Indeed. There is a massive double standard.

More on topic: here a few suggestions for people to chew on that would make the police less lethal to minorities and more accountable.

(1) Mandatory body worn cameras including audio.
(2) Better police training in threat assessment.
(3) Better police training in arrest making holds; emphasis on safety to person who is arrested.
(4) Misconduct laws regarding failing threat assessment, camera guidelines and arrest technique leading to blacklisting an officer for failing them.
(5) Police have to write their reports independently.
(6) Prosecution and charging of police officers by independent prosecutors. Review of current independent prosecution.
(7) Incidents like this leading to police being fired and blacklisted from law enforcement and private security.
(8) Independent examination of evidence in cases where someone was seriously wounded or died.
(9) Better police training in threat deescalation.

Even if all these were addressed, it wouldn't address the overall societal conditions that lead to economic disadvantage and crime.

But what's to do when "fascism, alt-right and white supremacy" are in power? 'Fight the power' seems like an idea... — unenlightened

Power is set there by the people, the people are informed by other people with power and influence outside the government. If you can't change how the government works, who's in office etc. you can change which movements that put certain people in government power positions.

So, who are the ones that drive public opinion and push certain ideologies into government power? Social media platforms only act when their PR is damaged. Exposing white supremacists, alt-right, racists and fascist groups, channels and posts together with linking them to the platform they are on will push bad PR for these companies. Twitter finally fact-checked Trump after years of people giving them the bad PR of being a channel for his opinions. If the largest social media platforms are forced into taking actions against racist movements and propaganda, it would choke a large part of that spread and force these people into creating their own places for expressing opinions. This, in turn, puts them into an echo chamber where their opinions doesn't spread as well as it has.

Since capitalists and neoliberals behind these platforms usually want the most users and don't ideologically care to silence racists, they will need to be pointed out in supporting racism, which would force them in another direction. If these people were indeed not of these ideologies, they would either already have put into action anti-racist decisions or are forced to do so in order to protect capitalist interests.

One way would be to actually use the Karl Popper frame of reference in the critique against the platforms. To ask them how they view his tolerence paradox and why they cannot enforce restrictions of their platforms around that philosophy. If they don't have an opinion on it, a question can be asked whether they actively support racists or just have apathy against such issues.

Someone who's philosophically educated could through the support of the people mount an offense against the social media platforms to silence out all of these racist movements that create public opinion voting politicians like Trump into office.

Cleaning up the social media platforms from the unrestricted (and uneducated) idea about freedom of speech and through that all the racist, white supremacist, alt-right, fascist propaganda... is a first step at least.

(9) Mandatory education in psychology and conflict de-escalation tactics.
(10) Mandatory meetups with community members of the districts they patrol within.

These points would A) have the police using de-escalating tactics rather than force in situations where unnecessary violence usually occurs while being able to assess a person's state of mind rather than just viewing them as hostile and B) Create a dialogue between the police officers and the members of the community they patrol in, in order to let them hear the voice of the people and humanize the ones they have a duty to protect.

The human factor to de-escalate conflict and binary divisions between police and the people would dramatically reduce the conflicts and violence. So far, all decisions made today are to enforce more conflict, not less. While psychologists know the mechanics of how to build bridges between people in conflict, there are no practical applications applied to actually do this.

If we feel bad about the homeless guy do we also feel bad about black and minority-owned businesses in low income areas being torched and looted? Do our sympathies extend to small white-owned businesses in low-income areas? I'm just not sure where people who are sympathetic to the riots draw the line.

In any case, the proposals by @fdrake seem reasonable and I've been supporting body cameras and increased transparency by the police forces for a while now.

Some interesting proposals from someone who seems to know their stuff:

Some highlights - Body cams don't work; Training programs don't work; Demilitarization works; Development of alternatives to policing works; Less shady police union contacts work. There's more in there.

The whole Twitter thread is short and an interesting read. Click to read the rest.

