angry and hopeless. It seems obvious to me from the videos that the police have done everything they can to escalate the situation, and it seems more than plausible that the initial Automart vandalism that started the private property destruction was done by an agent provocateur (police or alt-right or other)--the well-groomed white guy in brand new protective and identity-hiding gear was being yelled at by multiple black protesters to stop and he did it anyway then immediately left the scene.
The MPD at this point essentially needs to be dissolved and rebuilt from the ground up. And it will never happen.
I kicked in what I could to the protestor bail fund and I am going to try to get out to one of the peripheral protests this weekend with my kids. I wish I could do more.
FWIW, after Stephon Clark, we didn't get riots that damaged property, because the mayor told the cops to be present but yield everywhere they possibly could (including protests on a major freeway) and de-escalate however possible. After two days of large protests walking up and down the streets, there was no riot. That is a possible thing, with good city leadership.
This is going to spread so much Covid though.
Update to 93: a very likely candidate for the AutoZone window-breaking has been identified as a St. Paul police officer by his ex. (I don't have the provenance or the expertise to 100% say that the "texts from his ex" messages aren't faked, but it all looks credible to me.)
Jesus fucking Christ.
You also kind of have to watch what people say about their ex. It is plausible, but early.
I was just asked if I want to be a marshal, medic, or legal observer for a protest being planned here this weekend. I really DON'T, but I'm trying to think about that reflexive reaction before actually responding.
Yeah, it's certainly the fault of the police here, even if it turns out that it wasn't an actual cop seeding actual vandalism. The reason he would be doing it, if he did, is because the police would probably stop and the whole concept of rioting creating leverage is just completely wrong. IMO, rioting lowers the likelihood of serious charges, and raises the likelihood acquittals.
It's not in anyone's control, because of the fucked up situation the police, prosecutor, and government have created. But that's no reason to try to gin up some sort of tactical silver lining.
(I'm going to our protest tomorrow morning.)
The precinct building has been abandoned by cops and I just watched a livestream of folks attempting to start it on fire. Buildings are burning in St. Paul in my old neighborhood.
Fuck.
Well this has gone an unfortunately predictable route. Cheer this stupidity on, it's real easy when you're not bearing the consequences.
The guy bearing the consequences was slowly choked to death, on film, and with people pleading for his life, by the co-workers of the people tear-gassing the protestors.
Some corroboration for what Chopper said here https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1266107862918377472?s=21
And here, read down the thread too
https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1266166402521522176?s=21
I understand its important to riot right now but also people need to get the fuck home before the plague explodes again.
It's probably too late to stop that.
They are starting to close up the covid-19 hospital overflow sites here. We didn't end up needing them. I hope Minnesota is keeping theirs around.
103: which consequences? The racist police violence by the MPD and the lack of any sort of repercussion has been a problem since there has been an MPD. In the past decade plus, the police union has been led by a Trumpist with white nationalist ties. And activists have been fighting for change, peacefully, incident after incident after incident.
All the protests were peaceful to begin with--and then the rubber bullets and tear gas came out.
I wish that the small businesses hadn't burned. I wish that the neighborhood wasn't going to be impacted while things are rebuilt. But if you remove any possible avenue of actually making peaceful change, and then you escalate and provoke (whether or not a cop started the vandalism), what else do you expect to happen. And if the National Guard and SWAT roll in and people are killed by them, it is the NG and SWAT and the people who ordered them in who are at fault.
Watch this video. Tell me that woman doesn't have the right to be angry. https://twitter.com/vhic3adibe/status/1266159953431220224?s=19
I wish to God this wasn't happening, but the state can only put it's knee on the neck of a community for so long before people start fighting back.
107: believe it or not the early protests (and some of the ones still going) are being done with some measure of masking and social distancing. My ex texted me a pic of the one she was at tonight. It looked weird.
I wish that the neighborhood wasn't going to be impacted while things are rebuilt.
Could be decades.
Denver: https://twitter.com/bellers03/status/1266174838374313992?s=21
Natilo's First Rule of Revolution: Don't disarm the proletariat
Natilo's Second Rule of Revolution: You can always find a shill
Natilo, as far as I am aware you've never planned a revolution or carried out a revolution been involved in a revolution or even been in the same country as a revolution that was happening. But even just from watching the BBC you should have realised that successful revolutions don't normally involve armed proletariats. 1986 in the Philippines. 1989 in the former Soviet empire (with the exception of Romania). 2004 Ukraine, 2003 Georgia. The ones that go well - that end up with an outbreak of liberty and equality and all that good stuff - involve massive public demonstrations, not street fighting. Street fighting gets proletarians (literally "breeders") killed.
Something which strikes me about the UK in the context of this story - we had riots back in 2011, after the Duggan shooting, and at the time these were very widely linked to the government's austerity policies. Austerity didn't go away, but in the following nine years we have had no riots at all (though police shootings haven't gone away either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_Kingdom).
It gets a bit weirder
https://amp.kstp.com/articles/george-floyd-fired-officer-overlapped-security-shifts-at-south-minneapolis-club-may-28-2020-5743990.html
Guess which state is currently the tipping point for November. https://electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/tipping_point.html
I've got insomnia here in Sacramento. Got the front door open and I can hear helicopters circling and police radios. But I can't find any information about what is happening online and I'm too old to go look in person. Just today the Sacramento sheriff released bad footage from 2017, where they shot a man running away. That isn't going to help.
The only saving grace I can see for this weekend is that the temperature will drop thirty degrees, so it won't be maddening heat on top of it all.
Guess I'll make our signs for tomorrow evening or Saturday morning or both.
116: Chaupin murdered someone he knew personally? George Floyd was his coworker? That's absolutely horrifying. It's like the woman cop from Texas, Guyger, who killed her neighbor.
And I cannot imagine being the kind of person who looks at police violence like this -- the original coldblooded murder and then the inflammatory and abusive reaction to the protests about it --and gets self righteous about the tactics of people reacting to police abuse. That's grotesque.
I don't think ajay was being self-righteous, if that's who you meant. It seems to me that his position is that whether or not rioting is understandable or morally justified, it doesn't actually work. It won't improve the conditions of south Minneapolis and it won't change the culture of the police.
I myself am not clear about the second point. I suspect the threat of really widespread violence was one of the factors that set in motion the changes within police departments after the 60s which have, over a period of decades, led to majority black police departments in majority black cities. Whether the so far limited rioting in Minneapolis will have that effect or simply further polarise things is an interesting and important question about which I have no relevant information at all, an ignorance shared by at least some other commenters here.
116: Wait, the policeman's name is "Chauvin"? As in "chauvinism"? Just when you think the writing on that 2020 show can't get more hackish...
Oh, I was talking about gswift, I thought that was clear. Ajay seemed to be in some more specifically interpersonal way bitching at Natilio, which seemed pointless but not the same kind of horrifying redirection away from the actual malefactors.
The question of whether riots are the most sensible, effective type of mass action, and then implicitly judging whoever planned and scheduled the riot for making bad choices, seems to be framing the question tendentiously. If the police murder civilians and seem unlikely to face punishment for it, there are going to be mass protests. If the police gas the protesters and shoot them with rubber bullets, the protests are going to become riots. If you think riots are a bad thing (which I do), focusing on stopping the police murders seems like the right thing to do.
Chauvin, right, not Chaupin. I can't ever spell anyone's name until a week into a story.
121: I assumed that that was directed at gswift and Charley, and also at the president of the local NAACP, who are the only ones so far in this thread to wonder out loud whether the riots will have a desirable effect.
The 1981 Brixton riots led to the Scarman enquiry which led to PACE, which was certainly a Good Thing, and the Toxteth riots led to a fair amount of investment in Merseyside aimed at improving conditions there. The 1985 riots led to much better training and control of police firearms units. Does that mean the riots succeeded? I don't think you can answer that question because it implies that the riots had an aim in mind - you might as well say that the shooting of Cherry Groce succeeded, which would be really perverse.
I was talking about armed revolutions, which are different.
Why on earth would it be directed at Charley, who hasn't said a thing redirecting responsibility from the actual problem, police violence? What a strange thing for you to say.
The question of whether riots are the most sensible, effective type of mass action, and then implicitly judging whoever planned and scheduled the riot for making bad choices, seems to be framing the question tendentiously.
Yes - also nonsensically, I would say. Riots don't get planned or scheduled.
Wait, didn't you guys have recreational weekly soccer riots? Have those stopped since 2011?
126: because Charley said "the whole concept of rioting creating leverage is just completely wrong. IMO, rioting lowers the likelihood of serious charges, and raises the likelihood acquittals. It's not in anyone's control, because of the fucked up situation the police, prosecutor, and government have created. But that's no reason to try to gin up some sort of tactical silver lining."
Thanks for making that explicit -- someone particularly slow might have missed it otherwise.
128: they've stopped since, pretty much, the 1980s, thanks to better stadium design and better policing. (And, probably, the phenomenal expense of actually attending a Premier League match these days.) Proper sports rioting now is I think more in the Middle East (especially Egypt), South Asia, and a few countries in Europe - I think Italy has a fair bit.
130 to 127.
And if you can't tell the difference between what Charley was saying and what gswift was saying, I can't help you with that.
What you think the point is isn't clear to me. My point is that gswift going off on people in Minneapolis as "worthless people who don't actually give a shit about anything but taking advantage of the situation" is a redirection of responsibility away from where it belongs. I didn't see anyone else doing that.
I suspect one relevant factor is the difference between British and American miles. Toxteth is a bit distant from where the middle classes live in Liverpool, but Brixton is really, geographically, close to middle class London. So a riot there is hard for the political classes to ignore. The poor parts of US cities are in my experience much lower density and much further from where the voters live. So if they get trashed the problem does not seem so politically salient.
[I was sent to cover the riots in Toxteth as my first proper journalistic assignment. I had no fucking clue what to do or how to go about doing it so I retain a vivid panicked visual snapshot of the width of the road that had been trashed, and so the size of the crowd there must have been. That, and everyone saying "It's worse than the blitz", something which, even then, almost none of them could have actually remembered. An interesting glimpse of the hold the war has on the English imagination.]
The decontextualized clip? If I heard the whole thing, I might think she was mistakenly redirecting responsibility from the police violence that's the primary problem. Without that, I'm not really in a position to engage with her.
137 -- police violence is clearly the underlying problem. The question is whether the violence of the rioters is simply adding another layer of problems. Right now, that's the urgent problem, even if cleaning up the police force is the important one.
Still missing the point, I think. The current police violence is inflaming and exacerbating the rioting. Get the police under control and the rioting is unlikely to continue.
137: Context and a short interview here. I am sure any characterization I attempt will be a mischaracterizion and itself will likely be mischaracterized. So everyone should read it and miischaracterize it to themselves.
Moby- I want to thank you for 92. I like the way that contextualized the riot. I also feel like you pre-refuted ajay's 127.
LB, I don't think riots work like that. [not meant snippily] At least, some do and some don't; looting riots stop when people get exhausted and everything that can be looted has been. Riots where the aim is to attack the police might end when the police retreat but that retreat has to stop somewhere and then there is a new front line.
Ruptures of the public order are polarizing, who knew?
And our totally chill president has weighed in with a "When the looting starts the shooting starts" tweet which was given a Terms of service violation notice but remained up because "may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible." Politically this suckers going to 11.
Fox News whipsawing between "shoot 'em all: and "Ingraham: To our African American fellow citizens I say this. Given his own experience with an out of control FBI and unfair investigations.. President Trump knows how poisonous an out of control law enforcement process can be."
Take a look at Megan's 94 for my thinking. Similarly, while my god is the NYPD far from perfect, angry protests here have tended not to turn into destructive riots, and I think a lot of that is down to non-inflammatory policing.
Megan's 94 also describes what, as I understand, happened in Pittsburgh after the Antwon Rose shooting (JRoth can probably correct me if I'm off on this). An interstate was shut for hours; only one person was arrested, but she was quite literally asking for it and wouldn't have accepted any other outcome. Later protests that started in the gentrifying part of town and went to the traditionally bougie part had little property damage (from my memory, could be wrong).
The poor parts of US cities are in my experience much lower density and much further from where the voters live.
There's lots of variability in this. Usually "where the voters live" (which I'm just going to take at face value) are on average lower density and further away; most metro area Americans are suburban, not to say that there aren't poor suburbs. Often there'll be at least one highly visible poor, at least moderately dense, mostly minority area abutting a CBD.
Anyway. Fuck Trump for inflaming this. Fuck the craven DA who's teeing up not prosecuting or going through the motions. That Floyd and the murderer seem to have worked together is astounding. Everything is awful, and for those of us who can't do anything else for this state failure, donating to the bail fund will have to suffice. (Maybe there'll be some more general fund to help people pick up the pieces afterwards?)
