This is an 18 year old trans woman getting violently arrested by a swarm of cops.
NYC is taking after Portland – a trans femme protestor was pulled into an unmarked van at the Abolition Park protest – this was at 2nd Ave and 25th Street pic.twitter.com/1PDhSYuK9h
— michelle lh࿊࿊q (@MichelleLhooq) July 28, 2020
Nicki Stone, the woman being forced into an unmarked car, must be extremely strong and scary, because look how many men in shorts and t-shirts to control her. And then they need so many cops on bicycles to control the crowd.
But the real revelation is the NYPD using the ‘we’ve always been this way’ excuse.
The NYPD issued a statement on Twitter saying that Stone was wanted for damaging police cameras, and she was detained by the Warrant Squad, which uses unmarked vehicles to carry out arrests. NYPD Lt. John Grimpel told NBC News that the Warrant Squad has used unmarked vehicles to detain people for “decades.”
If we’ve been abused by bad cops and bad policing techniques for at least 20 years, isn’t it about time we got around to ending it?
Thanks PZ, that was my initial reaction as well when I saw this on Twitter yesterday.
Whether or not the NYPD deflection is true, I’ve always thought that “we’ve always done it this way” is the worst excuse for bad procedures at ANY worksite.
Oh, and the exaggeration of “offenses” that has become typical of police departments across the country has become so thoroughly outrageous that I now automatically discredit anything they say.
For those unfamiliar with this case: the woman placed stickers on the lenses of police monitoring video cameras (monitoring cameras?!), so she was accused of the “vandalism of five video cameras”. The implication, of course, was that she destroyed valuable equipment.
Also, a water bottle rolled under the foot of one of the arresting officers and he stumbled. A police spokesman later said that the “surrounding crowd” pelted the police with water bottles.
One might have thought that the NYPD learned not to lie so egregiously after the Shake Shack affair.
Pretty much, yes. The more you deviate from the normative “cis het white Christian man” the more the US has always been a police state for you and others like you. I think it was Will Smith who said in an interview a few years ago that racism in the US isn’t getting worse, it’s just getting filmed more. This is what the United States of America has always been. Always. It’s a shame that even in an era of prolific video recorded evidence so many white people still refuse to accept that (a) it’s happening and (b) that it’s a bad thing even if it was happening.
One of these days, some bystanders are going to physically fight back (because why not? they see someone literally getting kidnapped), and it will end very, very badly.
Worst case, the thugs will kill or seriously injure those bystanders, and they will face zero consequences for this. Slightly less worse case, some of the thugs will be killed or seriously injured, and the bystanders will be prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law. And in both cases, it will not matter one bit if those thugs were not identifiable as cops.
FWIW, I was talking with a trans friend of mine, and she was talking about an outdoor get-together that a bunch of people were having in Manhattan (with masks & distancing, etc. — she’s been pretty paranoid about that), where a bunch of NYPD squad cars showed up and started knocking people over and off bicycles and such. I don’t read the NYT, but she says that the NYT reported it as the NYPD stopping a riot. Not that it should surprise anyone who’s from around here that the NYT (like the rest of the MSM) misreports stuff to support the power structure. Maybe “Pravda on the Hudson” isn’t as far off as we thought, though not in the sense that the John Birchers meant it.
Not that this is much of a change. From all I’ve heard, this behavior has been going on for decades, maybe even as long as there’s been an NYPD. When I talk to older trans women, they tell stories of NYPD harrassment and brutality from back in the 1940’s; by all accounts, the NYPD raid on the Stonewall Inn that precipitated the famous riots was simply business as usual. And black and hispanic people say that it’s always been like this: the only real change has been that with all the video-capable cell phones and social media, it’s harder for the power structure to hide it. Not that being exposed seems to make any difference. It looks like White People as a demographic aren’t interested in changing anything, they’re just annoyed that all this social media stuff is making it harder for them to remain in denial. (OT: has anyone done a remake of “short people” but about “white people”?)
So…you’re saying we’ve been living in a police state for decades?
Well, viewed from outside the USA, yes.
Yes, and I’m sure that a guy who:
Has said point-blank that he refuses to defund police
Thinks it’s okay for cops to shoot protestors as long as they aim for “limbs”
Actually wrote the bill that did more to create this police state than any other single thing
and also
Has within the last week called for mass arrests of “anarchists” — which from context clearly means “protestors on the left”
…will actually do anything about this. Sure. Very realistic thinking. It definitely matters whether your vote is counted, because smiling fascism is so much easier to ignore once again than the abrasive kind.
And, of course, the party whose Congress members voted by approximately 90% majority not to cut Pentagon funding for Trump in order to fund social spending, and are still 70% against single-payer despite their voters being overwhelmingly for it, is definitely going to hold his feet to the fire. Keep telling yourself that.
Shut the fuck UP, Vicar.