Conflict erupts at Minneapolis, L.A. protests over George Floyd death

[Formless]

Have a sort of town guard organization to step in and deal with stabbing sprees/guy who just beat the shit out of a prostitute for fun/Florida Man. Make sure they're unarmed and drill it into their heads that their goal is to make sure everyone goes home unhurt as much as possible (this may be easier said than done, but it's a place to start).

Would this work in the US? My perspective of the problem as a Brit, and therefore an outsider, is that the root cause of the problem is the tendency of US police to resort to extreme violence at a very early stage of any interaction. This cannot have arisen in a vacuum, and I suspect at least part of the problem is the prevalence of, and attitude towards, firearms in the US. If any interaction with the public has a non-trivial possibility of escalating to the copper leaving in a body bag, the copper's primary concern going into any such interaction will be making sure that doesn't happen. No amount of training will override that fundamental instinct towards self-preservation. Even sacking every last cop in the US and rebuilding from the ground up wouldn't work, because the environment that lead to the development of this police culture would not have changed, and something very similar would therefore develop organically.

That is actually exactly what the cops want people to think, but it just isn't true. The cops use it as an excuse, but in reality the vast majority of crimes involve no firearm, and certainly no firearm capable of penetrating police body armor. Remember, pretty much all police forces these days can afford kevlar or equivalent armors (even in Europe!), which can stop any handgun up to the infamous .44 magnum. No one uses that gun in crime, for obvious reasons, let alone anything larger. Armor piercing ammo is also not available in the US by law specifically to prevent police deaths, and besides that most criminals use the most inexpensive ammunition they can find (non-expanding jacketed lead target loads). Now that doesn't mean cops can't be killed by a gun, because the armor doesn't protect the whole body, nor does it protect against rifles. But look up the statistics. While cops are significantly more likely to be killed by gunfire here than in other countries, its still a very small number. Larger than traffic accidents, but remember that its their job to risk their life, at least in theory, in order to protect the public. Cowards shouldn't be in uniform, because they are the ones most likely to draw their guns in anger.

Moreover, gun ownership among blacks is lower than among whites, and yet police shoot and murder black people disproportionately. Does anyone remember the time a cop shot a black child in a park when the kid was holding a toy gun? I do. If they had given themselves the time to assess the situation, they would have seen the telltale signs that the gun was a toy and not a threat, but instead they rolled right up and seconds after getting out of their car, the boy was riddled with bullets. The police aren't trained to use their own guns responsibly, because they aren't trained to give themselves the time to assess how dangerous a situation really is; nor are they trained in basic tactics like using cover to keep the gunman from shooting them. They are trained to shoot first and ask questions later so that no gunman can get the chance to even pull his piece. Unfortunately, that tactic leads to a lot of people getting shot for no other reason than the cop thinks they are armed when they are not. Police are trained to eliminate all threats, imagined or real, and imagined threats are treated too generously by the courts without considering the injustice that it causes on large scales when that is the precedent.

The police have been trained to fear the public, and because of racism they especially fear minorities to an irrational degree. Just because a criminal is armed does not mean the situation is immediately dangerous to the cops or general public. A lot of incidents are suicide by cop, for example. Most of these situations can still be diffused; by escalating them instead, the cops create the very shootouts they fear. Some states created rules against police car chases for similar reasons. They were shown to cause more damage and loss of life by innocent bystanders than just letting the criminal "get away". It was safer to just get the plates of the car and find the owner at a safer time and place (like a roadblock, if it was really that important to get them off the street immediately). At the end of the day, if you look up shooting statistics, the surprising fact is that cops shoot more people than the rest of us combined! How do you simplify that to a gun control problem? You can't, because gun control is a red herring. One which actually feeds into the police mentality. They think guns are more common among the populace than they really are, especially in the places where they are least likely to appear. And their own handling of guns is worse than that of the gun nuts, as the gun culture here teaches that you will be prosecuted for shooting someone even if you are absolutely able to claim self defense. Even if you win the court battle, it will cost you. Hell, we're even taught that there is no such thing as an accidental shooting, only a negligent one, because any discharge that injures someone else could get you prosecuted. The police don't have that worry, though, because they have qualified immunity and the blue line and all manner of other extraordinary protections to fall back on that normal citizens do not.

