Publicly registering my strong objection to these sort of posts. Last week, we had u/Cheezemansam start this ignoble series with a post stating 'Some Cops Are Bastards' because some dubious #BLM martyr's attorney disputed the DA's framing of a police video, which the user accepted as fact, headlining his post with "turns out that police lied about an incident involving a police shooting" and promoting his support for a narrative claiming "Brown was sitting in his stationary car with his hands on the wheel when the first of numerous shots was fired". Well, video of the encounter was released this week, showing that the DA did not, in fact, lie. When the police rushed in to arrest Brown - a career criminal with a 30 year record and 180 page rap sheet who has a lengthy history of resisting arrest - for active warrants illegal distribution of cocaine, methamphetamine, crack cocaine and heroin, he did indeed start swerving through officers in a characteristically reckless escape attempt before any shots were fired. From NYTimes:
Mr. Brown ignores officers’ repeated commands to stop the car, and lurches the vehicle forward while steering it sharply to the left, putting officers at risk. The car initially moves toward the same officer who had been grazed moments earlier. This officer does not move away from the vehicle, but takes a step into Mr. Brown’s path. It’s unclear if the officer is trying to obstruct Mr. Brown’s escape, or trying to evade the car. The officer briefly places his left hand on the hood of the car, and this is when another officer fires [the first] shot.
Regardless of your view of the rest of the encounter, the central claim that u/Cheezemansam made in his post - its entire raison d'être - was false. Moreover, the post was offensive in its feeble attempt to frame this as on obvious significant systemic issue by lazy references to 2014's Laquan McDonald - a thug who was slicing the tires of cop cars with a knife and shattering windows while on PCP, in which it was investigated and adjudicated that there wasn't a cover-up - and 2015's Walter Scott, a case where there's an entire award-winning documentary dedicated solely to a review of footage in the case showing support for the officer's claim that Scott indeed grabbed his taser while resisting arrest
All in all, an extremely weak post, premised credulously on the partisan claims of one side's counsel and unconvincingly extrapolated into some great societal concern. But even if the video had been very damning for police, it still would've offended me, because it's an obvious example of the Chinese Robber Fallacy for a cause that is already wildly overstated in the cultural consciousness due to a multi-year campaign of concerted media propaganda. #BLM is one of the biggest - and most destructive! - causes in the country, to the point that a majority of Very Liberal-identifying respondents estimated that >1,000 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019, with almost a quarter believing it was around 10,000 or higher. In reality, the best estimate is 27 - and if you take the time to read the cases, strikingly few are sympathetic
If someone were to post an example of a shopkeeper's lawyer accusing a Chinaman of lying about shoplifting a rice-cooker as a top-level comment here and title it "Some* Chinese Are Bastards - turns out a Chinaman lied about stealing appliances!", I would hope that people would recognize it as a bad post regardless of the object level claims (which in this case were incorrect as well)
Accordingly, I was upset by the previous week's post and am appalled to see you attempt to make it into a trend, as if we should sit through weekly installments of people "Boo outgrouping!" police in an era where the anti-policing movement has led to the single largest homicide spike in US history, with >4,000 excess homicides last year alone due to the massive crime surges anti-police activists have fostered and enabled. I, for one, won't stand for it. If this is going to be the direction the thread takes, I call for users to counter by providing infuriating crime stories in response, as crime is surely as much of a culture war issue as policing. Moreover, given how abominable inner city crime is massively more prevalent than police abuses, I think the ratio of posting should exist proportionally. We can start with Darriyyn Brown and his abduction and murder of a 4-year-old toddler and the illegal Guatemalan immigrant who bound and raped an 82-year-old grandmother in her own condo as beefy, top-level posts with lamentations about the systemic issues of massively outsized black crime and violence committed by illegals who are not deported after several altercations with law enforcement...
Alternatively, we could be rational and have a detente where neither side makes overt emotional appeals by spamming sympathetic incidents and makes arguments based on data rather than anecdote. Your call.