The quote in my post was from someone in Frowner's twitter feed -- a sense I read as somewhere between 'now we're getting somewhere' and 'maybe this'll work out after all.' The police are provoking violence because the juxtaposition of Chauvin and Kap kneeling is devastating to them, among the people with the actual power to make the DA behave differently, and jeez, I don't know how you make real progress on the police union problem, but it's going to have to be done politically, and that's going to require having the polarization fall differently. So the police needed to change the narrative. Rioting does that, to their short term advantage.
This isn't, and isn't going to be a revolution, imo. I don't think rioting will create leverage on the anti-police violence side, but instead creates leverage on the pro-police violence side. I'm not cheering on that leverage, by any means.
It was interesting watching Gayle King interviewing Attorney General Keith Ellison this morning. I'm not normally a big fan of King, but she acquitted herself really well -- really held Ellison's feet to the fire. Ellison, meanwhile, was quite flat -- except when he got visibly (but not excessively) annoyed with King. He clearly didn't want to discuss charging the officers -- he merely asserted that it wasn't the job of the attorney general to do so. King kept pushing and he said he "assumed" the charging authority (which he carefully did not name) had good reasons for not charging the officers at this time.
Not sure what Ellison could/should do here. It took guts to show up on TV. I'm glad I don't have his job.
CBS coverage is generally contemptible, which is why I watch it. (I find the rest of TV news contemptible and horrifyingly incompetent.) I've been really impressed with their coverage of Minneapolis. And Twitter is accusing the president of glorifying violence. I wonder if something is changing ...
The 1981 Brixton riots led to the Scarman enquiry which led to PACE, which was certainly a Good Thing, and the Toxteth riots led to a fair amount of investment in Merseyside aimed at improving conditions there. The 1985 riots led to much better training and control of police firearms units. Does that mean the riots succeeded? I don't think you can answer that question because it implies that the riots had an aim in mind - you might as well say that the shooting of Cherry Groce succeeded, which would be really perverse.
I think the riots succeeded if things were done to make riots less likely in the future. But it seems like that has to overcome the tension between the interest of the government and citizens, for whom rioting is bad, and the police, for whom rioting is good because it makes them seem like the Thin Blue Line Between Order And Chaos. (also a lot of petty criminals benefit from rioting but they don't have influence over policy)
I don't have much of value to add, except that when I moved to Minneapolis in 2004, I was shocked to hear how frequently police violence led to large civil settlements. Even just from listening to MPR, it seemed clear that there was a really serious problem with the police there. (I also lived near that Target for 6 months, and it really was much shittier than all of the other fancy Targets in the metro area. It sent a pretty clear message about who was valued.)
The Republic of Georgia fired its entire highway police force and started over from scratch, with a much, much smaller number of officers.
It can be done.
Certainly just replacing the chief isn't working.
Organizational culture can be completely poisoned in a way that's not fixable by just replacing leadership. That's the whole "Abolish ICE" idea -- it's not to leave immigration completely unregulated, it's that ICE as an organization was founded with an unproductively and abusively militarized culture, and whatever actually necessary things it does should be done by less screwed up organizations.
How, practically, you shake up police forces enough to fix them, I don't know.
Organizational culture can be completely poisoned in a way that's not fixable by just replacing leadership.
This seems to be the message of the TV documentary series about Sunderland F.C.
As has been noted, it's a mistake to infer a plan or a strategy to people who are just acting in the moment, but I wonder what the police were thinking when they arrested the CNN crew on camera.
So, apparently, a CNN crew was arrested while covering the riots (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arrested/index.html ) and, in other news, seven people were shot (by an unknown person) at protests for Breonna Taylor's death https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/7-shot-at-louisville-protest-over-fatal-police-shooting/ar-BB14Kdkq
My impression of the efficacy of riots comes mostly from Dick Gregory who famously got shot while trying to talk people down in what became the LA riots (and also said, of his participation in protest marches, that as long as people are marching they aren't rioting) but noted that riots in NYC did get the police department to change requirements which had been making it more difficult for minorities to become officers (a height requirement IIRC).
Would it help or hurt (and would it be legal) to have the National Guard brought in and the police sent home during situations like this? In general the military has a better culture around deescalation and rules of engagement than the police do and their presence would be less provocative.
This (note: I mean the video with text "Well THAT was uncalled for," when I click on the link the Twitter web client focuses on the previous tweet) occurred at another protest downtown. If that's what the police are willing to do, on camera, in the CBD, to white people...
153- Make them volunteer forces, like some fire departments? Less "us vs. them" bullshit thin blue line mentality, normal people without fascism fetishes who have regular jobs could be part of the force, less abusive or quota-focused patrolling of targeted communities (since they don't have to justify full-time work) but more self-policing from within communities. OTOH it might just attract more crazy gun nuts who now have an excuse to play vigilante.
Volunteer fire departments tend to attract arsonists.
159.last is definitely what would happen. There's lots of issues with the police, but 159 would make all of them worse.
Part of the problem comes when the police live outside of the city they patrol.
162: The State Supreme Court's recent decision that Pittsburgh cannot have a residency requirement may be a sort of natural experiment.
Why is it that the only strong unions left are malevolent and work against the instincts of wider society?
And, in an attempt to look for constructive ways out, are there known examples of corrupt and dreadful police forces being cleaned up and turned around? You might argue that this was done to the London Met in the Seventies and early Eighties when parts at least were thoroughly corrupt. Are there analogies from US cities?
(this to LB: also to LB -- if you're claiming that these riots could have been averted if the cops had allowed the original crowds to demonstrate and march off their anger, as Megan suggests, I'm not actually arguing. I don't know enough. I was thinking about what might be done now the shit has hit the fan and been very widely spattered. As Charley has said, this is not the beginning of a revolution and it is in fact strengthening the counter revolution.)
Plenty of examples of corruption being cleaned up (police selling drugs, police running protection rackets), but it's harder to find examples of "overzealous" over-violent policing culture being cleaned up. It's more like norms gradually changing. Gswift points out earlier in the thread that things were worse in the past in many places in some ways.
And, in an attempt to look for constructive ways out, are there known examples of corrupt and dreadful police forces being cleaned up and turned around?
Isn't the the Halford bat-signal? Wasn't he interested in the history of the LAPD?
165 may be unfair - it's more like improvement in these things does happen but it's gradual, it's not "We kicked out the bad apples and reorganized everything". The LAPD clearly improved.
153: I'm not sure all of this can be hung on (individual) organizational culture, it may have escalated to professional culture as a whole. If that goes on for long enough, there literally isn't anyone in the system who hasn't been adversely affected. I'm not sure how you solve it.
How, practically, you shake up police forces enough to fix them, I don't know.
Pass a city ordinance saying that civil settlements come out of the PD budget and not the City general fund. Make police violence a real problem for the police executives.
Walking patrols. Get them out of their cars.
Isolate and pare down the violent core of policing by:
Create a second set of non-militarized, un-weaponed mediation-trained responders, who do the mental health and EMT responses and whatever other non-violent calls come in. After they've built trust, give them more and more police functions and take away police authorities/responsibilities.
Make detecting a different agency, that can use police personnel as bodyguards, if necessary. We don't see the FBI standing on people's necks.
When the police can't also point to the non-violent things they do, they can either make a better case that we're glad to have their force potential (domestic violence calls) or we'll realize we don't want them to have it.
re 168. NB I don't at all think you can lay all the blame for this on police and police culture. They have been used as a blunt political tool by many levels of government for various reasons. I don't see how you can do that in a ham-fisted way (as it has been done) without causing lasting damage.
169 has a lot of good stuff. Another big one is enforcing speeding by camera like all other countries do. You just don't see police pulling people over in other countries. It's dangerous (to the person being pulled over, to the police, and to other people on the highway) and pointless.
A big side benefit of things like 169 is that one big cause of police brutality is that police departments are understaffed and have difficulty hiring, which means they're hiring and retaining people who they simply shouldn't be hiring. Tamir Rice's killer is a particularly notable example of someone who should never have been hired in the first place, but I bet that's true of many of police killing people. A smaller more focused police department might be able to be more selective in hiring. The culture of police instinctively covering for other police as though they're the Mafia (which is particularly notable in this case, where the three other officers didn't intervene even though they almost certainly wouldn't have murdered someone themselves) is a problem, but it's a problem that's very much exacerbated by the presence of officers who shouldn't have been hired in the first place and who should have been fired long ago.
re 169: I think there are a lot of good ideas, and a lot of examples internationally to look at where policing functions better. But how much of the problem is: we "don't know what else to do", and how much of it is "we don't know (or want to?) how to get from A to B".
Musing more, I can imagine a version of the "second set" where a completely fire-walled training and C&C structure leads to resources that are much more capable of handling the non-violent interactions is put in place, and over time takes over more and more of the day-to-day. But I can't really imagine a plausible path to get it funded and up and running, can you? I can also imagine versions of this that are done by the existing infrastructure and completely screwed up, which seem more likely.
The plausible path to getting it running is a spasm of reform after a terrible incident and riots. It would only happen after a crisis.
Living in Baltimore, this whole thing is like deja vu all over again.
I'm afraid our experience doesn't suggest that much substantive will happen as a result. Here the main consequence, other than local places going out of business, has been a revolving door of new police chiefs. Each one comes in with a lot of talk about reform and community outreach and then leaves after 6 months to a year.
175: I agree; but sadly I don't think that for example Minneapolis this week is nearly big enough. (yet?).
I suspect 176 is evidence for 168. It's like further up thread - agreeing that the LAPD has improved is quite separable from believing the LAPD is doing well.
Yeah, I've been gritting my teeth talking about the NYPD. They're not a healthy organization at all; they just seem better than Minneapolis and some other places on handling an angry demonstration without whipping it up into a violent riot.
How, practically, you shake up police forces enough to fix them, I don't know.
House them under the umbrella of social workers. Make the police force a department that answers to social workers. On 911 calls and other emergencies, there should always a social worker present, and the director of the whole shebang should have a background in social work.
I think Frowner was the one who put this idea in my head originally, but I parrot it all the time.
I don't know it, and don't want to research it, but there's a whole legal doctrine about giving cops the benefit of the doubt, to a ridiculous extent. We're, like, not even bothering with addressing that? Because people have been trying to (actually, I think CA did pass a bunch of laws and changed that standard by a little after Stephon Clark) and it doesn't go anywhere unless you elect better DA's?
As Charley has said, this is not the beginning of a revolution and it is in fact strengthening the counter revolution.
Okay - here's the presidential benchmark: With today's latest update, the 538 poll summary has Trump exactly 11 percentage points underwater on approval/disapproval -- 42.6/53.6. This happens to be the same result as yesterday.
So assuming Trump maintains the theme of shooting looters, we'll get a datapoint on whether riots play into the hands of reactionaries.
Or maybe tomorrow's outrage will make everybody forget today's, and this won't matter at all.
It's an interesting thought experiment, but when I think back to the police I shadowed for three months way back when, there are large parts of their job where social workers would not be helpful at all.
I actually was present taking notes and so on after a couple of 911 calls and in one particularly futile murder enquiry. My presence made things worse; made people more suspicious more defensive and so on. And in the fairly non-violent crowd-control parts of the job (old-fashioned football matches; the picket line at Wapping when Murdoch was breaking the print unions) there was absolutely no role for an unarmed untrained civilian except to keep out of the way and not be too frightened.
On the other hand I did I suppose record and publish a number of bad interactions and though my presence didn't stop them it's possible that the subsequent book had some effect. Certainly no one ever was offered the same access again.
See also David Simon's pre-Wire book about the Baltimore PD, Homicide.
Thirty percent of the country can prevent improvement on any of these issues if they are willing to pay the costs.
Not entirely, to the thirty percent thing. They can't prevent pockets of improvement. CA did pass that reform bill, because Republicans are just about 30% of our state legislature.
I'm having a hard time staying non-conspiratorial about all of this.
It seems very clear that in 2016, the Trump campaign believed it benefitted from BLM protests and the attendant crackdowns. It also seems the case that, while police violence against black people is constant atrocity, we haven't had significant national stories about BLM protests since 2016.
Now, just as the accepted COVID-19 pandemic US death toll crossed the significant 100k mark and the 2020 election campaign has six months to go, a white police officer (apparently a pretty rich one, too) calmly, patiently, intentionally murders a black man in broad daylight.
Announcement that Chauvin has been arrested just came out.
The district attorney was point a shitpost conference and I was starting to wonder.
I don't know what I was trying to do there, but it wasn't my phone's fault.
169. I don't often agree with Megan except about water engineering, but this is spot on. Should be made the basis of a movement/manifesto.
Yes, though it's not just Republicans who've been holding reform back. AB392 on deadly force only passed after it was amended down enough to get the state police/sheriff lobbies to switch to neutral, and that let it pass with only 3 no votes in the Senate and 0 noes in the Assembly. (50% of legislative Republicans voted yes by my count; 40% abstained.)
