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F is for Fascism (Ferguson MO)

Don’t know that i know of any specific writings on the subject or that my opinion is fully formed. But i think generally I think of gun violence as a public health issue caused by a variety of things, from poverty, to criminalization of drugs/sex work, and so on. I would think groups that do gang anti-violence work would probably have a helpful perspective on this issue.
 
It doesn't imagine a world of guns with disarmed police, but perhaps just interest argument contextually from Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall

Cops in the United States are heavily armed and this is largely taken for granted. It is true that some—police abolitionists and liberal reformers alike—voice concerns about the troubling implications of police militarization, but by and large the arming of police receives broad support in the United States. The National Rifle Association and other right-wing gun enthusiast groups like to claim that “an armed society is a polite society,” which endorses the right of individuals to arm themselves as they see fit, which then justifies more and more powerful police weaponry because of the number of people who arm themselves as they see fit. The irony here is that the Second Amendment, which guarantees a heavily armed population in the United States, was never about the right of individuals to own weapons, but rather was about the need for an armed militia to police Indigenous bodies and control Native land. The Second Amendment was about settler colonialism, not individual liberty.[2] It served to expand the power of the state to control Native land and later, through the slave patrol, to control Black labor. Today it serves to justify the expanded use of arms by police. An armed society is not a polite society; it is a policed society.

The NRA is also not at all interested in arming everyone equally. The NRA and the police have long feared Black gun ownership. This is partly because historically Black gun ownership has often been fueled by the need of Black people to defend themselves against the police and white people with guns.[3] The rate of Black gun ownership often rises in direct response to the racist violence of white supremacy. Thus the state has always sought to disarm Black, Brown, and Native people, not only during chattel slavery and Jim Crow, but also when Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, passed gun control legislation in order to stop the Black Panther Party for Self Defense from arming its members for protection against the police. The police support gun ownership for the white middle and upper class because it is a class understood as de facto police. But this support for gun ownership ends when historically oppressed populations arm themselves.

If you’ve lived your whole life in the United States, you might be surprised to learn that the use of guns by police has always been, and in some places remains, controversial, not commonplace. Historians of police often point to Robert Peel, an eighteenth-century British politician, as the father of modern police. Peel insisted police should not carry guns, partly to ease the tensions of those suspicious that an armed police force would be, in effect, a domestic army. Peel is usually invoked by reformers who seek to “disarm” the police. But to limit a discussion of police violence to the problem of shooting deaths risks elevating spectacular police violence—the SWAT assault and the hail of bullets—over everyday police violence. The shooting deaths might end, but what about the arbitrary harassment, or the racialized targeting, or the chokeholds and rough rides? Those will continue as before because police are violence workers.
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Deacon923 said:
Would definitely boost the stick price of the for profit "college" industry.
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Definitely. Cops wouldn’t be getting criminology BAs with a minor in philosophy. They’d be getting cop degrees with for profits likely paid for with taxpayer money.
 
Liquid Karma said:
The visibility and accountability that can be leveraged via social media.
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Can you explain? We've seen plenty of cop killings go viral and the cops get off. Social media has helped awareness of police practices, but it hasn't changed police practices at all.
 
I watched it and looked like he had a gun behind his back, which is what the story said. Seems like he dropped the gun, turned around, raised his hands, and stepped toward the cop, all in one motion.
 
PhDeac said:
Can you explain? We've seen plenty of cop killings go viral and the cops get off. Social media has helped awareness of police practices, but it hasn't changed police practices at all.
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Because it's really only in the last couple years that these things have been going viral and the movement has really taken off. Going forward it will continue to keep pressure on police departments.

Of course, we are a Chauvin acquittal from that being blown up even worse than it already is.
 
BiffTannen said:
I watched it and looked like he had a gun behind his back, which is what the story said. Seems like he dropped the gun, turned around, raised his hands, and stepped toward the cop, all in one motion.
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I watched it too. I was shocked at how fast it all happened. Doesn't change the fact that when he turned around he had his hands up and no gun.
 
the whole thing just fucking sucks

I feel so bad for the family and for the police officer and then feel guilty that I feel bad for the officer and ultimately just feel pretty impotent about how to untangle all the different things that got us to this point
 
EzClrYcXIA00lOX
 
Liquid Karma said:
I watched it too. I was shocked at how fast it all happened. Doesn't change the fact that when he turned around he had his hands up and no gun.
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Yeap. You can't make a mistake like that, that's what the job is.
 
I'll admit I'm struggling with the speed of that video. I had to watch it a couple times to be able to tell his hands were empty, and I knew what to look for.

Speed doesn't change the fact that he did not have a gun in his hand when shot, as CPD claimed. But in this particular case (nighttime, inconsistent lighting, running) I can at least get a better understanding of how fast that cop had to make that decision when the kid turned around. At the same time, I'm very confident that even if the kid was running with a gun and stopped with his hands up that he likely would have just been shot in the back instead of the chest.

I've read a gun was recovered at the scene, but nothing about where. And frankly, CPD has little to no credibility on this matter after the way they misrepresented the facts to the public.
 
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