The Derek Chauvin Trial

This is why I think the whole way we think about the purpose of police needs to be changed.

The story reads like they were planning to do this before they arrived. If so, I am not surprised. Most police departments in this country should be disbanded and a new system set in play, as Snood observed. I am daily sickened by this carnage.

Very much so. Like a hit - an execution of someone they wanted to be rid of.

Have you ever seen reports of the way the police executed Fred Hampton?

(And I am IN NO WAY saying that Andrew Brown Jr is the same as Fred Hampton)

But just in the deliberateness of the police. They shot as if they were executing a charging wild animal - when it was a black man, offering no threat or resistance.

Hampton of the Black Panthers? Shot in his bed. They seemed to fear the successes of The Black Panthers in those days more than almost anybody.

Both the left-wing and the right-wing in America have gone nuts. These conspiracy theories that police or Black Lives Matter protesters are setting up elaborate plans to "execute" people is crazy.

There has to be room for logical thought somewhere in the middle.

Yes, that one. J. Edgar Hoover is the one who attached that “Bkack Messiah” moniker to Hampton and a couple of other outspoken young black men. Their main fear was that one of the charismatic black leaders at the time could unite the poor and middle class of all races into an unstoppable political juggernaut.

I have always maintained that is the same reason they used to kill MLK also. They already hated him for everything else, but when he started his poor people's work that was the end.

Yes! Organizing poor people AND speaking out against the war in Vietnam helped seal his fate.

It does seem to me that a lot of people are considering their own speculation to be likely fact...based on very little known fact. Speculation can be correct, but often enough is not.

To me, it seems very unlikely that a whole team of police decided before hand to execute someone...and run their body cams to record the execution...with other officers on trial for murder...

...of course they could collectively be the stupidest officers in the entire force, to all record a planned execution, and provide evidence against themselves in any trial.

Where are you from Vikorr?

People steeped in propaganda have a hard time with the facts as they are on the ground. In the 60s I worked with two young men who told me about their beliefs as Black Panthers. I recognized in them two who but for culture and history could have been pretty much the same as me. But there was always a barrier in this country that never has wavered from its inception. I have always wondered how they fared in life. I never stayed in one place long enough to learn such things.

The longer I'm alive, the more I realise just how much upbringing affects our beliefs & values, that everyone is at a different stage on their life lessons/learning journy, and that everyones strengths differ...these might seem obvious, yet I watch how many are critical in a superiority based way (ie. my way is better in this aspect, and don't criticise aspects where it isn't) - which can implicitly dismiss different cultural values / stages of personal journeys / the realtiveness of differing strengths & weaknesses between indivudals.

That is a long winded introduction to the fact that human beings have a tendency to treat others we are suspicious of as less intelligent / less insightful than us as an individual (ie. I am superior)...even if there is no basis or investigation to establish that.

Not even racism makes a person less intelligent (just prejudiced), as once you start looking for blind spots, you realise everyone has them. Do people honestly believe it maims their ability to problem solve when it comes to areas not affected by their blind spot? Many people behave as if it does.

I personally consider all but a couple of posters on this thread very intelligent, including you. That doesn't change what I have posted so far.

Other than longjon (I think that was the name), I'm inclined to agree.

This Thread is coming from an extreme left-wing perspective. The narrative being told of police planning an execution is not rational.

There is a rational middle, where you can accept the need for police reform to address racial Injustice without embracing crazy conspiracy theories. This extremism doesn't help anyone. When the far left is outraged it makes it more difficult to make progress. Everyone is shouting and no one is looking for the way forward.

Someone opined that it’s irrational to suspect a small group of police of conspiring together to carry out a violent act.

What seems irrational to me is to rule that possibility completely out...

Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and one person’s speculation is as valid in this conversation as the next person’s.

If anyone finds themselves really disliking the “perspective” of the whole thread, do please feel free to find your way out.

When the right-wing posters here suggest that covid is a plot from the Democrats, or that lizard people stole the election... I am comfortable saying that they are nuts. These are not rational theories.

When the left-wing posters here suggest that police are conspiring to intentionally kill Black people, or that the names of jurors who don't agree with the party line should be leaked... they are equally nuts.

Both the left-wing and the right-wing have gone crazy. They are both spouting irrational conspiracy theories. The right wing is attacking the capitol. The left-wing is attacking random people at restaurants.

We can't make progress as a country until we start calling out the craziness from both extremes.

Although I don't see the 'planned execution' as believable - I don't know that you need to be far left to believe it, rather than just caught in the middle of the issue.

But each police officer is a human individual, and the desire to treat them as non human is a mistake. By desire to treat them as non human, I mean:
- seeing them as a uniform rather than individual humans
- seeing them as valueless humans based on the uniform they wear (ie. each of them must be a cold blooded killers because they wear a uniform... rather than inviduals with values)
- assigning motives you wish to assign based on what you think of a uniform (ie they all want to kill because they are police),
- rather than the actual human, individual motive (they invidually each want to kill because A,B,C,D etc individual reasons); and
- Seeing them as less than intelligent because they wear a uniform (everyones intelligence differs...but these 'conspiracists' have to be universally incredibly dumb to think they could record executing someone and not stand trial)
- Seeing them as being incapable of disagreement because they all wear a uniform (they all had to agree, and none of them had to value human life in general)
- Seeing other police officers as incapable of finding wrong in executing someone (they had to form a group of like minded people, which meant exposing their thinking to others)

In each of these...I think the humanity of the individuals involved had to be removed to come to the conclusion...particularly as very, very little is known about the situation so far. That said, perhaps an enclave did develop within this particular force, and perhaps the enclave was filled entirely with incredibly stupid officers, and perhaps they were all individually murderous in intent, and all were willing to carry it through with no remorse or second guesses, and perhaps they all went there with the intent to kill him in cold blood with each desiring to record their killing of another human being...and none of them at all considering that they might face trial/jail for it, and none of them considering that all that they would be providing the evidence that could/would send them to jail (the recordings)

The reasoning they are using is the exact same reason that causes people to believe in any conspiracy theory. Covid could be a plot from the Democrats. Bush could have planned 9-11. The Parkland school shootings could have been staged.

If you have a political narrative that is extreme enough, you can believe anything. There is a correlation between being on the extreme of your political ideology and buying into these conspiracy theories.

The irony of this is that the complaint is that X entity treats all people from Y group as a group, rather than individual human beings (ie they have pre-formed opinions based on the group a person belongs to)...and when something occurs they lump all people in X entity as a group - with pre-formed opinions (eg. you must be suspicious of all police officers motives), rather than treating them as individual human beings.