Maybe its time to take away that immunity.

And besides that, the murder of George Floyd obviously has nothing to do with guns. No guns were drawn. George Floyd wasn't shot. He was choked. The cops have no excuse this time. And not for the first time, either. I know you are british and have a hard time understanding what its like to live in a culture with guns. The truth is most of the time they are hidden from sight, left at home where they pose no threat to anyone. Including the cops. And they know that. At least, intellectually. That knowledge needs to be better reflected in their training, not used for propaganda purposes.

[Ralin]

It's easy to say, "We'll just make the regulations stricter!" but that isn't a solution to the problem, since the entire problem is that it is trivially easy for the cops to avoid accountability even for outright, blatantly illegal actions like the ones getting caught on camera all over the country right now. The only way for stricter regulations to be successfully implemented is by overhauling the whole damned system in the first place.

I know I keep harping on this, but the 'fire them all and make a new police department' bit wasn't hyperbole. I'd consider it a starting point in many/most cases.

I realize getting the political will together to do that is non-trivial, but no police union or blue wall can override the local government declaring "You are not police anymore and you don't get anymore money for equipment and salaries. Hand over your weapons." At least not without ratcheting up to the thuggery to warlord levels.

[The Romulan Republic]

It's easy to say, "We'll just make the regulations stricter!" but that isn't a solution to the problem, since the entire problem is that it is trivially easy for the cops to avoid accountability even for outright, blatantly illegal actions like the ones getting caught on camera all over the country right now. The only way for stricter regulations to be successfully implemented is by overhauling the whole damned system in the first place.

I know I keep harping on this, but the 'fire them all and make a new police department' bit wasn't hyperbole. I'd consider it a starting point in many/most cases.

I realize getting the political will together to do that is non-trivial, but no police union or blue wall can override the local government declaring "You are not police anymore and you don't get anymore money for equipment and salaries. Hand over your weapons." At least not without ratcheting up to the thuggery to warlord levels.

At which point they could lawfully deploy the National Guard against the cops and put them down as an armed insurrection, with treason prosecutions for the survivors, or at least the ringleaders. And they would, if the cops literally tried to take over the states by force of arms, because to do otherwise would be to surrender their authority and potentially their lives.

[Ralin]

At which point they could lawfully deploy the National Guard against the cops and put them down as an armed insurrection, with treason prosecutions for the survivors, or at least the ringleaders. And they would, if the cops literally tried to take over the states by force of arms, because to do otherwise would be to surrender their authority and potentially their lives.

Or they could continue their trend of ignoring police atrocities and shrug and say "Oh well, I guess the police really can seize money they decide we owe them in funding" or some shit.

Seriously, you know right-wingers and police get kid gloves for that sort of thing. Don't underestimate how chabuduo our military's reaction to this sort of thing can be.

[The Romulan Republic]

At which point they could lawfully deploy the National Guard against the cops and put them down as an armed insurrection, with treason prosecutions for the survivors, or at least the ringleaders. And they would, if the cops literally tried to take over the states by force of arms, because to do otherwise would be to surrender their authority and potentially their lives.

Or they could continue their trend of ignoring police atrocities and shrug and say "Oh well, I guess the police really can seize money they decide we owe them in funding" or some shit.

Seriously, you know right-wingers and police get kid gloves for that sort of thing. Don't underestimate how chabuduo our military's reaction to this sort of thing can be.

If the military decides to refuse direct orders to suppress an armed right wing revolt, then we've already basically lost.

