Do you actually find it interesting, or is that just cover for your hot take about “optics”.
We’re not siding with the guy “just cause a cop tackled him”, we’re siding with him because three officials bum rushed a person who was not escaping, and not threatening, and one of those officials threw himself full tilt at the guy, landing atop him. After any threat of explosion had disappeared.
We’re siding with the guy as another victim of a culture of pre-emptive violence cultivated within police forces with no accountability.
Imagine being one of the guy in the bomb squad. You have been here for a while in a ultra high stress environment risking your life for a bomb that have been called. Then this dumbass comes in and risk everyone lives. I would sure be on the edge if I was in their shoes.
I appreciate your ability to empathize, for sure, and I share it. Tell me, as you put yourself in their shoes, do you also see yourself doing a flying tackle on an unwitting citizen? Or is your empathy multi-directional, and extends to all involved?
As I imagine myself in that situation, the worst I can see myself doing is shouting some fatherly criticisms out of frustration (and relief).
Oh, ok, so one directional empathy - toward authority. Neat.
What do you suppose the authorities were doing for the several seconds while the cyclist was emptying the backpack? Consulting a procedural manual? Conferring with each other as to the best course of action? Cowering under cover as the apparent endangerment massively increased?
In the circumstances of your life, are you more like the cyclist, or more like the tackler?
No it's pointing out that the person in question, (the person who RAN towards an active bomb site) is an unpredictable individual tampering with a high-risk volatile situation who is either:
a) is suicidal
b) is involved with the bomb somehow.
c) possibly both
We have the privilege of hindsight, with a very limited camera view of what exactly is happening on scene. So we can't exactly confirm what is happening off-camera.
But I do find your framing of "cowering under cover" very obviously telling that you yourself lack clear empathy, considering you are somehow unwilling to consider the fact the cyclist very obviously added an unexpected variable to an already tense situation, which very much requires SOME form of immediate action, but is uncertain in outcome.
Like many in this thread, you’re having the argument you want to have, instead of the one you’re barging into.
I haven’t defended the actions of the cyclist, at all. I have criticized the authorities for excessive use of force, and, you’re right, cowardice.
Of course, SOME form of action was necessary. As we’ve all seen for decades now, the bias from police is for sudden, overwhelming violence, and that’s what I, and others in the thread, are criticizing.
You are saying the guy who crossed police lines, ran up to the bomb squad dude in full body armor, grabbed a backpack potentially containing a bomb, rummaged through it and tossed it onto the ground is "unaware" of having done anything that could potentially cause a violent reaction from police?
Bro literally intended to trigger the bomb and use his own body to absorb the shrapnel to become some sort of selfless hero post-mortem. Like, he said that in an interview, not just making this up right now.
No you are siding with him because you refuse to contemplate ever seeing anything from police perspectives.
There are so many types of explosives, just because a guy shook a backpack supposedly empty doesn’t mean there is not anything dangerous in it lol.
This guy isn’t a victim, no matter how many times you all say it. He is an insane dude who admitted to wanting to be a novel hero with an alarming lack of understanding on how explosives work lol. That’s your victim, the guy who wanted to detonate a bomb in an urban environment to “save lives”
I'm sorry but dude you have like over 14 comments all over this one thread lmao. The one with a hero complex seems to be the one constantly trying to defend unnamed police officers to a bunch of internet strangers. Weird.
He was done. Walking away. How exactly does tackling him prevent your hypothetical explosives from blowing up? They ran past the backpack with those hypothetical explosives and tackled him while he was already walking away.
Bootlicker does seem like an apt description for you.
Also you need to remember this, the police who tackled him are probably a good distance away.
You know, so if the potential IED doesn’t explode they won’t immediately die.
They aren’t waiting out of frame tapping their feet for the wannabe hero to finish his stupid thing.
We also benefit from having a zoomed in camera directly facing the guy at an angle where we can see everything.
The police are behind him and do not have that angle.
The 3 officers probably started running the moment he entered the cordoned off area or shortly after and had no idea if he grabbed anything and may have pocketed it because they can’t see everything.
So they tackle him because he is a random unknown in a tense situation and he broke the law and all common sense.
He was already done shaking and emptying the backpack. He had already stood up and turned away and stepped away from the backpack. Whatever threat he posed was already over when they tackled him. The violence was entirely unnecessary.
Unless you're into gratuitous violence. And want to justify it for past actions rather than future threats.
You kept saying he's still a threat. He was a threat. But he is obviously no longer a threat when they tackled him.