Create a second set of non-militarized, un-weaponed mediation-trained responders, who do the mental health and EMT responses and whatever other non-violent calls come in. After they've built trust, give them more and more police functions and take away police authorities/responsibilities.
I posed this concept in a public forum and the (non-city-employee) panelists reacted as if I had said "Abolish the police!" Although we have created a Department of Violence Prevention which could eventually grow into this. Maybe people don't like it articulated out loud.
qualified immunity is the legal doctrine piece of this appalling shameful "puzzle" (it isn't a puzzle bc it is not credible to think it is unknown-unknowable).
am tempted by megan's prescription but it fails to account for the history or horrific abuses of social service agencies inflicted on poor and non-white families for basically ever. there is not some well of support and trust of social workers out there to work with.
I think the key part of the solution is protests to ensure the arrest of police officers who kill unarmed black people.
194.2 is my immediate response too. I'm definitely nowhere near "all social workers are bastards" but the current child welfare system has so many racist, classist flaws that I suspect would be amplified if we expanded it. (And I realize social workers perform many other jobs too. But I would still worry, and I think the negative seeds have been planted long ago.)
105 yes but does shit all with qualified immunity.
Yeah, it's also vertiginously, grimly amusing to speculate about the funding and management structures for the combined police + human services department. So many possibilities for compounded dysfunction. The cream would, um, not rise to the top.
A fat ginger BLM protester yelled FUCK YOU as I drove past the precinct, I laughed and gave him a thumbs up. Good times.
Well done sending the message that the police don't give a fuck. You showed that guy.
Fat ginger didn't stick around to talk. Had a nice chat with the actual black guy next to him who didn't seem to appreciate white guy bringing the hostility.
Qualified immunity doesn't protect you from stronger state law (if passed) though, right?
203: Cars have these features that allow you to flip around and park and get out of them.
The leader/organizer of our BLM protest started off with a thank you, and asked for a round of applause, for our local police force.
202 smacks a little of confirmation bias. Notwithstanding that it might have been impossible to have a useful conversation with "the fat ginger" right then, gswift: has any of this caused you to reflect on what you personally, your dept. generally, and your profession more generally can improve on in order to address some of what's behind that "fuck you"?
Just for the record, I'm not the one who suggested the association with social workers (and I don't know enough to know whether one would be wise although I'm certainly willing to accept Thorn's and dq's knowledge. I wasn't thinking of the repeated relationship of social work, nor the set of authorities that social workers have). I was thinking more like the Burning Man Guardian people (defuse fights, get sick/high people home) or Park Rangers (drive away black bears).
oh lb i just don't know why you bother he isn't your 8 yr old going through an annoying phase. he's never to my knowledge said, let alone demonstrated, he'd learned anything new or changed his views on anything as a result of the vast amount of reaction & engagement he's gobbled up from this imaginary community over the years. at some point i wonder whether anyone who regularly engages reflects on their own motivations. yes you got the benefit of the pure unadulterated viewpoint of a cop with a v muscular father (gfather? can't remember) and tic-like ejaculations of just-so, just-enough liberal-in-a-red-state credentials. and that's it.
208: it was heebie in 180. And absolutely no offense meant, heebie, but with 30 years of insider knowledge about the workings of a county human services department in a wildly racist state (via parent), it seems more nightmarish the longer I think about it. Changing the organizational structure somehow is a reasonable thing to discuss, for sure.
208: I'm thinking particularly of mental health responses. Police forces in every major metro I've lived in (half a dozen ish) have been universally terrible at this. There is also a lot of community policing stuff where it seems like a combination of training and attitude can often get in the way, maybe a different service can be used there. That isn't even getting into the ridiculous amount of cushy overtime slots some cities have carved out for police. I'm sure there are other things they aren't doing well, with a short-ish path to replacing with something more functional.
Especially mental health responses. But I've seen cops called out for unbelievably drunk people; person experiencing homelessness collapsed on the street; after the fact police reports. The first two could be handled by an EMT or have a nursing basis. The other could be handled by a smart clerk. There are whole categories of police work that don't need to have the use of state force underlying the interaction. Shit, Gswift's own job as a school resource officer doesn't have to be based in authority to use force or potential state violence.
212, agreed. In many/most parts of the world, gswift's job being done by a (presumably armed) officer would be considered bizarre.
If, for example, you could dial 911 and ask specifically for a Community Nurse to arrive in a rush (here, for a heart attack, you dial 911 and get a cop or firefighter), think how useful that would be, and how many calls to the police it would displace. Just 'cause police are the only people whom you can ask for help in a hurry doesn't mean that they are the right people to ask for many of the things they do now. They are the monopoly on fast help, and so people have to call them even when they don't want the other cop functions/skills/militarization/longstanding racist culture.
One of the only two times I've ever been involved with calling the cops (other bystander actually dialed) was for an unresponsive homeless guy on a very very cold night. We didn't need law enforcement, we needed some way to get him indoors and safe, but there wasn't another obvious number to call for someone who'd come help.
So weird that the cops keep arresting black people while they're in the process of dying of natural causes. SO WEIRD.
214 reminds me of the inanity of fire trucks (crewed ladder trucks) being used as ambulances in some places; as far as I can see as a way to continue justifying budgets as fire calls drop over time - rather than figuring out how to deploy more ambulances. I know of one effort to at least post an ambulance and crew at fire halls that was killed by union squabbles.
In some places, the fire crew are the people with the EMS training. The ambulance crew is less trained, usually cheaper.
216: Makes you think of Freddy Gray. Who knew Sudden Van Death Syndrome was a thing? Sometimes you put an apparently healthy man in a van and when they come out they're dying, and no one did anything wrong inbetween.
I've not caught up on the thread yet but: our power went out at 3am last night; something, not sure what, happened to the power station nearby. It was just fixed about forty minutes ago.
This morning when it was first light I could see a big, big cloud of smoke coming up from where the police station was.
I still have only a vague idea of what happened overnight. There's a curfew tonight and all public transit is shut down for the weekend. There were helicopters and sirens again pretty much all morning, tapering off by noon. Sirens much of the day.
Since we're heading into the coronavirus peak and we live near a hospital, I'm not sure how many are coronavirus sirens.
There has been a lot on twitter about how "good" businesses weren't getting broken into/burned, which has proved not to be the case. The library, health clinics and lots of small restaurants, etc have all been damaged, and one of my favorite restaurants, right near the police station, is partially burned. I should say that Gandhi Mahal, which has been quietly a real supporter of left issues, put out a statement that said they were sad that their restaurant had burned but that justice was more important and that they could rebuild but you can't bring back the dead.
My point in saying this is that I observe a common left-ish mistake of assuming a lot of specific intent and strategy on the part of rioters. Obviously there's some strategy - people planned to get the police station and they did; people were pretty systematic about breaking into Target, etc. But getting your windows smashed isn't a referendum on a perfectly average building or business and there shouldn't be back-reasoning like "the rioters are good, therefore they wouldn't break the windows on a good business". A riot needs to be understood as somethig besides an individual writ large.
I'm glad the power's back. Selfishly, I was worried because we've got stuff I stocked up on for coronavirus in the freezer and I didn't want to lose it all. The fridge started to warm or at least get less cool, but we don't really have anything in there except milk which would go bad in 12 hours in a warming fridge, and even the milk may make it, we'll see how it goes.
187: BLM kind of fell apart for internal reasons, too, and the election shifted focus elsewhere. Also I think a lot of people - even sort of including me - did think that once most of the country knew how frequent and unjustified police murders were, there would be enough shaming and public pressure that things would change. All that happened was now everyone knows that the police murder people and nothing happens. I think that on a hard-to-quantify level this took the wind out of the protests.
This is part of why I think there wasn't another non-riot option. All those people out there (almost all of them probably between about 18 and 30) have come into full political consciousness seeing that when you have big protests, even big militant protests, nothing changes. The cops and/or killers in question make a lot of money in far right grifter circles and the liberal establishment has learned the correct language to turn away anger, that's it. Now, in the sense that "not rioting" doesn't violate the laws of physics, there are other choices. But in the sense that you have a critical mass of very, very angry people who have been given fuck all reason to believe that any non-riot form of action achieves anything at all, well, something is going to kick off at some point.
I am worried about COVID spikes, although all this was outdoors, people were moving around and a majority were wearing masks even though in absolute numbers plenty were not. It's probably not as spike-causing an event as all those reopening protests, but still worrying. God willing, we're indoors until case counts start to decline, which is forecast for sometime in July.
v happy to hear from you frowner, & wise counsel re riots. kai thaler is good on the complexities of movements & non- / violence, have you read him?
207: Yeah, for almost 12 years now.
212: Megan, you want cops out of their cars and engaging with the community? That's the SRO program. Out here trying to get SROs out of the schools will not be well received. The parents and the schools like the program.
I'm just in awe of "Fat Ginger." Calling it tone-deaf is not nearly enough. To start that out comment with an insult that just feels like it's dripping contempt... Wow.
I stay quiet about it generally, but I'm of the "it's good to hear GSwift's voice on cop issues" bent, usually. I don't hear enough of that. But the fat ginger comment, hmm...
Of course it's contempt. He's not out there to engage and do something productive, he just wants performative shit talking.
What do you think would have been productive? Thanking you for your service?
Yeah, for almost 12 years now.
Have the last four years felt any different from the preceding 8 in terms of changing culture, finding leverage, exhausting options, etc.? Serious question. (I admitted moral failure way back in comment 23, so I direct you there for my response to the tu quoque?) I know you've talked about criminal justice reform initiatives with unintended bad consequences; I don't know if that's representative of your pessimism in general, or if other parts of the picture look brighter to you.
227: He could have had a real interaction with someone who works the neighborhood's where these issues are most relevant. Pretty sure he was more interested in signaling he is one of the good white guys.
223: That is neither it nor true, chief.
227: You're pretty sure about a lot of shit you have no way of actually knowing. It's almost like your passing off your prejudices as facts.
(230 last should refer to 229, stupid fingers)
218: right, but the fight was about putting a physical ambulance at the fire hall so they didn't have to run out in a truck. Sorry I wasn't clearer.
228: Away from the laptop for a bit, I'll give a proper answer when I'm not on a phone.
223: That is neither it nor true, chief.
Are you seriously pretending to have knowledge about my assignment and community interactions?
220: We had our power go out right after shopping for our own lockdown. Losing a fridge of food added a lot to our stress. So happy you didn't lose yours. It rilly sucked.
233: I am extremely comfortable defending the position that what was described is not an SRO, and that there are absolutely families and children, particularly of color, that feel unsafe in the presence of SROs, not all of whom would, incidentally, say so to your face.
223.first : so, what progress do you see? Or direction for progress?
I don't think Megans comment on cops out of their cars had anything to do with schools or SRO's, rather that beat cops in the old sense were better at some of this, which seems plausible.
Looks like the Minneapolis public schools may be getting rid of SROs.
And it looks like we're off to the races again, let's hope the power doesn't go out tonight. Unicorn Riot is probably the best livestream, although it's not always running:
https://t.co/HT96rhndM5?amp=1
Just now the sirens and helicopters have started back up.
Just found out that one of my casual acquaintances from the activist/punk scene got shot in the head with a plastic bullet and is in the hospital with a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage. My close friend from the activist/punk scene and HS got shot with plastic bullets a couple of decades ago, and still suffers a bunch of PTSD symptoms because of it. So, yeah, I don't have a lot of sympathy for other middle-class people upbraiding demonstrators. With my own eyes I've seen the "peace police" deliberately escalate tense situations to the point of violence because they don't like the way other people are protesting. I support a diversity of tactics, always have and always will. There are plenty of people in left-activist circles who have a deeply flawed analysis of protests and their function in society. There are certainly examples where peaceful protest alone made a big difference in people's lives, but they're few and far between. Direct action -- whether that's a riot or a general strike or a campaign of workplace sabotage -- gets the goods. If someone wants to lean on their demographic position, or involvement with non-profit corporations, in order to hector me about how everyone should behave themselves, that's up to them, but I'm under no compunction to listen.
I meant a couple different things, mostly that being inside a car gives people a bad sense of physical invulnerability that I would like cops (and all drivers) not to have.
My take on the SRO thing is that a good person will do a lot of good in that position, and very little of anything good depends on the exclusive police powers (search, restrain, arrest, use state-sanctioned violence). I have to assume that the good they do comes from attention, consistency, listening, advising, kindness, etc.
If, for example, the SRO program that Gswift is in "went private" and was bought out by an NGO who kept Gswift in place, I bet he could do virtually all of the same job without having police powers. I doubt the good SRO's think they achieve much by handcuffing kids, for example. (The bad SRO's aren't an argument for having cops in schools.)
235: Who cares. You bring 0 knowledge and experience to this discussion. You're more than welcome to visit and come learn something.
