BREAKING: Human Rights Watch (@hrw) out with horrifying investigation. The brutal NYPD attack on hundreds of protestors in early June in the Bronx wasn't just criminal & unconstitutional. It was *planned*. NYPD used the curfew to trap, assault, & arrest.
[Embed] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/30/us-new-york-police-planned-assault-bronx-protesters
The person who made the tweet is Scott Hechinger, a public defender in Brooklyn.
Surprising absolutely no one who has paid attention to the experiences of protesters since the Seattle 1999 WTO conference.
Only the execution of the warrant has any bearing on the officers' liability. I'm not debating whether or not the warrant should've been granted. I'm debating whether or not Breonna Taylor was "murdered in [her] sleep because police showed up to the wrong address".
--snip--
This is fundamentally the difference between the approach you and I are taking to the subject. This isn't an individual case. This is a systemic issue. One that is incredibly well understood, especially by those actually perpetrating it. I might agree with you if it were an isolated case without various types of baggage attached. And from my perspective, approaching it the way you do is about trying to remove that baggage from the equation. You claim that the protester narrative is emotionally distorting the issue, but I rather think you're doing the rhetorical equivalent of what news organizations do when they write headlines about these incidents like "Suspect dies after struck by bullets in officer-involved shooting". Focusing on any technicality and sterilization of language you can think of to avoid addressing the nature of what transpired and who bears responsibility for creating the situation as it was.
The situation as it played out was knowingly and intentionally orchestrated. People are responsible for causing it to happen, and they need to be treated as such. This wasn't an unfortunate accident where no one was at fault.
One of my core points that I'll repeat again is that this has played out literally tens of thousands of times. Police KNOW what happens when they do things this way. But they keep doing it anyway. Logical conclusion is that terrorizing communities is the point. And if, as a profession, police don't understand the consequences of their tactics and behaviors by now, then that's *even less* flattering.
The individual officers ARE liable both for serving the warrant and it's execution. You can argue that they're not legally liable, but I don't care. Our legal system is broken. They are liable in the sense of what should be a reasonable standard of individual ethical responsibility. They KNOW what is going to happen, and they agree to do the job anyway. They know what they're doing is reckless and unnecessary and likely to get someone innocent killed. Anyone who knowingly does something like this in exchange for a paycheck is a murderer for hire in my book. If they don't want to get painted that way, then they can refuse to murder people, and then get fired or quit. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to turn down a paycheck if the job calls for murdering innocent people, and to judge them for it if they take the paycheck.
Author
Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice (Read 445963 times)