Guy Chamberlin

I disagree!

Wait....you knew this was a joke, right?

If you don't think a joke is funny, given the seriousness of the situation, it doesn't mean you didn't get the joke. Seriously. Wait. You think a cop making a Tik-Tok video where he pretends to pwn LeBron James by implying he wouldn't intervene in black on black violence to teach the uppity colored superstar a lesson is funny? Also, you know perfectly well that I'm frequently hilarious.

How come conservatives keep telling LeBron James to shut up and dribble, and liberals can't tell Scot Baio to shut up and act? Oh. Right.

Did anything in my post or my long posting history suggest otherwise?

The outcry over the poorly named Defund the Police movement ignored the reasonable policy shift to have other agencies step in to as many intervention situations as possible, including domestic disturbances, confronting the mentally ill. public drug and alcohol cases, vagrant complaints, even barking dogs and cats stuck in trees. A couple honest police chiefs admitted they would love to have these calls taken off their plate. Would an intervening social worker sometimes find themselves scared s#!tless and welcome an armed police back up? Of course. Could police learn about mental health assessment and de-escalation techniques from some unarmed experts? Why not? If the only other choices are Pro-Police or Anti-Police, it will only get worse. Our town of 50,000 had a full time mental health expert on the Police Department and he was pretty brilliant at navigating bi-polar episodes and helping police determine who was a danger to others and/or to themselves. He lasted about 5 years till budget cuts caught up with him. Pretty sure he was saving the department and judicial system time and money in the long run.

Remember a couple posts back where someone was talking about using the singular worst example to pretend the much bigger problem didn't exist? This would be that.

Yep.

You won't. No one would seriously suggest there's such a thing, just a comedian making a point The analogy is whether some professions should be granted a wider berth than others. The bad apple ratio for police officers, airline pilots, brain surgeons, and nuclear scientists should probably be lower than convenience store clerks, irrigation supply salesmen, athletes, and DMV employees. Right? They should be high for teachers, politicians, and stock manipulators, too. Some professions are pretty strict with their own standards — you screw up and you're out. Both police and teachers have unions that close ranks and give every benefit of the doubt to the bad apple. It hurts the larger profession. And again, in the law enforcement profession those bad apples can be deadly, and that doesn't take into account the selective enforcement that lands far more minorities in prison than white folk committing the same crimes -- or worse. The worst over-reaction to a policing event shouldn't negate a real and well-documented problem that's been going on forever.

That's why me and Chris compared jobs where the skill level and decision making of one person is a matter of life and death for others.

I totally sympathize with good cops who hate being branded by the worst actions of bad cops, but I think Chris Rock said it best as to why this isn't likely to go away: “Whenever the cops kill an innocent black man, they give the excuse, ‘Oh it’s just a few bad apples.’ Bad apples? Some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. “American Airlines can’t be like, ‘Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.’”

"Satan is the author of confusion." Corinthians 14:33

At the end of the day, COVID is going to be a lot like the flu. A deadlier flu that didn't use to exist, but a normal and expected part of our vaccine and seasonal health protocol. It was also preparation for whatever comes next. Among the things COVID has taught me is that our country and our generation has merely been lucky in terms of pandemics, which have been doing this kind of stuff forever.

Don't know and don't feel like researching, so I'm going to say "Demonland" refers to his cabal of Satan-worshippers, and the unholy practices he intends to bring to the University of Nebraska.

No. You don't.

Please. I'm asking you sincerely. Imagine a scenario of suburban white kids wilding, trespassing, vandalizing and/or doing drugs. Then imagine a scenario of inner city black kids doing the exact same thing. Does one scenario instinctively alert or concern you more? Can you imagine the incidents being handled differently by police, or on news channels? It's an exercise in empathy, and that's where I was going with the original post. If you're not biased, you're a better man than me. When I say my friends and I agree we would have been dead or in jail if we had been black, it's obviously not provable, or fact. But it sure as hell isn't hyperbole. And if you take away my particular anecdote, it actually is provable by incarceration and death statistics. Sometimes anecdotes help illustrate things. Perhaps that wasn't the case for you here. But it was an interesting revelation for my friends and me.

Why do you insist on missing the point? I mean, I know why. I'm just hoping you can make an honest attempt to step out of yourself, imagine the two scenarios -- one with white kids, one with black kids -- and see if you can detect the unconscious bias that most of us have. It applies to years and years of police enforcement across every jurisdiction in America, and overlaps with the most recent and publicized cases being discussed. Suggesting that the example is invalid because the LPD didn't kill any black kids is really reaching, and suggesting that black kids aren't killed or imprisoned doing things white kids get away with is just plain wrong.

