the old man, Michael Gugino, is a longtime peace activist, among other causes, and comes out of the left-Catholic — and nonviolent — protest tradition of people like Dorothy Day.
he’s been arrested at protests at least four times, never charged
the DA charging the officers says that arresting Gugino was the appropriate course of action
“Under New York law, a person who attacks someone 65 or older and is more than 10 years younger than the victim can be charged with felony assault, Mr. Flynn [the DA] said. If convicted, the officers face up to seven years in prison.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/nyregion/Buffalo-police-charged.html Gugino’s age is absolutely relevant to the charges the officers face.
My take: this incident (with all the familiar elements: excessive force, lying about the facts, circling of wagons around the offending officers) is one more small piece of evidence that a large fraction of the members of many US police forces have been ruined by bad training, bad leadership, and a corrupt fraternal culture of omertà. A root and branch approach seems, sadly, to be necessary — if cities want to fix this.
I think I am correct is saying nobody here has advocated knocking people around for not good reason. I do not advocate doing anything at all for no good reason.
That implies that you do believe that people *can *be knocked down if there is a good reason, right? Otherwise, you’d be opposed to knocking people down in general. So what good reason could there be for knocking people down?
To stop them from attacking someone springs to mind at once. After all there are very good reasons for doing much worse to people than knocking them over.
I think the officers acted correctly in terms of how they were trained and considering the overall philosophy of policing in the US. They did what was expected of them. I do not hold them personally wholly culpable. It IS in fact, more complex than it seems.
The system itself is based on dominating and intimidating fellow human beings. Even on a good cop’s, good day, it’s ever-present albeit less threatening. The Elephant in the Room is just the way things are done, round here. Sshh.
As a rule, most cops aren’t cruel but they’re almost always patronizing (though I think often they are unaware of it). It’s just been enculturated in them. They’re right, you’re wrong because DUH! They’re cops, right?
Of course you don’t push the old dude down in that situation… I mean, who would? Well, it turns out, people who are trained that way would. But almost no one else. Start with** training**… actually, more fundamental than that even–start with philosophy.
Or maybe just tell us: what is your raison d’être?
I disagree, you are going to great lengths to justify this act. The question is why did the police need to knock this old man to the ground? How was public safety enhanced by the act?
I’m not gonna give them a pass merely because they were trained that way. If anything, that just means there are even more people to blame, in my mind.
Nobody is giving them a pass. Responsibility is not zero-sum - if you say that someone is more responsible, that doesn’t mean that someone else is any less. There’s more than enough responsibility to go around.
And I’m not trying to say anyone gets more blame than others, I’m saying that given I Love Me, Vol. I’s view, the officers did not act correctly, and in that scenario where we trace it back to training, we find even more officers acting incorrectly—Not just the offending officers, but also the ones that trained them poorly in the first place are culpable.
So, yeah, let’s not get offended when your readers think you’re justifying the attack. Out of the 6 points you made in your OP, 5 of them used language to minimize the severity of this assault. From blaming the victim by suggesting he was seeking an attack by police, to suggesting he fell down accidentally, to claiming that the police weren’t supposed to render aid to a man with a cracked skull.
…well the President of the United States seems to think that there was a conspiracy here.
So there are powerful forces in full agreement with the OP. If you can’t trust the President then who can you trust? Congratulations. The President thinks this was an ANTIFA set-up. The plot thickens. You can’t get more complex than this.
I think I failed in conveying the proper facetious tone (or something like that… sarcastic maybe?)
I taking a swipe at the fundamental concepts of American policing. “They acted correctly” only in the sense that they probably behaved about as they were trained to behave. Ya gotta “Dominate the Battlespace”, dontcha know, but it’s getting harder every day with these damn video cameras everywhere!
The attitude is: “If you’re 75 years old and fall down easily then don’t come anywhere near a police officer and you won’t get hurt!” That’s so wrong in so many different ways.
So, wait, leaving him bleeding on the street was part of their mission of getting everyone off the street? That doesn’t accomplish the police’s goal; it actively works against it.
It’s not much of a defense (or an “it’s complicated”) to say that the police absolutely had to do the exact opposite of what they absolutely had to do.
How about the additional questions in my post, which you didn’t quote? Here’s the whole thing:
Let me rephrase:
Are you willing to agree that it doesn’t become permissible to knock people down in a fashion likely to cause injury because they annoyed you in the past?