"Police killings have continued to rise."

So?

Non-police self-defense killings are about 2,200 per year in the U.S. and are also on the rise.

Police killings are just under 1,200 per year. The fraction of those killings that are unlawful murders can be counted on both hands.

The relevant measure is are police murders on the rise?

That measures unjustified killing, rather than homicides that have been expressly legalized by democratically elected legislatures, be the perpetrator is a cop or non-cop.

Five years later, and Mike Solan is STILL prez of the SPOG. Sigh...

News Flash:

Minneapolis is over 1,600 miles from Seattle.

George Floyd’s killing had absolutely nothing to do with Seattle or the Seattle Police Department.

There was absolutely no reason to stage counterproductive violent riots in Seattle nor any reason to confront and attack the Seattle Police or to seize any part if the city in an autonomous zone.

The backlash against your actions helped return Trump to the White House.

A plague on all of you!

@3, FTW!

Much like the civil rights movement, casual witnesses will remember more the visceral opponents and their ridiculous mental gymnastics to defend racism and murdering unarmed minorities than whatever bland, paint by numbers agreement they have with the horror that set all of this off. No one's forgot these racist assholes "black lives splatter" posts or false crime data reposts from white power Elon or Donald to excuse Floyd murder. And that's a good thing, remember the bigots and their responses individually. As Sartre argued 150 years ago, they rely on fading to the anonymity after having light shown on them in order to perpetuate hate.

@Sir Andrew Aguecheek

A race based public, slow execution has nothing to do with... :checks notes:...another city in the same country and legal system where the same thing happened multiple times over the last 50 years? How does that work?

@ araucania

Multiple times? The only thing remotely like it was the shooting of John T. Williams in 2010.

George Floyd’s killing had absolutely nothing to do with Seattle or the Seattle Police Department.

@7 Except that SPD is full of racist fucks, Proud Boys, and Jan 6 insurrectionists.

@7 Even if true that has absolutely nothing to do with George Floyd.

Also the anti-police riots occurred before the January 6 insurrection.

A plague o' both your houses!

@9 It's funny that you blame "the backlash" to the protests as a factor that "helped return Trump to the White House" when Trump actually LOST the next election.

@notmyoptic

Imagine reading a headline about a horrible tragedy then an update pointing out what caused the tragedy has continued and replying "so what'? You think voters forgot the SPD union boss tried to blame BLM for January 6th? Or was caught defending a cop who needlessly ran over and murdered a young asian american pedestrian while chasing a minimal risk suspect? Does the right think that everyone has a focks news minimal attention span or just that anyone reading what rightwingers say does?

Then imagine lying and making up a statistic that the number of unarmed killings by police are less than 10 a year (the number of finger "on both hands") as if no one would call you one it.

I don't know if it's trolling or praying everyone reading your comment was born yesterday or sooner.

@Sir Andrew

Google is your friend. Ask the ghost of Manuel Ellis, here in Washington.

@11. On December 21, 2023, a jury found Burbank, Collins, and Rankine not guilty on all charges.

@ Trump barely lost in 2020.
The 2020 elections were a disaster for Democrats. They were facing an unpopular incumbent who had mismanaged a national crisis. It should have been an election that ended Trump’s career along with any other politician who supported him.

Instead, thanks to a summer of anti-police riots, the Democrats lost 15 House seats, Senate seats in Iowa and Maine, and Biden just barely won the EC.

Gee thanks a lot progressive.

A plague on ya!

@11, "ran over and murdered a young asian american pedestrian."

What the officer did does not meet the democratically established definition of what murder is.

Are you anti-democratic? What is the opposite of being democratic? Fascist?

George Floyd was killed in a manner that meets the democratically determined definition of murder. The officer was tried. A jury of his peers found his actions to have met the elements to establish murder, as determined by a democratically elected legislature.

He and his co-conspirators plead guilty to , or were found of, the seperate crime of denying Floyd his civil rights. A crime defined by a democratically elected Congress.

No fascism at work in any of those convictions. People being held accountable to democratically defined crimes.

All murders are homicides. Most homicides are not murder, as the crime has been democratically defined and established, unless you are using a non-democratic (fascist or authoritarian) definition for murder.

The danger of fascism stares us in the face from the White House. So why would you engage in fascism to call a traffic homicide something it is not: a murder?

Progressives like to point out how Trump is a convicted felon. That’s fair, he is.
They seem to forget though that Floyd is not only a convicted felon, but a violent felon.
I guess paying off a porn actor is worse than holding a gun to the belly of a pregnant woman.
Chauvin is where he should be, but let’s stop pretending that George didn’t contribute to his own death.

@11, The number of murders by cops per year is countable on both hands. I.e. Of those 1,200 police killings, you can count the murders on both hands. The rest are legal killings as defined by democratically elected legislatures.

Over 2,200 non-police killings per year are determined to be legal killings as determined by democratically elected legislatures.

Most homicides are not crimes.

I am taking issue with using a non-democratic (fascist or authoritarian) definition of what is criminal and what is not, and specifically a non-democratically determined definition of murder.

