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Poll: What's the Solution?
Riot in the Streets
21%
 21%  [6]
Peaceful Protests
64%
 64%  [18]
Who cares? I'm White
14%
 14%  [4]
Impeach Obama
0%
 0%  [0]
Total Votes : 28

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Precedent





  • #31
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 14:37
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meccalecca wrote:
Ahh... well then in that case, does his criminal record discount his video footage choking a man to death?
And is his possession of a firearm a worse crime than homicide.

They coincidentally found the gun on Ramsey Orta after they knew he had video evidence of a cop killing an unarmed man. He claims that this evidence against him is fabricated. Meanwhile there's no way to dispute the evidence against officer Daniel Pantaleo.

So why does Daniel Pantaleo walk free while Orta is indicted.


Oh I think that Pantaleo should have been indicted as of course homicide is worse.

No, his criminal record doesn't discount anything.
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RockyRaccoon
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  • #32
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 16:37
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Jon Stewart's reaction was great, and really powerful


Link

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Skinny
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  • #33
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 16:54
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Oh, and LeAnn Rimes can suck my dick.
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meccalecca
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  • #34
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 16:59
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Skinny wrote:
Oh, and LeAnn Rimes can suck my dick.



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Precedent





  • #35
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 17:03
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Skinny wrote:
Oh, and LeAnn Rimes can suck my dick.


Make a song don
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Skinny
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  • #36
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 17:05
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meccalecca wrote:



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meccalecca
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  • #37
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 17:13
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Skinny wrote:


i guess the deed is done
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alelsupreme
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  • #38
  • Posted: 12/05/2014 20:26
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Precedent wrote:
Of course he was arrested, what good is in this?


lemme put it this way: i wouldnt encourage, but i would probably look the other way.
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Saoirse





  • #39
  • Posted: 12/06/2014 13:43
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Shooting ten bullets at someone who is well away from arm's reach is not deemed suspicious enough for the cop to stand trial. Doing something that is clearly illegal protocol that leads to the death of a civilian doesn't mean the cop has to stand trial either. And that was recorded, no way for the officer to give a fabricated version of events. And the ever classy NYPD basically said it was the victim's fault for his own death by (illegal) chokehold. At this point it's saying to police "shoot at will, as long as they're not white you can practically do it in the middle of times square". It's becoming to a point where the law enforcement are clearly above legal retribution for any possible murder of a civilian, you know, if they fit the general public perception of who a dangerous criminal always is (ie non white).


And those two stories are not in any way isolated incidents. I don't know if it's simply the post-Trayvon Martin news cycle that all of a sudden is paying attention to these deaths of unarmed individuals at the hands of police (or in some cases vigilantes), but it is a problem and while some may smear all these protests as "misguided" civilians not understanding the "hardships of an Officer's job", it is doing what the legal system is clearly not: holding them accountable and bringing attention to the widening division between law enforcement and a sizable and usually under-heard segment of the country.
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Kool Keith Sweat





