GPWizard F1 Forum
Other Sports => Other Sports => Topic started by: lkjohnson1950 on June 22, 2020, 11:39:11 AM
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Just gonna leave this here. Disgusting.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbFYXivXgAE81Pl?format=jpg&name=medium)
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Unbelievable in the 21st century that this can happen. :o
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I remember when there was trouble with fans in Spain harassing Lewis Hamilton, the FIA threatened to take away the Spanish GP if that continued to happen. I'd like to see NASCAR make a threat like that too. (I suppose it's trickier when NASCAR owns the tracks, but it also takes a lot of legal stickiness out of the equation.)
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I'm sorry to say this but NASCAR has a fight on it's hands. Racism still runs deep in much of this country, along with sexism, xenophobia and about every other form of prejudice. I pass several houses flying the Confederate battle flag on the short drive between my home & office. This is especially ironic considering that I live in the home town of General William Tecumseh Sherman.
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Oh dear!
This has become very sad and we are supposed to live in a civilised society but it makes you wonder where we are heading?
If you were an alien, think Star Trek, and you were circling the earth looking down would you want to drop in and say "Hello"? I don't think so.
I look at the TV and see the "Black lives matter" demonstrations around the world and the violence that is going with it and become confused as to why is a Frenchman/Brit/Spaniard/Italian (the list goes on) are attacking cops in their own country because of what a cop/cops have done in the US?
Is this what many fought and died for to give the youth of today the freedom to do? They are even attacking the memorials to those who died then want to cleanse history by removing statues where they should have plaques placed to say about their history as a reminder of what was and how far we have come from that.
A lot of what went on in the past was wrong and probably in a hundred years time some things that are going on now will be deemed wrong too. Times, opinions and attitudes change mainly for the better but we need history to see that not have it taken away and end up with the same problems.
2020 will be looked upon as a sad year for far too many reasons.
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I look at the TV and see the "Black lives matter" demonstrations around the world and the violence that is going with it and become confused as to why is a Frenchman/Brit/Spaniard/Italian (the list goes on) are attacking cops in their own country because of what a cop/cops have done in the US?
Can't speak for Spain, but France and the UK started because of police violence that pre-dated the George Floyd murder, that was simply waiting for something to provide enough unity for the protest to happen and overcome their fear of what happened in the last set of protests in France and the UK. France is reeling from last year's protests, which from what I gather black people got the worst of it. The UK's black population has a lot of repressed anger from the 2011 riots.
Even then, it might not have got so bad had the police not been caught on camera doing deliberate kettling (to break social distancing, thus perceived as a deliberate attack against protestors) and unprovoked direct assaults (including at least one unprovoked neck lift) against black people in London demonstrations. Other forms of police brutality have also contributed. In the UK, mistreatment in custody and COVID-19 mishandling have been at issue (non-white people have not only been far more likely to die of COVID-19, but appear to have been deliberately targeted for fines due to actions for which white people have merely received an unofficial warning or been told was legal). In France, immigration woes and semi-open racist conduct towards the African and Arab communities have been hotly debated. Both have also had problems with:
- poor mechanisms to correct police brutality
- disproportionate imprisonment of minorities
- unequal sentencing practises (both when the minority member is the convicted and when they are the victim)
- discriminatory use of stop-search powers and police being sent to the wrong address (the latter particularly jarring as that was part of how Breonna Taylor got killed - the police were supposed to raid a house 10 miles away but raided the house she was in by mistake).
In both cases, "we are seeing behaviour like that in our own police, and only social opprobium discourages them from being exactly like their American counterparts, so let's make that opprobium as obvious as possible" is the reason they have joined in so powerfully with the protests. That, and lots of them have lost/paused their jobs due to COVID-19 and have little else to do. The latter is the only reason I can think of for nearly 10% of Barnsley joining a Black Lives Matter protest despite being almost completely white. (My hometown, similarly sized and also similarly white, had a protest too - beautifully socially distanced and 50% mask-wearing. As you'd expect from a protest of 6 people).
Italy's situation is different. There's a lot of repressed anger, and it's erupting into protests about pretty much everything. There are also pro-fascist, anti-fascist and the near-annual "just change the government" protests going on, with the Black Lives Matter protests being used as a political football by all three sides. Black Lives Matter there is providing an outlet for general anger by people who don't identify as particularly political - or don't want to identify as political, or are actually fascist but consider the pro-fascist demonstrations too dangerous (among other things, they're associated with anti-mask and anti-vaccination propaganda, even though the majority of pro-fascists don't believe in either as national policy).
While some Italian Black Lives Matter marchers actually believe in the things Black Lives Matter is about (and indeed some of the marchers are black), a lot are there for reasons that aren't really related to the movement. For the record, Italy definitely has issues with police racism and near-impossibility of formally protesting police maltreatment, but so far, I've not seen any reports of the police responding to the Italian protests with violence, let alone the unprovoked variety.
(I'm also going to add that the Bristol statue which sparked the statue removal campaign had had a campaign for its removal for over a decade, which the council had ignored. Part of the anger about that one was about locals having their wishes ignored. If the council had wanted to put a plaque near it for education, it had over a decade to do it. That no such plaque or similar device ever appeared or was even proposed, indicates that education was never part of the goal of that statue. It was only for glorification of its subject and what it stood for (which to the eyes of pretty much every Bristolian with an opinion who was not on the council, means "slavery". The council claimed it was because of the philantropy in his will, but there's plenty of precedent for people being dishonoured when the money enabing such philantropy turned out to be ill-gotten, and the slaver boats were never a secret...)
