South Florida cops claimed they were “forced to fire” at a 32-year-old Black man named Donald Taylor in August because he was armed and would not follow commands.
But newly surfaced video contradicts those claims, showing the Black man walking away from cops with his hands raised to his sides showing no gun in his hand when a Hollywood police officer fired a single shot as Taylor had his back turned to the cops, killing him.
ACAB.
And why I never get picked for juries.
I’ve seen many body cam videos and people don’t even get tased for kicking officers (even POC). Watching the video clearly shows the shooting was unjustified.
Rodney King SHOULD have been the last case
When they’re justified they release the body cam footage without needing to be asked. It’s become my go to litmus test. Footage is missing? Camera was off? Camera was blocked? Yeah that’s murder and they know the footage would show it.
“In general, signalling theory says that if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, that means chances are it’s because you couldn’t do the good way in the first place.”
— Vitalik Buterin
That’s a great quote, and fits the context well
Footage should be held by some independent 3rd party who will follow the rules on releasing it. It shouldn’t be up to the cops.
We tried that when Biden was in office and all these new body cam laws were passed. So many cops threatened to quit, politicians backed down and let police unions retain control of the cameras and recordings.
Damn, I had no idea that happened. So fucked.
Edit: Also, I kinda feel like the ones who threatened the quit, were the ones we wanted to quit …
They wouldn’t have quit. That would have impacted their pensions.
I’ve just been thinking on this more, that really would have been fascinating to see it play out.
I think you’re right for any old timers. New people it’s not a big an issue. I feel like there may have been a big lawsuit though over if that would be reasonable grounds to quit and keep the pension? It could be entirely baseless, I don’t know know anything about that, but that feels like what would happen for those that did quit or wanted to quit?
The ensuing aftermath though would have been a very interesting watch.
Edit: the ensuing aftermath also including all the changes in police misconduct stats.
Screw that. It should be held by a 3rd party openly hostile to police.
Exactly. The footage is there to keep the police from abusing their power, it’s not supposed to be neutral in the first place.
The cynic in me doesn’t believe there exists any such party.
I could do it. Problem solved.
I admire your gumption if not your efficacy
Public library systems, give them money from the police budget to get the job done.
Thats also fair.
“Neutral third parties” that who would rely on police departments contracts.
If the cops want it released then it’s released. If they want it buried then it’s buried. Because the customer is always right.
Cop body cams should just be open to live streaming by anyone at anytime the same way unprotected security cameras are.
I think that would be a potential privacy problem for the people interacting with the cops, given that the majority of their interactions with people don’t end up in a shooting. I once got pulled over when I was driving home from late night board games a few days after Christmas. I hadn’t been driving erratically, they were just doing routine breathalyser checks because there had been a lot of drunk driving in the area.
I think when the policy is well-made, it would fit with security camera workings. When you go shopping at the mall, pay for your stuff and leave, you’re recorded, but the running footage is erased every 48 hours or so. It’s only when the mall has a major shoplifting incident, or a mass shooting, would someone tag the period of the crime and save it all for review. Similarly, police would only need body camera review if there’s a report they discharged their weapon, made an arrest, etc.
Am I reading this correctly? That if you comply they still unalive you?
Edit: every single reply to this comment is to inform me they don’t like a word. Not one of them addresses the actual message of lethal compliance. If this were Facebook that would make sense but Lemmy isn’t MAGA land so I’m a bit confused by all this boomer shaped deflection.
From only this posted article, he didn’t comply. He was murdered for ignoring them
That has always been the case since I’ve been alive as a minority in America.
You don’t get to say what you want without other people being allowed to say what they want back.
Yes, when you comply they might still kill you
Having said that, please stop using that “special language” or whatever the hell it is that you’re using
It’s called killing murdering, etc. “unaliving” is just dumb and shouldn’t be used in a normal conversation
Thank you for at least addressing the topic before attacking the language. I do actually appreciate it.
A tiktok adult calling everyone a boomer who disagrees with their brainrot speech is pretty funny
There’s a large chunk of Lemmy that’s barely literate. Using words that might confuse them hurts their brains.
deleted by creator
That if you comply they still unalive you?
