The media should just tell the truth in these stories. You can’t kill some criminal just because you catch him passing off counterfeit money…we all agree to that. However this has to become a story of the saint murdered by the demons, as in:
However, then you go to a source in a foreign media that apparently isn’t so tied into the theme:
Notably:
He plead guilty to entering a woman’s home, pointing a gun at her stomach and searching the home for drugs and money, according to court records
Ok, that does not justify the cops in this instance in the least. But this is our second fake “gentle giant” by the media. Remember the Ferguson stories?
So do they not realize if they do this it is all going to come out?
The benefits of shows of force are only ever temporary.
If the police escalate a riot into warfare in the streets, it will quickly be understood how outnumbered the cops are, when it really comes down to it.
Eventually, if things are escalated - the illusion will break, and many will die.
I don’t have the answers…and neither does our society. If tear gas and rubber bullets isn’t working then fall back.
What those rioters had done is they changed the subject from death of George Floyd to devastation they have caused. People don’t usually remember the person but they remember the imagine of rioters and looting.
As for cops…I don’t hold it against them if they need to defend themselves.
So what’s my point in all this?
Instead of talking about George Floyd…we are now talking about rioting and looting thus validating my point.
Just adds more injustice in this entire event IMO.
No, the media should have stopped there. To the woman who woke up with a gun pointed at her stomach, he was not a “loving, gentle giant” he was a monster. Why did the media not stop with “the cops were not justified in this case” and try to turn him into a loving gentle giant? That should be your question.
What difference does it make? It is irrelevant to his murder. Hell, he wasn’t even taken into custody for THAT incident. It was over an alleged forged check.
The fact that you have shown more concern over his pass than you have over his senseless murder speaks volumes
I had no interest in his past until NBC News decided to turn him into a “loving gentle giant”. That you have no concern for their misrepresentation, that could only help fan the flames of hate and destruction in Minneapolis, and instead attack me personally for setting the record straight does indeed tell volumes.
National media is blasting all over about “prior complaints” that the officers had without any details of whether there was any merit to the complaints.
Having been a cop for nearly 25 years a record of complaints doesn’t mean a thing its own. So many people arrested complain about “excessive force” and “rudeness” as a means of retaliating for being arrested. Its almost never true which is why cops have embraced body cams as they exonerate the cops 99 times out of a 100.
A cop without complaints is a cop who is sitting in his car all day, making no stops, and dodging calls.
Point being that if the officer’s history of complaints is fair game so is Floyd’s history of violence.
Note: I’m not defending the officer, I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy of how one side’s history is fair game but the other’s isn’t according to some. As to the officer, I have no issue with anything at the beginning including the positioning of the officer with a knee above his neck since thats pretty common while holding someone down for pat downs and handcuffing - its actually pretty hard to put weight on the neck without toppling forward off balance and you can see several times in the video when Floyd moves that the officer is rocked backwards slightly meaning he wasn’t putting much if any weight. The idea behind it is that by keeping a knee above the head area the person can’t get up. Where the officer went wrong and will be justifiably charged was when he began taunting Floyd to get up and then prevented Floyd from even trying. Then keeping him prone which put Floyd at risk for positional asphyxia. Soon as they had him secure in cuffs and patted down they should have sat him up at a minimum or rolled him to his side.
If you want things to stop, then you police the police. The two officers in the video had a history complaints of brutality in their years on the service which ultimate culminated in the killing of a suspect in their custody in front of bystanders while knowingly being filmed.
The riots themselves and the destruction they entail are by no means lawful, but it’s not a spontaneous, random occurrence. It’s proceeded by acts like those performed by these officers. The riots are a reaction to the injustice and are a transactional display that there is a penalty for that type of injustice. Cops brazenly kill someone in their custody or otherwise inflict brutality towards citizens and they risk have part of the city they are supposedly on the job to protect go up in smoke. If they cared about the loss of private businesses and property they would take seriously the need to police their own. The risks are known and predictable. Those officers are not on the job now, but they should likely have been off the job some time ago when the complaints were mounting. Now their precinct is a smoldering ruin after choosing to repeatedly protect their own and the status quo rather than the private property that people are agitating over. They cared more about themselves than the property.
I didn’t watch that video and think “Man that sucks, I wonder if he has a criminal background”
No one cares about his past. No one is protesting or not because NBCNEWS said he was a gentle giant. NO ONE.
Every time a black person gets killed by the cops… everyone is busy looking up their history to find a reason to justify a senseless killing. This is exactly what you are falling for. The same media you are trying to say I should care more about.
I’m not the one who fell for a media narrative here.
As I said, I only did a google search to see what his past was like after I read that NBC article about the loving gentle giant. Obviously, the journalist and NBC Editor and Yahoo editor that carried it forward did care about his past, and went to work falsifying it.
So don’t say nobody cared. NBC and Yahoo cared.
And didn’t mind pushing their fake news.
You said their words lead to violent protests. I’m telling you that no one would have cared because his past wasn’t why he was killed.
What’s the narrative currently on MLK? From all sides? Is it that he was an agitator and adulterer therefore any media stories saying he was a “transcendent” figure was fake news because of his past. Nope.