  • #40
  • Posted: 12/07/2014 13:06
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"White cops who kill unarmed black youth are making news all over the USA:
July 17: a New York cop accidentally killed 34-year-old Eric Garner, who was resisting arrest after being caught selling cigarettes illegally.
August 9: a St Louis cop killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, who had just robbed a store and was threatening the officer.
November 22: a Cleveland cop killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was brandishing a toy gun at the officer.
One could add the February 2012 killing in Florida of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by self-appointed vigilante George Zimmerman.
I think these cases are different in many respects. One thing they have in common is that politically correctedness does not help see the facts clearly. So let's be politically incorrect and tell the facts as the outside world sees them.
First of all, there are way too many guns in the USA. This is a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. Guns kill. People with guns kill. Cops have a right to fight for their survival in a society where anybody can get killed for the silliest of reasons, let alone a cop patroling a dangerous neighborhood. Cops overreact because this is a society that overreacts. Cops know that there are 140 million guns out there, some of them semiautomatic, courtesy of the largest terrorist organization in the world, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which de facto masterminds the scientific extermination of the US population in order to make the gun industry prosper. (See, for example, Congratulations NRA: another successful massacre!). If there weren't so many guns, cops would not be so eager to use extreme violence. Knowing that your chances of returning home alive in the evening are not very high makes you more likely to shoot first. If a cop knew that the chances of returning home alive are as high as, say, in Germany or Japan, that cop would be much less likely to shoot first, or to shoot at all. Confiscate all guns and some problems would disappear overnight.
That said, anybody who has lived in multiple countries or who has traveled around the world knows that the police in the USA tends to behave like the Soviet KGB or even like the Nazi SS. The response by cops to trivial offenses, or simple mistakes, is often wildly disproportionate. I was stopped in Palo Alto (14 July 2012) because i had installed my new car's plate upside down: the cop blocked traffic on the city's main avenue for 20 minutes to write me a ticket for this heinous crime, despite the fact that i still had the screwdriver in the car and i was more than willing to fix the problem on the spot, which would have taken a lot less than 20 minutes (the cop did not allow me to get out of the car at all). And that's just my favorite example of arrogant and disproportionate (idiotic?) behavior by police officers that i have personally witnessed in the USA. Police cars have the motto "To serve and protect" painted on them but it would be more appropriate to change it to "To enforce rules and regulations without any regard for common sense and humanity".
Then there's the media. What these episodes have in common is that the media were rooting for riots. None of these cases would have become national without the obsessive coverage of the media, in particular television. TV channels competed for broadcasting debates (mostly biased), opinions (mostly by non-experts), testimonies (mostly by unreliable witnesses) and live images (mostly blown out of proportion). Each tv studio was clearly desperate to show a riot. There were massive peaceful protests in Ferguson that were hardly shown on tv, while a violent incident involving no more than ten people was shown over and over again. CNN showed a protest in Chicago for several minutes before the reporter admitted that there were only about 100 people protesting there (100 out of a population of 10 million, which means 0.00001% of Chicagoans). The effect of this kind of blood-thirsty coverage is to encourage more blood. The television networks wanted riots in order to increase their audience, and pretty much caused them. By watching the events unfolding in Ferguson one could begin to understand how Al Jazeera indirectly rallied terrorists in Iraq to fight against the USA. The rioters soon become heroes as television keeps showing their epic acts. Others, who would have normally played videogames or listened to a pop hit, decide that the "cool" thing to do is to join the riot. Before you know it, live television has created the very riot that it was eager to cover.
On to the specifics. Michael Brown was a thug. He had committed a serious crime and was resisting arrest by a police officer. The police officer did what any police officer anywhere in the world would have done. De facto, Michael Brown committed suicide. His parents and his friends should feel ashamed and try to prevent that others become like him.
Zimmerman may have been a racist maniac who was desperately looking for a chance to hurt or at least capture a black man, but he was heavily conditioned by the fact that young black men had committed a series of crimes in the neighborhood (and Trayvon Martin, like many black teenagers, might have indeed wanted to look suspicious like rap stars do). Zimmerman is as guilty of that murder as all he young black men who committed robberies in that neighborhood and created the tension that led to that deadly encounter (and as guilty as the NRA that arms all these vigilantes).
Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun. There are all sorts of toys and one has to wonder why kids in the USA enjoy toy guns over other toys (and violent videogames over all other videogames). Had he been playing with a soccer ball like most kids of this planet, he would still be alive today. Furthermore, someone had removed the orange warning tip that would have helped the cop determine this was a toy, not a real gun. If the cop honestly felt that this was a young black men (as politically incorrect as it sounds, this is the most violent category of people in the USA) aiming a gun at him, the cop can hardly be blamed for shooting first. Again, blame it on the wide availability of guns and on all the young black men who have committed murders in that neighborhood.