There’s a reason they are required to wear body cam. They’re the same brood that harbored the KKK.
lol, calling people complaining about you not speaking plainly “boomer”.
This isn’t Facebook/some-other-shitty-corpo-social-media. You can say murder
I like the word. It embiggens the language.
I agree that it’s perfectly cromulent where it lends meaning. But in this case it’s just not sing passive verb when thenacirivenverb was more meaningful and accurate
I personally hate when people use “unalive” rather than “kill” or “murder” but it’s not a battle I care to fight. With everything else happening right now, people that would focus on the word are shit-stains.
Whataboutism is for people incapable of holding more than one thought in their head at once
I don’t know, it sounds to me like you’re trying to sanewash murder by using a “tamer” word than straight up “murder” -which this is, we agree on that. I get that’s not your intention, but that’s what it sounds like to me
The actual explanation is way simpler. They’ve adapted their vocabulary to moronic social media’s censorship bots.
Are the words “kill” or “murder” censored on social media ?
I’m not totally sure, but I don’t think they’re explicitly censored, more of a shadow-ban via algorithm (for the folks that give a shit about that kind of thing).
Don’t speak the words our corporate oppressors demand. They want you to believe concepts like sex, murder, drugs, and suicide are too adult, too dirty to be discussed explicitly in public.
Don’t believe them. Say the words you mean. Use language that’s accurate, not what’s preferred by oligarchs for “marketing reasons”.
It embiggens the language.
It does not.
It does
Double plus ungood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Personally I disagree and think it’s more like the linked article. But you are also entitled to your opinion and i may just be a relic of an older time
Implying older is intrinsically worse
not trying to. just trying to imply that in order for the youth to listen i have to talk to them in a way they’d wanna hear
My favorite part of this is how every reply is someone butthurt about the word I used and doing everything in their power to avoid the issue by focusing on the language and not the message.
Yea, using a cutesy, made-up, baby word to describe fucking murder is a bit distracting. Who the fuck would have guessed?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think the reason you’re awash in upvotes for your original comment is because it’s simply a known thing for most of us and we don’t have anything to add. It just is what we know and what we’ve been fighting against my entire adult life. Conservatives will push all kinds of propaganda that doesn’t map to reality like “obey the law”, “just comply”, “all lives matter”. The police will shoot first and ask questions later, and those questions won’t have anything to do with law enforcement.
But there’s been a VERY long progression of reducing the amount of inter-generational connectivity and making sure that we barely even speak the same languages or dialects and some of us got caught off gaurd by your use of neotalk that’s been coaxed into reality by corporate social media platforms censoring certain forms of speech critical of the systems of torture we exist under. For example, what we today call cPTSD 100 years ago was called shell shock. Then it was called combat fatigue. Then combat stress reaction. Then it was PTSD. After that it was divided into cPTSD. And that’s an example of the terminology changing for reasons that we can very much find ways that it actually is positive. Each shift expanded the definition to include more people and more experiences. It’s easy to find the justification that while it divides successive combat veterans and how they talk about their own traumatic experiences and how the systems of torture that exist have broken them.
Most of us find it harder to find this silver lining in neotalk from corporate social media platforms. We just see our dialect eroding beneath us. But you don’t. And our generation has to do more to reach out to you and listen to you so that you have any reason to listen to us. So while I personally disagree, I refuse to let myself be upset about it, or butthurt as you put it (given that I’m not upset, I’m not even close to butthurt). All I can do is point out that inter-generational connectivity is intentionally broken by our oppressors by manipulating how we use language and hope that someday you’ll have this experience ready to help you talk to a younger generation who speaks differently from you. I hope you do so with grace, love, and patience.
That’s all I was getting at
It’s weird how the chat is assuming this is an age difference issue. That’s low key chopped.
chopped as in the AAVE use, or the co-opted TikTok use?
what does chopped mean in this context ?
It’s hard to say something profound about something so ugly and sad. It’s easy to critique language so you will have a lot more of what is easy. I’m angry at the issue but I don’t know what to say about it myself.
Wait what, why would it be hard? Ugly and sad things are probably the most important to talk about with more weight and significance than happy topics.
Correct. To cops, Floridians, and especially Floridian cops, black lives don’t matter.