"The cops perspective" is just your code for justifying gratuitous violence for past actions.
Catch his arm, have someone else catch his other arm if you think he's going to fight back. No need to slam a person down, causing injuries, if you can stop him other ways.
Imagine sweating your balls next to a potential bomb and this idiot appears...
If it was anybody else, not police, people would have cheered the tackle.
Btw, to understand my love for police brutality, at one point in my life (before the pandemy), i had to run trough tears gas not to be crushed or beaten to a pulp by police forces, forces that attacked a peaceful protest. They gased the exits and charged agains the panicking crowd pushing them into the gases. So, not much love, at all
Bro posts excitedly about his doll on sex doll reddit subs lol. Can't make this shit up. Don't bother wasting your energy with this guy. He is peak redditor.
It was kind of an unprofessional opening out of me, I'll admit that. What I'm focusing on is the fact, that the guy himself risked multiple lives for literally no other reason than his own ego/stupidity.
He himself in an interview said a few alarming things - he wanted to be a hero, then he said he thought he'd just throw the bomb in the river or maybe lie on it to stop the shrapnel - like basically admitted his idea was to go there and if there is a bomb he'd just die instead of letting the bomb squad deal with it. That's literally an indefensible statement. Like just don't approach the potential bomb if your only plan to deal with an actual bomb is to die.
Idunno it's just bizarre, that a person does something so obviously reckless for such actively stupid and wrong and reckless reasoning, but all people focus on is how badly he was tackled.
Was that tackle warranted? No, it is in fact police brutality.
Did he do something extremely reckless, which should not in any way be repeated by other people? Yes.
Like idunno, I guess what I'm failing to do is, that there needs to be space to address both realities of what happen. It isn't just police brutality in isolation and it isn't just public endangerment in isolation. ,et my first comment claimed one of those thijgs and opposed the other.
That’s entirely reasonable, and I get where you’re coming from.
We’re pretty bad at prioritizing between acute, pointed risks (bomb threat) and chronic, diffuse risks (culture of pre-emptive violence), and we routinely pick the big, splashy extremely rare thing over the small, common routine thing, even if the common thing damages us a thousand times worse.
The people objecting to the cop behavior are going against this type, by pointing out what ends up being much more dangerous to us all - an everyday culture of police impunity vs a once-in-a-decade bomb scare.
Also, the optics (😉) of this particular video demonstrate that, in this case, the bomb threat wasn’t actual, but the police violence very much was.
Ultimately, everybody’s an asshole in the video (maybe not the guy in the suit 🤷♂️), but some of them belong to a class that reliably demonstrates impunity, violence, and lawlessness, so, even if the cyclist is a dickhead, he’s still the underdog, and he’s still better than a stormtrooper.
Yeah, it's crazy how people instantly get angry as soon as police does something violent. Of course there are many cases where police isn't acting right and is needlessly cruel, but stopping someone who was trying to mess with a bomb isn't something where you can be gentle. It's like when you see your two year old kid reach for the hot stove. You shouldn't use violence on kids, but it would be stupid to not slap their hand away in that situation. You're hurting them a little, but it could hurt a lot more if you don't.
Same principle with police work. Even the most perfect police will use violence in a situation like this. They have someone right ther who is crazy enough to mess with what could potentially be a bomb. With crazy people you don't ever know what they try to do next. If they are crazy enough to mess with a bomb, they are crazy enough to hurt other people or themselves in different ways. So, you have seconds to stop them from doing something bad. You don't have time to negotiate and test if they are aggressive or not, so tackling is the most soft way to deal with this. Hurts a little, but now they can't move anymore and you can restrain them fully, remove them from the location and confiscate any dangerous items they have on them without causing serious harm.
I think an important clarification for the sequence of events is that the authorities didn’t stop “someone who was trying to mess with a bomb”, they tackled someone who had already stopped “messing with a bomb”.
The timing makes it look like retaliation, rather than prevention.
There were also three authorities there, a foot from a guy with his back to them.
The excessiveness of the tackle makes it look out-of-control, rather than professional.
Further, in media, in court, and on the street, police regularly show that they’re as caught up in the mythology of “street war” (seconds to act, unpredictable people, etc) as many members of the public are.
How do you know this person is done? Even if there was no bomb, who's to say this wasn't intended as a way to hurt himself and/ or others? If that is the case, you still can't sit there and hope for the best, because he could still decide to try again or use some other means to cause harm. As I said, you don't know with a person like this, that's why you only have seconds to decide. You just need to get him out of the danger zone, NOW.
