George Floyd

IdleRich

IdleRich
the obvious question: how many hundreds/thousands of similar police brutalities were never recorded?
So cynical, I think they probably got every single incident. It's kinda like when that guy off Blue Peter got caught taking cocaine, turns out it was the very first time he tried it and he didn't like it at all and swore that he would never do it again. So unlucky to get busted in those circumstances, although actually - would you believe it - the exact same thing happened to Kate Moss as well, eventually after years of resisting the terrible pressure she faced daily in the fashion world, she finally gave in and had one tiny little bump - which I'm reliably informed she found so disagreeable that she had just resolved that it would be her first and last experiment with any drugs of any kind when, with the cruellest of ironies, she discovered that she had been photographed.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Do Leo and Shaka really meet up and hang out on the Upper East Side or these glamourous sounding places that they so casually throw around? I'm jealous, I want to be at that meeting. Even if it doesn't happen, I want it to happen so I can be jealous.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Let's all meet in NYC can we get advertising on dissensus to pay for the flights. I would like to unreservedly apologise for all posts last night I was drunk, in fact I still am and I have to get a train I feel sick
 
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Leo

Well-known member
Do Leo and Shaka really meet up and hang out on the Upper East Side or these glamourous sounding places that they so casually throw around? I'm jealous, I want to be at that meeting. Even if it doesn't happen, I want it to happen so I can be jealous.

@shakahislop blew off my friend's birthday party in Brooklyn (to go to the Biennial!) a couple of weeks ago, he's been a bit cold and distant since there. perhaps you've noticed the uncomfortable silence when I tag him in a comment, leaving me hanging. I perhaps wouldn't put it on the level of being ghosted, not yet anyway. maybe he'll come around.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
@Leo when I, a civilised non-Englishman, arrive in a foreign town and someone is approachable the least to do is pay for the host city dwellers grub out somewhere. A few hours smashing whatever deliciousness is on offer, Gordon Bennett yoof today eh

pack a firearm and give it the “say hi to Don Ho for me”
 
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shakahislop

Well-known member
@shakahislop blew off my friend's birthday party in Brooklyn (to go to the Biennial!) a couple of weeks ago, he's been a bit cold and distant since there. perhaps you've noticed the uncomfortable silence when I tag him in a comment, leaving me hanging. I perhaps wouldn't put it on the level of being ghosted, not yet anyway. maybe he'll come around.
i've been wondering how long i can deliberately leave this post without responding
 

version

Well-known member
Was interesting to see the build up to the release of this footage from Memphis. The amount of damage control before the thing had even come out was telling.

I haven't watched it all, had a brief glimpse of it scrolling through Twitter and I've read enough to know I don't really want to.

Apparently the cops involved were part of some specialised unit called SCORPION and, predictably, would operate outside of their remit and just look to start shit; particularly chilling after having read City of Quartz recently and the stuff Davis says about the way certain police units behaved in LA in the 80s, e.g. almost leveling an apartment block doing some Rambo-esque drug bust where they managed to turn up a grand total of something like two small bags of weed on a couple of teens who didn't even live there.

Whenever these police (and military) units are created, they inevitably seem to behave even worse than the regular lot.
 

sus

Well-known member
Whenever these police (and military) units are created, they inevitably seem to behave even worse than the regular lot.
My intuition would be that you get higher variance in small, tight-knit units like this, because less guys + less bureaucratic oversight means the squad members/local leadership has outsized influence over culture. That these units can be total havens for really high quality police work, and also total corrupt shit shows if a critical mass of bad eggs are present.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
My intuition would be that you get higher variance in small, tight-knit units like this, because less guys + less bureaucratic oversight means the squad members/local leadership has outsized influence over culture. That these units can be total havens for really high quality police work, and also total corrupt shit shows if a critical mass of bad eggs are present.
I'd love to see you or anyone point to any of these nominally elite anti-gang/drug/violent crime special units that have done "really high quality police work", because the list of corrupt and brutal shitshows is long:

-CRASH in L.A.
-NYPD's Street Crimes Unit
-Special Operations Section aka Mobile Strike Force here in Chicago
-Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore (i.e. the topic of David Simon's latest miniseries)
-SCORPION

And so on
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Essentially there is a wealth of evidence that if you give cops the power to kick in doors and bust heads with little oversight, they usually end up becoming criminals themselves, robbing drug dealers/dealing themselves, beating and/or extorting suspects, etc
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Essentially there is a wealth of evidence that if you give cops the power to kick in doors and bust heads with little oversight, they usually end up becoming criminals themselves, robbing drug dealers/dealing themselves, beating and/or extorting suspects, etc

couldn't have said it any better myself
 

sus

Well-known member
I'd love to see you or anyone point to any of these nominally elite anti-gang/drug/violent crime special units that have done "really high quality police work", because the list of corrupt and brutal shitshows is long:

-CRASH in L.A.
-NYPD's Street Crimes Unit
-Special Operations Section aka Mobile Strike Force here in Chicago
-Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore (i.e. the topic of David Simon's latest miniseries)
-SCORPION

And so on
There are new task forces spun up every day in this country. Tens of thousands have existed in this country. Probably hundreds of thousands. The sample selection bias as to which groups go viral is obvious; why would we have heard about a competent group of cops? The variance point is so sociologically obvious as to almost go without saying, let alone defending; it's a big part of the localism vs federalism conflict. If you're gonna stick your head in the sand and pretend you don't understand what I'm saying, be my guest.
 
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