Anime cosplayer shot dead while being black.

[Eldar_Atog]

If I on the flip side looked at a Los Angeles gang member of non-white ethnicity and automatically assumed murderous criminal, you would rightly be excoriating me.

I doubt you'd run into many people that would excoriate you over the statement that a white/non white gang member is a murderous criminal. This is the reputation that they have intentionally built. They want to be feared as a group.

It is our duty to question those in authority because authority is power... and power corrupts. That is the problem with the US now. People got too complacent.. too trusting of authority figures. That's how the image of the policeman changed from the honest beat cop to the heavily armed thug that throws a flash bang into a baby's crib during a no knock search warrant. If police officers didn't want people to view them like that, they should not have condoned the behavior.

[DarkLink]

100% with Denzark on this one. I hope some of you never have jury duty. You'd walk in and see a cop across from a black family and decide to send that officer to jail before you even heard the charges.

[Kirsten]

that is not how it works DarkLink

[daboarder]

that is exactly how racism works

[Kirsten]

not sure who that is addressing.

the point is nobody is saying all police are bad. what is being pointed out is that the american police force has a serious issue dealing with the black community. an unarmed black man is shot every 28 hours in america by police officers. the situation in Fergusson shows what a serious problem there is. this killing of the cosplayer is all too common. that is not acceptable. it is not declaring all police to be guilty, nor is it racism.

[Denzark]

If York was not declaring them guilty he would not have included 'while being black' in the thread title. The victim was being lots of things, York drew attention to his ethnicity - because he is thereby claiming this is one of the cases where it was at the root of the issue. If this was at the end of a trial in accordance with their state law and they were found to be guilty AND his race was found to be a factor, then fair enough.

This is putting the cart before the horse and is a form of prejudice in itself.

I will wait for the verdict.

[DWest]

I will wait for the verdict.

The verdict will come back 'not guilty', because it always does. The verdict is not indicative of the facts of the situation, because of many reasons, including racism but also including the exceptional leeway American citizens give police, the nature of the relationship between police and prosecutors, and the lack of oversight measures (body cameras, for example) to provide concrete evidence of how police/suspect encounters play out.

[YorkNecromancer]

You'd walk in and see a cop across from a black family and decide to send that officer to jail before you even heard the charges.

Actually, what I'd do is sell all this military nonsense the police don't need -tanks, machine guns and whatnot - then spend that money on personal cameras which every police officer would wear at all times and in all places.

These cameras would automatically log their footage to a personal black box recorder built into the officer's body armour, as well as sending it (where possible) via wifi to an external server. That server would be run by each police department's Internal Affairs division; officers could have access to their footage, but the actual saved footage would be the property of women and men they don't know personally, to reduce the risk of it being tampered with. That way, in any shooting, there is a record of exactly what happened from the viewpoint of every officer at the scene, and we have a much clearer (though still imperfect) account of events as they transpired.

I would also consider live-streaming officer's feeds at random onto a dedicated, nationwide website - a bit like Youtube, or the channels people livestream games across - so that any ordinary citizen can observe police officers as they act. Officers wouldn't be observed all the time, but they would never know when they were being observed. Who watches the watchmen? Us. All of us. We have the capacity to do this now. If a citizen observes an officer breaking the law, they call a dedicated telephone line, and inform the desk of the date, time and officer number of the event in question. It would work like Wikipedia. If you wished to log a complaint against a police officer, you would have to give your personal details, to prevent fraud and false accusations. Complaints would be logged with Internal Affairs, or possibly some oversight committee, so that an officer observed commiting a crime in Texas couldn't hunt down the woman in Los Angeles who reported her.

I would make it an act of gross misconduct to be 'on the clock' and not wearing your camera as an officer. Keeping your camera working would be your personal responsibility. Failure to maintain your camera or have work carried out on it, getting lenses replaced after they've been broken, whatever, would mean an immediate suspension and investigation, pending a meeting with a peer review board. If you want all the power there is over ordinary citizens, if you want it, you can have it. But with that great power comes great accountability. If you have the right to police us, we have the right to police you.

The police and government are always telling us, the commoners beneath their boots, that if we're innocent of any crime, we have nothing to hide. We're filmed, photgraphed, monitored, our emails are hacked, and all in the name of keeping people alive. So okay. I would make them stand by those words. Let them be held as accountable at all times and in all places as they would hold us.

[daboarder]

Actually, what I'd do is sell all this military nonsense the police don't need -tanks, machine guns and whatnot - then spend that money on personal cameras which every police officer would wear at all times and in all places.

These cameras would automatically log their footage to a personal black box recorder built into the officer's body armour, as well as sending it (where possible) via wifi to an external server. That server would be run by each police department's Internal Affairs division; officers could have access to their footage, but the actual saved footage would be the property of women and men they don't know personally, to reduce the risk of it being tampered with. That way, in any shooting, there is a record of exactly what happened from the viewpoint of every officer at the scene, and we have a much clearer (though still imperfect) account of events as they transpired.

I would also consider live-streaming officer's feeds at random onto a dedicated, nationwide website - a bit like Youtube, or the channels people livestream games across - so that any ordinary citizen can observe police officers as they act. Officers wouldn't be observed all the time, but they would never know when they were being observed. Who watches the watchmen? Us. All of us. We have the capacity to do this now. If a citizen observes an officer breaking the law, they call a dedicated telephone line, and inform the desk of the date, time and officer number of the event in question. It would work like Wikipedia. If you wished to log a complaint against a police officer, you would have to give your personal details, to prevent fraud and false accusations. Complaints would be logged with Internal Affairs, or possibly some oversight committee, so that an officer observed commiting a crime in Texas couldn't hunt down the woman in Los Angeles who reported her.

I would make it an act of gross misconduct to be 'on the clock' and not wearing your camera as an officer. Keeping your camera working would be your personal responsibility. Failure to maintain your camera or have work carried out on it, getting lenses replaced after they've been broken, whatever, would mean an immediate suspension and investigation, pending a meeting with a peer review board. If you want all the power there is over ordinary citizens, if you want it, you can have it. But with that great power comes great accountability. If you have the right to police us, we have the right to police you.

The police and government are always telling us, the commoners beneath their boots, that if we're innocent of any crime, we have nothing to hide. We're filmed, photgraphed, monitored, our emails are hacked, and all in the name of keeping people alive. So okay. I would make them stand by those words. Let them be held as accountable at all times and in all places as they would hold us.

you know, lets for a moment ignore the whole "maintain their own equipment" thing...because I really expect a cop to know how to repair a digital camera.....

there is just so much wrong with this whole "live streaming idea."

Its impractical, Dangerous to the police, dangerous to the public and ultimately would be like wearing a sign saying "cops are here (or not) come and get me" to anyone that felt the need to break the law

[YorkNecromancer]

In which case, what if footage is uploaded 24 hours after filming, for the public to sift through?