Judge finds Ontario women were defamed in social media firestorm over alleged George Floyd post - "Shania Lavallee posted a video on Snapchat of her sister Justine play-fighting with Shania’s boyfriend, as they often did. But within days, a screenshot from the video that showed the boyfriend kneeling on Justine’s back was used to ignite a social media firestorm, and all hell broke loose for the Lavallee sisters. Shania and Justine were fired from their jobs — one at the Canada Border Services Agency, one at a local Boston Pizza — and had other job offers revoked, including Shania’s upcoming job as a teacher. Their home address, phone numbers and email addresses were posted online, leading to the family’s home being egged, their neighbour’s car getting seriously damaged (it was parked nearby), and harassing phone calls pouring in, causing the family to vacate the house for a week. The facts of the case, as laid out in an Ontario Superior Court defamation ruling, show what happens when a snippet on social media is taken from its context and turned into a full-blown mobbing by total strangers. The sisters were castigated as privileged white girls from an Ottawa suburb; in fact, they are both Inuit through their mother’s side, and are registered members of the Native Alliance of Quebec. The online frenzy was initiated when one of Shania’s followers took a screenshot of the video and shared it to her own followers. That screenshot was then seen by another Ottawa woman, Solit Isak, who is Black and was deeply involved in Black Lives Matter activism on social media. Isak had never met the Lavallees and had not seen the original video, but believed the screenshot showed a racist act of mocking Floyd’s death... Based on the screenshot, Isak waged a social media campaign against the sisters, posting more than a hundred messages slamming them as racists and calling on people to message the sisters’ employers and get them fired. Her followers picked up the cause, as did a handful of media outlets... Shania’s boyfriend was fired from his construction job. Unsuccessful attempts were made to get the Lavallees’ mother, Colinda, fired from her job as an educational assistant at the Ottawa Catholic School Board... Justice Marc Smith found the sisters were defamed by Isak, and ordered Isak to pay $100,000 in general damages plus legal costs — though he acknowledged the sisters are unlikely to ever see this money given Isak is young and was unemployed at the time of her testimony... From the start, the Lavallees have always maintained the video had nothing to do with George Floyd. Isak said she was told that one of the Lavallees had jokingly said “police brutality!” in the video, but later acknowledged under examination that she didn’t know if this was actually true, as she hadn’t seen the video. The lawsuit found no evidence this phrase was said, and both sisters testified it wasn’t... Smith said Isak never made any effort to understand the facts behind the screenshot before posting about it. “She did not verify that this information was true,” Smith wrote. “She did not care at the time. She blindly embarked on a brutal and unempathetic campaign to destroy the lives of two young women, when the evidence clearly establishes that these two women are kind-hearted members of the community with outstanding character.” Smith did not order Isak to apologize, however, saying he doubted Isak would ever accept the sisters’ version of events and that an apology would only bring more abuse onto them. Despite the court finding, the CBSA told the National Post on Wednesday that it would not be revisiting its decision to terminate Justine’s work with them... “I believe Ms. Isak was free to view the act complained of as racist and that she ought to have been free to express it,” he said. “I disagree that a white judge should be telling Ms. Isak or any other Black person what is and is not racism.”"
Azealia Banks calls critics of shocking dead cat video 'racist' - "Azealia Banks has hit back at critics after posting a disturbing video of herself and a friend digging up her dead cat Lucifer's remains. The 212 performer posted on Instagram Stories after she shared- and deleted - a disturbing set of clips on Tuesday in which she and another person exhumed the bagged remains of her pet cat who died three months ago. Insisting she hadn't gone on to eat the dead cat's remains, Azealia labelled her critics 'racist,' adding: 'this is very un-black lives matter of you all.'... 'Black people are naturally born SEERS, DIVINERS, WITCHES AND WIZARDS. we have REAL supernatural powers, and the sooner we ALL learn to cultivate them and access them, the sooner we can REALLY fix s***. This is also not the first time Azealia has been criticized for her alleged treatment of animals. In December 2016 she shared a bizarre Instagram video showing herself cleaning out a cupboard after three years of apparently sacrificing chickens... Banks claimed she spent a weekend at Elon Musk's home while waiting to work with his girlfriend Grimes in a collaboration that never happened. The controversial rapper claimed Musk was freaking out about having claimed in a tweet last week that he'd already secured funding to take Tesla private. Musk later insisted he's never met the rapper... Banks even suggested that the couple may have invited her to their home for 'some weird threesome sex s**t to begin with.'"