I am working therefore on the assumption that at least a substantial number of them still believe in their oaths to the Constitution. And for what its worth, the military leadership's reluctance to be a tool of Trump right now is encouraging (and even before this, his approval in the military had fallen to the point where it wasn't much better than his approval among the general public, and its much worse among the officers).

[MKSheppard]

Remember, pretty much all police forces these days can afford kevlar or equivalent armors (even in Europe!), which can stop any handgun up to the infamous .44 magnum.

*laughs in 7.62 Tokarev*

[Ziggy Stardust]

*laughs in 7.62 Tokarev troll*

Fixed that for you.

[The Romulan Republic]

More proof that Facebook is firmly on Trump's side:

https://aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/face ... 15148.html

Facebook Inc has fired an employee who had criticised Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to take action against inflammatory posts by US President Donald Trump earlier this month.

Brandon Dail, a user interface engineer in Seattle, said in a tweet on Friday that he was dismissed for publicly scolding a colleague who had refused to include a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement on developer documents he was publishing.

Facebook employees demand Zuckerberg take a stand against Trump
"I don't doubt that violates Facebook's respectful workplace policy," Dail wrote. "I'm not claiming I was unjustly terminated. I was fed up with Facebook, the harm it's doing, and the silence of those complicit (including myself)."

I'm not claiming I was unjustly terminated. I was fed up with Facebook, the harm it's doing, and the silence of those complicit (including myself). I called out a public figure in the React community. I think it's disingenuous to call it "bullying" but that doesn't really matter.

— Brandon Dail (@aweary) June 13, 2020
Dail sent the tweet in question a day after joining dozens of employees, including the six other engineers on his team, in abandoning their desks and tweeting objections to Zuckerberg's handling of Trump's posts in a rare protest at the social media company.

"Intentionally not making a statement is already political," Dail wrote in the June 3 tweet, mentioning the employee by name. He said on Friday that he stood by what he wrote.

Trump's posts which prompted the staff outcry included the racially charged phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" in reference to demonstrations against racism and police brutality held after the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.

Twitter affixed a warning label to the same post, saying it glorified violence. Facebook opted to leave the post untouched.

Zuckerberg defended his decision at a tense all-hands meeting with employees that week. During the meeting, Dail tweeted that it was "crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with us".

Facebook confirmed Dail's characterisation of his dismissal but declined to provide additional information. The company said during the walkout that participating employees would not face retaliation.

Dail did not respond to a request for comment.

Dail again voiced objections this week after both Facebook and Twitter declined to take action against a Trump post that contained an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old protester who was critically injured by police in Buffalo, New York.

"Trump's attack on Martin Gugino is despicable and a clear violation of Facebook's anti-harassment rules. It's again extremely disappointing that we (and Twitter) haven't removed it," he said.

Internal dissent is often encouraged at Silicon Valley tech giants, but the companies have been accused of penalising workers who organise and air complaints publicly.

Alphabet's Google fired at least five workplace activists late last year, while Amazon dismissed critics of its warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.

Both companies denied firing employees for speaking out.

Right. Criticizing a fellow employee for their racist behaviour is "bullying", but posts that incite racial murder and violate Facebook's own policies are fine.

[loomer]

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Mariame Kaba

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the future.

The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common complaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks,” as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.

The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations, like working to build “community support for law enforcement” and reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by police officers.”

These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests. Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

Source

[ray245]

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

I am utterly sceptical such a societal change will ever be possible in the US. Individualism is basically in-built into the whole idea of being America by this point, and many Americans seems happy to defend it even at the cost of people's lives in a pandemic.

