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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'

Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.

Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'

"He’s a hero," said the passenger, who has lived in New York City more than 50 years.

The witness, who described herself as a woman of color, said it was wrong for Bragg to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter.

"I’m sitting on a train reading my book, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone spewing this rhetoric. He said, ‘I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will. I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet,’" recalled the woman, who is in her 60s.

"I’m looking at where we are in the tube, in the sardine can, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re in between stations. There’s nowhere we can go,’" she said. "The people on that train, we were scared. We were scared for our lives."

Penny stepped in when Neely started using the word "kill" and "bullet."

"Why in the world would you take a bullet? Why? You don’t take a bullet because you’ve snatched something from somebody’s hand. You take a bullet for violence," she added.

Freelance journalist Alberto Vazquez began recording the confrontation after Neely was already in a chokehold and offered a second account of the homeless man’s conduct.

"He started screaming in an aggressive manner," Vazquez told the New York Post. "He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground."

I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".

Like past controversial cases of a similar nature, the full video does not exist to the public. Just short clips online. I am sure the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) has the full recording, from the start to finish of the altercation. The jury has more information than the public which is sometimes why the former may depart from the latter in terms of sentiment or opinion.

Most subway cars do not have cameras.

If we can reasonably expect every police officer to carry a body camera on duty in 2023, we could absolutely put a camera on every subway car. A little searching suggests that every car in the Tokyo subway has had cameras since at least 2020. Like the body cameras, at some point it becomes an obvious choice to not provide surveillance, although it's not completely obvious to me that 2023 is that point.

We can't expect either in NYC.

The NYPD claims that its rollout of body cameras to "all Police Officers, Detectives, Sergeants and Lieutenants regularly assigned to perform patrol duties throughout the city" was completed in August 2019, for a total of around 24,000 cameras. There are approximately 6400 subway cars in NYC.

The MTA is chronically mismanaged. Even if they make the decision to roll out the cameras, there's always going to be some little thing preventing the project from actually being completed. At best, it will be completed within several years.

Any analysis of how something feasible is should not assume the best or even reasonable humans will be implementing it. It needs to take into account the actual humans who will do it. And the actual humans here are far, far below anyone's standards.

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