After KC police say they shot armed suspect Leonna Hale, false and inflammatory narratives spread - "After a woman fleeing arrest was shot by Kansas City police for allegedly pointing a loaded gun at officers, an online frenzy peddling false narratives reminiscent of Ferguson began whipping up national outrage. Unconfirmed rumors and outright falsehoods that the woman was unarmed and cooperative were instantly amplified by hasty, ill-informed news and social media – much to the dubious credit of an eyewitness who made false accusations about what the woman did. The witness claimed the woman had her hands up – which was untrue, similar to the lie that gave birth to the Ferguson riots of 2014 after the police shooting of Michael Brown. Brown was later proved to be the aggressor. The eyewitness to the May 27 shooting of 26-year-old Leonna Hale, a convicted felon, also told The Kansas City Star that Hale “did not pull out a weapon” on police, even though that statement has been refuted by every other account of the incident – including a screenshot image from a police body cam showing the woman toting a gun. That evidence wasn’t enough to quell the hysteria: Anti-police zealots, aided by unskeptical journalists, still claimed that police faked the image. They noted that the picture was grainy, though that’s the case with the vast majority of still-frame photos taken from body cam footage... After having joined with police advocates to cheer on KCPD’s addition of body cams the past few years, anti-police activists now say they don’t believe their own eyes. “#LeonnaHale’s photo is altered,” one commenter, speaking for others, wrote on Twitter. “It is photoshopped. Wow. The government sanctioned thugs and killers will do anything to cover up their genocide of Black American men, women and children.” “When the anti-cop activists get their teeth into a story like this, they’re not going to let it go because a lot of people will believe that the photo was photoshopped,” National Police Association spokesperson Sgt. Betsy Smith told The Heartlander. “You’ve got to stoke this hatred and distrust of law enforcement if you’re going to continue with the ‘defund the police, don’t trust police, police are bad’ narrative.” Making the story even more sumptuous for the blame-the-police crowd was the allegation, soon proved untrue, that Hale was pregnant... Thesource.com nonetheless promoted both untruths – that Hale was unarmed and pregnant – in the headline and lead sentence of its story covering the incident. The outlet has yet to issue a correction... Mother Jones published an “update.” The magazine’s “update,” which is in large measure a full rebuttal to its own, still online, article, appears below a standing advertisement that reads, “Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter.” Toriano Porter, a columnist and member of the Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board, furthered the false narratives with a column in the city’s most-read news outlet. “Did Kansas City police shoot a pregnant woman? We need some substance, not cop speak”... the kindling of false stories have already spread their smoke. The left-wing site Democracynow.org piled on, publishing an article June 1 headlined, “Missouri investigates Kansas City Police Shooting of Pregnant Black Woman Leonna Hale.” That outlet also has yet to issue a correction. When a large local news outlet such as The Star pushes unsubstantiated and inflammatory rumors in the aftermath of such a volatile situation, it only makes a combustible situation more explosive, says Brad Lemon, president of KC’s Fraternal Order of Police. It also makes police officers’ jobs more difficult and dangerous. “I think one article in the Kansas City Star by Toriano Porter fed a narrative that went national in just hours,” Lemon told KCMO Talk Radio. “So I think it’s time for us to not only correct it, but to call out the people who are doing such a bad job in Kansas City of telling stories.”... "It’s clear all journalistic ethics were thrown out the window during this conversation.”"
order15 on Twitter - "Imagine believing the world is run by white supremacists when on your side is Every major corporation Every financial institution Every public educational institution Every celebrity Every major political party in the west and all mainstream media #BLMprotest #AntifaTerrorist"
Meme - Venn diagram: "looting and rioting Are the only way To overcome systematic racism and bring equality To Black Americans"
"white supremacists are the ones looting and rioting"
Intersection: "Honk Honk 2020"
'JUST BAD JUDGMENT': Two TV reporters suspended, boss fired after Afro-like wigs worn on air | Toronto Sun - "Sinclair Broadcast Group executives apologized for the “poor judgment” that led to the segment, fired the station’s longtime news director, Nick Genty, and indefinitely suspended Chris May and Barry Brandt, the anchor and meteorologist who wore the wigs... “It was a spoof on the ’70s that just went wrong.”"