[loomer]

Maybe so, and it may just be why the most vocal voices for abolitionism are Black feminists - people for whom the current US framework can reasonably be described a fundamental failure.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/1 ... ide-313797

Police lounged in Bobby Rush’s office while Chicago’s South Side was looted
As many as 13 officers broke into the congressman’s campaign office while nearby businesses were vandalized in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

By SHIA KAPOS

06/11/2020 03:34 PM EDT

Updated: 06/11/2020 04:24 PM EDT


CHICAGO — As many as 13 Chicago police officers broke into Rep. Bobby Rush’s Chicago campaign offices to lounge on chairs, drink coffee and make popcorn while looters vandalized nearby businesses in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Rush and Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on Thursday.

The two Illinois Democrats stood together at a news conference to call out the actions, which took place at the end of May. While they spoke, images of officers “in repose,” as Rush said, were flashed on a screen.

“Looting was going on, buildings were being burned, officers were on the front lines truly taking a beating with bottles and pipes, and these guys were lounging — in a congressman’s office,” Lightfoot said. “The utter contempt and disrespect is hard to imagine.”

The mayor added that “it’s almost inconceivable with what was going on … where looting continued into Monday morning, having started Saturday night.”

“Look at this guy, sleeping on a congressman’s couch,” Lightfoot said, pointing to an image of an officer.

Rush added: “They even had the unmitigated gall to go and make coffee for themselves and to pop popcorn — my popcorn — in my microwave while looters were tearing apart businesses within their sight and within their reach.”

Supt. David Brown of the Chicago Police Department, who was at the news conference, did not address the specific events but said: “Behavior reflects leadership, always. It’s a hard truth to take as a leader, that you’re responsible for the behavior of others.”

Rush’s campaign office, which has been closed since the primary in March, is in a strip mall that was looted over the weekend of May 30-31. Rush said his staff noticed someone had broken into the offices when they entered on Monday, June 1. Then they looked at the surveillance video, which showed officers sitting on chairs and one even taking a nap.

Lightfoot said the offices had been looted earlier in the weekend and that officers came in and out afterward over a period of four hours in the early hours of June 1.

“When you swear an oath to serve and protect, you are a Chicago police officer — not a police officer only for certain neighborhoods and only for certain times,” said the mayor, whose voice shook with emotion and who at one point wiped away tears.

Lightfoot showed an image of officers in the offices and said, “We know who you are and will find you.” She encouraged them to come forward on their own and pledged that the city would take “the strongest possible action — particularly with supervisors,” who were identified by their white shirts.

She called the police officers’ actions “deplorable … at a time when the city and their fellow officers needed them most.”

Lightfoot said that “their conduct will confirm the perception that too many people on the South and West sides were left to fend for themselves [and] that police don’t care if black and brown communities were looted and left to burn.”

The South and West sides were hit particularly hard by looting after the killing of Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25. Chicago officials and activists called out Lightfoot and police officials for not doing enough to quell the violence, but Lightfoot said that police had responded to all of Chicago’s 50 wards evenly.

As Lightfoot noted on Thursday, she and Rush “haven’t always agreed on every issue, but today we are in total alignment in righteous anger” over the episode at his office.

Lightfoot also said she was moving ahead to work with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state lawmakers to license police officers. “We must act,” she said.

Well looks like we found some police who just want to chill and not crack heads.

[The Romulan Republic]

The contempt by officers for the property of Democratic politicians is also deeply disturbing. It suggests that the police no longer regard opposition politicians as legitimate.

[loomer]

Looks like Atlanta is back to it after the execution of another man by the police yesterday, as the protestors have set fire to the Wendy's where it took place. The protests never died off but media coverage started to dwindle as part of the news cycle - but a burning Wendy's is the kind of dramatic imagery that'll bring the issue right back to the fore for coverage. Property damage transforms an incoherent human rage into a form that can be understood within the capitalist frame.

[Nicholas]

The contempt by officers for the property of Democratic politicians is also deeply disturbing. It suggests that the police no longer regard opposition politicians as legitimate.

This kind of behavior is exactly what I would expect from a demoralized police department.