Well on the one hand, regular people have to deal with people high on drugs and potentially violent all the time, and often don't call the police because it's a child, a spouse, or a friend. Unarmed social workers walk into high-risk situations every day, assess and de-escalate the situation, and call police only in the most urgent cases. In a majority of cases, the police do the right thing. But too many times, they don't. In the police shootings we're discussing, you have to ask yourself if the officer in question -- often backed by fellow officers -- is facing a life threatening situation when they use deadly force. Before facing any review within the criminal justice system, we have guys resisting arrest being executed. Turns out not all of these are resisting arrest scenarios, either. We also have Black men and women being held to a completely different standard, and that's really the issue here. And we do have entire police departments lying -- outright lying -- to protect their own, which has been SOP for as long as can be remembered, and few officers will deny it. It's not really an analogy I was making, just a legitimate source of frustration. Where to begin? I don't know about your middle school or high school, but what the Lincoln middle class white kids called partying and wilding was technically trespassing, vandalism, theft, and class one drug use and distribution. I remember many a fall night where the Lincoln police helicopter would fly overhead, tracking 50 of us with a spotlight as we wandered the neighborhood around Seacrest Field looking for trouble. When the police showed up, you know what we did? We ran. Laughing. Because we were young and fast and knew the neighborhood. I don't know if expected sympathy from the justice system, but we got it. That's why it's worth switching perspectives here: imagine a group of teenage blacks roaming the streets of Lincoln, drunk and stoned, tossing grassbags and eggs, smashing mailboxes, knocking out streetlights with snowballs, vandalizing construction sites, etc., and facing virtually no consequences. And of course we weren't a tiny minority of troubled class yahoos. Every popular girl shoplifted like crazy. Our biggest drug dealer is now a school superintendent in Kansas. My college roommate -- who I bailed out of jail when he tapped a police officer in the sternum while insisting we had the Constitutional right to play loud music in our own home -- is the vice-president of a large data analytics firm. I haven't egged a house in years. As white guys we could grow up and laugh at how stupid we were. As Black kids, we're dead or in jail.

Context and timing does have a lot to do with it.

I'm literally saying that old white guys thinking back on their youth, who then envision themselves doing the same thing with black skin, are inclined to say "oh sh!t....we could have gotten shot for that."

I've posted this in here before. It came up when I was hanging with some old Nebraska buddies, remembering the most legendary hijinks of our youth. Almost all of these guys are Trump supporters.. They've done pretty well in their lives. We may not agree on much, but they did have to agree that had we been black in our hell-raising days, we would have been dead or in jail years ago. That's they part some people just don't get.

First, as you say, resisting arrest puts you at greater risk, but it shouldn't be a death warrant. Second, as evidence has made painfully clear, many of these incidents involve people doing nothing wrong, and the confrontation is escalated by police with faulty information, mistakenly identifying a weapon, and sometimes just being pricks. Derrick Chauvin had a history of being a prick. Thirdly, both scenarios apply more often to Black people. I mean, you literally blamed the victim in the previous post. Even with your rationale, it still feels like proclaiming "ALL lives matter." While the sentiment is true, it's being used to distract from the real issue.

I didn't mean to misrepresent what you posted, but your point seemed to be that these unfortunate incidents wouldn't happen if people didn't resist arrest and treated police more respectfully. While that may be true, the proposition is really loaded, especially given yesterday's context, and it's an argument frequently aimed at Black people, ignoring some pretty major differences in police interactions.

Do police regularly get off of charges that would land anyone else in jail? Do police habitually protect their own using resources not available to others? Do police lie on the stand, and more to the point, lacking any video proof, does a policeman win virtually every "he said/she said" account entered as evidence? Has even compelling video evidence been ignored until yesterday? Are juries reluctant to convict police, mindful that the job is stressful and a conviction might discourage future recruitment? Is there any doubt that while you consider the Chauvin verdict correct, the Chauvin verdict would not have happened if there were merely eyewitnesses recounting what they saw, up against Chauvin and fellow police witnesses assuring us the actions were valid --- which is what they tried to do, rather dishonestly? And seriously.....are you saying that because you can't recall anything like this happening since Rodney King, it doesn't happen? This isn't "my view". It's just the way it is. I get the desire to use the "one bad apple" theory, and the rightwing's attempt to switch the narrative to making black protestors the real threat, but it's pretty cruel and ignorant for anyone who genuinely wants to move forward. I could grab some stats off Google. You could, too. But I'm going with the account of an ex-policeman who writes really well. https://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer

This was your first post on the subject. Nothing about justice. Everything about the protestors. Going so far as to say it was all for nothing. Pretending they should have just waited quietly for a legal system that habitually screws up these verdicts. This is the ugliest take you could have on today's events. Stick around and take the heat you've already earned on this thread, Pooh. Members 3,679 3,729 posts Posted 2 hours ago Just think, all that rioting and destruction for nothing. All that summer unrest all for nothing. Maybe next time, all the BLM leaders and CNN, MSNBC anchors will wait until the justice system makes it decision before crushing business owners dreams by destroying their business’s