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[Reelya]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/us/aurora-police-draw-guns-girls/index.html

In a 'mix up' police officers arrested a black woman and her three underage female relatives at gunpoint, because they thought they were in stolen car (they were not).



See the girl on the left? 6 years old.

At least they only handcuffed the 12 year old and older. Probably because the cuffs are too large for the 6 year old. They should really get ones that are adjustable.

[wierd]

... Many police use plastic zipties.

[voliol]

The old 'Driving While Black', I see. With an extra sprinkle of 'gun-threatening kids'. Doesn’t really matter much at that point that they didn’t hand-cuff the youngest kid, the lack of such a lesser evil is just bizarre, and so is commending them for it.

[wierd]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20mBi8-QsSc

gets more and more apropos every year.

[Frumple]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/us/aurora-police-draw-guns-girls/index.html

In a 'mix up' police officers arrested a black woman and her three underage female relatives at gunpoint, because they thought they were in stolen car (they were not).



See the girl on the left? 6 years old.

At least they only handcuffed the 12 year old and older. Probably because the cuffs are too large for the 6 year old. They should really get ones that are adjustable.

Is that the one where the stolen vehicle they were supposedly after was actually a motorcycle, or was that a different family the cops forced out of their car at gunpoint?

[scriver]

Look, it looked like a motorcycle from the side, they counted the wheels and everything

[Reelya]

Yeah it is the same one Frumple, somehow the CNN article missed that particular detail, which makes it an even more unbelievable story. However, one point that's mentioned in other articles is the question of why they ran their plates in the first place. It definitely looks like they decided to run that particular car through the check merely because it was a car full of black people, and once they got a partial hit, that was the trigger to leap into action, without any further sanity checks done.

Same plate number but wrong state and entirely wrong type of vehicle.

Actually for a smarter system the should require each state to have a different naming pattern for plates. For example. with 6 symbols of two types: numbers and letters, you can actually encode the state itself in the pattern of whether each symbol is a letter or number.

There are 2⁶ = 64 possible arrangements of letter/number/letter/number patterns. You then give states patterns with the least populated states having the most numbers vs letters. So your least-populated states get either 1 or 2 letters and the rest being numbers, minimum length 6, and if states need longer than 6 they just tack digits and/or letters on the end as they see fit.

[bloop_bleep]

Yes I think they just ran the plates because it was a van full of black people. Then it when it made a match they probably decided quickly to go arrest them without doing further checks because it was unusual for them for a plate they ran on a random car to actually make a match.

[hector13]

Yes I think they just ran the plates because it was a van full of black people. Then it when it made a match they probably decided quickly to go arrest them without doing further checks because it was unusual for them for a plate they ran on a random car to actually make a match.

They didn’t run the plates. Colorado has an automatic number recognition system that flagged the plate as stolen. Problem is, the plate matched a stolen motorcycle from Montana.

Dispatch fucked up by not passing that information on to the cop that responded, or the cop that responded didn’t care and decided the best way to deal with the situation was to assume that when you steal a car, you take your family along with you for the ride.

My question pertains to the latter part: why would you bring your family with you in a stolen vehicle? This should have given the cops pause, and they should have checked in on their computers or with dispatch to double check the details of the stolen vehicle prior to handcuffing some kids.

Edit for clarity. APR, automatic plate number recognition, not registration.

[Zangi]

Obviously cause thieving black mama is raising thieving black children.

/s

[Dostoevsky]

If I recall, initially they said standard operating procedure for stolen car encounters is to assume the people inside are dangerous, thus the officers were just following their training. Which, of course, begs the question of how the training is designed.

I'm reminded of an off-hand line in a Washington Post article a few weeks back. The article was a mixture of an anecdote of one officer's experiences doing social work calls and data on training. Can't remember the exact quote, but at one point they quote a more senior officer making a comment about how they're putting some new funding into their shooting simulations so that the targets aren't always 'standard black perps' or something to that effect.

[Reelya]

What? That's a horrifically off hand admission that their training material sets this shit up in the first place. It's like saying that from now on I'll endeavor to only use the thin belt to beat my child, and backslapping myself for that.