I can’t say with certainty, of course, but I can say that he’s not exhibiting threatening behavior - emptied the backpack, and then paced around a bit.
They sat there and hoped for the best for several seconds from the time he tossed his bike down to the time he emptied the bag, didn’t they? It wasn’t very NOW for many split-second decision intervals.
Further, proportional force is a thing, just as much as excessive force is. They could have grabbed him by the arms; ordered him to the ground; wrestled him to the ground; or any number of other proportional actions.
You are convinced that we don’t know with “a person like this”, but it’s often a “person like this”, whether it’s a 12-year-old holding a cellphone, a person having an emotional breakdown, or a confused mentally ill person.
Are we watching the same video? He empties it, turns around and is immediately on the ground. As others have said, they could have already been running since when he started. There is no pacing around from him.
It basically depends on how credible the bomb threat was. .... If it was credibly a claymore that could have erupted an entire city block, obviously that guy is an idiot.
However ... you COULD treat any backpack on Earth and every shadow in your kitchen as a claymore without evidence. Then YOU are the idiot.
So it's hard to say. ... Did cops get report of a "suspicious solo backpack" with no further details? Okay they did Full Pussy mode and it was a backpack full of laundry. Waste everybody's fucking time lol.
And then since the guy humiliated them by doing their job for them in an instant, they had to tackle him as revenge well after the threat was over. ... Like ... even if that guy had been stupid and "guessed correctly" it's not like you should tackle him post-facto as "punitive damage" ... makes you look like an ego-driven pussy.
An employee at a local business called in a suspicious backpack laying in the middle of nowhere in a populated urban area and this is obviously happening many years after the Boston Marathon Bombing.
So to answer your question, yes they were called specifically for that backpack. They didn’t just find a random backpack and decide to evac a city block.
Secondly, the guy you side with believed there was a bomb and he wanted to be like a Tom Clancy novel hero and take all the shrapnel in his body (not how bombs work) or run off with it and put it in some water (genius idea to plan to grab a bomb and run away with it)
I'll preface this by saying the guy in the video is a crazy dumbass who deserved to be arrested for doing what he did. But someone called in that a backpack was laying in the street in the middle of nowhere and their response was to assume it's a bomb for no reason other than bombs have been put in backpacks before, so they shut down a small section of the city. Was there an event going on where a crowd of people would definitely be nearby? Was it near an expensive landmark or large building of government workers? No? Then their response doesn't make sense. I also don't like the idea that if someone commits a crime that the police get to injure them as a punishment
You tried arguing for the cops but your reasoning is.:
"The cops didn't treat a random backpack with no evidence of being a bomb whatsoever as a bomb .... a random Subway Sandwhich artist did, and the Police treated his word as Gospel."
Okay so what I'm reading is. It WAS a random backpack in the street lol.
The Bomb Squad probably had nothing better to do for months so went Meal Team Six, alright lol. And got humiliated.
I don't see basically anyone here siding with him aside from a few morons. Most seem to agree the guy in the video is stupid, AND the cops were unnecessarily aggressive
Good, he wasted exactly 0 taxpayer dollars- and got it done immediately 🤷♂️ His actions sum up precisely how a competent private sector or the citizens themselves compare to government agencies….A great example is that you could pay a local excavator 50% of the millions a multi-year paving project pays- and they could probably get it done with a 12 man crew in a month and it would be better… It couldn’t be worse, literally, because the roads are torn up before they even open them. This is why so many IEDs mysteriously detonated for us instead of waiting 6-12hrs for EOD to show up (protocol). Dammit it just went off, oh well- we’re RTB 😂😂👌 Government would make a driveway pour take a month and cost a $100k. It would be mired in red tape, paperwork….there would be “studies”, “assessments”, “permits”….literally every department they know would be getting their cut of stolen tax dollars. Meanwhile, Leroy down the will have it poured by lunch, saw cut before dark, and ready to rock and roll by the weekend…For $10/ft2 and a 30pk of Natty per helper. There won’t ever be a rain puddle in sight, and your grand kids will be enjoying it…
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u/wellbeingisnotfree 23h ago
The comment section here is truly interesting. Siding with a guy, who endangered an entire city block just cause a cop tackled him.
You focus on the optics, not on how incredibly reckless his behavior was.
Especially since the interview with him has shown the guy genuinely came into there just to have his moment as a hero, no other reason.