Let me take back everything I said about the NYPD being successful at handling protests without inflaming them. Not today they haven't been.
I don't think Megans comment on cops out of their cars had anything to do with schools or SRO's, rather that beat cops in the old sense were better at some of this, which seems plausible.
No it probably didn't but the SRO thing is very much in this spirit if done right. The families know who I am, they get my cell number if they want, they come to me with questions or advice they'd never call dispatch for.
so, what progress do you see? Or direction for progress?
There's already been good progress on the mental health front. CIT training universal and takes place in academy. We also use MCOT whenever possible.
https://healthcare.utah.edu/uni/programs/crisis-diversion.php
We also already have several social workers in the department who come to assist with calls for people who need connecting with resources.
On use of force stuff there's very much more emphasis on de escalation and slowing things down than there was a couple decades ago. The listed first level of use of force is dialog. You have to correctly answer this question on your annual re cert for things like baton and pepper spray. Also significant movement towards knock and announce warrants rather than no knock.
First place I'd recommend for immediate improvement in removing people who shouldn't be cops is at the state level. Every state mandates a state cert for a law enforcement officer. The ability to yank that takes the department and other local forces out of the picture. Union's don't have much recourse either. It's way too hard to get your cert pulled in many states. Much easier here, and helps keep people in line and remove idiots.
242: Cool, cool. It's the position of the armed officers of the state that only armed officers of the state are allowed to exercise the critical faculties of judgment on the manner in which the state should exercise its monopoly on violence? You are blessed with the powers of telepathy that allow you to not only divine the purpose and actions of the, ahem, fat ginger protestors who got under your skin earlier, but blog commenters?
You're a fuckin' asshole, dude.
To those of you who gently pushed back against my 180, you can trust that I know exactly 0% of what I'm talking about.
I did go to our local rally today, and the college students in charge started with the normal speeches on the courthouse steps, and then surprised everyone with a ~2 miles walk along the main drag through town. Spread out down the sidewalks with signs, the group looked way longer and more impressive than it did clustered at the courthouse, and I had to admit that it was a very good idea. The rally garnered significantly more attention than the normal stationary ones that we seem to hold here.
Anyway, Minneapolitans in the 'tariat: thinking of you and your city.
245: Offer still stands, for you or anyone here. Come for a day, week whatever. See what actually goes on and learn something.
Do I need to be a uniformed police to have an opinion on this assault? https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266557509331976192
Is it okay for a citizen to comment on this assault? https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1266552262563954695
244 might have answered my question in 228, but I am still a bit curious if you've felt a shift since 2016. (Or, for that matter, any other milestone.)
A thing to note is that there are articles - that we've posted here! - about how unusually progressive Gswift's particular police force is, compared to the scene nationwide. They do seem to do things much better, in terms of the tone set from the top down, than other places.
This cuts both ways - it means that Gswift is sometimes flip, especially when he seems to be describing a less-toxic environment than all the commenters here understand police departments to be. But it also means that Gswift himself should not be read as an ordinary cop mired in a toxic environment, the way commenters may be picturing.
213: That's because having an armed agent of the state in a school is bizarre.
just wow pick your moment hg & lb pick your fucking moment. i mean it's your space but wow.
For what it's worth gswift, it would be a mistake to think that nobody here has any directly relevant experience .
This is a well-named thread.
Even if my experience of US policing is limited to dealing with immigration officials I remain on team gswift here. The mpls police force seems to be a nurturing environment for racist fascist bastards. That clearly needs dealing with and there are probably other cities the same. We don't have any reason to believe that gswift works in such an environment. And some of the comments at least seem to me quite unrealistic about the role of force in maintaining social order. Perhaps this is taking us back to the Lord of the flies discussion. But however much can and should be done by social workers, emts, and so on there will always remain a need for some force which stands for more than the rule of the strongest gang. Concede that many police forces fall - how can I put it - rather short of this ideal. But the underlying problem is still injustice rather than the idea of law enforcement.
252: Wait, why me? I think gswift is being an asshole in this thread, blaming people protesting police violence as worthless and contemptible.
And to be clear, has been an asshole about police violence repeatedly in the past.
255: When you say you're on team gswift, does that include contempt for people protesting police murder? Because that's the team he's identified himself as on.
What I feel relative to 241 is that all the good such a person can do rests, ultimately, on the knowledge that if you fuck them over, or cheat on the programme, there will be retribution. I was confirmed in this opinion by watching a really good man, a retired judge, try to help some teenage kids in trouble by taking them walking/climbing in the Welsh mountains. He has been recommended to me by an admiring liberal friend who thought he was doing enormous good, and a shining beacon of what the criminal justice system ought to be. Well, I thought that, too, until I spent the weekend with them. The boys took the piss continually. They defied him about things like smoking and drinking and there was at some stage a distinct threat of physical violence in the air.
I had gone there to write a story about rehabilitation and in the end wrote nothing at all because the story I had seen was one of young men learning the opposite lesson -- that they were strong and the rules were bullshit and all that liberal crap was for the weak.
Incidentally, there was no racial aspect to this at all. So far as I remember, all the protaganists were white.
Oh, honestly. Teenagers are ungrateful and disrespectful, so the only way they'll learn decent behavior is through the threat of force? I mean, I assume not your kids or my kids, but bad kids, who are completely different.
214. It's wierd how all the issues end up linking together (no it isn't). You see, here, if you dial 999/911/112 (they're all converged), the dispatcher asks which service you want and if somebody's had a heart attack they send a paramedic in a fast car followed by an ambulance. They can do this because medical and ambulance services aren't commpeting private companies. If there's a rumble outside a pub and somebody's been glassed, they'll send a paramedic and a cop. Etc. They're all emergency services.
255, I think you're generalising unjustifiably. His account is that he despises one of them, who shouted abuse at him just for wearing a uniform, but that he then gets out and has a perfectly respectful conversation with another. And, actually, I'm sure that some of the people protesting police murder -- not many, but a measurable fraction -- will just be opportunists who have no objection to brutal violence when it's their side dealing it out.
But it seems to me that the attitude of the protestor was that anyone who wears a police uniform is in favour of murdering unarmed black people and this is not only untrue, and specifically untrue in the case of gswift, but really counterproductive. You would not take kindly to being told that as a New York lawyer you have to be a fan of Roy Cohn. It wouldn't be a good way of starting a conversation with you about reforming the legal system.
Even if it were true, it would be a counsel of absolute despair because the only way police forces will get reformed is from within.
You forget that what's happening in Minneapolis generally is due to "worthless people taking advantage of the situation." Not a reaction to police murder, but worthless people.
You would not take kindly to being told that as a New York lawyer you have to be a fan of Roy Cohn. It wouldn't be a good way of starting a conversation with you about reforming the legal system.
And yet I think I could avoid expressing my total contempt for everyone who I perceived as doubting my unquestionably superior knowledge and good faith. Gswift does not meet that standard.
260 - teenage boys in my experience are like that or can be. And this isn't based primarily on "bad kids" but the children of the elite at single sex boarding schools. I think you're fortunate to have lived your life in a bubble where that side of human nature can be handwaved away.
What a bizarre accusation to make. I must be ignorant of how people behave because I don't think force is the only thing teenagers understand?
but that he then gets out and has a perfectly respectful conversation with another.
I'm sorry if I'm confusing the incident gswift related above, I'm not going up the thread to reread the comment, but a uniformed cop, turning his car around and getting out to have a nice friendly chat with someone who flipped him the bird is a form of intimidation. I might see this differently if it were a cop walking a beat.
That should "nice friendly chat" should be read with scare quotes.
Right. Two protesters were standing there, one flipped him the bird, he turned his car around and got out and the one who flipped him the bird fled. We're supposed to interpret that as the one remaining was pleasant and respectful out of fondness for the police rather than intimidation?
Gove me some credit here. I am not saying that force is the only thing teenagers understand, and certainly not that the imposition of force from the outside is the only way to deal with them.
The relationship between power and understanding is almost the opposite.
Teenagers who successfully use or threaten physical force are blocking themselves off from understanding any other form or argument. So long as you can solve your problems, or appear to, by hitting people or frightening them, you won't look for any other method. This is doubly true if you're in an environment where everyone around you believes the same.
If I were to apply this argument to the police, lots of people here might agree. Terms like brainless thugs would get thrown around. But you don't need a uniform to think like that, if "thought" is the right word for the process.
Supporting your argument by predicting that "lots of people here" would agree with you in a different context is not an effective mode of argumentation. You need to be able to point to people actually agreeing with you to make that work at all.
271: Tradititionally takes the form of "the lurkers support me in emails".
Hey gswift I hope you feel unwelcome here and go away
We don't have any reason to believe that gswift works in such an environment
Any reason? We don't have any reason? Of course we have at least one reason: he works in a police department in an American city. That's a reason! I'm sure that gswift doesn't love being randomly flipped the bird--who would-- but "#notallcops" is far less compelling as a response to "all cops are bastards" than "#notallmen" was to "#metoo". If you actually wish to position yourself as a well-meaning cop, maybe admitting that you've got an uphill battle and are justly regarded with suspicion, and letting it slide when a rando yells at you is a better way to show that than wheeling around to have a nice chat.
But however much can and should be done by social workers, emts, and so on there will always remain a need for some force which stands for more than the rule of the strongest gang. Concede that many police forces fall - how can I put it - rather short of this ideal. But the underlying problem is still injustice rather than the idea of law enforcement.
I am not personally so optimistic as to think that in the coming utopia there will be no need for something that can be called "law enforcement", but neither am I so satisfied with this rather abstract point as to believe that police forces as presently constituted in the real, actual US of A are, broadly speaking, salvageable as such.
Well, if you're right, the country is completely fucked. Which it may well be.
gswift also makes a big show of being a callous, dismissive asshole on this blog and has done that progressively moreso with his increasing number of years as a police officer. Recently the form of a walkback from some transphobic bullshit took the form of, well, I guess that's how I should talk with another cop, not here. This is reason to believe that even if his environment is marginally better than MPD, it has been a corrupting influence on him, he is a worse person for it, and it is probably pretty toxic.
Incidentally, if you construe broadly I am a member of a profession that exercises authority, sometimes coercive authority, and is viewed by suspicion by some people because of their history being abused by us. I make it a point to seek out environments where I can hear those complaints and even when I think something is distorted or unfair I never respond with any version of #notallmentalhealthprofessionals and if I am an active participant in the conversation I validate the other person's pain, anger, frustration, and mistrust. If I responded the way gswift did I would expect people to assume I was an abuser.
Friends of mine are posting on Facebook right now about being attacked by the police yesterday. She was shoved by more than one person and her partner was hit in the ribs with a baton. Only the police were armed. All protesters had their hands up. I am so angry.
Sorry, dq, I didn't mean to take sides exactly. I thought I could diffuse tensions.
I do have a tendency not to read the heated threads very closely, so it's a problem when I wade in. I did note that very early on in the thread gswift said in no uncertain terms that George Floyd was murdered, but then again his exact shtick is to slip back and forth between being reasonable and being offensive or provocative. But mostly: if I don't intend to wade in and carefully read what's happened, I shouldn't try to waltz in and make everything better.
I know she's not perfect, but Lori Lightfoot is delightful. First, the "FOP clown" comment and now this:
"We see the game he's playing because it's so transparent and he's not very good at it," Lightfoot said. "He wants to show failures on the part of Democratic local leaders ... his goal is to polarize, to destabilize local government and to enflame racist urges. And we can absolutely not let him prevail. And I will code what I want to say [to Trump] and it starts with F and ends with U."
When a reporter referenced former first lady Michelle Obama's famous counsel of "When they go low, we go high," Lightfoot responded: "Well, I'm not Michelle Obama."
"I don't take the bait every time, but this time, when we are suffering pain and trauma at the killing of a Black man in the street, the fact that he would use this opportunity to try to, for political gain and to blow the dog whistle to his base, I'm a Black woman and I'm a leader. And I feel an obligation to speak out when something as offensive as that is said by anyone, but particularly the president. And I make no apologies whatsoever for my word choice and the way in which I'm calling him our for what he said. It was wrong. It was offensive. And he should retract it and apologize."
thank you, hg. & agree heartily re the usual schtick, my ? is why there is so much more apparent energy put into engaging with it & so little examining why that engagement is attractive. but presumably many like me attempt to scrupulously avoid/ignore. obvious problem is that it cedes this imaginary community, & i believe that is destructive.
an urgent line of inquiry is how to reimagine-rebuild public services to reduce our reliance on state violence & there are many myriad sources of thinking on that. to those here that think there is some unique value to his contribution on this topic, really some self examination re why you think you can only get that input via putting up with the schtick seems in order. you may disagree, fair enough.
if the schtick is an acceptable price to you bc of some commitment to him as a person, fine just accept the destructiveness that exacts on this imaginary community.
is a form of intimidation
That's just not how it works out here. People know they can approach us. We're in the schools, we have a community intelligence unit with a detective assigned to each district who goes to the neighborhood and district meetings, the activist crowd gets an audience at a the department twice a month, etc. Bernie the angry hippie who teaches tai chi to the homeless may not like us but he knows he can come vent to us. If you think I'm making this up then maybe the local BLM chapter founder will be more convincing.
