> If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months. Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
This has to be the most hilariously and accidentally observational comment in the history of the Internet. Times apparently have changed since 2014.
> Imagine Moloch looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”
This was not a story about bird-watching. I don't know if you're drawing the comparison due to the faintest glimmer of similarity or you think it's about bird-watching. This was not a story that divided people. "Everyone" (that is, everyone who had opinions they wished to express) agreed the woman was a liar and a jerk.
That quote only describes our reality if taken out of context. "Something would get done" is referring to police reform enacted with a broad social consensus, not to a stream of escalating sub-terrorist provocations from leftists and from the government. And George Floyd was not "the most clear-cut and sympathetic case" in the presence of (e.g.) Breonna Taylor. The kind of hypothetical conspiracy is just not there; instead we're seeing memetic natural selection at work.
> If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months.
Yes ...
> Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
No, because there's an entire counter-news faction out there insisting that absolutely every person killed by police deserved it, that it is unacceptable to ever hold police accountable for deaths of anyone under any circumstances, such as shooting a handcuffed guy on the floor or firing blindly into a darkened apartment, and that everyone complaining about racism is some kind of Maoist.
Recently I watched some of the Live Aid 25th anniversary coverage. The huge charity appeal was sparked by Michael Buerk's famous report on dead and dying children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc
I couldn't help thinking that if you filmed that today it would vanish from the social media melee in a couple of days. It was shocking then. It might not even be the most shocking thing somebody scrolls past today.
Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.
My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all. There is nothing special about doing nothing on police brutality. It's just one more thing on the pile of unaddressed things.
It's been this way for a long time now, and that is why Presidents now try to rule by executive orders.
I am basing my observations off of the conservatives that I know personally, but offered evidence in the form of public social media used by millions of people because a common retort to this observation is skepticism or the claim that people like this don't exist.
There are loud internet agitators/troll who do this. It's important to not take that as some kind of opinion poll. "One Click One Vote" is a terrible slogan.
Not that I have a poll to offer, though some have surely been done.
I base what I say on most conservatives I'm aware of saying so. I can't think of any "name" conservative who has said the opposite.
> My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all.
I mean yes but also... Plenty of us just got and unprecedented $1200-2400 from Congress just a month or two ago... they clearly can act when motivated.
There are two layers of elected government between Congress and the Minneapolis police, and several layers of administration between the elected representatives and the police on the street.
Ever hard-head in Congress could have a conversion experience this week from attending John Lewis's funeral, and somewhere next year some guy with a gun or knee could repeat the Floyd killing.
I look at it as building software on top of an extremely complex system. It's just not going to move as fast as anybody likes it to, and often the best course of action after considering a new feature will be to leave it alone because it's not business critical and worth the risk.
> Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.
I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.
The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.
What is your source or qualification for saying this?
I know of several conservative groups that did infact hold or participate in protests against George Floyd's death in the days after. Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think, it was still wrong to kneel on his neck for 10 minutes after he was already under control.
The right-libertarian circles have been banging on against the militarization of the police and their unaccountability for decades now. Check out Radley Balko in particular, and the books he's written and the articles for reason.com. That's what conservatives saw this as.
Things did kind of turn over the weeks after. This was when the left's narrative that it was a racism problem took hold, the rhetoric escalated into "Defund the Police", and protests into some areas turned into riots and large-scale property destruction. This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.
Naturally, the Left is incentivized to dig up the most outrageously extreme version of those arguments and try to portray the entire Right as thinking like that. I do not know you or your ideology, but I suspect your source is Left-wing articles that seek to portray the Right in this way. If so, you ought to be aware that it's never a path to truth to view any group only through the lens of their enemies.
Indeed, IMO he's covered many sides of this issue very much in need of attention. Sadly, per the point of the article, it doesn't offend enough people or fit neatly enough into a right-wing or left-wing outrage machine, so it doesn't get a huge amount of attention.
> Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think
I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.
> This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.
But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.
The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.