I was on your side until you said that the hate you were getting was from a specific group. Would you even be commenting if a Boomer was “unalived”?
Exactly. There’s no incentive to comply. They completely gave away their authority. Just kill them all.
Within days of the incident, the Hollywood Police Department began to release misleading statements about the murder, suggesting that the officer fired his weapon because Donald was armed.
Even their made up, post hoc explanation isn’t a valid justification. How do the police constantly “forget” that in the most heavily armed nation in the world it’s completely legal-and not uncommon-to be armed?
There’s this second amendment loophole about being armed while black that our society just seems to be okay with.
He was 3/5ths armed, your honor
Damn, that is brilliant. That’s a clever fucking concept and I’m probably going to steal it at some point.
Well… If they can lie about a white woman, the sacred cow of whiteness, causing her own killing, what hope does this guy have?
She was a lesbian. That negates the whiteness and then some apparently.
white woman, the sacred cow of whiteness
Women are not treated as sacred but they are treated as livestock.
If it’s not a white male its life doesn’t matter.
If these were regular people instead of cops these guys would be catching obstruction and accessory charges.
Well tbf, not in CA. They make it hard to carry legally unless you’re one of those “better” than the rest of us, like rich actors and silicon valley types.
But you’re right that alone isn’t justification, even if he was carrying, even if it was illegal, it’s still not a death sentence unless he’s actively trying to use it for murder, at most it’s a felony charge.
Well tbf, not in CA
This was Hollywood, FL, not Hollywood, CA.
Ah yes an important distinction indeed, in that case nevermind on that!
(Who the hell named it that? That’s as dumb as having like, a Paris in Texas! …don’t tell me…)
Florida is full of places like that: Hollywood, San Antonio, Jupiter, etc.
At least there isn’t a Miami somewhere cold like the Midwest. Say, Ohio for example. 😂
Ohio has a whole county named Miami
Hollywood FLORIDA is a city in which literally anyone can carry a gun with or without a permit.
AH well yeah that is different then lmao.
by focusing on the crimes he was accused of
You mean the crimes where everyone walked away alive??? Seriously, with no other explanation, I have to assume the cop murdered this person because they were too lazy to tackle him. There’s zero other reason to shoot.
There’s zero other reason to shoot
Pig could be a racist, an homicidal maniac (which seems to be a requirement for the job), a little coward with no trigger discipline hiding behind its gun (another requirement) firing due to a nervous spasm, it could have heard an acorn fall and thought it was under fire and started blindly shooting “defensively” (happens more often than you’d think), aiming at a playful neighbour’s dog, under its monthly murder quota, being initiated into a cop gang, high off its mind on a cocktail of PCP, meth, and cocaine from the evidence room, or more probably some combination of most of those…
Funny how people from the USA hate the idea of CCTV and tHe SuVeIlAnCe sTaTe but public videos are the only proof of abuse of power.
I think it’s understandable that people don’t want technology being used in invasive ways, or as a means of control, but they’re okay with it being used to determine if someone committed murder.
there’s a lot of good replies here that approach the issue from different angles. the biggest one being “who benefits from mass surveilance.” in this current climate, that is the cops. the cops have spent the last 15 years showing us that they are not accountable to anyone or anything. you propose that video evidence will help hold cops accountable. my issue is that we already have video evidence in many cases and they’re still not. take it back to Rodney King, if you want. the cops have never faced consequence even when it’s clear they’re in the wrong.
so then what happens with more surveillance availabe? the police have an easier time carrying out their activities, which so often includes extra judicial killings. the reason us americans are wary of expanding the surveilance state is we’ve been doing that every year since 2002. none of us are safer. the extrajudicial killings have not stopped, they’ve only gotten more visible and are used as a form of terrorism. i understand where you’re coming from that you find our attitude odd, but a lot of it stems from first hand experience that more evidence of police wrongdoing continues to not bring us closer to any police reform
It’s not difficult to understand.
We hate the idea of only our government and the police benefitting from and having control over that surveillance. We hate the idea of being taxed so we can be constantly monitored, then prevented from accessing the surveillance footage we paid for when it could exonerate us or hold police accountable.