Finally, Garner was not shot but was accidentally killed while a cop was trying to arrest him. The police officer had no way of knowing that Garner had asthma. The cop's defense is that Garner was arguing and resisting, and the wildly overweight Garner looked like a really strong man. In this case what stands out is the disproportionate reaction by the police to a very minor crime that resulted in an altercation. If i was furious when the Palo Alto police officer cited me for installing a car plate upside down, i can easily imagine how furious this man was: he was not selling drugs, and was not robbing a bank, and was not a suicide bomber; he was merely trying to make a little money by selling cigarettes to passerbys. I would have argued vehemently just like he did. In a country in which people who sell guns, a much more dangerous item, are considered good citizens, and in which millions of citizens sell all sorts of articles on the Internet, it is difficult to conceive why it was necessary to arrest someone for selling cigarettes.
Therefore these case are different. What they certainly have in common is the color of the skin of the victim: black. Hence the national debate on whether police officers are too quick to pull a gun at a black person. That debate has always been a bit unfair to women. The victims are young black males, not females. Neither cops nor neighbors feel threatened by young black females. Statistics don't show young black females committing violent crimes. This is very much about the black male, not the black person in general. There is a racial divide, but there is a much bigger gender divide. In 2013 blacks committed 5,375 murders while whites committed 4,396 murders (and, given that there are a lot more white people than black people in the USA, this statistic should speak volumes to the black community), but about 90% of these murders were committed by males. If we have to draw a lesson from the fact that blacks are seven times more likely to kill than whites, shouldn't we also draw a conclusion from the fact that men are nine times more likely to kill than women? When was the last time that an unarmed woman (black or white) was killed by a cop? Why is it that it never happens to women? When was the last time that a girl committed a mass murder in a high school?
So the main story should be that too many males in the USA tend to be violent and love guns and think that looking scary is cool. A corollary to that story would be that the same males are behind the staggering success by the NRA to make guns available to just about everybody; and another corollary would be that police officers (mostly male) tend to be as arrogant and threatening as the criminals they are supposed to fight. Then a secondary story should be that black men are more likely to be violent than white men. And then it gets easier to explain why a police force that is trained to overreact will end up killing more unarmed black men than unarmed white men.
Being politically correct will not solve the problem. Each of us (regardless of skin color) has the same reaction when meeting a group of young black males in a narrow alley at night. That is a wildly different reaction than when meeting a group of, say, young black Indians. The Indians are most likely software engineers who never committed a crime and have a high credit score. Too many young black men like to look intimidating and indulge in intimidating others instead of focusing on getting a degree in computer science and saving money. Not all of these young black males are criminals, but the attitude of "looking" like a criminal is widespread. This is not to say that blacks "want it on themselves" but black communities should certainly meditate on why a minority that has lived free in this country for decades cannot achieve the same salary and credit score of minorities that just arrived. The outcry about white police brutality against young black males happens just when the country is debating what to do with millions of illegal immigrants: how is it that tens of millions of Hispanics crossed the border illegally, settled in very poor neighborhoods (sometimes the same neighborhoods of poor black families), accepted the humblest jobs and are now making a decent living while unemployment among their neighboring blacks is consistently twice the national rate? (This doesn't mean that i completely disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates's article in the Atlantic, but i doubt that reparations would solve the problem of the black male youth).
The people who rioted in Ferguson don't deserve much of an explanation. Those are thugs, who happen to be black males and who want to get away with crime: they would like immunity from being arrested when they rob a store. There are many more blacks in that same neighborhood who appreciate the fact that the police protect them precisely from those rioters.
The protesters who demand that police be fair to the 5% of the US population that is black and male are absolutely right: that 5% deserves the same treatment as everybody else. But those protesters should also march in the streets demanding that the other 95% be allowed to live without having to fear the attitude of so many black males. It is easy to protest against government, politicians and police; a lot harder to protest against the attitude of an ethnic group.
More importantly, those protesters should attack the real culprit: a society that relies on guns to the extent that everybody is ready to shoot at the slightest sign of danger, and shoot with deadly weapons. It is not only police officers who kill innocents: plenty of ordinary Zimmermans kill innocents too. If US criminals (white or black) did not have more guns than the Iraqi militias, ordinary citizens wouldn't feel terrorized and cops (and everybody else) would be less likely to overreact.
And, while we are at it, let me briefly rant against another facet of political correctedness: the term "African-American". Only in the USA can one think that the term "African-American" is politically correct. My friend Gerard, a white man from South Africa who relocated to Pennsylvania, is an African-American. My friend Hassan, a Moroccan who relocated to California, is an African-American. The white Zimbabwean businessman whom i met in Argentina and the black Angolan student whom i met in Brazil are African-Americans. But that is not what US citizens mean when they say "African-American": they mean a "black person who lives in the USA". In fact they call "African-American" even people from Haiti, Britain and France, as long as their skin is black. Most US citizens (particularly the self-appointed African-American ones) think of Africa as being only sub-Saharan Africa, and of America as being only the USA. And they do not consider white people born in Africa as "African". In other words, when they say "African" they really mean a "person with a black skin", and when they say "American" they really mean a "US citizen". Neither of which sounds politically correct to me. It is emblematic of how twisted the whole discussion about the black minority has become."

- Piero Scaruffi

I don't agree with this, other than the gist that guns may be more of a root problem than race, but it provided an alternative opinion and some good laughs, particularly when it gets to the Indians with high credit scores.
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