Police killings in the USA

[Tannin]

I'm amazed that there isn't a thread on this yet. Have we become so used to policemen in the USA shooting people dead on the flimsiest of pretexts that we just don't pay attention anymore? Have we all written off the USA as a terminally violent and dysfunctional society akin to Mexico, South Africa, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Extraordinary.

Meanwhile, nobody anywhere has even bothered asking why some angry black man with a military weapon has been shooting back. Well, fair enough I guess. It's not really a question, is it. We all know.

The real question that deserves an answer, the great perplexing mystery of it all, is this: why has it taken until now? Why in a year with an average of one African-American citizen a day shot dead by the police who are sworn to protect and serve, why has there been no great uprising? In short, the question isn't "why did this black sniper start killing random police officers", the question is "how on earth did they, the black citizens of the USA, manage to restrain themselves and not start shooting back until today?"

I am honestly amazed that it has taken this long, and fear deeply that, now it has started, it will be very, very hard to stop.

Let's face it: the reality is that US police won't stop shooting random black citizens. The don't seem able to stop.

And now that African-Americans have started randomly killing the police who are randomly killing their brothers and sisters, it wil get worse and worse and there will be no end to it.

[Pies4shaw]

It's been dealt with in The WTF thread.

[Tannin]

Thanks P4S. I don't get to read all the threads these days, just glance at the headlines.

I see that you wrote "The alternative to the conspiracy theories is to confront the reality that the Land of the Free has systematically subjugated, incarcerated and murdered a major part of its population. It's understandable that some of the Dotty Right would prefer madness to facing the truth."

Just so.

I can't see how the USA is ever going to recover from its terminal decline. (Not this matter alone, a range of other things too. This is just the arsenic icing on a very toxic cake.

[think positive]

I just asked our black Jamaican taxi driver what he thought, and he said with a shrug " there will be another one tomorrow and the day after, in church, at the movies, it's crazy, it's madness, it will get worse before it gets better" he doesn't like all the guns, but "what can you do? How Doyle fix it now? They are crazy here about their guns, it's nuts". He was about 25. Long dregs. I asked him if it worried him if he got picked up. He said you just have to do the right thing, behave right, but it could happen to anyone. He lives in buffalo.

We saw a small back lives matter protest in New York, but as with the save Messi one, we just walked around it.

It's a worry though.

I have quite a few American friends, only one is a gun advocate, (and she's nuts!) the rest want them gone.

Just saw on the news (we are at buffalo airport waiting for a flight to Denver,) there has already been an increase in assault weapon sales since last night.

There is a massive police presence, it was noticeable in DC New York, and Boston. Sirens all the time in New York. On the outskirts of all three towns, gangs of black youths in packs. I wouldn't walk around there. We have been to several small towns, and larger like Charlotte, and I felt as safe as I do in Melbourne. But who knows who has a gun, that's the thing. Not good

[sixpoints]

I haven't checked any further than this as to what is happening in the USA. Eg demographics of victims, race of victims/perps, reasons for shooting incidents (family violence, gang, robbery, minor disagreements etc), so I offer no attempt at analysis.
But just finding this site and looking at the sheer numbers is staggering.
If this is the price that nation is willing to pay, then so be it. But the trauma of gun violence, by these numbers must be all pervasive. Every one of these thousands of victims has parents, siblings, friends...the place must be full of traumatised people!
Imagine being a cop knowing everybody you pull over could be armed to the teeth? What would that do to the way you approach your job, let alone your psyche?

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

[watt price tully]

Not much has changed in some respects. I remember showing this to my then school age daughters when Michael Moore was just starting out on his TV series "The Awful Truth" which we used to watch as a family (on FTA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE

[Wokko]

Politicians and media stoking racial tensions and pandering to hate groups like BLM have finally got the payoff they wanted. Same old sheep parroting gun control instead of focusing on the actual issue which is racist hatred of blacks towards whites, incubated from the President down while ignoring the violence of blacks against each other.

Just forget that blacks killing blacks is the real issue, in Chicago (one of the most tightly gun controlled cities in the USA) there have already been 344 homicides this year, overwhelmingly black on black shootings with no arrests.

http://heyjackass.com/

[Culprit]

People are angry, unemployed, under employed, depressed and can still purchase fully automatic weapons. This is their gun laws coming home to roost. The NRA are pretty quiet but everyone should be able to carry a weapon so everyone can shoot back. It's working, people are shooting back.

My American friends blame Obama, they reckon it's a conspiracy and the media cover it up. They can't wait for Trump to be President.

[Tannin]

Politicians and media stoking racial tensions and pandering to hate groups like BLM have finally got the payoff they wanted. Same old sheep parroting gun control instead of focusing on the actual issue which is racist hatred of blacks towards whites, incubated from the President down

Ahh, I get it. The reason the white police have shot hundreds of black people dead is that the black people don't like it. Yer right. On your bike.

[Wokko]

http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-st ... on-bandler

Educate yourself you numpty.

[Wokko]

https://twitter.com/JoeVargas/status/751623298975358977

[stui magpie]

It's a messy circular self perpetuating and self fulfilling slow moving disaster.

Cops in the US are on heightened guard whenever they pull someone up, as it's highly probable that person is armed, quite possibly legally. Our cops don't have that pressure. That would put an edge on you for a start.

The majority of cops are white, Blacks are over represented in arrests unsurprisingly as they make up the majority of the poor and disadvantaged, the breeding ground of crime.

So when a white cop pulls up a black person, both are on seriously heightened guard.

BTW, I'm not even going to attempt to justify the two shootings in the lead up to the latest event, they are unjustifiable.

Are the cops racist? Dunno, but doubt it as a generalisation. More likely they're racial profiling and are on a hair trigger so more likely to make an error of judgement faced with a black suspect.

Would the same thing have happened in the two lead up shootings if the suspects were white? Probably not.

If it did happen, would the outrage have been the same? Probably not.

Interestingly in the USA from my observation, the majority of homeless and beggars in Vegas was overwhelmingly white.

In San Francisco, I'd call it 50% black, 30% white, 15% mexican and 5% Asian.

[Pies4shaw]

I hear the strains of "Strange Fruit" far off in the background.

[David]

[HAL]

That seems like quite a lot.