Black Lives Matter Protests in Africa Shine a Light on Local Police Brutality
I never knew that white supremacy was such a problem in Africa
How Black Lives Matter protests may affect police violence and murders - "There’s long been a fierce debate about the effect of Black Lives Matter protests on the lethal use of force by police. A new study, one of the first to make a rigorous academic attempt to answer that question, found that the protests have had a notable impact on police killings. For every 4,000 people who participated in a Black Lives Matter protest between 2014 and 2019, police killed one less person... From 2014 to 2019, Campbell tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests... his research on homicides aligns with other evidence. Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University who has done seminal research on the effect of protests, told Vox that the results are “entirely plausible” and “not surprising,” considering existing protest research... To try to further prove his findings are sound, Campbell also shows that before 2014 there were almost parallel trends of police homicides in both the places that would go on to see protests and places that wouldn’t. That suggests that what changed in 2014 and beyond — regarding both the reduction in police homicides and the increase in murder — is likely the effect of the BLM protests, not some other hidden variable... while randomized trials “in American and European police departments found that body worn camera’s reduced the number of complaints filed by local residents against the police ... they showed mixed effects on use of force by and against police officers.” In a major 2017 study conducted in Washington, DC, the researchers found that “the behavior of officers who wore cameras all the time was indistinguishable from the behavior of those who never wore cameras.”... Deepak Premkumar, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, found in recently released research that police do reduce their efforts following officer-involved fatalities: Theft arrests fall by 7 percent, and for “quality of life crimes” like disorderly conduct or marijuana possession, arrests decline by up to 23 percent (weed possession alone declines by up to 33 percent)... Campbell observes a 5.5 percent decline in the share of property crimes cleared, which is consistent with police reducing their efforts immediately following the protests."
More evidence for the Ferguson effect
It is better that twenty people are murdered than that one person is shot by the police (probably with good cause)
The body camera studies suggest that many complaints against the police are frivolous (which is why when people know there is video evidence, complaints go down)
Hours after Maxine Waters called for more confrontation, Minnesota National Guard target of drive-by shooting - "Just hours after U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters called upon her followers to get more confrontational, a National Guard security team in Minneapolis was the target of a drive-by shooting. One soldier was treated at the hospital for lacerations from shards of broken glass and other members suffered minor injuries. The attack happened after Waters called for Minnesotans to get more aggressive in their attacks against “racists”."
Mathematicians urge cutting ties with police - "Ten mathematicians from eight universities and one company wrote an open letter last week calling for mathematicians to cease collaborating with police departments. The letter also urges math scholars to publicly audit influential algorithms and to embed learning outcomes related to ethics in data science curriculums. "It's a political belief, that collaborating with police in any capacity contributes to white supremacist violence and oppression," said Tarik Aougab, a math professor at Haverford College and one of the letter writers, speaking personally on his motivations. "Really any collaboration between mathematics, which is something that I love and that I find extremely beautiful, and the institution of policing shouldn't happen." The letter has 1,500 verified signatures from mathematicians... The letter writers take particular aim at "predictive policing," which involves using data and mathematics to predict where crime will happen... Although the group has gotten some pushback for not having personally worked with predictive policing mathematics, Aougab said that for them, opposition to the technology isn't based on finding errors in equations or formulas. "It's not about our mathematical knowledge," he said. "We're using our mathematical knowledge and connections to further a goal that we inherently believe in politically.""
From 2020. Way to ensure more minorities die
Ethics means making algorithmns less accurate to ensure "equity"
When the experts are proclaiming their political bias, are they still to be trusted unconditionally?
Meme - "The Liberal Hero!!!
Someone done this to one of George floydd memorial art pieces
*Floyd pointing gun at pregnant woman's belly*"
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "The three biggest actual problems in the Black community - some of which, certainly, are partly rooted in past racism - are fatherlessness (72% O-O-W birth rate), crime (52% of murders in recent years), and academic disengagement (940 SAT). "Police genocide" isn't in the top 50.
