In all honesty: I have missed these numerous videos. Can you source any of them?
Please note that I am plenty well aware of how often police abuse prisoners or use their powers of arrest to coerce people. I just doubt that there are plentiful videos that show police officers arresting, raping, and killing 16 year old girls.
Hyperbole undermines causes. As the other poster right under you alluded to, though, there is sufficient evidence of other police misconduct that is nearly as egregious.
These things that really happened should be the focus of conversation, I think, if we absolutely must shoehorn discussion of the USA into every conversation about how authority figures abuse their position worldwide.
So I don’t frequent the places that collect those vids anymore, because it messes with my mental health when I watch them too regularly, but there were subreddits dedicated to those types of vids on reddit. Not sure if those communities have migrated over here yet. I forget the name of them, but their whole aim was to document police brutality, catching a shocking amount of deaths on camera.
I’ll edit this comment if I do manage to find them, or someone else can reply to this comment chain if they happen to know a good source. But I assure you they are out there, I just really do not like watching them. I saw enough and said, “Shit this has to change,” and saw no reason to visit those places anymore.
Seeing how the police escalated absolutely everything to violence over and over and over is one of the things that radicalized my view of cops from “protectors” to oppressors.
I put “protectors” in quotes because I was a skateboarder growing up and for whatever reason, cops love to bully skateboarders, so they were always shitheads to me and my friends. Before this movement against the police started, I had already seen how they treat people who can’t fight back.
Listen, I respect you enough to believe that you saw some fucked up things. Seeing those kinds of things can really do a number on your head and memory, and it’s easy to conflate memories of trauma. Especially when it’s consumed as it seem like you have, via (social) media. And I do not at all disagree with your assertion that US policing needs fundamental change (approaching complete tear down, ideally).
However I, too, have been around on the internet for quite a while, and frequented bad parts of it. I didn’t see what you describe. I have a professional interest in watching such events, and I have worked very closely with police for quite a long time (albeit in just a few municipalities in a single US state).
Your “trust me” just doesn’t cut it, so my point stands: unless you have specific proof or ability to refer to evidence, don’t be hyperbolic. You simply can’t compare US policing to Iran, it’s apples and oranges of terrible, awful, horrifying shit.
And I have also met and studied with folks who have fled from Iran. I have had conversations with them and heard first hand stories. Please, use caution when you compare such dramatically different settings and circumstances of brutality. It really serves to undercut the complexity and uniqueness of these circumstances. Since different forms of resistance are necessary to combat them, it does nobody any good to try and compare them.
Finally, please don’t seek out things you don’t want to seek out for the sake of “winning” an internet argument with somebody who genuinely agrees with the spirit of your statements. It’s not worth it, I think.
Ah, I guess we were approaching this from different perspectives. I had never considered the winning thing, I just assumed you were curious.
I like that about Lemmy so far, most people I have encountered so far act in good faith and are fairly polite. Def a contrast to Reddit, lol.
Anyway if you do go down the police brutality rabbit hole, it gets bad fast. Let’s not do that, I agree, but there is a list of unarmed black people killed by police on Wikipedia organized by year. So that is one place to get some info without anyone being traumatized, haha.
Luckily now that folks realize that it’s happening and a common reaction is, “What, no way that is true,” people are taking great efforts to document them all now.
Anyway, if you search “police brutality”, “acab”, “reddit”, general stuff like that you should a few subreddits of that nature should you become curious.
In all honesty: I have missed these numerous videos. Can you source any of them?
Please note that I am plenty well aware of how often police abuse prisoners or use their powers of arrest to coerce people. I just doubt that there are plentiful videos that show police officers arresting, raping, and killing 16 year old girls.
Hyperbole undermines causes. As the other poster right under you alluded to, though, there is sufficient evidence of other police misconduct that is nearly as egregious.
These things that really happened should be the focus of conversation, I think, if we absolutely must shoehorn discussion of the USA into every conversation about how authority figures abuse their position worldwide.
Edit: “one” to “old”
So I don’t frequent the places that collect those vids anymore, because it messes with my mental health when I watch them too regularly, but there were subreddits dedicated to those types of vids on reddit. Not sure if those communities have migrated over here yet. I forget the name of them, but their whole aim was to document police brutality, catching a shocking amount of deaths on camera.
I’ll edit this comment if I do manage to find them, or someone else can reply to this comment chain if they happen to know a good source. But I assure you they are out there, I just really do not like watching them. I saw enough and said, “Shit this has to change,” and saw no reason to visit those places anymore.
Seeing how the police escalated absolutely everything to violence over and over and over is one of the things that radicalized my view of cops from “protectors” to oppressors.
I put “protectors” in quotes because I was a skateboarder growing up and for whatever reason, cops love to bully skateboarders, so they were always shitheads to me and my friends. Before this movement against the police started, I had already seen how they treat people who can’t fight back.
Listen, I respect you enough to believe that you saw some fucked up things. Seeing those kinds of things can really do a number on your head and memory, and it’s easy to conflate memories of trauma. Especially when it’s consumed as it seem like you have, via (social) media. And I do not at all disagree with your assertion that US policing needs fundamental change (approaching complete tear down, ideally).
However I, too, have been around on the internet for quite a while, and frequented bad parts of it. I didn’t see what you describe. I have a professional interest in watching such events, and I have worked very closely with police for quite a long time (albeit in just a few municipalities in a single US state).
Your “trust me” just doesn’t cut it, so my point stands: unless you have specific proof or ability to refer to evidence, don’t be hyperbolic. You simply can’t compare US policing to Iran, it’s apples and oranges of terrible, awful, horrifying shit.
And I have also met and studied with folks who have fled from Iran. I have had conversations with them and heard first hand stories. Please, use caution when you compare such dramatically different settings and circumstances of brutality. It really serves to undercut the complexity and uniqueness of these circumstances. Since different forms of resistance are necessary to combat them, it does nobody any good to try and compare them.
Finally, please don’t seek out things you don’t want to seek out for the sake of “winning” an internet argument with somebody who genuinely agrees with the spirit of your statements. It’s not worth it, I think.
Ah, I guess we were approaching this from different perspectives. I had never considered the winning thing, I just assumed you were curious.
I like that about Lemmy so far, most people I have encountered so far act in good faith and are fairly polite. Def a contrast to Reddit, lol.
Anyway if you do go down the police brutality rabbit hole, it gets bad fast. Let’s not do that, I agree, but there is a list of unarmed black people killed by police on Wikipedia organized by year. So that is one place to get some info without anyone being traumatized, haha.
Luckily now that folks realize that it’s happening and a common reaction is, “What, no way that is true,” people are taking great efforts to document them all now.
Anyway, if you search “police brutality”, “acab”, “reddit”, general stuff like that you should a few subreddits of that nature should you become curious.