--

On a related note, and something I'd meant to mention previously - I think the current events make clear just how little body cams do work in the current regime of accountability. The stratospheric rates of police violence across the US right now are being recorded from multiple angles. George Floyd's death was recorded from multiple angles. The police are well aware of this. They simply do not care, because they know the footage won't amount to anything. For body cams to work, it seems like they can only do so in the context of institutional reform where there are real threats of sanction that follow. Until that is in place, body cams are placebos.

He won’t. Neither will other innocent victims: the Oakland security officer gunned down in the street, the people murdered in Iowa last night, and the countless people who have been assaulted or had their property destroyed. Whatever “movement” was here has lost my support a long time ago.

So I have been thinking about this bit. Is there any reasonable expectation that this time around, there will be Bipartisan support for change? That the republican establishment didn't even seem to blink at Trump's suggestion to send in the army isn't encouraging.

And there is the question of how much good reform does in the short term. Police departments cannot retrain, much less replace, their entire staff overnight. And arguably the police violence is another symptom of the huge economic disparities.

So if the political will isn't there for not just police reform, but a change of economic policy, then what is the next step? The elections aren't until November, and whoever does get elected will not necessarily change much. If the political will doesn't materialize, and I don't think it will, what level of disobedience to the system is justified & effective? Will property damage cause enough disruption to force the holders of economic power to the table? Will just being out in the street, refusing to comply with curfews etc. continue to build pressure?

Thinking about it, it's hard to maintain any hope that anything can cause the necessary change. Just like with gun control, climate change etc. — Echarmion

There are no easy answers but a couple of points are well worth making. First, that 'political will' is not something that pre-exists, but is forged - sometimes in fire, necessarily. Given the fact that the US has dragged their feet on this for, well, decades, the lack of will is simply a fact of nature that any good political strategy must take into account. It is less an obstacle than exactly the problem to address.

Second, the actual elements of reform exist. As I linked to in my previous post, there is empirically baked research on what does and does not work. It's not a matter of starting from scratch, and more noise needs to be made about the concrete design elements of reform. That the US State is entirely mum about his ought to be a spur for further protest, quite frankly.

Third, there are no guarantees about how any of this is supposed to proceed. In fact, given historical precedent, what's happening right now is more likely to fail to secure change. But this is nothing new for progressive causes. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better"; that's been the percept for the longest time now. Defeatism will simply lay you back in the same quagmire, only perhaps even more widespread and more violent next time.

Fourth, as I tried to lay out way back - at the big picture level, the problem goes beyond borders. The US is unique in the way it has taken seriously the imperative to gut social provisions and replace them with class terror, and it's ultimately only by redressing that system-wide neo-liberal policy strategy that the problem will be tacked in earnest. It goes beyond Trump, beyond elections, and beyond institutional reform limited to police.

This is alot of words for "I'm a shill for the status quo".

Interesting research via that Twitter link.

I certainly didn't say Trump was the root cause, but not only is he an accelerator, but the best example why the issue isn't resolved. And likely he will want more riots, more cars being burned and then send the military in. Not just the National Guard, but the Armed Forces. Trump desperately wants to do it to be the "Law and Order" President and eagerly wants the liberals to be appalled about the historical decision. It's all about him trying to get his followers to vote for him. Something that reminds me of how the Assad family stayed in power, actually.

C'mon man, I just wrote you a whole thing about the specific function and employment of the police as a matter of social policy in the US and all you can muster up is 'there are police in every country?'. You can do better than that. — StreetlightX

You have to understand that the police does the same thing in other countries as in the US. You don't have an Apartheid system or Jim Crow in place, what you have is a police culture and a society where this kind of behavior happens and is tolerated, not an open institutionalized harassment by the police what you have in totalitarian countries or earlier in South Africa. It really goes down to the culture of specific police departments as the police isn't an uniform single institution like the FBI.

So far the status quo looks far better than anything you guys have offered. What a lost opportunity.

You have to understand that the police does the same thing in other countries as in the US. — ssu

No it does not. I wrote a couple of paragraphs on it. Perhaps you can address what I said.

So far the status quo looks far better than anything you guys have offered. What a lost opportunity. — NOS4A2

A dead black man is not an opportunity.

Now there's a good start.