She's been fostering a relationship with local police for years now."We work with Salt Lake PD. We've been meeting with them every two weeks for three years," Scott said. She's a part of Community Advocates Group Utah, which meets with Salt Lake City Police officers regularly. "You need to build those face-to-face relationships," Sergeant Keith Horrocks with Salt Lake police said. "They've been very responsive and they've implemented a lot of change," Scott added.
You forget that what's happening in Minneapolis generally is due to "worthless people taking advantage of the situation." Not a reaction to police murder, but worthless people.
Protests are fine. But if someone's "protest" involves burning down the low income housing project then yeah, I'm not inclined to think highly of them.
So, protesters are worthless and contemptible in general, until people call you an asshole over it and then it turns out you're only condemning the real criminals who commit atrocities like burning down low income housing or being rude to you face to face. Just like activists are the worst and don't do anyone any good until someone brings up the people in helping professions you work with who do think of themselves as activists.
I am sure you are thinking of yourself as horribly unjustly maligned and misrepresented. The way you come into conversations actively being an asshole, and then hedging after the fact, is a transparent effort to set that dynamic up. I don't know what you get out of it, but if you ever want it to stop, it's on you.
but I am still a bit curious if you've felt a shift since 2016. (Or, for that matter, any other milestone.)
Things definitely seem accelerated the last four years. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The bail reforms in Chicago and New York were very poorly thought out.
Hilariously, after shitting on activists so incessantly he's linking to an article in which activists have chosen a cooperative strategy with his department, as if the choices of the people he has already shit on reflect on his personal behavior, or prove that he is so smart or empathetic he can be sure that his wheelbacks and nice chats are totally non-intimidating. We are supposed to take his word for it that he is princely in his day to day interactions, when he does a great impression of an asshole here.
I am sure you are thinking of yourself as horribly unjustly maligned and misrepresented.
You're way overestimating my emotional investment in these things. You've got kind of a penchant for flippant hostility yourself but a lot of what you attack is your perception rather than the things I've actually said.
Did I say you were upset about it? You certainly seem to be doing it deliberately, so I'm figuring the coming in like an asshole and walking it back thing is fun for you. I don't quite get the attraction, but if you weren't enjoying yourself I figure you'd stop.
but a lot of what you attack is your perception rather than the things I've actually said.
So, you're saying you're maligned and misrepresented? I thought that was a possibility.
I think it would be cool if there were some mechanism by which we could get a temperature check on "gswift commenting makes the blog worse." For the record, if we're entering a period of protest and police violence and people I know and maybe me are in situations where we are directly vulnerable to this, I'm going to need to fully check out to the extent of blocking the site for my sanity. I'm too disgusted; it makes me too angry; I need to concentrate. I'm not trying to flounce, just pointing out that if I, someone only vulnerable to police violence when she's trying to protest, need to check out of this right now, how much worse is this for lots of other people, who again, mostly don't comment here, because of our dysfunction with regard to some issues, race especially.
If you are asking for a show of hands, I say I value his contribution. I think he is unnecessarily provocative, but I mostly enjoy that.
I think people who don't comment here mostly don't because basically no one comments on blogs.
293: Dude. Maybe that is mostly true but there are non-white people in the Allison Roman thread saying no actually this place really can suck in this specific way, and at least one saying it always sucks in this specific way. I really think that should be heard. Off to a Zoom.
I'm kind of surprised at the heat directed at an offhand comment about a random white dude yelling in my direction. I just thought the situation was funny. He gives me a vigorous "FUCK YOU" and the black guy next to him gives a "dude what are you doing" kind of side eye. So yeah, I stop to talk to them because well I tend to get out of my car and talk with people and it was also funny that he boogied out while the black guy hung out and chatted.
Right. The cowardly white activist fled even though there was no reason to think you were any kind of threat. The sensible black guy knew better than to run from the police, and had a pleasantly respectful chat with you. Obviously, none of us were there, you can tell any story you like. But that story doesn't sound the way you think it does.
My dark, conspiratorial leanings are not in any way helped by the apparent predominance of masked white folk in the smashing windows and starting fires crowds. The situation is very complex with lots of actors pursuing conflicting agenda, but it's hard to see how this results in anything nationally other than a big bump for Trump.
Yeah. I'll be really interested to see if Umbrella Man gets identified. Someone who believed she was his ex and said she recognized the gear he was wearing said he was a St Paul cop. The St Paul police have denied it was him, but I'm not clear what their basis for the denial is.
297: At least out west the various Antifa groups are loaded with white people.
Goddamn outside agitators getting peaceable locals riled up. It's been a problem since the Civil Rights Movement.
Or maybe it's people who are being destructive without a left-wing agenda. I understand there are some violent white people out there who aren't Antifa.
The right wing groups for sure come out to fight and stir shit but it's the antifa/black bloc crowd doing the vandalism.
Why on earth would you expect anyone to take that as authoritative?
Lol, conflating antifa, black bloc, and the boogers is a very cop thing to do.
When the G-20 was meeting here, I worked with a woman whose husband was an officer. She was always breathless about the dangers of the anarchists. The actual violence was mostly imported Chicago police officers.
Attributing the violence specifically to the disliked groups without, and I emphasize this, any actual knowledge, is also a very cop thing to do.
I don't know Minneapolis, but that's what we see out west. I imagine it has to do with the "fuck capitalism" bent of a lot of the antifa types. The wingers come to fight, not to smash stores up.
Amazing how well informed the SROs are about the actual acts of the anti-state actors on the mean streets of SLC lol.
Amazing how well informed the SROs are about the actual acts of the anti-state actors on the mean streets of SLC lol.
183: That wasn't a "low income" building. It was condos with 38 out of several hundred which were supposed to be "affordable", which, given pre-plague market rates, isn't actually affordable to low income people. It was a standard S MPLS gentrification tower with a fig leaf of affordable housing. If the pandemic hadn't happened, it would have brought mostly rich people to the area as part of ongoing gentrification.
I have to say that my main fear here is that coronavirus cases are going to spike like mad and there's already fears about our hospitals being overwhelmed. I think the worst of this will actually be our hospitals crashing, even given the fires.
You don't know Minneapolis, but you do have authoritative first hand knowledge of 'the west' generally. Man, you get around.
Or, possibly, you know what you read being reported on, like the rest of us.
309: I'm hoping that everything I've been reading about outdoor transmission being low odds means that doesn't happen, but it's an awful possibility.
Gswift commenting makes this blog much worse, always
310: Training stuff tends more towards regional, at least out here. Narcs, auto theft, terrorism conferences, etc draw from surrounding states. And we have a lot of guys in this department retire and get jobs in other states because of the double dipping regs here. All the guys I know have stayed out West. So yes, I know a lot of cops west of the Rockies, and 0 in MN.
None of that sounds like much of a basis for "The right wing groups for sure come out to fight and stir shit but it's the antifa/black bloc crowd doing the vandalism", particularly as a statement about what's going on right now, rather than even a generalization of whatever level of reliability about police impressions of prior riots.
Big ol' difference between acknowledging complexity and imperfect knowledge, and claiming certitude.
As a rule, the cops have, or at least display, a shockingly bad level of intelligence about the anti-state or even reformist left. The documents unearthed after Charlottesville display unconscionable levels of confirmation bias. It isn't even a little bit conspiratorial to question the accuracy of the police perspective, to say nothing of their sanctioned training materials.
291: People always line up behind him. Always. There have been so many referenda. If we hold one more, will the results change? Maybe there's been some tipping point in the past... month?... but I'm doubtful.
there is not some well of support and trust of social workers out there to work with.
That's pretty focused on CPS, and is partly because people don't want you taking their kids away whether it's for good or bad reasons. CPS, meanwhile, is an awful job: the caseloads are huge, the pay is often bad (not everywhere), the paperwork is endless and pointless, and the stress immense because you are always perceived as the marauding villain coming to take the babies until that one day when you don't, and the kid dies, and you are perceived as the person who let a baby die. I'm surprised they can fill the positions.
I haven't worked in CPS (perhaps because I don't like kids!) but my work has been adjacent and I have friends who do. I was in a supervision group here with mostly CPS workers and it was mostly women of color and they were diligent and invested in the job.
Anyway it's like 10% of the field, I think, but if we're toying with ASWAB as a thing, by all means, stick with cops.
317: I was imagining something more like a real vote, like with some actual technical mechanism to take it, but I know it won't happen.
I just emailed some of the front pagers and asked them to take my pseud off the front page of the blog and take away my login. I don't want to feel even trace vestigial responsibility for this anymore. There's a tension between the values of a forum (although fora also have limits) and the values of a community and even I get confused about what the point of this is, for me, but since quarantine I've been trying to use it as a community and it doesn't meet standards that define my bar for voluntary association in any other context, and I should notice that and stop trying to use it as a community. I am going to work my hardest to discipline myself to remove myself from this and try to do supportive and meaningful things; I don't find recreational arguments on the internet fun at all; I do it because I hope it can be a way to make this place a more functional community, and it can't, and I should just be clear about that with myself. I put an email I have been very desultorily using in the email inbox. If you want to reach out to me feel free to do it there and I'll probably redirect you to my IRL email address. Like the oldster I am, I'm also available at the Other Place. Barry knows how to find me on WhatsApp. Etc.
318: Sorry, I was being sarcastic about ASWAB. I've worked with many amazing CPS workers, but the job itself is impossible already. I just meant that the perception of social workers in poor communities is IME that they're unreasonable baby-stealers, even though there will be lots of individual examples to the contrary. And I'm sure I'm getting a skewed perspective by spending a lot of time with people who've been involved with the system, but even just in the neighborhood and the schools it comes up a lot.
319 saddens me greatly though I understand and support Tia here.
what does aswab stand for?
& yes re cps on all points, unfortunately your clarification kind of illustrates my point that we don't have a reservoir of trained professional public servants already organized into a corps with a high degree of public trust that can be deployed to take on duties currently handled by the police. we need this! my point is that we are going to have to think hard & do intelligent collective work to get there, including surfacing & dealing with why we have such low trust now.
my sister dated for many years a guy who's father was a cps case worker & wow dude was the poster guy for tightly wound stress exceeded only by my brother at the tail end of his 20 yrs in mil intell following several yrs sleeping in a tent in some stan when not running the back of intell gathering planes. tbf my bro outstripped the cps guy by several fair margins in this completely unenviable race.
So Uncle Hugo's, the oldest SF bookstore in the US, burned last night. Per the owner, someone was seen to break in and set a fire. My assumption is that given SF fans, there will be a big fundraiser to at least take care of any debt and the employees, but it could be pretty bad - he thinks his insurance excludes civil unrest. It's just wretched - tons of SF history and archival material gone, what must have been one of the nation's best selections of used SF gone, not to mention the space itself. I loved Uncle Hugo's. I was just there right before the pandemic and bought a big stack of books.
On my twitter and via FB, I'm seeing stuff that suggests that there actually are a significant number of white far right and white opportunists here from out of town and out of state - protesters busted a group of young, affluent-looking white looters from WI and I've seen photos linking white people at the protests to well-known white supremacist activists. (There's been a TON of work online since Charlottesville tracking and identifying specific Nazis/far right, without which this would not be possible.)
My guess is that the breaking stuff/police station fire/taking stuff from Target and Cub has nothing in particular to do with outside agitators/Nazis - I think that's just an intensification of regular protests. And some of the other damage is just damage that's going to happen in a chaotic situation, either due to feelings running high or due to rubber bullets and stuff flying around. But I also bet that a lot of the other fires and breakage are opportunists and Nazis. Some of them just don't make a lot of sense - a local bar well off the trail of the protests that was mostly known for small punk and hiphop shows, for instance. And actively setting a fire at Uncle Hugo's doesn't make any sense - if it had just caught fire, or someone had smashed the windows as part of smashing all the windows along there, etc. But it wasn't exactly some wealthy palace of privilege; it was extremely shabby and run-down, in a shabby old building. I just can't see local protesters thinking, "let's burn this shit down, this is what needs to go", especially since it's very clear that people were sparing small shops in general - for instance the Mercado Central and the Mexican grocery/bakery near us were left alone, as were the other Mexican businesses. I can't believe that anyone thought "let's walk a block and a half off of Lake Street to burn down the SF bookstore, that will show the man we mean business".
At first I felt like the whole "outside agitator" thing was nonsense, because it always had been in the past. But I think that since Charlottesville, with all these people actually hoping to start a race war who are used to moving around the country, that's not totally true anymore.
