Lots of newbies showing up to lecture about cops and shootings.

[Savannahmann]

5. I guess I should have explained it in the reply.

I'd like to think that we can discuss our honest opinions here, and really anywhere on the web. I don't like to be manipulated, and I don't like to be thought of as an imbecile who could be so easily swayed. Yet, that is the obvious conclusion that we must reach.

I wish I could say that everyone here was giving their heartfelt and honestly held opinions. Conclusions reached by careful thought on an issue. But as is obvious, there are a few here who have showed up out of nowhere and all have the same basic meme. The cops are people who are doing a great job and don't have any choice in the matter when they use force. Even if one or two incidents do happen with excessive force, it's unfair for us to use that to blame the entire group.

I'm sure I'm not explaining it well now. Please believe it isn't personal, it's reluctant agreement that the authoritarian set think us so malleable that they can infiltrate and modify our opinion. As I mentioned, it's a blunt instrument. It's as subtle as a brick to the head.

It's part of the ongoing meme that things just don't happen that way, and we know they are. Torture, it's been in the news, and we hear how President Obama has totally ended it. OK, so we're no longer water boarding people in the CIA prisons. We've told the military to stop using pain as a means of interrogation. Yet, we still use pain in punitive measures in our prisons today.

I've posted this video a couple times recently to prove that torture is happening, today, this week, this month in our prisons and jails.

There can be only one conclusion from those events. It was torture. Yet, many run around swearing that this isn't happening because the President said it wasn't. Why, the police are good people who would never do anything like that. Then when it gets exposed, the answer they give can be summarized to the answer given by President Nixon. If the Police do it, it's automatically legal.

I wish I didn't agree with you because if the infiltrators are here, that means the Police despite the rhetoric to the protesters about evaluating and reforming, the usual lies, they have no intention of even considering any reforms. Instead they hope to sew division among the most vocal supporters, and swear that it's just not happening like that.

A couple days ago, I posted an OP asking why we didn't apply the same principles to Police use of force incidents as we do to aircraft accidents. The purpose of the aircraft accident investigation is to determine what happened, why it happened, and what changes, if any, are needed. Imagine that process applied to Tamir Rice. The first obvious conclusion is that the police started the encounter from too close. It did not give them adequate time to evaluate the situation properly and determine the appropriate course of action. They were point blank, the range that you couldn't miss with a weapon if Stevie Wonder was the one shooting.

Was this a deficiency of their training? Do we need to modify the training for police officers to try and make sure that this never happens again? Was it a character defect in the officer? Was it in violation of the training and standards? Or is this a policy that needs to be addressed? We will never get answers to those questions, and it will happen, again, and again. Instead of heeding the public demands for reform and review of policies, we get infiltrators here to want to try and tell us it isn't happening, not the way we think it is.

It's happening.

It's happening all over the nation. It happens every day to one of our citizens. It will almost certainly happen to someone today.

So the reason I wish I didn't agree with you is because it saddens me to think that there are people out there who believe that this crap is acceptable, or even necessary. I wish I didn't agree with you because the presence of those infiltrators means it will happen tomorrow, and next week, and next month, next year, and probably next decade. More people beaten, abused, tortured, and more civil rights eroded to the point that we just can't recognize them anymore. And we'll never get them back.

I probably haven't explained it well enough here, but I hope you understand. It's not personal against you by any stretch of the imagination. It's disgust, and discouragement, of the situation. If you believe nothing else, please believe that I meant no slight against you personally.