Honestly this meme is way understating the sinisterness

• Election interference for money machine
• Whole internet is ads company
• Dopamine addiction for all children
• Superpowers for law enforcement

Okay so you have no idea what the actual number is; you just kinda have your way that you look at it and that’s all you want to know

Got it

How many uses of force are justified

Almost none.

How do you know this?

Imma unpopular opinion

1. How many uses of force are justified? Just the fact that they used force to arrest somebody doesn’t mean an atrocity. It could have been 300,000 armed rapists trying to carjack a mother of 3 to get away, or it could have been 300,000 peaceful Palestinian protestors. The relevant number to track is how many unjustified uses of force there were.
2. Is it possible they’re tracking things better now? When the police document that force was used is HIGHLY dependent on their policies about what has to be documented, which I would suspect is highly correlated with time going by since 2020.
3. “Use of force” and “injuring” are super broad. If they tackle somebody on the grass to arrest them, that’s a use of force. If they taze somebody causing cardiac arrest, that’s an “injury.”

They do dive a little bit into the details, but I think a lot of the details either undercut the headline narrative or are misleadingly presented. E.g.:

despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.

Half of the agencies reported increases in overall force in the two-year period following Floyd’s murder, the report said.

So, basically, it hasn’t changed. And it went up in half and down in half. I mean it is fine if you want to present that result as an indictment of the claims of reform, but the way they wrote the “everything’s getting worse” headline out of that data is weird.

The most common use of force was stun guns, which are considered “less-lethal” but can also have deadly consequences; the organization tracked more than 20,000 stun gun deployments.

In 2022, the group also cataloged more than 8,000 incidents of chemicals being sprayed; more than 4,700 cases of people hit by weapons like batons and beanbags; and more than 2,100 cases of contacts with K9 dogs.

Sounds like, if those are the numbers out of 300,000, then by far the most common use of force (the remaining 264,200) was tackling / wrestling with a suspect. And then they decided to lead with the descriptions of more lurid uses of force that make up 1%-7% of the times that things happened. No?

Then at the very end the whole tone changes:

of the 757 agencies that disclosed types of force used over time, there were 973 neck restraint uses in 2019. By 2021, there were 112 of those cases, a nearly 90% drop.

Jurisdictions with DoJ reform agreements reported a 22% reduction in overall reported use of force, Mapping Police Violence found. And 13 out of 18 agencies that adopted state or federal reforms reported reductions in use of force.

Policies that reduce overall police encounters can be most effective at reducing injuries and killings by police, such as alternative responder programs dispatching mental health professionals to people in crisis, Sinyangwe said. He said he hoped his database would help officials, including a potential Kamala Harris administration, identify agencies in need of urgent intervention. And he hoped to see an expansion of initiatives shown to work.

See this sounds great. It’s like, some reforms are working and some are not (or just aren’t even being attempted in some places), let’s strategize how we can fix the existing and continuing problems. Let’s get a clear eye on what is happening and try to make things better.

If they had led with this, I would have no griping, but the whole headline and 2/3ds of the article is just feeding into the “OH MA GAWD THE POLICE ARE KILLING EVERYONE WON’T SOMEBODY STOP THEM”.

Bring on the downvotes 😃

100% the same

Dude I’ve never been so happy to be wrong as fuck

raises hand

Question

Does that mean that if Likud has a headquarters near some civilian installation, that it’s okay to blow it up and the civilians along with it?

(Not that I necessarily believe that Hamas had a command center next to all of the children, but even if they did, I don’t think that automatically means that blowing up all the children in the school becomes okay)

One of the dead guys was sentenced for unlawful possession of a firearm. Not that he necessarily did anything with it; he just had it.

I had a feeling you wouldn’t have an answer for what her messaging should be / what she should do instead.

Honestly, like I say, I do sort of agree that it’s off-putting and misleading messaging, and that maybe it would be better to make some sort of attempt to communicate what’s actually going on and what the Democrats have been trying to do (since our media seems uninterested in doing that fairly important thing.) But, it is complex. Maybe it is right to just talk “border security”, lean into that, and if people get confused but still vote for her, then whatever it is fine.

But yes it’s a bunch of shit to attack her with headlines that claim she said something she never said. IDK if she will make a genuine attempt to fix the border, but Biden did make that genuine attempt, and you attacked him with precisely the same messaging, so I think it’s fair to call this one bad faith also.

(Edit: Also I see what you meant about “angry”; I went back in fixed it in my message)

Hello! Okay so, one, she didn’t say that. The quote was:

“Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C., supported the bill. Even the Border Patrol endorsed it. It was all set to pass, but at the last minute, Trump directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down.”

There’s also a quote that’s a little closer, from this pretty good article about the rally where this all happened:

“Donald Trump does not care about border security — he only cares about himself,” Harris said. “As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law, and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like," she said.

So, she’s not claiming she’s tougher on border policy than Trump is, but it is fair to say she is pivoting to a “border security” narrative. In order to explain why she wants to pass a border bill, it is necessary to explain what is actually going on at the border. Because our media is shit, almost no one knows; I suspect she’s pivoting to “border security” as a narrative because she’s being attacked from the right on it, and because something genuinely does need to be done, and she wants to lay the groundwork for making the attempt. But anyway. What is happening is that there are two big problems in immigration in this country:

1. There’s a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
2. We’re rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it’s fuckin dangerous

There’s also a problem that the whole agency in charge of the border police is for the most part made of racist people, but that one is unfixable unless Harris can fire the whole agency en masse and then find 40,000 people who want to be immigration police who are not racist. So, unfixable. The other two problems do have legislative solutions, but the Republicans blocked anything Biden did, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time a Democrat tries to do anything about any of this, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border, or increasing the number of judges to reduce the backlog, or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks they’re just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad.

So, OP: What should the Democrats do? You are (edit angry) attacking them because they are talking about border security and trying to fix this mess. What should their messaging be instead (since you seem angry about this particular messaging, which again, you kind of have a point about “tough on the border” being a callous message in addition to feeding into the false media narrative)? And, what their legislative action?

49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”

Nearly all of these statements are, I think, undeniable if you’re paying attention. I’m surprised the percentages are so low.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys.”

(Emphasis mine)

And that is exactly the point where the misinterpretation train leaves the station. The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.

If you wanted to check whether young voters feel that the right answer to that bleakness you asked them about is to give up on politics and let whatever happens happen, rather than to get involved and fix it, you could have asked them that directly. My observation is that they are voting and getting involved in protest movements a lot more so than other younger generations in the recent past, but it kinda sounds like you don’t want that to be true, so you asked them something different and then decided that they said something different than they did.