Please Justify This Police Action For Me

[Irreligious Atheist]

I don't believe you argued that we think it's ok to pepper spray a 9 year old, and I respect that from you. Some others are acting like we supported the pepper spraying though, and that's dishonest.

Not so much supporting it as trying to find a way to excuse it. In other words, no one is claiming you’re saying, ‘The cops pepper sprayed a nine year old girl...HOORAY!’ It’s more that you’re saying, ‘It’s awful what happened to that girl, but...’

There is no ‘but’. The cops always had to option to not pepper spray her. They went another way.

Boru

Thank you for that. I beg to differ though that I was trying to excuse it. When these police brutality stories come up in the news, the first thing I do is check out the video if there is one, and look at all of the surrounding facts to see if it can be excused, or so I have more of an understanding of the picture of what happened. If the facts are not all known, I try to withhold judgment until more information comes in. I call that being intellectually honest and looking at the facts before I let bias take over and determine my opinion on the matter.

I don't think she should have been sprayed for being fat, full stop. I don't hate fat people. I actually have an eating disorder myself and wish my parents would have tried harder to correct it. You said she was 60 lbs (honest mistake) and I chimed in and corrected that. I'm sorry, but I don't see how it's ever wrong to correct incorrect information. Was it wrong for people to correct false information in that entitled white Karen tackling a black teen thread? Did pointing out that she's actually Vietnamese and Puerto Rican excuse what she did, or cover for what other white women have done in the past? If someone made a claim that police cuffed a 5 foot 2 12 year old, and I corrected them and said, wait, this 12 year old is actually 6 foot 4, does that mean I think that they deserve to be brutalised or that I'm covering for the police? I don't think so. I'm just trying to get the facts straight.

When I brought up the potential for hypothermia, it's because I was simply trying to understand the police's mindset.  was trying to understand why the police didn't simply give the girl more time to calm down and let her be. I was not trying to excuse their actions. I was simply trying to work out in my own head what their mindset might have been so I could try to make more sense of the situation. Is the concern over hypothermia a good reason to not sit around for an hour and wait for her to calm down? Sure. Is the concern over hypothermia a good reason to mace her? Hell no.

Is "All cops are bastards. End of discussion." the only response we can have in a thread like this? Not every post that slightly differs from that is covering for the cops or sending out a dog whistle because secretly we hate 'the blacks'.