The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[Valmy]

I honestly prefer physical media, if given the choice.

Gotcha

Yeah I have come around to the idea that it is better to have physical media. I was pretty close to just getting rid of it all but seeing the darker implications of streaming have changed my mind.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/injured-boy-stopped-and-searched-by-met-officer-he-asked-for-help

Injured boy 'stopped and searched' by Met officer he asked for help

Rights groups have criticised police after a boy of 16, attacked by far-right opponents of a Black Lives Matter demonstration in London, said he was stopped and searched by the policeman he had asked for help.

The teenager, who is black, said that even though he had been injured in the attack, the police officer he approached for protection looked him over, searched him and told him to find medical help elsewhere.

His family is preparing to launch a complaint against the Metropolitan police.

Katrina Ffrench, chief executive of StopWatch, the UK organisation that works to promote fair and accountable policing, said: "It is disgraceful that an injured child asks the police for assistance and is treated like a criminal.

"This is precisely the type of disservice that causes young people to not trust and engage with police. The officers involved need to be reprimanded; rather than support this boy they searched him, despite there being no grounds that he was carrying any illegal items."

Gerard, who preferred not to give his full name, and two friends had travelled together from Essex to join the Black Lives Matter protest on Saturday, 13 June, unaware that organisers had called off the rally to avoid confrontations with far-right protesters and football hooligans.

The boys were near Victoria Street, in Westminster, when far-right protesters confronted them and Gerard became separated from his friends. He was attacked and knocked to the ground when one assailant hit him in the face with a bottle, cutting him below his left eye.

"When I was on the floor I was thinking ... I don't really know how I'm going to get out of this and if I do get out of it I still don't know how I'm going to end up," he told Channel 4 News. "When I was able to stand up I felt blessed that I was even able to stand up after what happened."

A bystander came to his rescue, separating him from his attackers and going with him to find a police officer. Gerard said he asked the officer to help him to safety, or to an ambulance.

"And he was like: no," Gerard said. "He had to go and help the rest of his team. He did at least try to talk me through it and look for injuries, but he also stopped and searched me."

The Metropolitan police said there was a section 60 order in force, giving officers the power to stop and search "those they believed to have been involved in violence", and that the officer who had first assessed Gerard "deemed [his injury] was not serious".

In a statement, the force said that police told Gerard's family about what had happened and had begun an investigation into the attack on him, which was being treated as a racially aggravated assault. But Gerard's family have said that police contacted them only after Channel 4 News began asking questions. They contest several details of the Met's account.

Suresh Grover, of the Monitoring Group, an antiracist organisation, has been supporting Gerard's family. He said: "Gerard was a victim of an unprovoked and brutal racially motivated assault, the intention was to kill him and he is lucky to be alive. He was bleeding heavily from his eye and in a state of a shock when he sought help from a police officer but he wasn't afforded the protection that he rightly deserved.

"Instead of being treated as victim, he was viewed as suspect. That attitude stems from a mindset of seeing black young teenagers as problem. It took one of Gerard's white friends to ask another police officer to call the ambulance.

"We are working with the family to ensure that Gerard recovers properly and to ensure that the police investigation of the assault and the stabbing is investigated properly. The family has asked us to initiate the complaints process."

Kevin Blowe, coordinator of the police monitoring group Netpol, said: "This was a racist attack. For decades local police monitoring groups argued that treating black people as second-class citizens when they report racist violence was the flipside to the stop-and-search racial profiling that immediately treats black communities as criminals.

"The grim inevitability of Gerard's treatment is a direct challenge to the claim last year by the commissioner, Cressida Dick, that 'this is an utterly different Metropolitan police', one that is no longer institutionally racist."

[Tamas]

Should have been born white than none of this would have happened.

[mongers]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/injured-boy-stopped-and-searched-by-met-officer-he-asked-for-help

Injured boy 'stopped and searched' by Met officer he asked for help

"The grim inevitability of Gerard's treatment is a direct challenge to the claim last year by the commissioner, Cressida Dick, that 'this is an utterly different Metropolitan police', one that is no longer institutionally racist."