(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)
I'd say Radley Balko is libertarian. The intersection of doctrinally libertarian viewpoints with main stream American politics is complex at best. For what it's worth, I often see his articles shared in right-wing circles favorably. I haven't really heard of him having much of a following in left-wing circles. It doesn't sound very helpful to our political scene to be highly concerned that somebody can't be easily placed in a bucket of right-wing or left-wing.
On the other, to borrow some of the left's standard viewpoints, I could say that it's a very privileged viewpoint that property damage is inconsequential compared to injury. How many lower-class people will suffer from losing their mode of transportation, having their home rendered unsafe, or even having "luxuries" that were sources of comfort in a difficult life destroyed? How many people started out in poverty and spent a lifetime building a business from nothing so they could rise into the middle class, only to watch it be destroyed by privileged mostly-white rioters in response to something that they had nothing to do with, that happened in a completely different city? And it certainly isn't like rioters haven't intentionally attacked, injured, and in a few cases killed, both citizens and law enforcement officers as well.
The reason the Floyd killing has been such a powerful force is that there is a live video of a man being strangled, begging for his life, for minutes.
It is much easier to discredit a split second decision, mistaken identity, justify feeling threatened in so many other cases, but there it is, a man immobilized on the street with a knee on his neck, people standing around objecting to what’s happening, time, so much time to consider actions when there was no reasonable threat.
Someone with a phone camera just happened to record a video of the ideal case: a police officer obviously murdering a black man. It's brutal and pointless, with racism being the most obvious and likely explanation.
The thesis of this article has a lot of validity though. There is an escalating "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!" arms race that has no interest whatsoever in solving problems, only in getting attention.
As far as I can tell, someone actually happened to record a video of a slightly different ideal case: it was obviously a police officer murdering a black man when carefully framed and portrayed that way, the most clear, vivid, brutal and unambigious demonstration of police racism and brutality - but only for people who already believed this. Basically, a cross between what this blog post describes and a maximum-strength scissor statement [1]
The most vivid demonstration of this is that one phrase: "I can't breathe". It really is the most vivid image of racist police murder imaginable: a white officer kneeling on a black man's neck, slowly cutting off his air as he begs for mercy. It's appeared again and again in protests and news coverage worldwide. There's only one slight complication: Floyd started repeating that he "couldn't breathe" before he was down on the ground at all https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-camera... All of a sudden, things get a lot more fuzzy in terms of cause and effect and what the officers should've realized, and naturally one idelogical side has been claiming it debunks the whole thing whilst the other is using a different framing to claim this shows the police were even more depraved cold-hearted murderers than previously thought: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/george-floyd... It's almost the perfect scissor.
Even if it had been the most clear-cut case imaginable, one of the first things that happened was to turn it into something divisive and effective for signalling by - for instance - demanding charges against the other officers present that seem extremely hard to justify legally speaking, and calling for Minneapolis to burn until that happened. There is no escape from the process described in this blog post.
- One poll showed only 10% of Americans calling the Floyd death a "Tragic accident." With the majority calling it murder. That's not even close to a perfect scissor.
- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not.
"- I have several cop friends, from a relatively geographically diverse range of the US. All of them say that how Floyd was arrested was at a minimum against procedure, and almost certainly contributory to his death.
- One cop I spoke to pointed out that his training mandated that once a prone subject is handcuffed, their training mandates rolling them onto their side, as being unable to leverage oneself up can restrict breathing, even if nobody's kneeling on you. He also pointed out that kneeling on the neck or back in order to handcuff someone is well within procedure at his department, but continuing after they are restrained is obviously not."
That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other? The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad. This to me reinforces the impression that it's not a small minority that's the problem, but the entire institution. Is the media just not picking these voices up?
If there had been strong voices within the police calling for reform and officers had kneeled with the protestors instead of attacking even peaceful ones, the situation now would look very different.
> why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other?
Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis.
Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.
How many people on HN have reported unethical behavior of their coworkers to their bosses?
Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory.
As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned.
I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.
> The only voices I hear from the police are coming out in defense of other officers who did something bad
You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go.
The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police.
I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.
