George Floyd protests

[Tero]

My workplace for 18 years was a few miles Nort of downtown St Louis.

To avoid rush hour congestion on I-64 South I would often drive an arc around the downtown area. Going through the Old North St Louis area, you could see some of the more stable black community. Once I saw cops holding 3 black teens with zip ties, sitting at the curb. Shootings and robberies were in the news so I would never drive thru it at night.

Moving North from there, the black neighborhood was presumably the more easily flooded land...

[Tero]

The entire stretch from downtown to the airport along I-70 is black neighborhood.

Along the way there are a few white working class neighborhoods, such as Ferguson. They were there due to to two auto plants along that interstate. Those closed.

Directly across the interstate from Ferguson is the university campus, a commuter college. It's a stop on the light rail to the airport. Airport is just past I-70 and I-170 corner.

I would drive past Ferguson some 2 years, 1990s, to go pick up my kids from preschool by a rather complicated route. The interstates don't connect very well to each other. Anyway, I had no clue Ferguson would be the site of riots.

[Tero]

here is a street scene from that near north side

There are some corner shops, hair cutters, bars, a funeral home. The park nearby is nice...it is mowed. A few parks in the area are just fenced up and wild bushes and trees have taken over. To get to a grocery store with decent food (not 7-11) you would need to take a bus or two to 5-10 miles away. Fried chicken take out shops are all over the place.

The two story homes and buildings were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Streets are cobblestone with black top laid over.

[Tero]

(it sends me free summaries of big stories to email)
NYT
In several big cities, however, things have changed. Police departments have adopted new policies, and, while problems remain, the number of shootings and deaths have fallen significantly.

It’s happened in Los Angeles, where fatal police shootings have declined in each of the last four years, down to 12 last year. It’s happened in San Francisco. And it’s happened in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and Phoenix, Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and activist, writes for FiveThirtyEight. “Many of these reforms were initiated in response to protests and public outcry over high-profile deaths,” he adds.

The changes often revolve around training officers to de-escalate situations and reduce the amount of force they use. Tougher measures to get rid of violent officers also seem to help. Hiring more police officers sometimes helps as well, research shows. “Overstressed, overtired officers working too many shifts generate more complaints of excessive force,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias notes.

The most sweeping proposals to emerge in recent days, like defunding the police, are unlikely to attract broad political support. Many Americans feel positively toward the police, as David Byler of The Washington Post points out — although there are large gaps by race.

Still, most Americans also say that the police have a racism problem, and most favor reforms, such as body cameras and outside investigations of misconduct. Drew Linzer of the polling firm Civiqs notes that support for the Black Lives Matter movement surged in recent days to almost 50 percent, “the highest it has ever been in over three years of polling.”

All of which points to some common political ground on police reform. “The problem is not that we lack a playbook for fixing the police,” a former police commissioner in Philadelphia and three other experts write for the Times Opinion section. “We have one. The problem is that we have not successfully followed the one we have.” Barack Obama posted a Twitter thread last night making similar points.

Why hasn’t reform worked in Minneapolis? The police department “failed to set clear criteria on the use of force and de-escalation,” Jamiles Lartey and Simone Weichselbaum of The Marshall Project report. The department also failed to “weed out bad cops” and “continued to use choke holds.”

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. Remembering George Floyd

Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
A memorial service on Thursday for George Floyd was by turns personal and political, celebrating both the life he had lived and the movement that his death has inspired. Floyd’s brother Philonise recalled playing football and eating banana-and-mayonnaise sandwiches; one of his cousins, Shareeduh Tate, said, “The thing I miss most about him is his hugs.”

In a defiant eulogy, the Rev. Al Sharpton said: “George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks. Because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck.” Later, with the crowd rising, he added, “It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ‘Get your knee off our necks.’”

More developments from the protests:

Two Buffalo police officers were suspended after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester. They left him on the ground while he bled from the head. Mayor Byron Brown said the man was in serious condition.
The Buffalo video is one of hundreds across the country that have documented violent police tactics, often in response to nonviolent protests. (Related: Wesley Morris, a Times critic-at-large, writes: “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones.”)
2. Some good news on the virus
If you look at one of the charts tracking the coronavirus in the U.S., you’ll probably notice a disturbing pattern: The number of new cases has virtually stopped falling, hovering around 20,000 for the past 10 days.

But the actual trend may be more encouraging. The number of tests being conducted has been rising rapidly in recent weeks — which means more virus cases are being uncovered than otherwise would have been. Another key measure is the percentage of tests that come back positive (as Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has argued), and it has continued to decline...

[Tero]

Mayor protests
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politi ... d_ms_fb_mj

[Brian Peacock]

Which mayor protests what?

[Tero]

There is a picture there. A picture is worth 100 words.

[Hermit]

Which mayor protests what?

You should be able to work it out from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCWnT94Q9kA

[Tero]

How does this work? Feds have no power over states:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that a new initiative would be introduced next week to end racial profiling and excessive use of force by police officers. The Congressional Black Caucus is leading the effort to put forward a package of bills on police reform in the coming days.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/live-update ... 020-06-05/

[Seabass]

Protect and serve!

[BarnettNewman]

Could be... could be.

Your Russian friends have been busy:

Twitter said Monday that it has suspended an account named "ANTIFA_US" which it says was tied to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa. Over the weekend, the account had called for violence and its posts had widely circulated online.

https://www.axios.com/twitter-suspends- ... FfzUBkaMHg

Makes you wonder why they would bother posting that if Antifa was actually as violent as they claim.

[Tero]

Policy Options

There are several options policymakers might examine
should they choose to play a role in facilitating better
police-community relations and accountability for
excessive use of force, including the following:
 placing conditions on federal funding to encourage law
enforcement to adopt policy changes to promote better
community relations by, for example, expanding
training or reforming how use of force investigations are
conducted;
 requiring DOJ to develop model policies or best
practices regarding the use of force, training standards,
or accreditation;
 expanding efforts to collect more comprehensive data on
the use of force by law enforcement officers;
 providing grants to law enforcement agencies for the
purchase of body-worn cameras for their officers;
 taking steps to facilitate investigations and prosecutions
of excessive force by amending 18 U.S.C. Section 242
to reduce the mens rea standard in federal prosecutions,
or place conditions on federal funds to promote the use
of special prosecutors at the state level; or
 using the influence of congressional authority to affect
the direction of national criminal justice policy.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF10572.pdf

Mens rea is the mental element of a person's intention to commit a crime; or knowledge that ... or hopes that the attendant circumstances exist.

[laklak]

If you give governments power and money they use it. If you threaten their power and money they react like this.

[pErvinalia]

But we all just need to sit down over a cup of tea* and talk it out. The dude wouldn't stand for this violence!

* or a kaluha and milk...

[rainbow]

If you give governments power and money they use it. If you threaten their power and money they react like this.