rsmurphy wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2024 1:53 pm That anyone reading this post takes more than a few moments to become well-informed with the tragic execution of Sonya Massey at the hands of Deputy Sean Grayson.

Abhorrent enough to be all over the international news if it's any consolation. What a fucking psycho.

pretty girls make graves

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2024 8:26 pm

rsmurphy wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2024 1:53 pm That anyone reading this post takes more than a few moments to become well-informed with the tragic execution of Sonya Massey at the hands of Deputy Sean Grayson.

Abhorrent enough to be all over the international news if it's any consolation. What a fucking psycho.

It's uniquely American that this continues to happen. One would think after watching a white police officer kneel on the neck of a black man for over eight minutes that there would be the start of reform and accountability but the FOP will not fix what isn't broken, which leads me to a video I watched from NYPD whistleblower and author, Edwin Raymond. He wrote a book titled An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America. It's a long watch, but informative and measured. One issue he raises about the stalled George Floyd Justice In Policing Act is no "justice-minded officers" were involved in drafting the bill and without their perspective the bill won't be strong enough to move forward. All I can think is the perspective of "justice-minded officers" and whistleblowers is a moot point when the scale is always balanced towards upholding the system which allows people who shouldn't be cops to become cops. I don't see how America can move past its long-standing practice of policing without destroying it and building something else in its place.

Made worse I suppose in the US by the size of the country, the history of segregation, broken political system and insane gun culture, but police-as-a-gang is something that tends to happen everywhere if you don't actively stop it from happening. We don't let our cops carry guns and long may that continue.

It happens that my significant other is a clinical nurse specialist and master trainer responsible for training the people who train the nurses and security guards who have to deal with violent patients in the mental health inpatient units. How to safely restrain somebody without anyone getting hurt, break out of choke-holds and all of that. "Floor work" she calls it. But her passion and what she considers the most important part of her training is de-escalation and seclusion reduction, trying to teach people how to avoid the use of force altogether. And she is just frustrated as hell with her job because she cannot change the culture within the hospitals. They did a feature article about her recently which she is hugely embarrassed about so I won't link to it. She said the quote she really wanted to give was "no cunt listens anyway". Changing a culture is hard for sure.

And that's just nurses and security guards. When the cops bring patients in, they have their cop training protocols and they act like fucking thugs. Many a time she used to come back from the ward upset after having witnessed some cop-on-patient violence.

She didn't watch the George Floyd footage because she didn't want to see it, but this kind of unsafe restraint kills people in psych wards. Everything about that restraint was obviously wrong, wrong that it even happened, but it showed a lack of even basic restraint training, so what the fuck were they even doing at cop school? The knee in the neck was terrible, but her comment was, if you pin somebody on their stomach and sit on their back, you trap their diaphragm, they won't be able to use their lungs any more, and they will DIE. They teach this. This should be known by anyone who administers restraints. She also said that just because somebody can talk, it doesn't mean they can breathe, so if they say they can't breathe, BELIEVE IT.

But thanks to smart phones I guess we all know now that people who can't breathe can often still say "I can't breathe". Anyway, I know it's more than just bad training. It's hard to change a culture. And who's going to do it? I have watched someone dedicate their career to trying, worn down because they still can't prevent patients from being assaulted. And that's just nurses and security guards, never mind cops, never mind AMERICAN cops.

Edwin Raymond appeared on the Majority Report for a good long-form interview a few months back:

The Educated Rapper had the best bars in "Roxanne, Roxanne."

This Olympic Basketball tournament has really been bonkers thus far. What a fun sport on an Olympic stage!

About a body that was pulled from the Chicago river yesterday morning and how that brings the total of dead bodies pulled from Chicago waterways to 19 since 2022.

Be careful out there.

1. It's disheartening to me how the Olympics are supposed to be this great thing that brings the world together in goodwill, but it's become just another excuse for bigoted people to show the world how ugly humanity really is. I wish we could open a portal to a parallel Earth and leave bigoted conservative pricks behind to destroy this one at their own bone-headed discretion.

2. I love watching videos from the Babish culinary universe, but homeboy Andrew needs to learn to step back from the mic a few inches when he's doing voiceovers. His voice turns to mud in anything but total silence real quick!

Why does everything in Bavaria and Austria look so nice, even small towns and in comparison why does the UK look so shabby?

I’m currently on a train to Vienna.