322 It's a play on ACAB, All Social Workers Are Bastards.
319 tia the honesty you've held yourself to wasn't really what i was trying to inspire but i am completely supportive bc it probably will make you happier but totally sucks for this imaginary place. ❤️❤️❤️
Tia, I'm very sorry to hear that. I think this place really benefits from your contributions, but I'm of course sympathetic to what you say in 319.
There is definitely a contingent of local boogers that organized on Facebook to caravan up to Minnesota to start some shit. I'm super wary of seeing what one looks for, but, geez, for years these right-wing groups have, specifically, planned to instigate race war under the chaos caused by a pandemic. You figure mostly it's bluster and bravado but it doesn't take many violent actors for shit to get way out of hand.
Delurking because I've done what is being proposed: I was a social worker in a new role to take over existing duties of the police (in this case it was the sheriff), in child protection, in Hennepin County. The role was created out of recognition that it was unnecessary or actively harmful to have sheriffs counseling families when serving a warrant to remove a child.
Child protection is indeed very bad. And social work as a profession is tainted by white saviorism. I'm still a pretty big believer that "social workers" taking over policing duties would be at least a small improvement over the status quo, if only because it removes the use of force. It would help the discourse to be more specific about what these generic social workers would actually do. They would be mental health clinicians, trained mediators/negotiators, support navigators, and just boring old coordinators/administrators.
The last one is important because so much policing work is administrative. Why do beat cops ever respond to a check forgery at a corner store? Or to any type of property crime? Last year the adult son of a woman who lives on my block had several psychotic episodes and the only way to intervene was to call 911, who sent out the police, who did absolutely nothing for him. It's hard for me to believe that situation wouldn't have been handled better if someone with serious mental health training had responded instead.
Back that social work/sheriff role: everyone thought it was a huge improvement from the previous sheriff-only approach. It was lauded as a new position that should be expanded into other areas policing and sheriff work. The position was eliminated a couple years later due to budget cuts.
327: Yeah, things have changed. As recently as ~2013 the nazis/radical right around here were, if young, disconnected pathetic nerds who could easily be run off or, if older, biker types who were fundamentally more interested in posturing and fist fights than anything else. It really was Gamergate/4chan that consolidated things, along with more diffuse gender stuff in the culture as a whole. There are a LOT of guys on the left who are also obsessed with weightlifting, the gym and guns and who will say a lot of stuff along the lines of, "the pandemic let me live out my dreams of doing nothing but lifting and reading Marx". Now, those guys are morally and politically 180 degrees from the far right and while they might finish something they're not looking to start it - but there's this whole sort of gendered weirdness floating around that, I dunno, feels like it comes from TV and social media gender culture stuff and feels very reactionary, like it's a response to the increasing visibility of women/AFAB people/queer people, but then it's also a response to the weird twinkle-sparkle-fashion-shopping of hip pseudo-liberal pop culture too.
I think folks have gotten so used to dismissing the outside-agitator thing that it may be difficult to see it when it actually happens.
I really hope there's some exit from this situation in MPLS that isn't "the National Guard starts shooting, a small but significant number of people get killed and everyone else gets terrified and goes home". Walz claims he's going to name names about outside agitators, and if he's actually got a long list of Nazis that might change the momentum of the protests. Enough stuff has burned that it's going to be actively bad for near south - it looks like there's no longer any pharmacies in a big chunk of near south, and while Target will presumably reopen, the other one is completely burned down. It matters when you take out pharmacies in poor areas, especially during a pandemic - I wonder how many inhalers and other bulky things burned? A lot of that stuff is replaceable and one pharmacy's worth isn't the end of the world, but it's not that great for some stuff. And everyone whose prescriptions went there will have to get their clinic and insurance to change things.
I would really like there to be an exit strategy - an exit to "protests but with less fire" would be fine with me - that doesn't involve people getting shot.
Yeah, situations like this I never know what, specifically, I'm hoping for. On a long-term basis, I have hopes for the next Manhattan DA being productive -- the guy I'm rooting for in the primary, Bragg, is a progressive civil rights guy. But that doesn't fix anything this week.
That wasn't a "low income" building. It was condos with 38 out of several hundred which were supposed to be "affordable"
This is what I was basing the description on. It said 189 apartments for low income with three dozen for very low income.
I'm watching footage right now of protesters on the actual I-35 highway, surrounding a group of cops. At the moment it is not violent, but holy shit is my adrenaline running just watching them. It's the "Mike Ramos Brigade Facebook Page" if anyone is local and curious. Or not local.
I'm hardly here anymore but broadly agree with 312.
(They're off the highway now, less intensely looking like things are going to erupt.)
I think further that there's a general tendency among either many folks, or among some prominent folks, to enjoy the process of argument, when the argument concerns something that doesn't really directly impinge on them (or, sometimes, when it does, because they are, regardless, detached or thick-skinned), so that conversations get entertained and drawn out in a way that is, at best, exhausting to those who are more invested in them.
328: In my town the police have been trained in some de-escalation techniques, and they have a social worker they bring along to the calls where someone is psychotic, but they still go to keep people safe.
I'm not a social worker, but I worked with a bunch of social workers when I did psychiatric rehabilitation with individuals with serious and persistent mental illness. Sometimes even the most skilled at de-escalating needed to call the police to help get someone to the hospital.
Please don't take this to mean that I'm endorsing what Gswift is saying. But I remember someone doing that kind of outreach work who had worked as "welfare" case worker back in the day who felt that she had to put herself in unsafe situations alone all of the time as a single young woman. Some of that could be improved if people were allowed to go in teams, but that would cost money, and these kinds of agencies with state contracts routinely expect their employees to transport clients alone in their personal vehicles.
I have no proposed solution. Cops mostly scare me, even though I have very little to fear as a white woman, but I'm not sure that putting social workers in certain settings without back up from police would necessarily be productive.
But mostly, I think it would be better to listen to people in the communities most affected.
319: I just want to say, which I've been remiss in not saying in other threads, that I've really appreciated your efforts to make this place more like a community.
If we as a society were dedicated to solving these problems we could, because we would take the time and the money needed for lots of consultation, trying different things, meeting with community groups, consulting with individuals, hiring various people who have life experience in a neighborhood, etc. We could reduce or replace policing if we as a society actually said, "this is a serious problem, we're going to keep working on it until we solve it" instead of "here is a one-year $30,000 grant, small local organization, you can hire a part-time person to try your little idea and if it doesn't change everything your funding won't get renewed".
Most problems of human interaction are largely solvable as if you're willing to dedicate enough resources to them.
Also, even if you're just talking about emergency "this person is literally a physical threat right now" level stuff, we would need a lot fewer cops and social workers and so on if everyone had decent quality housing, food security, health care, transit, education and retirement, and if we didn't have so much material inequality qua inequality.
Basically we're willing to do everything to fix the infected splinter except buy tweezers, disinfectant and bandages and then sand the plank. Anything else, fine, we'll do that - but not remove the splinter and sand the wood!
Startribune has the criminal complaint up. "No physical findings that support a diagnoses of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation." That line might be a problem in a jury trial.
Scantee, thanks for 328. That was interesting.
The defense "It was a pure coincidence that he died after I spent over eight minutes kneeling on his neck, more than two of which were after he was unconscious and with no detectible pulse," would convince you if you were a juror? I wish I could say I'm surprised at you.
Can we limit the response to what I actually said instead of your mind reading?
I didn't say I would be convinced, just that I could see it being a problem. Juries do dumb stuff. And including the line seems off to me. I've been a part of a lot of probable cause statements and criminal complaints and I can't recall any of our DA's throwing in potential reasonable doubt like that.
It's almost as though our crooked legal system produces crooked, boot-licking medical examiners too.
I mean, if the cops knelt on me and I died and they did an autopsy - I'm 45, I have high cholesterol and I'm overweight. They'd probably say that I had heart disease (because most people my age, especially people with high cholesterol, technically have it - we have plaque build-up in our arteries) and that was why I died. I mean, they wouldn't say that because unless things radically worsen a cop isn't going to kneel on my neck til I die because I am white, but if you're really determined to find some medical reason why someone would be susceptible to dying while being crushed, you can probably find a pre-existing condition by autopsy for anyone over thirty who is not a fatless triathelete.
And TBH, this seems like saying "unless you're in perfect health you should expect to be stress-positioned by the cops until your heart or lungs fail, that's your fault for being sickly or old".
343: Sorry, are you asking me to be more politely respectful to you? That's not going to happen. You're a member of a profession notorious for keeping a unified front to protect murderers. I don't care if you originally said that kneeling on someone's neck for eight minutes is bad practice. If you bring the weird charging documents up as a problem in a jury trial, it's going to sound like gloating that Chauvin may not be convicted unless you're explicit about being horrified by that outcome.
If you are horrified by that possibility, I'm not going to stop you from saying so.
Anyway, a jury might do anything, there are a lot of Thin-Blue-Line white supremacists out there. The line from the criminal complaint shouldn't have any legal effect. If you intentionally do something to someone that could be reasonably expected to make them die, and they do that's murder (precise charge depending on state law) regardless of whether there was some underlying health condition that played into it. Otherwise you couldn't murder anyone over 22.
If the situation were completely different -- Chauvin's actions couldn't predictably have severely injured anyone, they were genuinely reasonable and harmless, but there was some condition that made George die anyway as a result, that would be a defense. But kneeling on someone's neck for more than two minutes after they have no detectible pulse is not plausible in that category.
345: It comes off as you trying to bait me into a fight by immediately ascribing the shittiest motive possible to anything I say. If it makes you feel better have at it I guess.
You don't want a fight when you say shitty things, don't say them. I can think of two useful tactics: say things that don't come off as shitty, or don't say anything.
I am certainly not going to present myself as non-confrontational, as you noticed above hostility is kind of a hobby of mine. But when I'm not trying to pick a fight, if I'm talking to someone who takes something the wrong way, I back down and clarify, to see if we can resolve the misunderstanding, or if it's not worth it I give up. You could try that too.
When the DA released the "no asphyxiation" statement, it made me think the protestors were right that there would have been no charges but for them. The DA is throwing off chaff because he would rather not prosecute. People who want to have police impunity are going to hear that as "didn't kill him" and "no asphyxiation" is not remotely close to "wasn't killed because he was knelt on for five minutes."
I don't actually know the medical language, but I read something on twitter suggesting that traumatic asphyxiation is something like as the result of an impact, what you'd expect to see here is positional asphyxiation, and that that's sort of a circumstantial diagnosis -- not necessarily any unambiguous physical indications, but an obvious reason for death given the facts. But this isn't stuff I know myself, just something I read.
I don't know the medical language either. But I know that they don't report things the person didn't die of when somebody died on camera and wasn't killed by the police. People get shot and die because their heart stops, they don't say "the bullet didn't hurt the heart."
Right, the language does seem very suspicious. And of course Trump's wrecked the DOJ, so there's not much hope for a backup federal prosecution.
I read 340 as saying it just got a lot harder to make a murder case, probably because juries.
As to the rest, I read gswift's tone a lot differently (despite him calling my adoptive town full of trash, possibly bc he also recommended the town when I moved here) but dude, stop needling people, Minneapolis is sickening, and so is the thought that racists are actually going to get the race war they've been prepping for at least 20 years. (Maybe more. I just know when I heard it from a since-then estranged relative telling my then little sister than she shouldn't be friends with an Indian girl due to the imminent black on white race war.)
And I don't know how to fix cops but the criminal justice program at Cala U has a lot of sociologists and turns out educated cops, one of whom was shot two days ago responding to a domestic violence call so I sort of hate everything right now.
If you intentionally do something to someone that could be reasonably expected to make them die, and they do that's murder
Yeah, if the coroner says what you did was the cause of death. But if the coroner says that the kneeling isn't what killed him that makes the case more difficult. A lot is then going to hinge on the part about the death being caused by the combined effects of being restrained by the police, the health issues, and the intoxicants. And the necessary details about the contributing factors of the restraint might be there already and we're just not aware because all we're seeing is the broad strokes of the report outlined by the PC statement.
And what Moby said. Why the hell phrase it like that?
This discussion seems to be generating more heat than light, but for what it's worth I agree with Cala's 353.
An honest person would distinguish between the charging document and the preliminary medical examiner's report, and also not deny the obvious evidence of one's senses, but, well, here we are.
If you do something to someone that can reasonably be expected to kill them, and it causes their death, you killed them. Possible defenses like the ones you're straining for would be "Chauvin kneeling on George's neck had no causal relationship to George's death, it was a complete coincidence. Because Chauvin's actions were unrelated to George's death, Chauvin is innocent." Or "It would be unreasonable to expect kneeling on someone's neck for eight minutes to cause death. Because Chauvin had no way of knowing his actions could kill George, he lacked the necessary intent and is innocent." Both of those would be good defenses; both of those are completely absurd given the facts.