Some of those were followed up by the same cops teargassing the people they kneeled with. They didn't change minds because it's not just the protesting side doing PR. Those photo ops were only convincing to people who wanted to be convinced.
> That's the thing I don't get and that is the most upsetting thing to me about this situation: why aren't police officers speaking out more against each other?
Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their ability to continue harming others.
I can't remember the last time that a doctor or lawyer blatantly murdered someone on tape and had their peers go up to bat for them about how they're actually the victim and did nothing wrong. When it comes to law enforcement and correctional officers, I can find a dozen of such instances from the last 12 months alone.
> Other professional groups that practice solidarity often have review and ethics boards that are, in general, quick to denounce bad actors and strip them of their continue harming others.
While professional groups are often mistakenly analogized to labor unions, they aren't and have very different functions. Professionals in organized professions like law or medicine may also be in labor unions (this is unusual in the US outside of the public sector), but the labor union and the professional organizations aren't interchangeable.
When was the last time a union carpenter, welder, electrician, or engineer was caught on camera murdering someone, and their peers went up to bat for them explaining how they were really the victim, and they did nothing wrong?
When an engineer's structure causes injury or loss of life, it is studied and taken very seriously. Liability falls on both the engineer and their employer, if there is one. Blatant negligence means the removal of licenses or the ability to practice in the field they're licensed in, along with civil lawsuits or even criminal charges.
When a cop causes injury or loss of life, the entire system tries to brush it under the rug completely, and learn nothing from it. Then their peers go up to bat for them explaining how they're being unfairly persecuted and that they did nothing wrong. Cops are often shielded from civil and criminal liability for abuses that other professionals would end up in prison for.
Trying to place the blame on unions is pretty far-fetched, and you're speaking to someone who is against the idea of police unions in particular.
It may be worth bearing in mind that one thing police union contracts can and do win as a concession is cities taking on civil liability and paying for legal defenses. The whole system is set up to dismiss and ignore poor behavior because those are the grievance-handling processes designed by police and enshrined in union contracts to serve that purpose.
Police unions have played a major role in protecting union members from management. Or as we call it elsewhere in politics, accountability.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
> I'm not saying solidarity is bad. I'm saying it's a tool that police unions have weaponized against the general public.
I think that reducing the problems of policing in the US down to "solidarity" isn't apt, as solidarity in other unions doesn't produce this level of opaqueness, lack of honesty and responsibility, negligence, ineptitude, or criminality.
The issue is at play is culture, one that comes from the top and is reinforced every step of the way to the bottom.
I agree that police unions have a strong hand in enabling and enacting the policies that shield police from accountability, but police are given powers that are unique to any other government or otherwise union worker. Allowing easily abused power to consolidate to the point that it has is why I'm against police unions in particular, but not others.
My apologies! I can see I have been unclear. Please allow me to correct this error.
I do not think, do not believe, and do not claim that all the problems of policing in the US reduce to weaponized solidarity. I think, believe, and stand by my claim that solidarity has been weaponized by police unions. I also stand by my previous claim that the particular behavior pattern other commenters pointed to is one form of weaponized solidarity in action.
I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Again, please accept my apologies for my failures in communication.
"The media's just not picking those voices up" is definitely a part of the story. Portland for example is looking pretty bad right now, but the Portland officers did kneel with the protesters.
The prevailing ethic promoted by culture seems to be against acting as a "Karen." In childhood there are admonitions against being a "tattle-tale." There are popular alliterations like "Snitches get stitches."
Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer.
There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.
> Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then?
Then we'd never heard about George Floyd.
Not to say there is no serious police brutality problem, but it's worth remembering the huge selection bias in what videos go viral and we end up seeing.
There is over 1 million cops in the US, and out of however many million interactions they have with the public each day, an overwhelming majority are perfectly fine.
There isn't any room for error when you have the power to ruin or end someone's life. A bad cop can ruin or end more lives over a career than die in a plane crash. Where is the NTSB for police?
Which poll? And what were the full gamut of options/how large of a majority was it? I'd be absolutely floored if 90% of Americans agreed on almost anything.
(I suspect the scissor is murder vs every other option).