Police commit homicide 1,200 per year and its increasing. Non-police commit homicide 2,200 times per year and its increasing. But they ARE NOT CRIMINAL HOMICIDES, based on democratically established laws that define a criminal act, and murder specifically.

If they aren't crimes, so what? We have democratically determined that those homicides are non-criminal acts that aren't subject to prosecution or criminal sanctions.

Parents should never escort their children into riots where they could get tear gassed or worse.

@12 Democrats did not lose the Iowa and Maine Senate seats in 2020. Both races were won by Republican incumbents. In fact the Democrats took back the Senate in 2020 by gaining three seats. And also retained the House. Clearly you are an idiot.

Both Ernst and Collins were vulnerable in 2020. With a hugely unpopular incumbent candidate leading the ticket, the GOP should have been swept away in a huge wave election.

The Democrats did not win the Senate. The Senate was tied 50-50, and that took a miraculous Democratic victory in a runoff election in Georgia. Leadership in the Senate would not be decided until the vice-president was chosen.

The presidential race was astoundingly close. Considering the unpopularity of the sitting incumbent Biden should have won in a landslide, instead it was within a few thousand voted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The Democrats barely held onto the House after losing 15 seats, giving Pelosi what was at the time the slimmest majority in history.

Trump should have lost so badly that his political career was over. Instead the best that can be said about the 2020 elections was that it was a stalemate.

Ha! Nice try. You’re dumb.

@19

Name calling? Really?

Care to actually dispute anything I said?

@20 nobody's going to have a debate with you, take your nonsense to X or somewhere

@21

And yet here you are.

@22:

Yes, because some of us have literally been here for decades, long before you and your racist ilk started polluting the comments threads here with your bottom-feeding garbage. And some of us will continue to be here long after your irrational hatred finally burns itself out in a flaming ball of peevish self-victimization and unexamined vitriol.

@23

You wouldn’t be interested in refuting any of the points I made in 3, 7, 9, and 12.

Or are you just going to call me a racist without any evidence?

Thank you to Christian Parroco for these photographs and article reminding us of a person who kneeled on another person's neck who had his hands cuffed behind his back after being drug out of the backseat of a "law enforcement" vehicle. The "law enforcement" person who caused the death of George Floyd by kneeling on George Floyd's neck for over 8 minutes showed as much concern as a person eating a hamburger at McDonalds. The person who murdered George Floyd has all of the qualifications to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

5 years ago, if you were living in a relatively liberal city, and considered yourself one of the middling spheres of Newtons cradle pendulum, you will never forget the THWACK of the left most ball crash into the center grouping - an ideological and emotional Donnerschag that seemed to touch every aspect of society.

The most astonishing aspect of it to me was personally witnessing a self described progressive family deconstruct themselves from explicit joys, beliefs and values via "social learning."

Nellie Bowles described this process with wit and acumen in "Morning after the Revolution." Mainstream society was impacted, but liberal society was racked.

In the 6 months prior to the "Summer of Love" this family had enjoyed; group Thriller dance sessions, Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss, Disney productions. To the children these were canonical.

By September, it had been obliterated. Couldn't even discuss any of it. Assorted vestiges of such evils were quietly placed in some boxes and sent to the cellar. And readers here know why.

What were the 9 and 11 year old immersed in instead? Well, the Tiktok learnings were volcanic...and traumatizing; climate disaster courtesy of GT, structural racism, trans culture, drag queens, patriarchy. Within a few months the daughter exclaimed her epiphany - the only true Americans are drag queens!

Even if the learnings were the shing lantern of truth, they were clearly taking their pound of flesh from the kids, the daughter especially. We could occassionally hear her sobbing in her bedroom. Why? Every time a new learning. One evening it was courtesy of NYT. The police MAY have been hanging African American men in city park trees and framing it as suicide.

Of course, as anomie took hold of the city, the family quietly made plans to escape...heading back to safe and sane Canada. The selfies of their pilgrimage to the CHAZ remained in the socials.

And well, for those of us who stuck around witnessed a slow ebbing of the red tide, a creeping restoration of normalcy.

And then...back to Newtons pendulum. In 2020 the right most ball went flying off into oblivion when the left one sent it sailing...until last November, when it landed back like a meteor.

MAYS. not floyd. This is Seattle and there’s the small matter of the unsolved lynching of a black kid by white men at a Capital Hill BLM / defund protest. It’s shameful that you’re not talking about the unarmed Antonio Mays Jr — executed by white AR-toting chop security LARPers in the middle of Capital Hill, in front of dozens — during a Floyd protest. Seattle looked the other way. The murder — lynching, really — of 16 year old Antonio Mays Jr by Seattle’s very own progressive left is objectively worse than the Floyd murder, and despite the fact that several dozen BLM and CHOP protestors watched the execution — and thousands more on stream, no arrests were made and the BLM/CHOP crowd destroyed evidence and covered for the white CHOP cops insuring the unarmed black kid’s murder would go unpunished. George Floyd is not relevant here. Antonio Mays is the name you should’ve written. No one likes to talk about Antonio tho, even though he was murdered by “armed white insurrectionists”. I guess bc the murderer was trans tho that’s all off the table.