Thursday, May 14, 2020

The Heir wanted to talk about this one for well over a week now.  Like most people, he's appalled by at least a still of that one video of that suspect being beaten in New York.  He was concerned in case that might lead to a rollback of compliance enforcement all across the board, from New York into Bachelor Blue State.  Thankfully that doesn't seem to have happened.  People are encouraged to call or text a special hotline in case they believe there was excessive force used in compliance enforcement.  That's how it currently is in BBS.  This stands in contrast to New York where the Heir sees a direct threat to enforcement through this talk of "minders" taking over the role of cops in enforcing compliance.  His low confidence in human nature *ever* really doing the right thing indicates that the so-called minders, if they're ever appointed, would likely be ignored by the violators, and you'd have to get the cops in there anyway.  He strongly doubts that most people in that one neighborhood where that beating took place would ever regard or respect a "minder."  He wonders if an increasing consistent amount of non-compliance in both that neighborhood and the others eventually led to the beating incident.  Sure, two wrongs don't make it right, but if a cop issues a friendly reminder to people in a given neighborhood to maintain a 6-foot distance, or not have large gatherings, and people ignore that reminder, the cop's ability to command respect is at stake.  He might as well not be a cop if that happens, the Heir points out.  So he's thinking that since failure to comply will result in X, and there was likely a failure to comply, so X happened, whether that's a forcible breakup of a gathering or a physical escort of people to maintain social distancing, and the people were like "oh how dare you," only because they may very well be out-and-out cop-haters, where does the cop go from there?  Most cops will consult with their respective precincts as to what leverage they'd have in case of an impasse, but there are those very few bad actors who will take matters into their hands, and not a good way.  And that's what the Heir believes happened two weeks ago.  Keep in mind that all we have to go on is that phone video showing the actual beating, and not all the events that led up to it.  Also, the Heir wonders, did the cop have his body camera turned on or not?  If he had it turned off against policy for officers, that should figure into either a complaint process, or even proceedings in a criminal court.  But since it's two weeks later, and the media news cycle has expired on the incident, don't expect any meaningful followup until months down the road.  The Heir's hoping it'll be sooner, so we'll have answers to some unanswered questions.

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