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Police Brutality, Paris


JGP

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I haven't seen this anywhere in Gen Chat, though might've missed it amidst all the hullabaloo in NA. I wish I hadn't read it now, yet I'm glad... [something] I did. The act itself is bad enough, but to then double down by declaring it an accident? The hell did the investigators think would happen? 

I'm just... no words. Just outrage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paris-police-brutality-sodomy_us_589cc442e4b04061313c43fd? 

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 We had an incident locally in the Boston area where an officer was caught attacking a guy who got arrested for pulling a prank over Halloween. It turned out the officer in question was married to the chief of police for the same town. I'm sure she was not very happy with her husband. Pretty crazy. I think this is not completely uncommon given the power dynamic around prisoners and officers. 

http://www.wcvb.com/article/salem-police-chiefs-husband-also-an-officer-charged-with-rape/8273047

 

 

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16 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

I haven't seen this anywhere in Gen Chat, though might've missed it amidst all the hullabaloo in NA. I wish I hadn't read it now, yet I'm glad... [something] I did. The act itself is bad enough, but to then double down by declaring it an accident? The hell did the investigators think would happen? 

I'm just... no words. Just outrage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paris-police-brutality-sodomy_us_589cc442e4b04061313c43fd? 

Good lord.  How do you "accidentially" sodomize someone?

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The EU is often perceived as more progressive than the US in this respect, but among the citizens in general and the police and armed forces in particular, there's a whole lot of rage buried just below the surface. It was there even before the recent influx of migrants and concurrent terrorist attacks. I remember before Switzerland got rid of the border with Schengen states (we thought it was for good, but apparently not quite), there were always French border police standing near the customs post. I drove past them almost every workday and the way it would work is that everyone would slow down to ~10 km/h and they'd wave people on. In the months that I did this, they only stopped me to check my passport once. On the other hand, there was an African-American professor with the same routine and they stopped him literally every time. One would think that after the first week they'd personally recognize him, but no, he was still stopped.

After the recent developments, the rage grew more intense and while most of it is still buried, I'm not surprised that some will find its way to the surface. I have no doubt that the elites will try to strike it down to the best of their ability and with as much harshness as possible, but at some point this becomes harder to do.

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"Rage" somehow implies that there is a valid reason to be enraged, I would not call it that. I would call it prejudice built over the years upon the failed immigration and integration policies in France, coupled with low-education recruitment demographics in the police.

Essentially, when one specific group emerges as the enemy in the collective psyche of your forces, the hostility ramps up, then it's reflected by the other group in a vicious feedback cycle... then it's down to the leaders to mend the gap, and attempt to un-single out the target group throught efficient policies.

Of course, the right's response has consistently been full repressive, after the fact actions, shameful provocations and the cancellation of peace-oriented policies. M. Sarkozy provides a great case study, from insults (likening whole districts to garbage cans he wanted to jet-pressure-clean) to disbanding of proximity police -police agents who would yet talk in a non-confrontational manner to those usually asked for their identity papers at first sight).

Note the left has not been that much more praise-worthy, what with the abandon of the promise to institute a process where a receipt would be delivered to those victims of police harassment (like your black guy at the frontier here. Was he really (african-)american, by the way, or is it just unvolontary cultural appropriation? just curious, nothing else meant), or the "emergency state" starting to becoming the normal state, or the caving in to police syndicates to give them weapons and the right to shoot even though it proved uneffective again and again (specifically, one couple who *was* carrying weapons thanks to the emergency state was still killed and used as a pretext to request weapon carry outside of service, for example)

In general all of these politics allow callousness from the police forces because they need some support against both media and justice, and they DO play one against the others. Lately, t'was M. Fillon and Mme Le Pen who started to use the Trump strategy, it's disgraceful, but I'm rambling.

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11 hours ago, Errant Bard said:

Note the left has not been that much more praise-worthy, what with the abandon of the promise to institute a process where a receipt would be delivered to those victims of police harassment (like your black guy at the frontier here. Was he really (african-)american, by the way, or is it just unvolontary cultural appropriation? just curious, nothing else meant)

He was really African-American -- born in the US, working for an American university and traveling to Europe for the same reason I did. I don't think he ever complained about this to French authorities; he was only there for a summer and by the time he returned, the border post was gone. I haven't spoken to him in a long time so I don't know what the status has been after the border was reinstated in the wake of the attacks.

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Europe is generally much more progressive, but in my experience...and to my surprise...racism was the exception. Not generalized racism like in America, though...much more accute. Almost every country in which I spend time has one sub-culture which somehow threatens the dominant one...North Africans in France, Turks in Germany, Indian/Pakistanis in Britain, etc...and the narrative is almost always the same. Something about how 'they' came over en masse as part of a post-war reconstruction, somehow agreeing that it would only be for ~ 20 years or w/e it took, then were supposed to go 'home' but instead remained and are changing things they weren't supposed to. 

I want to live in Europe, but this is the one aspect that might eventually send me back to Canada.

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Canada may look better on the surface, but I'm not sure it actually is. Identity politics are big in Quebec, and Motion 103 has turned out to be a bit of a bipartisan weather vane on the topic across Canada (judging by the majority of comments on News sites covering it, Conservative FB accounts, etc)

Le sigh.

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11 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

Canada may look better on the surface, but I'm not sure it actually is. Identity politics are big in Quebec, and Motion 103 has turned out to be a bit of a bipartisan weather vane on the topic across Canada (judging by the majority of comments on News sites covering it, Conservative FB accounts, etc)

Le sigh.

Urban Canada, well Toronto/Vancouver anyways, does sincere multiculturalism as well as it can be done IMO. Might be a bit more difficult in Quebec because of the French sense of cultural oppression (historically legit, btw). And rural Canada might as well be America in my experience. 

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