{"id":57,"date":"2018-09-20T20:41:22","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T20:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justtalk.blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2018-09-20T21:06:10","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T21:06:10","slug":"police-violence-round-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/2018\/09\/20\/police-violence-round-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Police Violence, Round Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late yesterday Roderick Douglass posted a news story on how the \u201cEndicott Police Mistakenly Tase Disabled Bystander, Causing Heart Attack.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0As Douglass reports, witnesses state that Devon Johnson, an Endicott resident, rushed to scene of a car accident last Sunday, removed a victim from the car, and waited for first responders. Searching for a Black man who fled the scene on foot, the police grabbed Johnson\u2014another Black man. While his partner frantically told them he had a pacemaker, he was tased several times.\u00a0 He had a heart attack, and was taken to UHS hospital.\u00a0 The police charged Mr. Johnson with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and his partner with disorderly conduct.<\/p>\n

This is the third time there has been public community protest about police violence in recent weeks. \u00a0The first focused on Binghamton officers who on August 11th<\/sup> roughly handled and detained a 13 year old girl and a developmentally challenged 14 year old boy. \u00a0This was captured on video. The second, also on video, \u00a0involved the abusive treatment and arrest of a Black woman outside the YWCA. \u00a0A large public demonstration on August 17th<\/a> protested the first; the second led to a public rebuke from the YWCA<\/a> for the violent, public escalation of a dispute that had resolved itself until police arrived on the scene.<\/p>\n

There are some elemental truths here.\u00a0 If you call the police, expect an armed and often fearfully violent response. That is how police are trained to respond to every call<\/em>, as senior officers<\/a> and police research groups<\/a> themselves report. \u00a0If a Black or Latinx person is involved, expect a racially-biased response:\u00a0 data and studies from across the nation continually document this<\/a>.\u00a0 If the incident involves a person with mental health problems or substance use disorders, expect the criminalization of the individual, their incarceration, and, in too many cases, their death.<\/a><\/p>\n

Can we imagine different outcomes? Can we employ community forces trained in de-escalating, rather aggressively exacerbating, domestic and family disputes? What might happen if persons with mental health problems were met by counselors rather than armed police? Is it possible to imagine giving persons who want drug treatment access to it, rather than repetitive confrontations with the police followed by stints in jail (or worse, death by overdose)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late yesterday Roderick Douglass posted a news story on how the \u201cEndicott Police Mistakenly Tase Disabled Bystander, Causing Heart Attack.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0As Douglass reports, witnesses state that Devon Johnson, an Endicott resident, rushed to scene of a car accident last Sunday, removed a victim from the car, and waited for first responders. Searching for a Black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}