It won't change everything, but these kind of reforms would contribute to changing the culture. Perhaps in a decade the police and police - civil relations would be different.

the status quo — NOS4A2

You mean drinking tea at The Empress with all your well heeled, clueless mates?

No it does not. I wrote a couple of paragraphs on it. Perhaps you can address what I said. — StreetlightX

So you think that the US so special, so different from anybody else, that any kind of comparison is useless? You don't think that other countries have minorities or poor people? That a large portion of the "customers" of the police are poor people?

Of course, perhaps it would indeed be better to compare the US to Mexico or Brazil, but I guess your legal system performs better than those and is less corrupt.

People organizing to protect a Target store. Well, it at least proves that people have the ability to cooperate and get what they deserve.

Again, I gave my reasons. If you can't address them, that's OK.

Review a bit of Street's twitter link above as to why some of the ideas don't help. I was surprised body cameras don't make a difference to be honest.

So the US is totally incomparable to other nations. OK. :sad:

The lesson I took from it is - look institutionally. Solutions pitched at an individual level don't work. Body cams don't work because the institutions in place are not set-up to make their footage significant. Training people to be 'good cops' doesn't work unless the institutional mechanisms of accountability are in place to match, etc etc.

Correct. The US is orders of magnitude more barbarous than the rest of the world, when it comes to their cops, as reflected in their social policy, quite specific to the US.

Yes, I too reckon the trail of dead black bodies is perfectly OK.

They’re stacking up.

Chris Beaty, murdered in the streets.
https://sports.yahoo.com/former-indiana-football-player-chris-beaty-shot-and-killed-in-indianapolis-violence-135059190.html

Dave Underwood, murdered in the streets.
https://richmondstandard.com/community/2020/05/31/community-mourns-death-of-federal-officer-dave-patrick-underwood/

I’m sure the “movement” will remember them.

Yeah me too. Updated list:

(1) Mandatory body worn cameras including audio.
(2) Better police training in threat assessment.
(3) Better police training in arrest making holds; emphasis on safety to person who is arrested.
(4) Misconduct laws regarding failing threat assessment, camera guidelines and arrest technique leading to blacklisting an officer for failing them.
(5) Police have to write their reports independently.
(6) Prosecution and charging of police officers by independent prosecutors. Review of current independent prosecution.
(7) Incidents like this leading to police being fired and blacklisted from law enforcement and private security.
(8) Independent examination of evidence in cases where someone was seriously wounded or died.
(9) Better police training in threat deescalation.
(10) Police demilitarisation.
(11) New laws to restrict police use of force.
(12) Federal investigation of police departments.

Intervention in the communities to make 'em better and not just cop at them are good too,

(13) Investment in community organisations (this worked a lot with Glasgow and knife crime); educating/feeding people.

See here for where the strikethroughs come from. Thanks @StreetlightX for the resource.



If having police brutality on camera doesn't end up making police accountable, the whole thing is rotten.

Don't pretend you give damn.

If anyone has the stomach to follow the hundreds of incidents of police brutality captured on camera in the last couple of days in the US alone, they can all be tracked here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

It's these that really drove home for me how footage is, as it stands, totally ineffective.

No it isn't. Been there, lived there few years in childhood, your not so different from everybody else. Really.

Just look south at your border. Travel guides don't advise tourists when coming to the US the following way: "If you are robbed or something happens to you, DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. Seek help from your Embassy. Avoid especially Interior Ministry Special Forces."

That is how an ordinary travel book explains police in Mexico. In many countries EVERYBODY distrusts the police and thinks that they are just thieves in uniform.

You have A LONG WAY to go just how bad the police can be.

I gave you stats and references, you gave me anecdotes. Want to try that post again?

If having police brutality on camera doesn't end up making police accountable, the whole thing is rotten. — fdrake

Many times the real solution is just to form a new police department. Let everybody go, start from scratch.

Well, It's not hard to show that Mexico and Latin America do have bigger problems with police than the US, so it's not just anecdotal. This thread is going forward quickly, so could you link just what stats you were thinking?

No, I put in a fair amount of effort in that post, if you can't be bothered to have read it, then I can't be bothered to do more lifting for you.