This is also why the other statues aren't (or mostly aren't) getting "education plaques" or the like - because the people who are protesting them know that few people will read them and that most people, especially those most in need of the education, will simply assume the statue is there for celebratory reasons because that was why it was built).
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The Breonna Taylor incident was made even worse because the police used something called a "no knock warrant." The police don't even announce who they are. They just smash down the door & storm in.
Another disturbing trend we have here in the States is the militarization of the police. It is federal government policy to make surplus heavy military equipment available to law enforcement at little or no cost. Here in Lancaster law enforcement has two army surplus armored personnel carriers. One for the Lancaster P.D. & one for the Fairfield County Sheriff. Nobody seems to know why we need them. The local joke is that it's in case we get invaded by Rockbridge, a tiny village right across the line in Hocking County.
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Don't really see the problem with 'No-knock' warrants per se, we've had them for years in the UK. Especially necessary if trying to catch drug dealing activity, no chance of suspects flushing or disposing of substances when surprised early in the morning.
The issue with 'No knock' raids, if there is one, must lay with the judicial system not having robust enough checks & balances protocols when giving permission for such actions.
Mind you in the main we don't have loaded weapons in our homes over here, and the police are usually unarmed when carrying out the majority of dawn raids.
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The difference is that in most places over here, smashing into someone's home unannounced is an almost sure way to get shot by the residents of the home. That was the case here. They smashed into the apartment after midnight and her boyfriend understandably opened up on them.
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The other issue with the Taylor case was that the guy they were looking for was already in custody and the raiding group was not informed.
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The issue with 'No knock' raids, if there is one, must lay with the judicial system not having robust enough checks & balances protocols when giving permission for such actions.
Also, police in the UK generally check they've got the right house before they start attempts to enter it. If only because the amount of paperwork that has to be filled in on fulfilling a warrant is long enough without having to also fill in paperwork for an incorrect one...
(The "gun already in custody" issue is very possible, if it entered the records shortly before the raid - especially if a different police force took custody of the gun - an equivalent issue happens every so often with drug hauls that cross county lines, enter/exit a city, or move to a different district of London).
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Not gun Alia. They were looking for a specific man, who, it turned out had already been arrested.
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The issue with 'No knock' raids, if there is one, must lay with the judicial system not having robust enough checks & balances protocols when giving permission for such actions.
Also, police in the UK generally check they've got the right house before they start attempts to enter it. If only because the amount of paperwork that has to be filled in on fulfilling a warrant is long enough without having to also fill in paperwork for an incorrect one...
My Brother-in-Law has a locksmith business and was called out to secure a door after UK armed police burst into a house with all the usual commotion then after crashing into the bedroom with three of them pointing their automatic weapons at the woman in bed they said "Julia Smith (name changed to protect the innocent) you're under arrest" to which the woman replied "Next door she lives next door". Obviously by the time they got there she had gone.
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*facepalm* Police searches are rarely subtle...
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I earlier mentioned the military vehicles that our local law enforcement has acquired. This was in our local paper today. The Fairfield County Sheriff Department's brand new Cougar MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) Vehicle. We do have a mine problem around here. Long forgotten coal mines occasionally collapse & cause sink holes. However, I don't think that's what they meant by "mine resistant." :-[
I do see one advantage to having this unit. When they use it in a parade it will do less damage to the streets than the armored personnel carrier.
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Get a lot of rioting and hostage situations that need putting down there huh? :crazy:
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The difference is that in most places over here, smashing into someone's home unannounced is an almost sure way to get shot by the residents of the home. That was the case here. They smashed into the apartment after midnight and her boyfriend understandably opened up on them.
And that they were plainclothes police. That part seems pretty crazy (maybe not true?). Why wouldn’t you want to clearly marked as police in the middle of the night?
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The difference is that in most places over here, smashing into someone's home unannounced is an almost sure way to get shot by the residents of the home. That was the case here. They smashed into the apartment after midnight and her boyfriend understandably opened up on them.
And that they were plainclothes police. That part seems pretty crazy (maybe not true?). Why wouldn’t you want to clearly marked as police in the middle of the night?
A few reasons:
1) If you think the community is hostile to police presence, being unmarked prevents the community from doing anything to warn the suspect of their presence - or to just plain shoot the police, which is occasionally a problem in the USA. Since people getting changed in a car in the middle of the night is likely to cause problems, that tactic forces the officers to continue to be plainclothed until they have an opportunity to change. (This, I think, is the most likely reason. Or at least what the bosses who approved the venture were told).
2) If police think being unobtrusive will help them gain the trust of the occupants, it might make their search easier and/or less dangerous. Of course, no-knock tends to render that pointless...
3) ...but if they obtain entry without alerting the occupants, they might be able to do the search without waking the occupants up. If they are lucky. I'm not saying that's legal, but it's possible that might have been in the officers' minds.
3) To exert priviledge. Plainclothes is usually an earned privilege, and expressing that can have a certain in-group social value.
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"No knock" doesn't mean that they enter by stealth. The term for that is a "sneak & peek" warrant. No knock means they smash in one or more doors & charge in with weapons drawn.
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The Police said they announced before entering. Maybe
the truth will emerge. Usually when you point a gun or fire
at the Police you won't have a good outcome. I live in Louisville
and have heard more than you see in the paper or hear on the news.
One article on a local tv news site disappeared after one day. I worked ina bad part of town back in June and in 10 days two people
were killed....not a thing in the paper. Killing involving drugs may or
may not be in the news. In most Police shooting if the person shot
would follow instructions they'd still be alive