Predictably causing the death of a sick person is just as much murder as of a well person, even if they're easier to kill.
Potential intoxicants, my lily-white ass. Fuck anyone who doesn't see this as the obvious attempt to carve out some maneuvering room that it is.
See above. Killing drunk people, still murder. To make a defense on these lines, you need to sell a jury on the idea that Chauvin didn't know that kneeling on George's neck for two more minutes after he was unconscious and had no pulse could kill him. Without that, George's health is neither here nor there.
347: It is beyond rich for a guy who continually ascribes motives to all and sundry to act upset when he's subject to it.
Christ, what an asshole.
359: I absolutely think we're looking at positional asphyxia. But I've also lost obvious cases at trial with jurors that were legitimately dumb and didn't grasp reasonable doubt. That line is exactly the kind of thing I could see working on some fool.
"Potential intoxicants" usually just means "physical evidence of drug use but we're waiting for the blood work to come back."
I'm hardly around and don't run the place, but I just read all of gswift's comments in this thread and unless the perspective of a police officer is prima facie unwelcome, I think there's a bit more heat than is warranted. I personally agree with Moby in 92, and I also tend to think that in a lot of this country, the only difference between the cops and neo-nazis is which shift is on, but I've never gotten that vibe from gswift, and, you know, cops tend to prefer law and order and hate rioters.
All that said, I almost never have to interact with the police, and when I do, it tends to be friendly chats, and I can totally understand why, for some folks, the cop perspective is more upsetting, even when it's not racist and hateful. This is a bummer that I don't have an answer for, though I'm fairly certain that the answer isn't banning people who aren't being deliberately cruel or disruptive.
Finally, gswift, you know more about policing than we do, and you see a lot of shit, but it's also not the case that the rest of us are just liberal ignoramuses. 296 is the kind of thing I always loved about the blog: consider that in some cases your internally coherent narrative is not actually the true internally coherent narrative.
Back to family time! I'll probably check back in, but likely not today.
I mean, it's not just this thread, ogged.
So, you're worried that Chauvin's lawyers will put on a bullshit defense and the jury will fall for it out of either stupidity or cop-worshipping white supremacy? Join the club. But there's nothing in the report that suggests any valid defense, and your 354 was horrendously drafted unless you meant to imply that it did.
I'm not suggesting a valid defense, I'm thinking of possible jury hangups. That line, if it was a case of mine? I'd be asking the attorney why the fuck he would say that.
but it's also not the case that the rest of us are just liberal ignoramuses. 296 is the kind of thing I always loved about the blog: consider that in some cases your internally coherent narrative is not actually the true internally coherent narrative.
Fair enough.
I think the DA is deliberately throwing non-relevant talking points to the other side and it worries me because it, in combination with past events, makes me think he's signalling that how he's going to lose to the defense.
This will never end without an independent prosecutor for police killings.
For the opposite extreme coroner's finding on cause of death, the Philadelphia DA prosecuted a murder where the victim's death was 41 years after he was shot. The suspect, 70 at the time of trial, had already served 16 years for attempted murder based on the same incident. The coroner testified that the shooting caused the death.
Coroners have less difficulty determining cause of death when the police officer is the victim.
(the suspect was acquitted but spent a few more years in jail for a parole violation anyway)
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/homepage/20100525_Jury_acquits_man_of_murder_in_1966_police_shooting.html
Did I mention my candidate for Manhattan DA? Bragg. People should check him out and give him money.
truly in these troubled times it is heartwarming indeed to see daddy thanked so promptly for the cookie lol.
I have a question for Frowner and Natilo. I knew Betsy Hodges years ago (I was surprised when I learned she was mayor of Minneapolis). Was she any better on police issues than Frey?
I don't know what 373 means, to be honest.
328: Thanks for weighing in, scantee! Here we have a program for social worker who go out with police on opioid-related calls and gets people connected with services. Results seem promising from what I hear. This seems like exactly the kind of program that would help actually make progress, same with the role you had.
I read 373 as a response to 369, with comment 364 being the cookie in question, but alternately, fuck absolutely everything.
I thought that 373 was a straightforward response to 372.
Just heard from one of the local neighborhood organizations that the cops and military have shoot-on-sight authorization tonight.
I hope they are ready to reap the whirlwind
"Salt Lake City" now trending on Twitter because protests have gotten violent there, for anyone still following this accursed thread. I'm guessing that almost 400 comments of discussion, getting in faces, etc. is going to have zero point zero zero effect on anything that happens there. I hope people stay safe and, as most of the rest of you are doing, I should take a break.
329. There's a long article on B\ellingC\at about the boogers and their various manifestations. Worth reading if you can stand the twitter excepts and memes they reproduce. TL;DR: part of 4chan metastasized into promotion of civil war and includes left, right, and minority adherents (the common ground is liking violence and guns -- some antifa are part of it, for example). You never know how real something on the internet is but it was scary-fascinating reading.
364. I find both gswift and Tia to be contributors (Tia's long-form stuff is always worth reading) that I like to see here and would be sorry to see either go. (Note: I liked Halford, too.) I also find that Tia reacts to gswift who reacts to her in an infinite loop of escalation. gswift is really good at saying something that, if there were an belief/opinion test here you had to agree with X% of to fit in, he'd be right on the cusp. I think he knows this and is annoyed it's the case, so he drops down to X% or little less, and in a Dutch Uncle sort of mode speaks about his real-life experience in ways that outrage some people, who then respond angrily, and so on. Not a good dynamic, especially in these fraught times.
(I haven't posted much here during the pandemic, though I read this place pretty regularly.)
Some scary messaging around the curfew tonight. The actual state announcement says delphic stuff like "tonight's response will be different" and the governor sent out a tweet saying "don't violate curfew because you will be mistaken for one of the bad people" (I paraphrase, but very, very slightly.) But two neighborhood orgs say they were told that the NG would be using deadly force. City council is advising people to evacuate kids and the elderly from the Lake Street area until Monday. Mail delivery has been suspended indefinitely. People have been advised to set up block defense plans, then advised to just stay inside.
This has all NOT been communicated very well. You'd think they would be able to plug into the statewide and citywide emergency text thing.
I have to say, unless Walz is going to show up tomorrow morning with a proven statement about heavily armed white nationalists roaming the city who have been responsible for the bulk of the fires, etc, this is going to be one of the most infamous days in Minnesota history. I just really feel like people are going to be shot tonight. I am very, very worried that protesters are going to feel that they can overwhelm the guard by numbers as they have the cops and the guard will start shooting. The protesters have been winning so far but the state isn't just going to throw up their hands and say, "Okay the nebulously-organized Minneapolis Commune is now victorious"; they're going to shoot people and reestablish control.
I am here to tell you that this is scary. I am also here to tell you that the amount of burned buildings is scary and is going to reshape near south MPLS, probably not for the better. A lot of people on twitter are whooping and hollering about insurrection and "cool zones" and so on, but that's really not how things are going to play out in the long run. Or if it is, I will gladly and humbly eat my words.
I'm so gutted about Uncle Hugo's being gone. Places are less important than lives, yes, but burning Uncle Hugo's wasn't necessary. And places are important. The same people who are on Twitter saying that places don't matter are the people who talk about how the depression is going to mean that all the small businesses go under and get replaced by chains and how bad that will be. Uncle Hugo's was an organizing point for local SF and fantasy people and it was an archive of important old stuff. It matters that it's gone.
I can't think of anything funny to say in response to 381 and 382, so I'm just going to ask you to keep your ghoulish fantasies to yourself, please. Things are horrifying enough without you providing unsolicited insights into your thirst for more violence. (To be clear, I have absolutely no idea what order the cops may or may not have. I just want fewer people to get hurt.)
I texted our neighbors (and some friends) to make sure everyone knew about the curfew/NG stuff, and the neighbors texted back that they'd taken their kids out of town to the grandparents today (although they're here). (They're really great neighbors actually - I didn't know them until, like, two weeks ago except to say hello.)
I am so scared, you guys. And I'm sick of this town. I used to love it here but things have been going bad for the past four years or so - huge homeless encampments, crazy amounts of heroin use around here, things starting to feel dirty and dangerous except where they feel rich and icky. Nearly everything I cared about when I moved here is gone. If my job evaporates I'm seriously thinking of selling up and going to family to get back on my feet, pandemic permitting.
This just went out from the governor:
At 8pm tonight, it is time to separate out those protesting peacefully in pursuit of justice from those who wish to undermine this movement through chaos. I urge all to respect the curfew in the Twin Cities as we take necessary action to protect the safety of our communities.
I just cannot believe this. He makes it sound like they're just going to open fire in eighteen minutes. Pray for us and if you have any way to prevent things going this way in your city or country, act now. Reform your cops if you can, fix your problems if you can, because that's the whirlwind we're all going to reap.
They started a curfew here too. I found out fifteen minutes after it started. It's not nearly the issue it will be in Minneapolis, but I have no idea how they are notifying people outside of Pokemon Go.
I usually go for a walk this time of night.
The fuck, von wafer. What a shitty and unnecessary interpretation of Frowner's words,
5 minutes until martial law.
Here's my prediction: A couple of the white supremacists who are dumb enough to be out and about tonight are going to be arrested. A much larger number of protesters & bystanders are going to get seriously injured or killed. This may very well be one of the most defining nights in the history of Minneapolis, and perhaps the country. Walz and Frey are going to be held to account for this, and it's not going to be very nice. We'll probably get a Republican governor and a much more conservative mayor -- maybe DFL, maybe independent -- in the respective next elections. Lake Street is going to be significantly gentrified in the areas amenable to it, but not before it sits around as blight for several years. There's going to be some hemming and hawing from the City Council and the County Board about changes to policing, but within 5 years the MPD will be exactly the same as it is now. Chauvin will get a Mehserle-esque slap on the wrist, the other officers not even that, and they will very likely get their jobs back in arbitration. There will probably be some more riots, but so many people have bought into the outside agitator narrative that the MPD will bust a lot of heads and the newspapers and politicians will praise them for it. Longer term effects are harder to predict, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a Black exodus out of the city and the state.
I am so sorry this is happening anywhere, to anybody, and more that it's happening to you and the places you care about. It's not much, but if you've got organizations that are doing rebuilding that are raising money, post them here.
Best of luck, Frowner.
I should really check in with my SIL -- she and my brother live two miles south of Lake, but she's been working diligently at good allyship for years. I'm 100% certain she is also very scared for people she cares about.
I assume most houses in the area are wood frame? That won't do much stop stray bullets and it would be incredibly reckless for the NG to get into a firefight in such an area.
392- VW was responding to Nat's comments, not Frowner's.
I'm so sorry, Frowner. It's all hard and I don't have any useful responses. Mayor just announced a curfew here too but I am crossing my fingers things haven't and won't escalate as much.
Usually I don't clarify comments here, because if you aren't smart enough to get it the first time, I very much doubt you'll get it after one repetition. But just because I am such a nice guy, I will point out that I do, indeed, think this action by the security forces will have some very negative consequences that the people who made the decision have not taken into account. As I've said before here, my street-fighting days are long over, and what little power I have as a middle-class white guy is not going to mean much in the coming storm. I know that the military commanders don't care what happens, and obviously the highest levels of the federal government are gleefully rubbing their hands while they wait for the show to start tonight, but the local politicians who have been cowed into making this decision are going to be very sorry they didn't show some backbone, both in electoral terms, and in terms of what it will do to the city and the state.
And THAT'S what I mean by "reap the whirlwind".
Ah. I am glad to be corrected. Sorry I mis-read you, von wafer; glad I was clear about the mistake I made so that people could tell me. Still, though, given that Natilo is in the thick of it and we (like, we two, here in our NorCal cities) are not (for the moment), I don't see any good in chastising over their feelings or expressions. Anger and craving that power be re-balanced by vengeance seem like very natural desires in the moment.
Or 'comeuppance', if not vengeance.
You shouldn't have had to clarify, Natilo. The presumption for good faith commenters here should be the benefit of the doubt.
They've had a curfew in Boston for a while because of COVID, but that's more of a suggestion.
We *just* got a text & voice alert pushed out to us at about 7:55 to warn people to be inside by 8 or face a free-fire zone. I didn't hear a word about this escalation until the neighborhood association posted it on FB. Meanwhile, hundreds of people met much earlier today and agreed to form block-by-block neighborhood patrols, which was communicated to thousands of people. It's very likely that people in my neighborhood will get shot tonight, and perhaps even some people I know. There are Blackhawks and AH-6 helicopters in the skies.
And to top it all off? Apparently my sister is out of wound dressings for an infected bedsore she picked up during her ongoing attempt to survive her liver & kidney meltdown. She is staying with friends who live *literally* a block from a large hospital with its own pharmacy, but of course it might as well be on the moon since 28 minutes ago.
