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Journal by fustakrakich
That the Democrats lose House seats, do not win the Senate and barely manage to drag their demented presidential candidate towards a stalemate tells a lot about their lack of sane policies. A donor party completely disinterested in what the people really want - medicare for all, no fracking etc. - will have little chance to survive a future onslaught of conservatives with a more competent figure head than Donald Trump. ...should Trump lose this election, Trumpism will only grow and make the U.S. ungovernable.
"Can't Count Votes? Just Draw Straws."
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
L'etat c'est moi.
[I am the state.]
-- Louis XIV
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2020, @07:06AM
I'm the AC you responded to above. I don't read minds, but you were talking about Tamir Rice. What happened to him was extremely wrong. Police go into situations looking for a confrontation. Instead of telling Tamir to put his hands up, they should have tried just talking to him normally. He'd probably be alive if the police had acted responsibly.
I'm from St. Louis but I don't live there any longer. I went to school for four years at UM-St. Louis, which is about a mile from where the Ferguson riots happened. The motto of the St. Louis County police is "To serve and protect." Police shouldn't think they can just order people around, bully them, and use force whenever anyone questions them. They're supposed to serve and protect us.
Just a few months ago, I was out walking at night in a fairly nice neighborhood. I had a friend out with me and we were taking a socially distanced walk. Because the color of our shirts matched two out of three people who had been breaking into cars earlier in the evening. The officer who stopped us had a bad attitude and she was immediately being a smartass for no reason. It wasn't until more officers showed up who had seen us out walking earlier in the evening that we were told we were free to go. She was looking for trouble with flimsy reasoning. There was no physical description of the suspects beyond the color of our shirts. Given that I'm very short and I have a weight problem, had I been responsible, it should have been very easy to describe me to the police. I had a white shirt on and my friend's shirt was red. We're in Lincoln, Nebraska, where red and white are the colors of the Huskers. A red and a white shirt would match a huge part of the population. That officer just wanted trouble and we were fortunate.
By the way, Ferguson isn't the disaster area people think. UMSL's campus was a country club just a few decades ago. The neighborhoods around the campus were once very affluent. There are a lot of very nice old houses right near campus. I never felt unsafe as a white person in a predominately black neighborhood. But there are a number of ticket mills in the area and plenty of cops around looking for trouble.
Police really aren't very good at solving crimes, nor are they very good at curbing traffic violations. Now, we really do need someone to investigate crimes. We need someone to respond when we call 911 because we're in danger. But we don't need patrols that are looking to ticket and harass people to get revenue for cities and target black people. The problem is that last part encompasses a lot of what police officers do. When we talk about abolishing the police, we want to get rid of the patrols and buillshit like civil asset forfeiture. We want to stop the war on drugs and programs like stop and frisk that have been implemented in a very racist manner and aren't helpful. Abolishing the police doesn't mean we want anarchy. It does mean replacing the police with people whose purpose is to serve and protect.
To your credit, you said Breonna Taylor's name and admitted she was the victim of a horrible injustice. And Tamir Rice damn well should be alive today, too. Worse yet, police are rarely held accountable when they abuse their power.