Disturbing.

Also Ch4 News covered this about two week ago, you should give it a try, a more 'progressive' approach the BLM issues than the Beeb or Sky.

[Syt]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

[Valmy]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

As before the thing degenerated into symbolic issues, which seems kind of ominous. We should all be following the case in Minnesota as it unfolds.

[Syt]

"Non Mask - No Service" ... doesn't seem to apply if you're cop. 

https://twitter.com/PeterRQuinones/status/1278669366448488450?s=20

[Syt]

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/505592-massachusetts-detective-fired-after-post-supporting-black-lives-matter

Massachusetts detective fired after post supporting Black Lives Matter

A Massachusetts detective has been fired over a social media post last month expressing support of her niece attending a Black Lives Matter rally.

According to a report from MassLive.com, Florissa Fuentes, who had recently joined the Springfield Police Department's Special Victims Unit, was fired on June 19 after a May post she made while not on duty.

"After I posted it, I started getting calls and texts from co-workers," Florissa Fuentes told MassLive.com.

Fuentes says she removed the Instagram post on June 1 and that she received a call from the head of the Detective Bureau, who said the police commissioner was upset with her.

"I was initially confused, but then I realized they thought I was being anti-cop. I wasn't," Fuentes told the news outlet. "I was just supporting my niece's activism. I had no malicious intent, and I wouldn't put a target on my own back. I'm out there on the streets every day like everyone else."

The photo that Fuentes shared was reportedly from protests that happened after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

Fuentes said that Police Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood told her she was "getting pressure from the mayor's office" and to "fix" what she did. Fuentes said the police commissioner suggested she post an apology, so Fuentes did.

"The commissioner said: 'You have to find a way to fix this. I'm getting pressure from the mayor's office,' " Fuentes said, according to MassLive. "I said, 'Ok, I'm sorry. How do I fix it?' Officer Gentile suggested I post an apology on the police union Facebook page. So I went home later and I did."

Clapprood has denied that account and also told MassLive that this was not Fuentes's first issue with the department.

Fuentes said she received mixed reactions from her colleagues after posting the apology to her feed. Some said they are afraid to express support against police brutality after what happened to her.

"There's a lot of officers who are afraid to speak up about this issue and don't want to be targeted as well," one officer told MassLive under the condition of anonymity.

According to Boston.com, other officers have been fired for social media posts, including an officer in 2017 who posted a Facebook post in response to the violence during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

[11B4V]

 

[Tamas]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

.
Don't forget that everyone even the Premiere League showcased meaningless acts of solidarity. Well worth ignoring the pandemic for a couple of weeks and doing mass gatherings for.

[mongers]

I know I slag off the UK a bit, but man I'm glad I don't live in a country where firearms aren't prevalent.

That's not to say there aren't serious issues around policing and treatment ethnic minorities/

[Solmyr]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

So the choice is between breaking shit and getting heard, and protesting peacefully and not getting heard.

[celedhring]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

.
Don't forget that everyone even the Premiere League showcased meaningless acts of solidarity. Well worth ignoring the pandemic for a couple of weeks and doing mass gatherings for.

I loved the Catalan Parliament passing an unanimous declaration against racism and in favor of the BLM movement, and a few days later the regional police quietly reassigning a group of racist cops that had been separated from the force (they beat up a black suspect while yelling racist shit at him), instead of firing them.

[Tamas]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

So the choice is between breaking shit and getting heard, and protesting peacefully and not getting heard.

Have any violent protests achieved anything between nothing and regime change?

[viper37]

So protests and BLM have largely disappeared from headlines. I assume systemic racism is fixed, then?

So the choice is between breaking shit and getting heard, and protesting peacefully and not getting heard.

Have any violent protests achieved anything between nothing and regime change?

Only in the dreams of extremists.