Surely you can understand it’s more about who controls and benefits from the surveillance than the surveillance itself?
CCTV is not panacea from abuse of power, unfortunately. They have plenty of CCTV in Russia and yet there are still cases of power-tripping politicians/oligarchs/nepobabies. As per usual, video evidence is either disregarded or tucked away from society’s eyes. Doubt heavy surveillance would do much for US or any country where law is not applied to everyone.
The problem with mass surveillance is that, for it to be impossible to abuse, it both must be and can’t be publicly transparent.
If access is only provided to a small group and they are corrupt, it will be used against the out-group while denying the out-group any hope of using it for justice against the in-group. This is the current state of affairs right now with big tech, digital surveillance, and government CCTV.
If all the data was publicly available without safeguards—which is the only way to prevent the above problem—the problem shifts to it being used by bad actors for harassment and blackmail. No matter who you are, if you’re always watched by a camera, you will be eventually be recorded accidentally or intentionally breaking a law or some moral code. For digital surveillance, something could easily be taken out of context and used to irrecoverably damage your reputation before you get the chance to defend yourself.
When the solution to either situation is the same problem causing the other, there is no middle ground or way to reconcile them. The only way to prevent both is to just not have mass surveillance, and instead provide a framework allowing the public to create recordings that can only be used to protect themselves.
the problem shifts to it being used by bad actors for harassment and blackmail
It’s in public: no expectation of privacy exists. This could in principle already be done.
You’re right, there’s no expectation to privacy in public.
HOWEVER, if I follow you around in public, every time you leave your house, all day, every day, and record all of your public activities when I do so, that’s still a crime, and it’s called “stalking”.
Furthermore, when there is no reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, merely investigating that public footage would be akin to following that person in public, which is defined as a “search” in the eyes of the law.
So, the sticky legal issue is, you can legally record it. But, unless you have a reasonable suspicion someone has committed a crime, the fourth ammendment prevents you from watching it. If all one needs to do is watch a video to violate our rights, its perfectly reasonable to expect us not to want that video watched.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
-Cardinal Richelieu
Be very careful with that desire of yours to be able to watch all people all the time the second they step out into public. Even in a magical world where all laws are sensible and just—which is, notably, not the situation in the real world—it is still possible to do a lot of harm with that kind of information.
The knowledge that someone is being recorded in public spaces doesn’t make them cognizant of every possible law they may be breaking or prevent them from breaking one unintentionally.
There are different laws at different levels of government, and it’s unreasonable to expect somebody to comprehensively know every law on the books for everywhere they happen to be. For example, you have likely broken a city bylaw you weren’t even aware of. And unfortunately, ignorance of the laws is typically not an absolute defence when breaking them. Furthermore, there are tons of archaic laws still on the books that are absurd by today’s standards. They’re not worth the cost to waste time investigating otherwise-innocuous civilians over, but that calculation changes when there’s an army of volunteers doing it for free.
But, let’s assume somebody does know every law—they’re still human, and humans make mistakes. Opportunistic blackmailers could use the public camera pointed at this person’s house to record the 50 instances where he/she accidentally parked two inches past the driveway and onto the sidewalk.
Would the city care if someone handed them an envelope of timestamped, verifiable evidence of finable offences? Maybe! It’s free money and little effort for them to act on, and you can’t run under the assumption that they will act in good faith when presented with evidence used as blackmail when you can’t even trust them to act in good faith when they’re the only ones with CCTV access. And even if the city won’t care enough to follow up with such a tip, it doesn’t matter as long as victims think they will.
No matter which way access is regulated, mass surveillance networks only create more problems than they solve.
And in the US, police will look for any possible interaction to charge you with if they decided they want to.
Do you know what CCTV stands for?
This is why I’m not looking to cops to save me from ICE.
Cops were never there to save you from anything at all.
Agree entirely. Every time these news releases come out with “oh, we’re going to have cops escort ICE” or “cops are going to arrest ICE for (random broken law)” I’m like… really?
Didn’t t FOP in Minnesota just say they stand with ICE?
ICE are not law enforcement.
To quote Ulysses Everett McGill: I don’t want FOP, god dammit!
They would join ICE if they didn’t already have sweet pension.
MURDER!
ACAB
