Beyond appalling.
Please post useful links, pics, videos. I will update this post with more.
Video of demonstration, police firing teargas and rubber bullets.
Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.
Google News Realtime coverage of Ferguson
@ redpoppy..i saw one of those open- carry, “come and take it” bumperstickers on my way to work, and…
. It occurred to me that if you replaced the cannon on said sticker with a strap- on- dildo, the meaning of the slogan would * really *change …
Someone linked an app that might be useful for NYC dwellers.
http://www.nyclu.org/app
I’m hoping that other regional versions, or a national clearinghouse, will come about.
Sorry, will can further topic deviations. Unfortunately, I have a very gruesome sense of humor, will stow. Sorry.
@blahlistic– LOL I would love a bumper sticker like that.
Blahlistic, yeah, I’d appreciate you not joking around on this thread. But feel free to go over and put it in the general open thread.
Sorry, too!
There’s some kind of gallows humor joke to be made about sundown towns here, but I think if I tried I would start screaming until nothing came out but blood.
Delphi Ote, there’s a lot of information coming out of Ferguson that makes pretty clear how over-the-top the quasi-military response to the demonstration tonight was; see that video I linked to for starters.
Speaking from outside the US, I’ve always been gobsmacked at the levels of violence by cops there. My bedside table usually has a crime novel of one sort or another, I used to think that the casual corruption and extreme violence was there for dramatic effect. Not for a while now.
The one thing that struck me like a bolt of lightning, given my perspective, was that when the Ferguson cops called in the St Louis County people, they turned up with a SWAT team of 70, read that again SEVENTY, officers. I doubt very much that South Australia even has 70 swat trained officers, let alone available at a moment’s notice. (Then I checked. The population of the Adelaide + suburbs region is 1.2 million. for St Louis County it’s just over 1 million.)
The second thing has also struck a lot of other people. The parallels to the 60s and 70s. Lousy Canuck included one side-by-side pair of images that a few other people have used. http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2014/08/13/rachel-maddow-on-the-record-of-racial-disparity-in-ferguson/
Though I suspect that any attempt to poke flowers in the barrels of those guns would meet with exactly the same reaction the action would have got 50 years ago if it had been the black protesters rather than the college kid war protesters. (Though I always admired those people – I think they were dealing with National Guard rather than local cops, which can make a difference.)
Speaking of cops with guns. Has anyone yet come up with a coherent explanation for the blokes on top of that vehicle pointing their guns at an unarmed group of people?
Why?
It looks like something from Cairo or Syria.
It’s not that I don’t feel outrage, either. But it’s also that…I spent my 20’s marching around about stuff like this. Discrimination in the justice system, police brutality.
It. Never. Fucking. Goes. Away, it seems like.
We’ve made a stunning amount of progress on LGBT stuff, probably because LGBT stuff isn’t as big a threat to the power structure as advertised.
But systemic discrimination based on skin color, police abuse of power…
It really disgusts me that we can’t move past this shit.
If I run around outraged all the time, I make my health even worse. And the shit does not get any more fixed.
How does one deal with outrage that just keeps on festering?
It’s related to the pathologizing of black men that happens in the US, and the the police are especially awful about. The comment I made about the kid with the puppy wasn’t a joke, there really was a recent case where a 14 year old black boy was tackled to the ground by the cops when he was just standing there holding a puppy, and the justification given was that the cops thought he was looking at them in a threatening way. You have to have a lot of preexisting socialization that pathologizes black boys as violent and dangerous in order for something like that to happen and the cops to think that’s an acceptable reason to give for attacking a child. Minus the pathologizing attitude towards young black boys it’s hard to think of a less threatening image than “child with puppy”, but American society frames black boys as scary and dangerous all the time, and that attitude is then used to justify use of force in situations where that force would otherwise be seen as completely unreasonable. You see it in the way sentencing is handled too, with black boys not being given the sort of leeway that kids are normally given and being framed as if they were older and more responsible for their actions and more dangerous than boys of other races of the same age.
So yeah, the cops here are more violent than in a lot of other places in general, but in terms of the incident that started all this it’s not just about that, it’s specifically about the way that American society frames black boys and young black men, and the way the cops think they can get away with acting as a result of that.
You see it to a lesser extent with black girls and women too, with the cops sometimes being physically aggressive towards them in a way that most people would see as outrageous if directed at a white woman, or even more so at a white little girl. It’s in that context that you can have the image mildlymagnificent describes above show up and not have the entire country have the same reaction to it she’s having.
But a fair average quality police officer who’s been _trained_ to keep in touch with the community would use such a golden opportunity to establish or enhance relationships. And there are very few interactions less loaded than “I used to have a dog when I was your age. It was fun.” or “I’ve got one like that at home, but she’s mostly tan. She’s three years old now.” or “How old is yours?” or other normal, predictable Awwww, cuuute, conversations everyone engages in when there are big-eyed puppies involved.
They’re not, though. In fact all available evidence appears to point to them being trained to think that viewing a black child just standing there holding a puppy as a potential violent criminal is normal and reasonable.
@mildlymagnificent
The problem is, POC are not seen as part of the community by so many precincts and cops. This is especially true for Black and Latin@ communities. That sort of interaction is reserved for White boys and girls. POC are not part of the community, we are the suspects. Cops are much more likely to cultivate relationships with informants than they are to cultivate a relationship as the protectors they’re supposed to be
And I wish we could brush this off as just being a problem with the police, but it isn’t. The way the police relate to black boys and men is both a product of the surrounding society and sustained by it. Seeing white people react to random black men who’re just walking around minding their own business with visible fear was one of the strangest things about moving to the US for the first time for me. This idea that black people, especially men, are inherently scary and dangerous is really deeply embedded in American culture.
…fearing black or darker people is reacting to a false signal. Trusting white or light-skinned people is also reacting to a false signal.
It is a totally useless way to determine whether a person is a threat or not. Simply from a threat- evaluation perspective, it’s useless data
I don’t know why the surprise reading this. But I’m not just shocked, I am also surprised.
This tweet was linked by a commenter on a Pharyngula thread. https://twitter.com/yarens1/status/499781723970740225/photo/1
http://wearecitizenradio.com/
Citizen Radio is covering the police brutality.
Warning:
Citizen Radio does mostly chat and comedy for the first 20 or so minutes of the show.
I hope everyone in the area is staying clear of and is safe from the police. This is tragic and the jerkass who did it needs to be brought to justice. That poor boy, his friends and family…
This morning is the first time my local news has mentioned Ferguson. And they merely deemed the situation to be “violent protests” without appropriately identifying who is perpetuating most of the violence — the police. Alderman French has been arrested, a state senator was tear gassed Monday night as she stood with peaceful protestors, they shot tear gas at the Al Jazeera news van while they attempted to set up their cameras to report, they’re shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protestors, they’re arresting journalists, they’ve instituted a no fly zone above the city….this is infuriating and terrifying.
And listening to “progressive radio” all morning — they are talking Ferguson on Bill Press all week, then Stephanie Miller starts and opens every single show with Robin Williams talk. WHAT THE FUCK.
I forgot to add “QFT”.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/michael-brown-shooting-the-police-s-military-like-response-to-missouri-riots-1.2735588