Exactly. Similarly, if a white legislator meets with a delegation of black constituents and offers them a photo-op luncheon, and what’s served at the luncheon is fried chicken and watermelon, the legislator may not have intended to do something racist.
Maybe the legislator in question simply loves fried chicken and watermelon and has it for lunch every day and figured it would be the natural choice to serve anybody else. But given the longstanding use of those foods as symbols in US racist iconography, serving them to those people in those circumstances would definitely come across as racist.
I work for the state government (not in Texas) and one thing we’re taught in our ethics training is that as a public employee, it’s not enough to avoid doing something wrong, it’s also important to make sure it doesn’t look like you’re doing something wrong. For example, if you have to perform an inspection at a bar that serves alcohol, you should park your state vehicle a block or two away so that it doesn’t look like you’re drinking on the job.
You seem to be excusing the police because the man was walking, and was not actually exercising passive resistance and being dragged. So a headline used an incorrect word, and this makes it OK then? You think the problem was with the “dragging” part, and the rope around him was no big deal? Huh? Have you just beamed down to the planet?
It’s not okay but being guided by rope as you walk is very different from being dragged. The headline is worthy of scorn like all sensationalized clickbait headlines that are misleading.
But the whole look and what it evokes, given America’s past, is really bad. The incident itself is still not okay, and criticizing a headline doesn’t make it less bad.
All I can think is what that poor man must have been going through. I imagine I’d have gone along with the policemen, led by rope… because they had guns and could kill me if I disobeyed or ran. Yet I’d also be terrified, wondering if I were being led to some worse death. Wondering if there’s some chance I could get away safely.
The whole thing is so weird and inappropriate that the idea they were leading me to some more private spot for something awful (and unofficially sanctioned) to happen would seem quite plausible. It’s not as though there’s no history of this happening.
All they had to do was call a car and wait a little while. Parading a man, especially a black man, bound by rope feels more like a public display. At best, public humiliation as punishment.
I’m wondering if a lawsuit is pending to declare a violation of human rights, particularly a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment.
There was no rope around him. Stop with the exaggerations. The rope was tied to his handcuffs. He was not dragged, he was walked. I don’t know what the policy is for handling a resistant person in that situation. Probably wait for a paddy wagon, since that situation is supposed to be crowd control, not general transport.
I’m not saying what they did was right, but exaggerations like above just inflame the situation.
That is not true. The police chief has admitted that they used poor judgement in this incident.
Irishman has called for the paddy wagon in a thread dealing with the question of police racism. Irony’s last words were “Oh, man, I wish I’d thought of that”.
So let me get this straight. You’re upset not because anything bad actually happened, but because it looks bad? Not because anybody actually got lynched or anything, but because a rope kinda sorta reminds you of a lynching, and horses just seem to antiquated?
You realize cops use horses in 2019, right? And this doesn’t matter a good god damn if they remind anybody of the 19th century? And that it also doesn’t matter what something looks like because it’s not the cops’ job to look good?
But why? They didn’t need a car. They had horses. The suspect could walk. Why would they call for a car? So they don’t look bad?
He’s their boss. It matters what he thinks. I’m not their boss, and neither are you. It doesn’t matter what we think. There are about 10,000 people being disciplined and written up by their bosses today, all across America. I don’t care about them, either.
I just want to make sure that the SDMB’s ire is pretty much based soley on optics, not, y’know, substance. If I’m wrong, if this is some sort of specific call out to some previous instance, something intended to actually have an effect on or “send a message to” the Galveston citizenry or whatever, please tell me.
But so far as I’m aware, the complaint here is that this is visually reminiscent of a general practice from 150 years ago, 50% of which is due to the presence of a horse, something commonplace in 2019 policing, not to mention ranches and races.
Yes. This is the problem. It’s a pretty big problem. As a public servant myself, if my agency had done something the equivalent of something this it would be a huge scandal and we’d probably be getting special training and messages against it for years.
Right, and what he thinks is that these officers violated correct standards of practice and “showed poor judgement”. Presumably there are official policies backing up his assessment of the situation, unless you think the Galveston police chief is an arbitrary despot who gets to just rebuke his officers as a matter of irrational whim.
If you think lynching in the US ended 150 years ago, no wonder you’re confused about why people are indignant about this incident.
No kidding. And there are threats often enough, even in 2019, such as hanging nooses around schools to show that the idea of lynching someone is a nifty weapon for the bigots.
For the most part, lynching didn’t end a 150 years ago; it started 150 years ago. Lynching was a means to an end - the end being confining newly-freed blacks to lower class status.
Yeah. Because when it comes to race and public perception, what something looks like is a pretty big deal. This looks like an old-timey reenactment of a minstrel show.
You know how “All cops are bastards” used to mostly be used by ganster rappers and not, y’know, liberal white guys? And then this happened? And this happened? And this happened? And now trust in the police keeps going down among everyone who isn’t white, republican, and an asshole?
Yeah, see, this is why it is absolutely the cops’ job to “look good”. If your community does not trust you, policing that community because hard to impossible. Pulling shit like this doesn’t just look bad. It’s extremely humiliating for the person involved, and for anyone who can identify with that person. It will give them yet another in a long list of very good reasons to not trust or go to or snitch to or help the cops in any given situation; yet another in a very long list of reasons to see cops not as “Officer Friendly, the helpful community safety officer” and as “Office Punisher, the guy with the itchy trigger finger who has some very strong subconscious biases about the place of the negro”.
If you think lynching in the US ended 150 years ago, no wonder you’re confused about why people are indignant about this incident.
