A thread to discuss the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that have arisen in the wake of his death. No trolls.
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The Killing of George Floyd: Open Thread
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
Thanks, David.
I don’t have a lot to say on this topic, other than I really wish authoritarian types would stop hurting people. That’s simplistic, but I’ve got family in hospital right now, and my brain can only process so much.
A couple relevant links:
Minnesota Freedom Fund: providing help to PoC jailed or victimized by police in MN.
A thread on the recent history of police brutality in the Twin Cities prior to George Floyd’s murder.
I am sick. I am so tired of people complaining about rioting, but not about this poor man’s death. I hate that the police will likely get away with it and probably get their jobs back. (police union, only union I hate). MPD sent 75 officers to that murderer’s house for protection. 75! Sick. Could have used them instead of the riot police they used on the people marching to the police station.
Only bright spot is murderer can’t even order food to be delivered. They get close and refuse to finish the delivery. Hope he has to live with even a fraction of the fear poor Mr. Lloyd died with.
Cops are making it hard for me to argue ACAB. Not enough of those I know IRL have even mentioned how wrong this is. Nobody even in law-enforcement adjacent fields either. Been a great way for me to delete people .
The lesson is that if you’re white and protesting with AR-15s and hanging the governor in effigy, you get treated with kid gloves, but if you’re nonwhite and unarmed you get treated with tear gas and rubber bullets.
That’s not an unintentional or incidental lesson either.
I am disgusted with America right now.
George Floyd’s death is so troubling. We who watched the tape witnessed a murder. We knew it in advance too. I watched and listened as the bystanders implored the a-hole cop to let the man breathe. It was hard to sit still while watching. I imagined an alternate reality wherein someone stepped forward and got that murderer off of Mr. Floyd’s neck.
Yes, that person would’ve been arrested, berated, perhaps beaten, etc., but another man’s life would’ve been saved… and the kicker is (for those of us who watch a lot of sci-fi with alternate endings themes) that person who would’ve saved Floyd’s life would not have been viewed as a lifesaver, because none of us would’ve believed that the cops were going to kill that man on the ground in the first place. Like going back in time and killing baby Hitler; yeah you stopped a murderous regime but people in the alternate never-Hitler scenario would be sick that you’d killed a little cooing baby.
Also tragic is that Ahmaud Arbery’s filmed murder can’t be fully processed now because we’ve been too quickly ushered over to the next Black man’s murder.
Yeah, I couldn’t do it. I was unable to watch the tape and have only seen still photos.
@PoM
Same here. I just didn’t have the spoons, and I don’t now either.
Whaddya mean ‘us’ here? White people in general don’t believe it now, but I expect better from folks here.
It’s kind of surreal having this happen so close to me. I don’t want to give away my exact location too much, but the murder happened not in my neighborhood, but one neighborhood over and I’ve passed through that intersection more times than I could ever count.
I haven’t been to the protests because I’ve had to work and because they’re clearly too chaotic to maintain social distancing. I do plan on donating though.
The MPD have always been racist POS, even more so than a lot of cities, going by the stats and the only reason their rep isn’t on the level of the LAPD and NYPD is because we’re a smaller city with less of a media presence. They truly are a stain on what is otherwise a great city. Pretty much every black person I’ve met has been harassed by them or the St Paul PD (or both) at some point. They’re the worst.
I’m livid, but not surprised that people are more concerned with the well being of Target (even though those same people are probably the ones who derisively refer to that particular location as “Targhetto”) then they are the murder of a black person.
And here we have someone trying to act smug and superior because white people don’t protest when the same thing happens to a white person.
https://twitter.com/kawashima_ami_/status/1266034369287860224
quite a few people replying with “well maybe we should speak out about police brutality” and a few “yeah,we only riot when our sportsball team wins”
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Not sure how this Twitter link will turn out on mobile, but it shows video of a white man who was smashing windows and looking really sketchy. It’s been said that white nationalists were at the protest in Minneapolis and I wonder if he was one.
@LindsayIrene
Link is missing a : and goes to a home improvement outfit! I was able to fix manually but fyi.
I don’t think America as a nation will even want to learn. The system has been rigged against people of color and the working class from the start. America needs a radical rearrangement or else it deserves to evaporate through losing its power. Unfortunately they still have power since they have money and guns on their side.
@wwth this is the same fucking business conservatives threatened to boycott over the bathroom law. Capitalism is merciless if you somehow live through it.
There’s video of white people being involved in yesterday, including the Target free-for-all.
It’s not just the police who are rotten, it’s the whole legal system in the US. Look at what the courts do with qualified immunity for cops, for example. So I despair of it ever being fixed: it feels like you pretty much have to burn everything down and start again.
@LindsayIrene
He almost certainly is, but he was there in his capacity as a cop, not his extracurricular nazi groups. Regardless of what the demonstrators do it’s pretty much inevitable for cops to show up out of uniform and break shit at non-fascist protests. Then they use that to justify the violence they employed if they’re ever called on it.
yeah pretty sure the sport riot comments were intended to be sarcastic generalizations mocking whites for being more invested in the outcome of sporting events then social justice . not that white don’t riot over other things
White people “riot” by moving to newer/”better” neighborhoods/cities. That is the privileged way of dealing with stuff you don’t like. Protesting is performed by people who don’t have, or don’t feel like they have, any power to effect change without a public performance. White people, as a collective, have the power to effect change, or at least escape unfair conditions, and so they exercise that power rather than protesting.
You don’t see ExxonMobile organizing protests in favor of fossil fuel subsidies. They don’t because they don’t have to do it. They just pull the strings of power and money that they possess already and operate behind the scenes to secure the subsidies they like.
When you see a protest, you are seeing people who fundamentally feel unheard by those in power. This holds true across the political spectrum. People in power don’t riot, they just quietly make the changes they want, or move away to a new locale where they don’t have to deal with the stuff they don’t like.
Actually, most of the time white people riot to murder nonwhites and burn down their homes
The video I was trying to link to is on the Twitter account of @molllygurl. It’s very suspicious. The white man that broke the windows is dressed like a Hong Kong protestor, complete with black umbrella to hide his face. POC are asking him questions about what he’s doing and he will not answer. At the end, he lunges at the person filming him.
Yeah, dude’s 100% a cop. Like I said, this is a known thing that organizers have known to watch for since basically forever.
I’d like a “happy ending” with these murderers in prison for life. The happy ending is a world where cops stop killing minorities. And well the latter ain’t happening anytime soon.
I can’t watch the video. I can barely look at the screenshot that accompanies every article. Floyd looked unimaginably frightened.
And I keep seeing (white) people expressing greater upset over broken windows.
There is a huge caveat here in that I have not independently verified this except the Wayne Reyes part, but it comes to me from a person not usually known to bullshit me. Apparently the police officer who killed him is actually a serial killer who also shot an Alaskan Native American, Leroy Martinez, in 2011, another unarmed black man, Ira Latrell Toles, in 2008, and was one of a murderous posse against Wayne Reyes–who was a murderer but who also does not appear to have threatened police. It total he has 12 police brutality complaints against him, which are all closed without discipline (because duh, the police never get disciplined).
Wow
Even Ben Garrison says the police is in the wrong.