I ended up taking a look at the polls mentioned in that article. The one from Data for Progress (the source of the 10% number for tragic accident, some numbers from other surveys indicate to me the number is probably higher than that) has pretty leading questions.
> On May 25, 2020, an unarmed black man named George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds before he died. Which of the following comes closer to your view: [the choice to add the facts that Floyd was unarmed and knelt on for that long to the question is quite heavy-handed for a survey and sure to influence the respondent]
and
> Which comes closer to your view on recent protests:
>
> These sorts of protests will continue unless we solve the root cause of the problem. We need long-term solutions to poverty and violence.
>
> The first priority is ending the protests and violence, which means we need more police officers and national guard to calm the situation down
>
> Don't know
> [this question pretty assumes the respondent agrees that poverty is the root cause of what's going on]
as compared to the YouGov survey which has a much more neutrally worded set of questions (and a much larger set).
It's therefore not surprising that the YouGov survey records more opposition on some questions that seem similar in spirit to the questions that dataforprogress.org does.
But the two surveys taken together do provide information that does floor me, which is that the overwhelming majority of Americans (indeed around 90%) are convinced that the police officers in this case did something wrong and should've been fired (although they might be not be all convinced of the severity of the offense, but everyone seems to agree it's at least essentially manslaughter).
So you're right! Floyd's death itself is hardly a scissor issue.
The scissor issue instead seems to be the protests themselves. Again I much prefer YouGov's question here to Data for Progress, which asks
> Do you think these protests have been motivated more by a genuine desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions or a long-standing bias against
the police?
And the numbers there are
> A genuine desire to hold police officers accountable: 43%
> A long-standing bias against the police: 40%
> Not sure: 17%
The police responsible were arrested long ago. Even Trump called this a murder and condemned it right away.
This is still going on and over 20 people connected to the protests have died since then. There was a retired cop shot while protecting his friend's store. There was a young girl killed for no reason outside a Wal-Mart. There was a burned body found long after the fact in one of the buildings burned during the riots.
The question isn't whether things should change or whether this is a problem but what to change and how to change it and whether that change will really make things better.
Kneeling on someone's neck for 9 minutes is inexcusable no matter what was said. In my opinion the most important aspect of the murder of George Floyd is the other cops who stood by and watched while their colleague committed murder. That was the thing that directly contradicted the prevailing 'it's just a few bad apples' narrative among the general populace, because it showed as clear as day that if a 'bad apple' feels like murdering you, their supposedly good colleagues will do nothing to stop it. The apathy to the suffering is staggering.
I would not take that training video as factual evidence.
In a real scenario the officer would be pressing much more force on the suspects neck than what is presented in the video. The placement of the knee is another important factor. Because we see in the video that the training partner is lying completely still and not giving up much of a fight. Why aren't they demonstrating a scenario where the suspect is trying to break the restraint?
The upload date and content is also a direct response to the killing of George Floyd. It was uploaded not too long after his death. They even make a passing mention of it in the video too. This is clearly a video meant to push a narrative of policing techniques that don't actually work.
> demanding charges against the other officers present that seem extremely hard to justify legally speaking, and calling for Minneapolis to burn until that happened
Demanding a moderate response in polite terms has been demonstrated to get you nothing. Nobody making those demands realistically expects them to be met. There is a vague hope that some incredibly watered-down version might come about.
It's rather like pushing at a stuck door that's become stiffer over time and ultimately locked. If you shoulder-charge it, maybe it will budge.
That just says to me that the man was in distress, and instead of dealing with that distress, the police officer allowed him to die, possibly further exacerbating the issue. Either way, it does not paint a pretty picture, but I guess we're just more forgiving of someone preventing someone from living vs taking their life.
That is a difficult question to answer. I imagine there is always a balancing act. Especially if the police have some rule in place, it could create situations that criminals would attempt to take advantage of. However, I have always been of the mind that I'd rather a guilty person walk free than an innocent person not. And there are always consideration of how use of force can affect those who see it, with secondary effects creating, what I imagine, are the more troublesome effects.
