The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[Syt]

Ahmaud Arbery, 3 years ago:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/19/us/2017-ahmaud-arbery-tasing-incident/index.html

Police attempted to use Taser on Ahmaud Arbery during a 2017 incident

(CNN)Police in Glynn County, Georgia, attempted to use a Taser on Ahmaud Arbery during an incident in 2017, according to a police report and police body camera video obtained by The Guardian.

The events captured on the body camera do not appear to line up entirely with what the first responding officer wrote in his report.

According to a police report from that incident, an officer was patrolling Townsend Park on November 7, 2017, when he noticed a vehicle parked in an area "known for drugs and other criminal activity."

Attorneys for the family confirm it is Arbery -- who was shot and killed during a confrontation while jogging in February -- in the 2017 video.

What happened in 2017

In the body camera video, the officer checks Arbery to see if he has any weapons on him.

Arbery repeatedly demands to know why he is being questioned and begins to argue with the officer, who asks to search his vehicle.

"He raised his voice and approached me," the officer wrote. "I observed veins popping from his chest which made me feel he was becoming enraged and may turn physically violent toward me."

Though Arbery is agitated, he complies with most of the officer's demands. However, he tells the policeman not to touch him and not to search his car and repeatedly challenges the reasons given for his questioning, the video shows.

Another officer arrives a short time later, and the officer already on the scene fails to disclose to his colleague that he's already checked Arbery for weapons, the video shows.

After Arbery again declines to let the officers search his car, he heads toward the driver door and the officer who just arrived tells him, "Don't reach in it, buddy," and draws his Taser. Arbery backs at least three steps away from the car, the video shows, and his hands drift toward his pants pockets.

The officers instruct Arbery to take his hands out of his pockets, which he does immediately, holding them out wide in plain view. Still, one of the officers then deploys his Taser, which does not work. He curses and orders Arbery to the ground, the video shows. Arbery complies again, and only then does the original officer inform his colleague that he has already checked Arbery for weapons.

The police incident report suggests that Arbery posed a danger to the officers.

The original officer wrote in his report that after Arbery was instructed to remove his hands from his pockets, "Arbery did not take his hands out of his vehicle; therefore, (the other officer) attempted to deploy his Taser to protect himself and I from the possibility of death or serious bodily harm."

You see, these kind of police interactions are completely alien to me. In 15 years of living in Vienna, I regularly see police in the streets, or on a train, and I've never had any interaction with them.

Not so my Indian colleague (he could almost pass for garbon's brother based on looks). He gets IDed or questioned two or three times each year. In one memorable instance three squad cars stopped around him, and even though he had all his papers on him, they didn't believe that he was a university student at the time. They took him in for questioning for a few hours until they'd confirmed his story with fellow students and two professors. At airports he's regularly tagged for "random checks" and once almost missed his flight back from Greece where he was vacationing with friends (he was held 45 minutes for questioning, though during that time he was left sitting alone for 30 minutes, and any time he asked if he could help in any way was told to STFU).

He's surprisingly well spirited about it, because I would be seriously pissed at this point. It is what it is, he says. (That said, he's very progressive/leftist, and considers going back to India not an option, esp. not with Modi in charge.)

[Sheilbh]

I know someone who is black and worked in the British embassy in Vienna. He had to go in and work on a holiday or weekend at some point. Despite having a pass and his passport the police guarding the embassy didn't believe him and arrested him. He had to have the British ambassador come down to the station to pick him up and open the embassy.

[Valmy]

Really? The cops used to give me shit when I was younger but now that I am an older guy they only occasionally scream at me. It is kind of funny how much that changed when I stopped being a threatening teenager/young adult.

[The Brain]

This rare footage of a visit to Vienna PD might be relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaVtCN3rX4M

[Syt]

Really? The cops used to give me shit when I was younger but now that I am an older guy they only occasionally scream at me. It is kind of funny how much that changed when I stopped being a threatening teenager/young adult.

I literally never had an interaction with the police outside of border crossings and such. And in years of air travel I was once tagged for a random check for hints of explosives on my fingers which lasted all of 10 seconds.

[Eddie Teach]

What was on your fingers?

[Valmy]

Really? The cops used to give me shit when I was younger but now that I am an older guy they only occasionally scream at me. It is kind of funny how much that changed when I stopped being a threatening teenager/young adult.

I literally never had an interaction with the police outside of border crossings and such. And in years of air travel I was once tagged for a random check for hints of explosives on my fingers which lasted all of 10 seconds.