(2) Many of these 2021 problems ~did not exist when ethnic conflict was far worse, do not exist for Black and Asian immigrants today, and exist to the SAME extent for poor Latinos and whites. These, not a rich man's debate about "cultural theft," should be the national focus."
Meme - "We need to have a conversation about race"
"Yes, absolutely, let's talk-"
"No! You need to listen conversation to people of color and believe their lived experiences"
"Ok, so tell me-"
"No! You have no right to demand emotional labor from me!"
"Why aren't you speaking up? Silence is violence!"
Meme - "Keenan Anderson: Black Lives Matter founder's cousin dies after police arrest" "So he was involved in a hit and run road traffic incident, tried to get away jumping into a strangers car, resisted arrest, got tasered, died later in hospital from a cardiac arrest, and a toxicology report showed he had cocaine and cannabis in his system."
How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? - The New York Times - "A handful of cities post data online showing how their police departments spend their time. The share devoted to handling violent crime is very small, about 4 percent."
Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data - "Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out. In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime... most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action... In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.” “This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.” Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people... Studies have shown that the average police officer spent about one hour per week responding to crimes in progress, Friedman wrote. Police spend most of their time on traffic violations and routine, minor issues, like noise complaints"
Yet if they spend more time solving crimes, people will also be upset
Cities Try to Turn the Tide on Police Traffic Stops - The New York Times - "Officials pushing the new rules cite data showing that minor stops not only disproportionately snare Black drivers but also do little to combat serious crime or improve public safety, and some escalate into avoidable violence, even killing officers or drivers... Police chiefs and criminologists say the rule changes amount to the first major reconsideration of traffic policing since the early 1980s, when rising crime rates, a shift toward more proactive policing and the advent of squad car computers for checking driver records helped make pretextual stops a cornerstone of enforcement... Some police unions and officers are fighting the new rules, arguing that pulling over cars to search them is an essential weapon against serious crime... In 2013, Harold Medlock, the now-retired police chief of Fayetteville, N.C., told his officers to quit stopping cars for expired registrations or equipment violations to focus on speeding, reckless driving and other more dangerous infractions... traffic fatalities, the police use of force and citizen complaints about the police all declined during that time — while predictions of an explosion in gun and drug crimes never came to pass."
America's Traffic Laws Give Police Way Too Much Power | Time - "The offenses that populate our traffic codes are so numerous and sprawling that the average driver can scarcely hope to spend a few minutes behind the wheel without committing an infraction. Simply hanging an air freshener from the rear-view mirror or failing to illuminate your license plate can get you pulled over and ticketed in some places. It’s only a matter a time before any driver falls prey to the minefield of traffic infractions that awaits them every time they fire up the engine. As a practical matter, this gives police nearly unbounded discretion to pull over any driver, any time they choose. And one way that they put this discretion to use is by engaging in what’s known as pretextual traffic stops. These are when police have a hunch that a driver has committed a crime (or perhaps the driver just looks “suspicious”), but not enough evidence to stop and interrogate them about it. So instead, police just pull the driver over for a petty traffic offense. Once the motorist is stopped, officers can start questioning her about the non-traffic crime that they’re really interested in. The traffic stop is just a pretext for their true motivation... So, what’s wrong with pretextual stops? For starters, they don’t make us safer. Rigorous studies have shown that pretext stops turn up evidence of non-traffic crimes at abysmally low rates, and that they have no effect on crime rates. These same studies confirm that when we invite officers to be led by their gut instincts and other unchecked heuristics, it is people of color who are disproportionately affected. Racial disparities in who gets pulled over erode trust in the police, and deepen the perception that police use race as a proxy for criminality. There are roughly 20 million traffic stops every year, many for petty infractions. For drivers like Castile and Daunte Wright, these stops can quickly turn lethal. But the consequences need not be deadly to have lasting effects. Even citations for minor traffic offenses can lead to hefty fines, and for those unable to pay, late fees and even license suspensions. And this is to say nothing of the fright, humiliation, and other indignities that these stops visit upon the innocent."
GA Mom Says Rittenhouse's "Bad" Parents Are To Blame; She Is Then Killed By Her Own Son On Thanksgiving [VIDEO] - "A Georgia family is still in shock as on Thanksgiving, Marcia Chance, 42, was fatally stabbed by her own son. Arriving on the scene, police found Chance inside a Lawrenceville home, on the floor – lifeless."
