The Police Brutality Thread

[smokymountainrain]

while i agree with this sentence entirely, “He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence.” and am certainly not going to "cheer on violence in prison", i have to say i fall on the side of NS on this one.

it's shame when anybody suffers violence in prison or anywhere else, but if a murderer gets the shit beat out of him while in prison, i just don't care. doesn't mean i'm saying it's right or that i'm cheering it on (i'm not), rather i simply don't give a rat's ass. sorry, just being honest!

[Jeff Lebowski]

while i agree with this sentence entirely, “He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence.” and am certainly not going to "cheer on violence in prison", i have to say i fall on the side of NS on this one.

it's shame when anybody suffers violence in prison or anywhere else, but if a murderer gets the shit beat out of him while in prison, i just don't care. doesn't mean i'm saying it's right or that i'm cheering it on (i'm not), rather i simply don't give a rat's ass. sorry, just being honest!

So you are OK with violence as long as the victim "deserves" it. Apparently you trust the criminal justice system to get the verdict right (juries don't make mistakes, right?) but you don't trust it enough to accept the sentences it hands down.

And if we shrug off or even cheer on violence against a group of people we don't like, are we really any better than the violent criminals?

[smokymountainrain]

So you are OK with violence as long as the victim "deserves" it. Apparently you trust the criminal justice system to get the verdict right (juries don't make mistakes, right?) but you don't trust it enough to accept the sentences it hands down.

And if we shrug off or even cheer on violence against a group of people we don't like, are we really any better than the violent criminals?

it's not okay. and to be very clear, he doesn't deserve it. i just can't bring myself to care what happens to most exceedingly violent criminals. there is a difference.

[Bo Diddley]

I don't know how you remove violence from prison. If he felt he was in danger, he could get protective custody, which is essentially being locked away in a cell all by himself with the ability to come out for an hour or so a day to walk around the rec yard with walls 30 feet tall and to take a shower. But if he wants to interact with other inmates, there's a good chance he'll run into violence one way or the other.

It is interesting to hear people voice their desires for criminals to do "hard time". The conditions under which people serve their time is really important to some people.

[Non Sequitur]

So you are OK with violence as long as the victim "deserves" it. Apparently you trust the criminal justice system to get the verdict right (juries don't make mistakes, right?) but you don't trust it enough to accept the sentences it hands down.

And if we shrug off or even cheer on violence against a group of people we don't like, are we really any better than the violent criminals?

Yeah, we're better than the violent criminals, given that they're in prison for committing violent crimes, and we're not. I get the logic of your arguments on a rhetorical level, but they simply don't align with the real world.

[Northwestcoug]

It is interesting to hear people voice their desires for criminals to do "hard time". The conditions under which people serve their time is really important to some people.

It is such a slippery slope to rightfully expect justice for criminal action in our society and unhealthy vengeance. Incarceration has become a black box for our society, and relatively few care what happens to people serving time. It's some base sense of justice that whatever bad happens to someone in jail is part and parcel of their debt to society. It can be hard since there really are violent criminals who 'deserve' any violence coming their way. But there aren't too many better opportunities to showcase how a society treats the least of these than those who are incarcerated.

I don't know if it's a solvable problem. Certainly outlawing the death penalty like other sane nations could reset our view of criminal justice, and maybe that leads to a heightened concern of basic humanity for prisoners. We could also stop incarcerating people 2 standard deviations away from most developed nations. The less in jail the less violence happens towards them I assume.

Something about the better angels of our nature seem applicable here.

[BigFatMeanie]

It is such a slippery slope to rightfully expect justice for criminal action in our society and unhealthy vengeance. Incarceration has become a black box for our society, and relatively few care what happens to people serving time. It's some base sense of justice that whatever bad happens to someone in jail is part and parcel of their debt to society. It can be hard since there really are violent criminals who 'deserve' any violence coming their way. But there aren't too many better opportunities to showcase how a society treats the least of these than those who are incarcerated.

I don't know if it's a solvable problem. Certainly outlawing the death penalty like other sane nations could reset our view of criminal justice, and maybe that leads to a heightened concern of basic humanity for prisoners. We could also stop incarcerating people 2 standard deviations away from most developed nations. The less in jail the less violence happens towards them I assume.

Something about the better angels of our nature seem applicable here.

It's already being tried in many jurisdictions around the country, no?. Ask Chesa Boudin and the citizens of San Francisco how that's working out.

[Northwestcoug]

It's already being tried in many jurisdictions around the country, no?. Ask Chesa Boudin and the citizens of San Francisco how that's working out.

One wonders how the rest of the developed world survives with decreased rates of incarceration.

[Non Sequitur]

One wonders how the rest of the developed world survives with decreased rates of incarceration.

Lost in this debate is the fact that the U.S. has large rates of incarceration because of the proliferation of guns in our culture and the violence that those guns bring. Our country is off the charts with gun violence, so as long as we treat the second amendment as scripture from God Almighty, we're going to be packing prisons in this country.

[Northwestcoug]

Good article highlighting factors in medical examiners' office that can quickly exonerate cases of police brutality that lead to death:

https://newrepublic.com/article/1769...-cops-scrutiny

One of many eye-opening facts:

About two months before the Chauvin trial, a team of researchers led by London-based cognitive neurologist Itiel Dror published a study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that, along with the trial, would open an ongoing feud within the medical examiner community.

Dror and his team asked 133 medical examiners to review an autopsy report of a child’s death and determine if the death was accidental, a homicide, or if there was insufficient information to make a determination. The participants were given identical autopsy reports, with two exceptions. Half were told that the deceased child was Black and had died while in the care of the mother’s boyfriend. The other half were told the child was white and had been in the care of a grandmother.


This information should have been irrelevant to the manner of death. While it’s true that Black children are more likely to die from homicide, and it’s also true that stepfathers or love interests of a child’s mother are more likely to kill a child than a grandmother, neither of those things should be relevant when determining how a specific child died in a specific case. We don’t convict people based on generalizations about the demographic groups to which they or their victims belong.

Or at least we shouldn’t. The study suggested that perhaps sometimes we do. The medical examiners given the scenario with the Black child were five times more likely to rule the death a homicide than those with the white child. There was also broad disagreement among the study’s participants about whether there was sufficient information to even make a manner of death determination.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Good article highlighting factors in medical examiners' office that can quickly exonerate cases of police brutality that lead to death:

https://newrepublic.com/article/1769...-cops-scrutiny

One of many eye-opening facts:

Fascinating. Thanks.

Of course, we have known forever that blacks are far more likely to be convicted and given harsh sentences than whites. And far more likely to be convicted when they are in fact innocent. Which is partly why the "they chose a life of violence so why should we care?" narrative with regards to prison violence is so wrong.

[Bo Diddley]

Good article highlighting factors in medical examiners' office that can quickly exonerate cases of police brutality that lead to death:

https://newrepublic.com/article/1769...-cops-scrutiny

One of many eye-opening facts:

I am not surprised at all.

What if AI started becoming medical examiners? Which leads me to my next question for a discussion in another thread: could AI become racist?

[Northwestcoug]

I am not surprised at all.

What if AI started becoming medical examiners? Which leads me to my next question for a discussion in another thread: could AI become racist?

At least in my field, medical AI usually starts out with similar biases as humans, since it's the humans that train AI to diagnose. You can set up algorithms to arrive at new ways of diagnosing disease that minimize traditional human-derived data, but my impression is that it takes a lot of computing power.

[Maximus]

More insane cops

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[Pelado]

More insane cops

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wtf