I would ask in what sense is a Democratic house member from Chicago an "opposition" politician? All politics is not national. The Chicago cops work for the Chicago city government which is completely dominated by Democrats. They are living in Illinois which is also dominated by Democrats. The politicians in a position to punish them for this are all Democrats. There is no good reason to view their actions as in any way related to politics.

Nicholas

[The Romulan Republic]

The contempt by officers for the property of Democratic politicians is also deeply disturbing. It suggests that the police no longer regard opposition politicians as legitimate.

This kind of behavior is exactly what I would expect from a demoralized police department.

I would ask in what sense is a Democratic house member from Chicago an "opposition" politician? All politics is not national. The Chicago cops work for the Chicago city government which is completely dominated by Democrats. They are living in Illinois which is also dominated by Democrats. The politicians in a position to punish them for this are all Democrats. There is no good reason to view their actions as in any way related to politics.

Nicholas

Aside from the fact that Democrats have largely expressed at least symbolic support for the protesters, while Trump is fully behind a brutal police crackdown?

The term "opposition" may not be accurate for Chicago, but this is definitely political. Its the police aligning with one party to violate the rights of the other.

[madd0ct0r]

On the day that was expected to mark the 50th anniversary parade of Boston Pride, the city’s massive annual celebration of LGBTQ identities, a crowd of about 2,000 people turned out for a Transgender Resistance Vigil at Franklin Park.

Though the parade was postponed due to the threat of spreading coronavirus, a huge and diverse crowd of mask-wearing participants showed up for the hastily organized event that replaced it, in a rebuke of the Pride board’s leadership.

Organizers of the Saturday gathering expressed dissatisfaction with the Pride leaders’ responsiveness and what they regarded as a lukewarm public statement on the recent killings of Black people. From now on, they made it clear, they intend to speak forcefully for themselves.


“We have seen them fail this community, year after year, for 50 years,” said speaker Tre’Andre Valentine, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. “It is up to us. We are the ones we have been waiting for."

Organizer Athena Vaughn opened the vigil with a moment of silence for transgender people who have been killed in recent years, many of them Black women. The Human Rights Campaign identified 26 transgender or gender non-conforming people violently killed last year and 14 already this year.

Two this week. Dominique Fells & Riah Milton
#Blacktranslivesmatter

[Bedlam]

Going by the CDC figures about 7 people die a violent death in America each hour so about 60K a year.

Going by the above violent transgender deaths would make up 0.04% of the total violent deaths.

There are probably various measures of the number of transgender individuals but Wikipedia gives a level of 0.58%.

So that would seem to show violent transgender deaths to be about 1/10th of the general population.

Does any have different figures?

[Darth Yan]

Maybe so, and it may just be why the most vocal voices for abolitionism are Black feminists - people for whom the current US framework can reasonably be described a fundamental failure.

Reading through the comments of the article. The police as stand absolutely need to be done away with but law enforcement of some kind will ALWAYS be necessary no matter how much you spend on social programs and the like. Those can help but anyone who seriously thinks getting rid of law enforcement is good is an idiot. Models like Germany's can work

[loomer]

Maybe so, and it may just be why the most vocal voices for abolitionism are Black feminists - people for whom the current US framework can reasonably be described a fundamental failure.

Reading through the comments of the article. The police as stand absolutely need to be done away with but law enforcement of some kind will ALWAYS be necessary no matter how much you spend on social programs and the like. Those can help but anyone who seriously thinks getting rid of law enforcement is good is an idiot. Models like Germany's can work

Are you perhaps confusing 'the police' with the whole sum of possible forms of 'law enforcement'?

[madd0ct0r]

Going by the CDC figures about 7 people die a violent death in America each hour so about 60K a year.

Going by the above violent transgender deaths would make up 0.04% of the total violent deaths.

There are probably various measures of the number of transgender individuals but Wikipedia gives a level of 0.58%.

So that would seem to show violent transgender deaths to be about 1/10th of the general population.