I'm going to hang out at the front of the house, I'll post more if there's anything happening on the street, but I am praying that, despite being a busy street, we're far enough from the worst of the destruction that we'll be mostly ignored. Of course, I'm an atheist, so I'm not counting on that being very useful.
398: All wood frame, yes. I'm not personally worried about being shot, knock on the so-present wood - if there's a lively exchange of gunfire on my block, well, we will have entered history and there's nothing we can do about it. I am a little worried about uncontrolled fires, since we're a couple of blocks off Lake.
I'm way more worried about the immediate and long-term consequences if people get killed tonight. I'm worried about people I know, although at this point even my youngest friends are pushing thirty and are almost all at home. Long ago I used to volunteer with Natilo's acquaintance who is in the hospital with a skull fracture. I haven't seen him since the bookstore where we volunteered closed down, which was basically at the start of the recession, but it's awful to think of him in the hospital.
I'm afraid both that people will get killed and it will stop the protests and that people will get killed and it will just escalate the protests. I'm afraid that there will be so many fires that the city can't put them out.
I'm afraid of the coronavirus spike that's coming most of all.
Ugh, I was just reading something before the pandemic (since which I've lost all heart for serious reading), either Kotsko or Mark Fisher, about the way that bourgeois life tries to create predictability and that predictability is the hallmark of bourgeois life. I've got to say, I like predictability, and not the "things will get worse indefinitely" kind.
The cat can tell I'm freaked out and is sitting on the chair arm, not a usual spot for her.
405: Is that what they are? I thought they were louder than the ones we'd been hearing earlier.
Okay, I will stop monopolizing the thread unless something dramatic happens. God willing we get to morning without anything too terrible.
402: I've long made it clear that I like Nat. I wish him well. That's never been truer than it is now. I've long made it clear that I don't appreciate his calls for violence. That's also never been truer than it is now. I'm grateful to him for clarifying his comment, because, given his history of violent rhetoric, I think my original interpretation was reasonable. Still, I'm very glad to learn that I was wrong. Again, I wish him and everyone else in the Twin Cities peace tonight and in the coming days.
That said, if you're going to be censorious about things I write, I'd be grateful if you'd take the time to read them more carefully in the first instance. Something about good faith and the benefit of the doubt and all that.
Yeah, you're right. I should have re-read your comment more carefully.
Thinking of you, Natilo. Hoping you and your loved ones and your city are as safe as can be given all that is happening right now.
No worries at all. I wish you peace as well. These are very nearly unbearable times. When all of this over, I hope to see you again.
The governor just called out the National Guard for SLC. Curfew is 8pm.
Is this a weird headline, or is it just me? "Tension rose at protests in Los Angeles, where memories of Rodney King are still raw." It's one of the bullet points that you can't click on, on the NYT.
I mean, Rodney King was in 1991. Most of the protesters couldn't possibly have any memory of it. And there's so much recent trauma from the past few years that might be more relevant. Maybe I'm underestimating how vivid Rodney King is in LA today.
I want to apologize to Tia. I'm sorry, I can see that my supporting gswift contributed to making you feel unwelcome. I didn't mean for that to happen. It's funny, gswift has been hostile to me ever since I called him a troll months ago, so its not like he'd be any loss personally. I just like to hear different perspectives and some conflict helps me stay engaged with the discussion. I hope you'll still come around some and share your perspective, even if some people are always spoiling for a fight.
Let me share with you a tweet from our governor, who is proving to be Orwellian with language, but really bad at it. War is Peace, Hate is Love, We Have Always Been At War With Oceania would be subtle in comparison:
We are bringing the full force of goodness and righteousness to restore order on our streets tonight. Please be safe, please help our communities, and please stay home.
Is it just me or do the "anarchists" look like posers? The ones I've seen IRL look crunchier.
I know she's not perfect, but Lori Lightfoot is delightful. First, the "FOP clown" comment and now this:
Jammies has been reading all these creepy accounts of various cities where it appears that scenes are being set up to entice protesters to violence, like a stack of bricks just set up unattended outside a courthouse, or a police car that gets parked and abandoned in the middle of a peaceful protest.
Holy fuck. He just showed me the footage of the cops in NY accelerating five feet or so into a crowd.
418: Aw, fuck. She had a really close relationship with Chicago PD when elected; I was naively hoping she'd get some distance as mayor - the FOP hot mic thing seemed promising.
419 Has he seen SLC bow and arrow guy?
where memories of Rodney King are still raw
Maybe ross it is generational? I mean, my partner and I are from L.A. and we each have strong memories of the Rodney King events. We're old enough to be the parents of today's protestors. Maybe it got handed down from parents who remember it intensely?
This thread has gotten terrifying.
Frowner and Natilo, thanks for the updates, and stay safe. Fingers crossed, that it won't get as bad as it looks, and thinking of both of you.
I'm embarrassed to be smug, but I am proud that disagreeing over Rodney King was the beginning of the end for me and a college boyfriend (who said looters should be shot). I didn't understand the issues very well as a 19 year in 1991, but at least I chose the right side then.
Look at this clip of riot cops and national guard sweeping a residential street. It's somewhere in SMPLS but I don't recognize the block. They fire a marking round at someone who is on his porch.
422:. local FB had it that the guy loosed a bolt into the crowd, was promptly set on by protesters, and the cops let them have a minute before arresting him. Then the protesters torched Bowman's SUV.
422:. local FB had it that the guy loosed a bolt into the crowd, was promptly set on by protesters, and the cops let them have a minute before arresting him. Then the protesters torched Bowman's SUV.
So a bunch of police and humvees went down our street. There's been some gunshots but fewer than past nights.
What I'm hearing from twitter and FB is that there really are a small but scary number of roving armed nazis targeting people and places. What's weird is that it seems like very particular but not obvious places were chosen - there must be some angle, but what? An artists' work and residential space got threats that it would be burned down and had scary looking vehicles circling it, a Jamaican restaurant on one of the main entertainment streets in the city was repeatedly threatened last night and tonight shots were fired into it. Something is happening at Midtown but details are murky; last night people were trying to set it on fire. Some other people have chased away fire-starting nazis from their homes.
It's like in Charlottesville they were planning to go around the city attacking people after the big rally - only the counter-protest kept that from happening. So they're just roving around terrorizing people.
There seem to be several protests going on; last I heard people were sort of kettled by the horrible light rail stop by the 3rd precinct and also under another overpass and also another group was headed toward downtown. I've not heard a lot about fires so far, knock on wood.
In addition to the incident Frowner linked above, we've had credible reports of medical aid stations and journalists being attacked and shot with less-lethal weapons.
Two convoys of hummvees and police cars went by between 10 and 11. A couple of regular cops racing by as well. Paradoxically, there have been far fewer gunshots and indeterminate small explosions tonight than the past 3 nights -- most of the action is elsewhere I guess.
Oh, I spoke too soon: just heard three groups of four shots each fired relatively close by.
Someone just woke all of us up with some kind of loud fireworks in the big park across the street. Not snapping ones or simple explosions, some kind of quick whoosh and then a hollow boom, but no light that I could see. I guess they were feeling left out.
In normal times, we get a fair amount of both gunshots and fireworks. Not every night, but often.
I am going to try and decompress a little and then go to sleep. Still pretty quiet over here for now.
This is a fucking terrifying thread to wake up to. Stay safe Frowner and Natilo and everyone else.
430: yes, an LA Times reporter did a. Idea saying that she was with a group of journalists who identified themselves as press and asked for directions, only to find themselves shot at.
I've been seeing the same sorts of stories all over Twitter. Deliberately targeting journalists.
One angle I've not seen here is George Floyd's work as a sort of missionary in Houston.
Even Swedish, blonde, journalists are getting shot at.
Video of a black man standing calmly with his hands up. An NYPD officer pulls the man's mask down and pepper sprays him in the eyes from a few inches away: https://twitter.com/marklevinenyc/status/1266945154159644673?s=21
I really regret having said that the NYPD was successful at responding to protests without inflaming them. They've been shockingly bad.
I'm almost afraid to say this out loud, but Boston hasn't been too bad.
From what I've read this morning it sounds like they didn't kill anyone last night, so, uh, congratulations America for meeting the absolute minimum threshold of not gunning down your own citizens?
We could get them one of those signs with the changing numbers: "It has been ___ days since our last police murder." Maybe order cake for the precincts when the number got high enough.
442: I'm sure someone will be killed in Boston, and it will be my fault for writing that. Our response certainly has not been free of violence.
Salt Lake City police establishing their non-racist credentials: https://twitter.com/rtraister/status/1267050051752341504?s=21
I wonder if Gswift knows any of the pictured officers?
Cops have been covering up their badge numbers. This ought to be made a fireable offense.
Always. Likewise with any attempt to interfere with journalism or other documentation of police action.
445: Flloyd's death was clearly racist, but there is a real militarization of police that affects everybody. Tim's family lives in a "city" where the police have been pretty aggressive, and everybody there is white. He was talking to a black friend of ours (half Nigerian half black Louisianan) who went to college in Minneapolis) who was commenting on that. I wonder whether the preference for veterans has intensified that. I think that that may be part of the issue in Canada, because the police issue near Tim is a much bigger deal since the Afghan veterans started joining the police force.
Chatted with my SIL last night, sheltering in place hosting 3 friends evacuated from closer to the main action. I hadn't realized that Floyd was killed just a block from where they lived for many years. She told me that a couple of gas stations in their current area were burned (night before last?) and no one thinks that was by people protesting Floyd's murder.
Well, no one is dead and it appears there were no major fire, so it was not as bad as I feared. The police and National Guard did fire on, pepper spray and arrest journalists from the leftiest to the most mainstream and also attacked the vigil at the corner store where George Floyd was murdered. I've seen a photo of a nazi's car with some kind of white supremacist flag on it, one particular black SUV of white supremacists was driving around threatening people - they appear to be the ones who shot up the restaurant and they shot at someone on the street. Probably did more that didn't make it to my FB and twitter. The police also fired rubber bullets at the organizing point by Midtown market where people who were trapped by the curfew or otherwise in need of shelter were being taken into the small hotel there.
I feel like what happened so far is that the protesters, very wisely and thank god, didn't feel that they could go head to head with the NG, and so the NG went around attacking people.
The helicopters were so loud that they woke me up, I think around 6. I did get back to sleep.
One visiting journalist lost an eye - not last night, a couple of nights ago - because she was shot directly in the eye by a rubber bullet.
As you might expect, there were a whole bunch of rumors and misunderstandings that spread over the internet - that there were a bunch of KKK members, that someone had set a building on fire at the Riverside Plaza (huge mainly-affordable housing complex with largely Somali residents). I think the latter one was panic rather than pure falsehood. I only posted on here about things that I was sure had happened.
I think that in the future there's going to be a lot more neighborhood fire watches and block patrols, because I think that people are going to feel more and more abandoned by the city. I mean, they virtually told us that we were on our own AND that we all had to stay inside not to get shot. This is all like a huge cross between my three least favorite (because so frightening) SF novels, Oryx and Crake, The Parable of the Sower and The Sheep Look Up.
Now of course we sit around and wait to see what tonight brings. And still no buses or mail delivery or any sign of when we'll get those things back.
Yeah, nothing much to add except my deep despair at how badly the Star Tribune has failed the communities it supposedly serves. The top article this morning was 80% cheerleading for the police/NG response. I have at least five friends/former colleagues from my student newspaper days working there right now. One of them's even an editor. And I know they all have decent politics -- the one who's an editor is of Vietnamese and Norwegian ethnicity and grew up in overtly racist St. Cloud -- but it just doesn't matter when the ideology of US journalism takes over. Don't want to upset the advertisers after all!
Looking at the local mutual aid FB page, I see that the same black SUV was witnessed to shoot at a young Black guy earlier this morning. He wasn't hurt, but I think we can assume that they've been shooting at people overnight. Lots of other reports of gunfire, multiple vans with white supremacist stickers on them, etc.
People were calling gunshots in to the cops all night with no response. Like, a lot of gunshots, possible semiautomatic.
It seems pretty clear to me at this point that there actually are a meaningful number of white supremacists here in town targeting people. It seems not actually unlikely that some of the fires were started by them and not protesters. The "outside agitators did it" narrative is obviously wrong, but there are nazis here attacking people and it is not immediately clear to me how people are going to deal with that since there doesn't seem to be any police or city help. They drove down our street in the small hours, per my FB.
I wonder whether the preference for veterans has intensified that.
I have no idea what the actual situation is, but I've definitely seen a Twitter theme of veterans saying "holy crap the police are a bunch of untrained yahoos and we'd have gotten immediately busted if we ever did anything like they did." I don't know anything more than that.
453 is also what I see from my friend in the military. That said there might be an officer/enlisted split on that point.