A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.
The footage shows that William McNeil Jr., 22, was sitting in the driver’s seat, asking to speak to the Jacksonville deputies’ supervisor, when authorities broke his window, punched him in the face, pulled him from the vehicle, punched him again and threw him to the ground.
Yes, yes. Once again they are suggesting we, the people, do all the work, because they are too busy to care about us. We have to do the recycling, because it would be too onerus on the producers of waste to change. We have to do the overseeing of unsafe practices by industry, because it’s too costly for the government and hard to ask their friends to stop doing terrible things to save a few dollars. We now also have to protect ourselves from authority, God forbid we ask the government to remain accountable for something. What is the point of having a government if they are not going to do anything but enrich themselves? Are Americans capable of asking questions, or do you just eat what you are fed without even blinking? Wake the fuck up, you don’t live in a country, you live in a billionaire making machine, and you are the fuel, not the product.
“Social Democracy” countries like Sweden and Norway produce more millionaires and billionaires than capitalist ones like the US. So actually we’re not a billionaire making machine, but a poverty making one.
Sweden and Europe in general has 10 times the generational wealth as America, because it’s been around for centuries longer. American wealth came mostly in the past 250 years, and much of it has been accumulated in the past 30.
We made a lot of barons in the slave era, the railroad era, the oil era, the prohibition era, then there was a lull, we got the new deal, and more importantly WW2 and the manufacturing boom where workers had power and socialized wealth (as long as white anyway). Then the barons found a way to weaken and strip our wealth and power since the 80s and set the country up for our current baron crisis.
Maybe a general strike could do something, but it would have to be overwhelming. Like a minimum of 30% of all workers, for weeks or months maybe more, would be necessary to get attention and not be vulnerable to mass firing and replacement.
Other non Social Democracy countries that have been around for millennia have far fewer billionaires.
Well ain’t that just a cup of tea then, eh. It must be the social democracy that allows them to accumulate vast piles of wealth then, hey?! No wonder Canada is full of billionaires!
Social Democracy countries are run more effectively than others. Not saying those countries are perfect but it’s better than what the US has currently.
Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. Historically this is the requirement for most societies to upend these types of structures. It’s what drove the “New Deal”, which was essentially a stopgap to allow the wealthy an opportunity to comply with the requirements of basic human needs and dignity. Same with Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting.
After that they allowed some tinkering around the edges to make our enclosure more habitable, things like the Civil Rights Act and even parts of LBJ’s “Great Society”. All the while continuing to exploit foreign markets and people for our industries, consolidating economic and military power around the globe. Now, not only have all the lines in the map been filled in, but we are starting to see conglomeracies like BRICS form in order to subvert the total dominance of the United States.
The only way for the wealthy business interests to maintain their profit margins was to turn the exploitation inward, to subject the American people to the same type of exploitation they have been meting out in the global south, while desperately enacting last minute and insufficient plans to suppress these rising entities and eliminate them if possible.
The rot has reached the core
The government always has and still does work for wealthy. They all really do. Some just strike a different balance in perception because they need to in order to keep the people working for the benefit of the wealthy.
Yes, but the wealthy create their wealth off the backs of our labour, so if they don’t tend to the flock, the flock gets unruly. Heads will roll…
Yep, always a balancing act. And of course they tend to make sure thier is a scapegoat so it won’t be thier heads that roll. I bet they really love trump for how well he draws attention to himself and off of them.
Suggestions of the nanny state never come up here. The dichotomy of what were expected to do for ourselves vs what they say the nanny state does are a vast ocean filled with bullshit Republican rhetoric
Yup, there are AMAZING videos of people who use the app Attorney Shield that immediately puts you in contact with a lawyer, starts recording video and audio and blocks the device so their only option is to smash it to stop recording.
It feels like an “anti tyranny” insurance of sorts, you pay what? $200 a year? and you use it even on traffic stops because there’s absolutely and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT TO COOPERATING WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT, embrace and exercise your rights and then go to court.
What the distopian fuck
TBF, this kind of thing has probably been needed since the inception of police, it’s just now that we have the technology.
ACAB
This kind of police brutality needs to be a capital offense. We need to start hanging these pigs. Abusing your authority to this level is a crime on the level of treason. You absolutely deserve to die if you do this to another human being.
I have long been a proponent for mandatory and severe sentencing guides/augments for public officials who violate their oath and duty.
So I agree with you whole heartedly.
The death penalty might be a bit extreme, however, I am in favour of a dystopian tournament where these cunts have to face a series of increasingly dangerous tasks in order to be provided with food.
Could call it Pig Game.
Tattoo their previous police badge to their forehead, throw them into three general population, and call it a day.
How is it extreme? They have literally beaten black people and minorities to death for years. But if you want to kill one single cop for doing this it is all of a sudden too extreme? Wtf.
Yes. I think the death penalty is barbaric and would make us as bad as they are. Better to either educate, or lock em up and throw away the key, so they can spend the rest of their lives regretting their actions. Preferably in an dystopian pig game scenario as a warning to everyone else.
Start with taking away their qualified immunity…
The government should not take away anything that it cannot provide. It can’t make life so it should not take it.
That’s a really concise formulation of my own beliefs on this matter. My opinions on how society should handle justice are experiencing extended renovations, so it’s useful to stumble across complex ideas distilled so effectively. Thanks!
Normally I would agree however in this situation a government official took a life so it’s the government self cleansing.
Why?
While I agree that this should be a severe offence that removes the perpetrator permanently from any employment from city to federal, killing people just brings you down to their level.
I have no problem holding police officers to a higher standard of behavior than the general populace.
A higher standard and the death penalty are two very different things.