Does any have different figures?

I assume this was same CDC page https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/ ... index.html

In the United States, more than seven people per hour die a violent death. More than 19,500 people were victims of homicide and over 47,000 people died by suicide in 2017 alone.

So you included suicide, the national average of being violently killed is a third of that.


Trans pop stats are always a bit dodgy, and they include people at all points along their transition, while I'd guess the violence killings focus on the most visibly identifiable. Such killings are patchily recorded, hence https://tgeu.org/tmm/
For such a small number of killings in usa, that %rate of general population really shifts the rates a lot. 0.3% Vs 0.58% Vs 0.62% for example.

According to the Williams Institute, in 2016, approximately 0.6 percent of adults in the United States identified as transgender. This translates to just over 1.3 million adults.

This number shows a huge increase from the institute’s study five years before. In fact, the percentage had doubled.

I'm going to take a squint at the trans murder monitoring project and see if the us stats include race.

[Darth Yan]

Maybe so, and it may just be why the most vocal voices for abolitionism are Black feminists - people for whom the current US framework can reasonably be described a fundamental failure.

Reading through the comments of the article. The police as stand absolutely need to be done away with but law enforcement of some kind will ALWAYS be necessary no matter how much you spend on social programs and the like. Those can help but anyone who seriously thinks getting rid of law enforcement is good is an idiot. Models like Germany's can work

Are you perhaps confusing 'the police' with the whole sum of possible forms of 'law enforcement'?

The NYTimes article seem to think just social programs will make things go away and that because cops mostly deal with routine issues they aren't needed which is asinine. Some form of police are always going to be necessary because people are imperfect. Other countries have managed to make better forms of policing without abolishing them. I can't help but see the idea of getting rid of police as a group and department as a pipe dream. As it currently stands the US is definitely going to need to abolish what it has but it can be rebuilt afterwards in a less corrupt form

[loomer]

Also, I'm just gonna put this out there, but it's weird to quibble over whether trans folk are actually getting murdered too much in response to several of them getting murdered. One of them, Tony McDade, is a perfect example of why the stats on this are extremely rough - there's been a consistent effort by the media and the police to misgender him and deny that he was a man. That shit is very common and means that there are plenty of trans people who don't get picked up as such when they're the victims of crime.

[loomer]

Reading through the comments of the article. The police as stand absolutely need to be done away with but law enforcement of some kind will ALWAYS be necessary no matter how much you spend on social programs and the like. Those can help but anyone who seriously thinks getting rid of law enforcement is good is an idiot. Models like Germany's can work

Are you perhaps confusing 'the police' with the whole sum of possible forms of 'law enforcement'?

The NYTimes article seem to think just social programs will make things go away and that because cops mostly deal with routine issues they aren't needed which is asinine. Some form of police are always going to be necessary because people are imperfect. Other countries have managed to make better forms of policing without abolishing them. I can't help but see the idea of getting rid of police as a group and department as a pipe dream. As it currently stands the US is definitely going to need to abolish what it has but it can be rebuilt afterwards in a less corrupt form

So, that doesn't actually answer my question. Do you think that policing is the only viable model of law enforcement?

[Darth Yan]

Are you perhaps confusing 'the police' with the whole sum of possible forms of 'law enforcement'?

The NYTimes article seem to think just social programs will make things go away and that because cops mostly deal with routine issues they aren't needed which is asinine. Some form of police are always going to be necessary because people are imperfect. Other countries have managed to make better forms of policing without abolishing them. I can't help but see the idea of getting rid of police as a group and department as a pipe dream. As it currently stands the US is definitely going to need to abolish what it has but it can be rebuilt afterwards in a less corrupt form

So, that doesn't actually answer my question. Do you think that policing is the only viable model of law enforcement?

I believe that to some degree it will always be needed despite what idealists would like to think. It can be reformed but getting rid of it is NEVER going to work.