> All of a sudden, things get a lot more fuzzy in terms of cause and effect
It got more fuzzy for who?!
The kind of people who will turn the most clear cut case of police brutality we've seen in years into their own personal chance to play "devils advocate" and be the obligatory contrarian no one needed, wanted, or asked for?
-
Because, after all, do you think the fact he was in respiratory distress means the officer should have knelt on his neck for 9 more minutes while he begged for mercy and was reduced to crying for his mother?
Do you think having your neck knelt on for 9 minutes is an appropriate response for respiratory distress?
It makes them look like even more cold blooded murders.
It makes their initial excuse of "he was faking to get out of the hold" even more abominable
If he was in such respiratory distress that he was dying before being knelt on, it could be interpreted he additionally needed 9 consecutive minutes of having a knee on his neck?
I was wondering how that could be an unpopular sentiment then I realized, I broke the first rule of HN. You can be as passive aggressive about tech stuff as you want, but don't be overtly heated about anything "political", like police murdering (sorry, manslaughtering) people in broad daylight
Do you ever worry that we are building Superhuman Artificial Intelligences with the goal of maximizing the amount of attention paid to advertisements? I'm concerned that they might accidentally either turn the world into paperclips or turn journalists into maximally conflict-driven-story finders.
This is not about good/bad journalism. A great journalist will turn in a fantastic story, get it approved and even on the front page, only to have it get few clicks because it can't compete for attention with the sensationalist crap.
This is about how humans first discovered that, given an infinite amount of reading material, we choose to read things that give us an emotional reaction. Any emotional reaction.
On the flip side we are training humanity to be less susceptible to advertising. Hence the increase in noise as humans naturally and unknowingly filter it out.
We really are not training humanity to resist advertising at all.
If anything its quite the opposite and at the very least no change from before. We should try individually and we might get some success. We might try at a societal level but I have not see this occuring (apart from things like bans for things like cigarettes or products aimed at children). There's no fundamental human change occuring.
Additionally the vast majority of HN users are dependent on advertising. Advertisments are core to the western life. It's deep in our psychology, and requires more than just an ad blocker.
Yeah, if anything, we're training people to aspire to be living advertisements, since the reward for success on Instagram is luxury brands subsidizing your lifestyle in-kind and perhaps even in money.
Is advertising in the 50s more or less successful than now? I do not know the answer but I am curious. Does the more in your face advertising actually make a difference or is the bar simply raised?
> with racism being the most obvious and likely explanation
Is it though? Even after all this time, I've yet to hear how racism had anything to do with the incident, other than rampant speculation. Tragic? Yes. Brutal? Yes. Murder? Yes. Racism? How?
I can't speak to what the parent commenter thinks, but I think it's less the idea that these specific police were racist (maybe they were, maybe they weren't) than it is systemic, institutional racism. Black people are statistically way more likely to be killed by police, and police appear to be largely immune from consequences when they misbehave even egregiously as in this case, the Breonna Taylor case, or many many others. While these killings were obviously tragic and unnecessary, nonchalant acceptance of police brutality and abuse of power remains at the core of the problem that needs to be solved.
That "pay attention to me" screaming is because of the advertising business model.
I'm not saying it wouldn't happen without advertising. But advertising forces otherwise rational people (e.g. newspaper editors) to do ridiculous things to compete for attention, because attention is money.
And because there are more people screaming for attention, everyone has to scream louder.
...While the people who are supposed to be paying attention find it abhorrent and start deleting their social media accounts and finding ways of paying less attention.
...So the people who need the attention to pay their salaries have to scream louder.
And so it goes around and around, while cities burn and lives are ruined because (as TFA says) nothing gets attention like a controversy that splits the audience into two halves.
The reason why this case fits in with the cases as described in the article is because it also an ambiguous case but it's also a good example because those on both sides hold concrete views about it.
We must be cautious when we notice ourselves saying "the outgroup is bigoted"
This has to be the most hilariously and accidentally observational comment in the history of the Internet. Times apparently have changed since 2014.
Brilliant article.