If you dont wanna die dont beat innocent people, doesnt seem hard.
*non violent people
I get that, but I also don’t like the government deciding who lives and who dies. It’s too error-prone and corruption-prone for me to be comfortable with that.
So? They won’t come up to our level so we’ll just have to beat them at their level. We aren’t going to win this by playing by a set of rules they don’t have to follow.
You aren’t going to win by daydreaming about executing cops either.
At the very least an old school tar and feathering and run em out of town on a rail (watch the series John Adams if you ever thought tar and feathering was silly)
There’s endless reasons why the last decade+ has pushed me to being completely done with authority worship. Fuck you and your fucking badge. Fuck these pigs. If you’re a cop, you should just fucking quit or drop dead. Fuck police. Fuck security. Fuck military. Fuck em all. Countless times we have seen this is a profession that seeks, attracts, and breeds the most vile pieces of scum.
If you’re a cop or were a cop, go fuck yourself and fuck your precinct and fuck your family and fuck your friends.
I have never needed a cop in my entire life. I have never found myself in a situation where a cop would have helped. They HAVE however found themselves in MY life a handful of times making the interaction AS FUCKING NEEDLESSLY INTENSE AS POSSIBLE. I have never done drugs, don’t drink, came from an affluent family, and got a degree and became a productive member of society and do not visually come off as any sort of minority or profiled group. Yet even I have personally witnessed how fucking aggressive cops are abojt ANY fucking interaction no matter how mundane, and I know countless people personally who have experienced far worse than I did.
Fuck the police. Every fucking one of them.
“Protecting” yourself with a camera is pretty minimal. If the cop sees the dash cam they can grab it and destroy it. I was going to suggest the ACLU’s mobile justice app, but that got shut down. Anyone got a good app you can record with that can work on a locked phone?
I think the best solutions to problems like this take a sociotechnical approach. That is to say that in this case, I think that a crowd of people recording is more powerful than any app. I live in a country where police violence is less prevalent than in the US, and I have seen times when the police have tried to intimidate someone into stopping recording them. One of those times, it was successful, and the bystander got scared and stopped. Another of those times, someone who was better informed overheard the exchange and whipped out their camera too, and explained that the police had no grounds to ask that, especially given that we weren’t interfering with their investigation of the original person.
It is unfortunate about the ACLU app though. Tech tools like that helped protect individuals who were trying to hold the police accountable, which is a useful step towards normalising a healthy suspicion of the police. I haven’t read the above article yet, but I suspect the only reason why this footage wasn’t destroyed or confiscated is because the cops didn’t realise they were being recorded.
There are dash cams that upload to a cloud so destroying the camera doesn’t destroy the footage as well.
That’s usually a paid subscription feature. People getting pulled over and beaten aren’t always the ones able to afford a subscription. It might be something a few can use.
We need open source, multi channel dashcams that record to a central box that can be hidden deep inside the car and in times of duress, livestream via a connected smartphone. Press a button, the camera connects to a smartphone and triggers an app. All channels, audio and video, livestream out via the smartphone.
Or skip the cell phone pairing. Keep an eSIM in the recorder and upload it that way. Easier said than done, I suppose.
Blackvue has SIM card options with cloud storage. My blackvue 4K can do it But you have to pay a subscriber fee to them for the storage.
I bought it because it’s the only camera I could find that could handle reading a license plate at 30 ft. I never activated the SIM features.
And their camera’s processing and memory cards are all mounted on the windshield for some stupid reason.
Having a small discreet 4 or 6 channel camera that writes to an SSD hidden inside the car and has a 4g radio attachment, or even connects to a hotspot would be massive.
This would be much more expensive. It would also create a weak point. Cops tell cell phone carriers to kill that SIM and you’ll never notice. If it goes through your phone the cost is lower and you’ll notice a service interruption.
Hey, I planned that out over a period of about thirty seconds. My plan is solid!
I’ve been kicking this idea around for months. I just haven’t been able to solve all the problems with it. The biggest among them is small wide angle low light cameras with decent frame rate and resolution are NOT cheap. If I can solve that problem th rest would actually be pretty simple.
U use the cell phone…
The cell phone presents issues when used by itself. It can’t catch what actually happened and led to an event, so cops can lie. It only catches one angle, so it cant see everything. It requires you to directly handle it so it can be wrestled away and destroyed.
You’re sacrificing light for the wide angle. Increase the sensitivity to fix that and you’re introducing noise. Extend the exposure time for each frame to reduce noise and you get motion blur. I know, it sucks. You can’t win. Best of luck, my friend.
Exactly. I can get around some of this to some extent by sacrificing resolution for frame rate and just allowing distorting the image of it just letting showing things as they happen and that could address light sensitivity but that means sacrificing detail which could be important too. I dunno. I haven’t been able to solve this cheaply. There’s definitely off the shelf solutions to this but nothing at all affordable.
Except that cops are stupid. Most of them don’t delete video evidence most of the time. And destroying the camera itself produces evidence that can and will be used against them. And there’s no excuse for taking one out of the car. They are also recording already, and can be quickly voice activated. So dash cams are not minimal.
You should also record on your phone.
Of course dirty cops could do tons of bad things, but the more complicated the cover-up is, the more likely that they get caught.
Having body cams on cops was the one of the best decisions we’ve made as a society in recent years. Not only do they flush out shitty cops like this, but they have also protected good cops from false accusations and violent people. They need to be required everywhere and cops must have them on their entire shifts or they’ll face criminal investigations.
Don’t u worry, Trump’s on it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-enforcement-administration-ends-body-camera-program-trump
Of course he is. President dipshit is on a mission to make everything worse
I mean, this is a weird article to post that on lol
