I understand the impulse that would link rent control with inflation. But incomes don't rise just because inflation does. Rent control should really be linked with median income instead. It's the relationship between rent and income that determines if a place is affordable, not the relationship between rent and inflation.

well, at least we can advocate for reduced funding for MPD together and get those funds redirected to social services.

a person with a knife is generally a threat that can be contained and so as a general practice i'm going to default to assuming that the police acted irresponsibly if they shot the person.

i genuinely appreciate that you are willing to consider some reforms; we have some common ground there. i don't mean this in an antagonizing way but please keep in mind that my stance is not reform of police - it's abolition - so i'm not surprised if you feel like my stance is somewhat at odds with yours, because it is.

have you seen this pdf? if you haven't, it's a great tool for thinking about reforms that do or do not move towards abolition. you've mentioned some of the things in green, and so like i said, we do have common ground.

but my position is that policing and prisons as we know them are fundamentally problematic institutions and our aim should be to build a society free of them.

the whole point of de-escalation is to apply it to someone originally intending to do violence.

also, i haven't said that lethal force is never required, even with a knife. i've said that it's heavily overused. if my sentiments feel extreme to you, maybe you should do some more reading on police and prison abolition. this article was written by someone skeptical of police abolition and might be useful: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/12/21283813/george-floyd-blm-abolish-the-police-8cantwait-minneapolis

sorry your moral grandstanding in your last comment didn't have the effect you hoped haha

the preferred term is bastards but you've got the right spirit haha

the driver of the car said she fled because she was nervous - understandable after someone starts shooting

this cop unjustly shot an unarmed man - he's a criminal

where would this conversation have gone? no one asking that question has an open mind because it has an obvious answer and doesn't serve any purpose but to regain rhetorical footing.

a silly question gets a silly answer

a knife could be thrown, but it's mostly a melee weapon. cops should keep a little distance and de-escalate when a knife is out, not shoot. if they can't handle that with all the training they get, they don't deserve the gun in the first place.

didn't i just say that?

>we agree that cops lie

it certainly would. maybe you're just projecting.

cool

well, at least we agree that cops lie.

then you don't really think this person should've been shot either. you just enjoy feeling more powerful than someone else.

a knife is rarely sufficient cause for a shooting. even a gun isn't necessarily sufficient cause.

the Post link is paywalled for me, but looking at the Guardian's database for 2016, half of those killed by police had a firearm. i don't think all of those were likely justified uses of lethal force because sometimes the killed person never fires their weapon, but lets assume they were all justified. That's about 500 people per year killed without cause.

i don't have stats on hand for how many times police use lethal force without actually killing the person, but i think it's reasonable to say it's at least the same frequency, if not twice or thrice as frequent. so that's 1,000 instances of unjustified lethal force, conservatively, per year. so we hit 10,000 in a decade or less of policing. if we're less conservative, that's 10,000 in 5-7 years.

you know, that's a much fairer critique than others have offered. like i said in another post though, my priors are to disbelieve the police. so if they use soft language to say they might've made a mistake, i'm gonna assume they really did make a mistake.

then let's do both lol

the difference though is that police & their violence are a major means by which oppression is conducted. police violently enforce laws that contribute to racism, pollution, poverty, and more. police violently suppress protest against those laws. and because the government depends on police to fill those roles, the government tends to look the other way when police do shit like this.

government gets more corrupt when it has a militia it can use to suppress the public's discontent. if we want a truly accountable government, we need to get rid of the police as they currently exist.

the point is that "drugs" is a convenient excuse for police brutality.

the war on drugs was a racist policy from the start, cops plant drugs on people, and even if they guy was carrying drugs we don't know what they were. and then on top of that regardless of the criminality of the drugs, it's included in the article in a way that's meant to bias the reader against the shooting victim and to partially justify the cop's actions. even though the possession of drugs is not a violent offense and provides no justification for attempted murder.

lol you're living a delusion.

did you read the initial report that the Memphis police filed after the Tyre Nichols murder? they knew that bodycam footage would likely get out eventually and they lied through their teeth. if they'll lie about that they'll lie about anything. it's called damage control and getting ahead of the narrative.

sure, if they find a gun in the car and the body cam footage shows that the man pointed the gun at the officer, then i'll revise my opinion.

but there are thousands of cases where police have shot someone with no provocation at all and then lie about it afterwards, so my priors are to assume the man was actually unarmed.

it's amazing that you think this is sufficient for a person to be shot.

do you think you deserve to be shot when you go over the speed limit in your car? that's more dangerous and criminal than what this man did.

My point is that the original suspect wasn't reported to have a gun, he was reported to have a pipe. Presumably if this wrongfully shot man was "reaching" for something, it would've been a pipe. But we don't even know if he was reaching for anything or what the cop said, because cops lie all the time. Nothing they say can be trusted until we see the body cam footage.

It's amazing to me that you can be alive here in 2023 with the tens of thousands of documented cases of police overreacting with lethal force and give them any benefit of the doubt.

how do you know the drugs were illicit?

how do you know the person committed any crime?