Meme - "Introducing the Nobel "Mostly Peaceful" Prize Obey!
Nobel peace prize. Black Lives Matter movement nominated for Nobel peace prize. blaque_buffoonery: Never forget. They glorify demons and demonize Angels. It's called satanic inversion. If they say go right, you had better go left"
New Zealand's other pandemic – political correctness - "The humble Eskimo Pie, an ice-cream treat beloved of Kiwis for generations, is to be renamed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the globe. That it wasn’t an indigenous circumpolar person killed by a police officer in Minneapolis makes no difference. It’s now just not cool to call Inuit people – all 183,000 of them – Eskimos. Times change but it’s still a chilling move, if you’ll excuse the pun. No one of Inuit descent has complained about the brand name Eskimo Pies... Nevertheless, the maker of Eskimo Pies, Tip Top, has decided to drop the name so as to be ‘part of the solution on racial equality’. How changing the name of an ice-cream sold for decades in a country more than 12,000 kilometres from even the closest Inuit native is ‘part of the solution to racial equality’ remains unclear... New Zealand Herald reporter Siena Yates. Yates, an entertainment reporter, wrote an op-ed explaining why she’s decided to have weight-loss surgery. We’re all ‘fatphobic’ apparently. And, as it turns out, racist and a bit sexist. That’s why Yates, a person of colour, is overweight and now in need of surgical intervention. Fatphobia is all related to anti-blackness, says Yates, quoting US academic and author Sabrina Strings who, in her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, said that during times of colonisation and slavery, ‘overfeeding and fatness were evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority’. Sure, journalism these days is a tough gig, but it’s not yet slavery as far as I know. And this diagnosis will likely come as a surprise to the huge numbers of non-slaves also suffering from obesity around the world."
The dangers unarmed individuals pose to police - "When police shoot an “unarmed” individual, the implication or outright accusation by media and activists is often that the deadly force was unjustified because the subject, without a weapon, was “defenseless” and thus could not have posed a threat. Now a newly published study by two criminal justice researchers paints a far different picture. Their findings should be shared with PIOs and other LEOs responsible for communicating reality to the civilian world. After reviewing all reported cases across a two-year period, the pair found that:
“When police officers used deadly force during an encounter with an unarmed citizen, they were, in fact, facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to themselves or a third person” in nearly 90 percent of the situations.
The rest involved “accidental shootings or unintentional discharges” rather than deliberate targeting.
Unarmed subjects shot by intent included those who were attempting to disarm an officer, drown an officer, throw an officer from a bridge or rooftop, strangle an officer, gesturing as if armed with a real weapon, keeping hands concealed despite commands and charging toward an officer with apparent intent to assault.
“Being unarmed,” the study concludes, “does not mean ‘not dangerous.’”... With “unarmed” connoting “not dangerous or threatening,” the offender is “often lauded as a martyr in the encounter,” as if he were “someone walking down the street minding their own business” when “summarily executed” by an “unreasonable, biased” cop. “Unfortunately,” the researchers note, “most onlookers believe that if a police officer is not punished for using force against an unarmed person, then they are not held accountable.”... As a case in point, Shane and Swenson cite the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “where [the] widely held assumptions [that] Brown was unarmed and did not pose a threat to the officer could not be overcome...notwithstanding the factual evidence that Brown physically assaulted the officer.” When the facts were presented, “a large segment of the population failed to modify” their unarmed-and-defenseless assumption. “Indeed, the objective evidence was rejected...as a product of a failed criminal justice system and illegitimate, biased investigators.”... “The risk of dying from a police-citizen encounter is exceptionally low and an unjustified fatality is even lower.” It’s a fact that medical errors by doctors and nurses “kill many thousands more Americans annually than do the police.” Some contend that “the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.” Yet there is “not nearly the same level of public outcry” about that as about police shootings."
When the media profits by division
Liberals claim that police deaths are bad (even though they are few in number compared to civilians killing each other) because the police are supposed to protect people so this betrays social trust. Meanwhile, when it comes to medical errors...
Republican attacks on Maxine Waters prove the GOP is committed to a politics of white whining
Incredible spin. The double standards for Waters and Trump are transparent. But it's Salon after all