See I figured a metal head looking guy like you would be on their radar as potential trouble maker. I guess that just raises less eyebrows in Europe than Texas.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I'm like Syt. I can't think of any interactions with police outside of border crossings - and there I am frisked an unusual amount of times (I should probably stop asking) and have had my luggage searched a few times too. No idea why.

[Malthus]

Cops arresting news crews for no obvious reason while they are recording seems a new low to me. I don't remember that ever happening before in the US. Seems more like something you would expect to see in China.

It's not common but it definitely is not unprecedented; there are usually at least a few such incidents every year: https://pressfreedomtracker.us/arrest-criminal-charge/

Keep in mind that when it comes to law enforcement, the US is at least 50 different countries, and arguably more given strong local control over police forces.

I know journalists have been arrested at protests before. The reality unusual factor here is that they were arrested during a live broadcast, which showed for all to see that the arrests had no reasonable basis. That may well have happened before, but I don't remember it happening any time recently.

[Syt]

This rare footage of a visit to Vienna PD might be relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaVtCN3rX4M

Vienna police has a bad record when it comes to POC. Famously, they took one African (married to an Austrian) who was to be deported to a warehouse where they almost beat him to death and ran over him with a car. The involved policemen were sentenced to a few months probation. They were only fired years later. The victim was to receive 800k in compensation, but the payments were stopped by court order after 110k, with the state claiming that the physical and psychological harm isn't as bad as he claimed. The incident was in 2006, and he's still fighting in courts. The policemen tried to reopen the case to be found innocent, but a court denied them. They have yet to apologize for their actions.

In another case, police pulled a black man from a subway train, manhandled him and threw him to the ground ... then realized he was not a drug dealer, but a teacher from the US. There's more stuff like this.

Tbf, they're also quite rough with leftists. At a climate protest last year they cleared a road from protesters. One was positioned so his head was under a squad bus, and one of the cops revved the engine and moved the bus a few centimeters,  pretending to drive over his head. Another protester was arrested and kicked in the kidneys repeatedly. A cop can be heard shouting "In the kidneys!" A judge found the action to be illegal and, based on video evidence, said that one could have the impression that the policeman was politically prejudiced in his actions against the protester.

And there was the case of an animal protection group that had eye catching protests and walked a very fine line with regards to the legality of their actions that was investigated as "organized crime" (which is normally reserved for mafie-like structures), with nightly raids by anti-terror units. To their credits, the courts threw out the case against them.

I guess the upside is that death by police is rather rare in Austria.

[Ancient Demon]

The police murdered George Floyd, and I hope at least a manslaughter conviction is coming. It would be better to keep the focus on police brutality however, rather than make this a race issue. The constant race baiting by the media is in large part responsible for these riots, and it's not going to solve anything.

[Valmy]

The police murdered George Floyd, and I hope at least a manslaughter conviction is coming. It would be better to keep the focus on police brutality however, rather than make this a race issue.

Well I mostly agree, that the focus needs to be on holding the police accountable.

But it is not really the media's fault racebailting. This stuff was not really big in the media until the black community made it a big deal on social media and in independent media. The race issue is real, not some fake story the media cooked up a short time ago. If anything the media was very late to the game.

But the problem of the cops mostly being held unaccountable for things like this is vital even if the race issue wasn't an issue and I think we should be able to get most people on board with that...or at least I hoped that would be the case.

[Malthus]

The problem with violent rioting is four-fold.

First, there is not much evidence it is effective in actually making positive change. There have been numerous violent protests over police violence, as far as I'm aware not much evidence this has changed the problem.

Second, allied to the first, while violent rioting definitely gets public attention, people tend to see what they want to see in it. Those already convinced police violence is a problem see this as the inevitable result: no justice equals no peace, something that may (or may not) be regrettable, but which is in either case inevitable. Others will have their stereotypes of the affected communities confirmed: what is necessary, in their view, is harsher measures to repress the violent rioters. What you tend to get is more division, when what is needed is unity of political purpose to clean up the corruption in policing. This is why people like Trump love this situation ...

Third, the victims of the rioting tend to be third parties, not the police. In the current case, a number of businesses and, oddly, an affordable housing unit.

Fourth, the ultimate victims of violent rioting tend to be the same population as is impacted by corrupt policing. Businesses burnt out by rioting may not come back.

[grumbler]

He also said this: "If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history."

Which while I agree he wouldn't agree with the violence, surely he'd understand that many feel as though they don't have ways to express those emotions in nonviolent ways.

I'd argue that MLK believed that hos approach WAS providing the means of expression through nonviolent ways.  His observation was that the alternative to his methods was violence.

[Razgovory]

Maybe we just need braver police.  You know, police that don't fear for their lives the moment they see a black guy.