And of course there's the secondary implied horrific thing, that they're just going to train them to be equally trigger-happy on everyone in the pursuit of fairness, rather than invest that money in de-escalation. The idea that they'd spend the money on more diversity in their beloved shooting simulations is almost like they're asking for that money to go somewhere else.

[Iduno]

What? That's a horrifically off hand admission that their training material sets this shit up in the first place. It's like saying that from now on I'll endeavor to only use the thin belt to beat my child, and backslapping myself for that.

And of course there's the secondary implied horrific thing, that they're just going to train them to be equally trigger-happy on everyone in the pursuit of fairness, rather than invest that money in de-escalation. The idea that they'd spend the money on more diversity in their beloved shooting simulations is almost like they're asking for that money to go somewhere else.

Is that a better or worse than the only proposed solutions from the people in charge being either require the training they already require, or making murder illegal?

[Dostoevsky]

What? That's a horrifically off hand admission that their training material sets this shit up in the first place. It's like saying that from now on I'll endeavor to only use the thin belt to beat my child, and backslapping myself for that.

And of course there's the secondary implied horrific thing, that they're just going to train them to be equally trigger-happy on everyone in the pursuit of fairness, rather than invest that money in de-escalation. The idea that they'd spend the money on more diversity in their beloved shooting simulations is almost like they're asking for that money to go somewhere else.

Yep, it was appalling enough to stick out. I was reminded of how over the course of the 20th century the US military developed more human-like targets in an effort to increase their soldiers' willingness to shoot to kill. (Or so I've read.)

Article itself was interesting too, in that it featured beat cops complaining about having to be social workers while the article shared background about the disparity between police budgets and social work budgets.

Also spent a bit of time describing the social work training the police in this area received (and how it was woefully insufficient). Wish I could find it.

Edit: Ah, found it. Here's a link (caveat of Post paywall). Here's the particular quote I had in mind (emphasis mine):

Three of the four mentally ill people fatally shot by Huntsville police since 2015 were black, a pattern Police Chief Mark McMurray said the department is working to correct by meeting with experts about mental-health-care access for black residents, recruiting more diverse cadets, and investing in a new shooting simulator that “can vary the races so you’re not always being confronted by a standard black male.”

[Reelya]

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/blm-protesters-demand-white-people-give-up-their-homes/news-story/857efdf252d4fcbdcd04bdddd322487e

Black Lives Matter protesters in Seattle are demanding white people give up their homes during demonstrations in suburbia.

I think this is the kind of point where escalation undermines the goal of the movement, in a similar fashion to that college where the social justice people switched a day on which minority students traditionally boycott classes into one where they actively blocked white people from coming onto campus. Not a constructive way to take a movement. Going on about how white people have to give up their homes is such a strong "vote for Trump" thing that you'd have to think twice about whether these are planted people or just blithering idiots. So, there's a justification in that this was a traditionally black neighborhood, but the logical extension is in fact that all white people in the entire USA should give up their homes. The land belonged to American Indians after all. Maybe it's correct in a lot of ways, but it's not constructive to make that the core thing you're fighting for. No rational person would let squatters live in their house, no matter the race, temporary or otherwise. The squatters would either destroy it or take over it and refuse to leave. So it's not going to happen, and the only gain is that Trump can now point at these BLM people and say he's been proven right.

One thing I said before was that a lot of regular folks had moved over to the BLM cause recently, and that could cause some friction within the movement. I'm just wondering whether this doubling-down of stuff that is actually most likely to drive regular people back away from the movement, done by the more radical elements, is in fact a type of "purity test". Like if you're not down with the full on revolutionary-speak about kicking people out of homes then the movement doesn't want you on their side. This sort of things acts to entrenche the radicals as maintaining control of a movement by doubling-down on stuff that's too radical for most supporters to agree with, and they can say "well if you're not down with the revolution then you're an enemy / wrecker" which effectively sidelines more mainstream voices. The most likely reason for this stuff, now, of all times is probably because BLM was gaining traction outside of the more radical-left core, so they needed to do something to re-radicalize it, and keep those more moderate voices out of the discussion.