When Those Who Serve and Protect Stay Silent

So... you know how all the police associations unify and publish / present in media the same narrative during all the recent "white officer shoots unarmed black man" incidents?
The silence of the same police associations in the wake of the Walter Scott murder is deafening.
I'm a big fan of effective, efficient, community focused police. They're there to protect us, we should be there to support them. When that breaks down we get police departments who fight wars against our own people and a frightened, cornered, occupied population. Every encounter is a potential shooting, a potential assault, every incident puts everyone in extreme danger, and people on all sides flip the fuck out.

...and the unarmed colored folks are doing the dying.
I want my son growing up in a world where police are respected, trusted, loved and fiercely protected by their communities so they can do their jobs: providing essential services and protection to the communities they serve.
Until then I get to worry that, even though we have the privilege of living in an area with great local police, if my son who is half latino stays outside enough and gets a little too brown or ends up in the wrong area or hangs with brown or black friends, he may feel he has to run when he sees the police instead of giving a friendly wave and a smile.
Here's hoping individual officers step up publicly, condemn this shooting, and reaffirm their own commitment to protecting the people they serve so we can restore a little sanity and start working on fixing our problems.

In the meantime, here's an incomplete but rolling recent list of "excessive use of force against minorities" incidents.

c/o The Chicago Tribune
FBI investigating death of teen shot 16 times by Chicago cop
Chicago police officers trailed the knife-wielding teen for nearly a half-mile last October, from a trucking yard where he'd allegedly been trying to break into vehicles through the parking lot of a Burger King and onto a busy street in the Archer Heights neighborhood.
...with family commentary on the settlement from the Chicago Sun-Times.

c/o The Guardian
Michael Slager radioed in Taser claim six seconds after firing at Walter Scott:
Analysis of police audio synced with video raises further questions about whether officers performed any CPR on Walter Scott after he was shot eight times

c/o The Washington Post w/commentary via Daily Kos

Report confirms that police killed Natasha McKenna with her hands cuffed and legs shackled
A mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.

...and for a counterpoint of police restraint when "white people be crazy":

c/o CNN

Christian family band members in deadly parking lot brawl aka: "Brawlmart"
Arizona investigators have released dramatic video of a Walmart parking lot brawl that left a police officer wounded, one man dead, and reportedly involved members of a Christian family band.

c/o mLive

Tense encounter between open-carry advocate and Kalamazoo police detailed in recordings, reports
Police reports and recordings of a sometimes tense 40-minute encounter with a belligerent, rifle-toting man offers insight into how officers tried to defuse a volatile situation without infringing on his right to openly carry the gun on a city street.

...with some commentary via Daily Kos



....aaaaaand for what happens when the good ones stay silent. The bad ones speak up

Supervisors told to falsify reserve deputy's training records; department announces internal review
Supervisors at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were ordered to falsify a reserve deputy’s training records, giving him credit for field training he never took and firearms certifications he should not have received, sources told the Tulsa World. Bates, 73, is accused of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of Eric Harris during an undercover operation on April 2.

A past coach of mine decided to speak up and break the silence surrounding peoples' relationship with Roller Derby, good and bad. I've been rolling comments around in my head the last couple days and I think I've come to a better understanding on why derby can be so wonderful but so hard.

People have passion.

People express passion for sports all the time both as fans and as players and that passion, when your team is winning a championship and that sense of loss, helplessness or a feeling of seeing insurmountable tasks pile up people feel really are two sides of the same coin. The highs are dizzying and wonderful, the lows are soul crushing and make you wonder why you bother. People want to love, people want to fall in love with what they do, with who they root for, with the people they do it with.

In this way, roller derby is no different than any other sport, except for that many of the people who play roller derby also run the league's day to day business; from accounting to marketing and sales to legal to management to human resources, slamming a small but motivated motley crew of players from nearly all ages, experience levels and areas of competence together and expecting to get a perfect result is not a recipe for perfection.

Roller derby isn't a business. We fall in love. We get hurt. We get angry. We express that anger. We get frustrated. We fall out of love. We set fire to the people and places that hurt us and vow to never let it happen again. We start new leagues, we taken on entirely too much responsibility. We burn out. We get bitter. We see motivated people as naive and useless. We lose the patience to build the team and the sport we love.

... because it's like a goddamn relationship, except your in a complex multipersonal relationship between people with varying levels of communication skills, trust levels and commitments. It's so easy to fall in love and pull all the wonderful relationship energy from everyone, and so easy to get hurt by just one thing, one miscommunication, one slight whether intentional or not.
Everyone can be well meaning and still fail. Everyone can want the same thing but still end up moving in terrible directions. Everyone can still love the team and love the sport but take action to destroy it all.

It's because we love what we do and we need to give it the space, the respect and I think most importantly... the understanding and the compassion to help everyone on the team succeed,

to push the team to succeed.

to push the sport to succeed.

to learn to love and maintain a long term healthy relationship with roller derby and to steward that love and spread it to other people.

Comments? Head over to Reddit and chime in.

OkCupid Throws Down the Gauntlet, Misses the Target

Multiple friends in the various sex-positive and sexual education fields posted a link to an article they saw on Valleywag about OkCupid coming after Mozilla and its CEO and its call to action to not use Mozilla software.

 

Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there's a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we're asserting ourselves today. This is why: we've devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we've worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure. If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

 

LOL 

So... I'm really torn about this.

Mozilla -is- a corporation but the software they write is open source. Mozilla Firefox is just software, it's a tool, and in general I endorse using the best tools for the job and the fact is... Mozilla Firefox is the only truly platform independent open source browser that's completely functional and unencumbered by platform preferential setups like Safari (for Mac/iOS), Chrome (for Android/Windows/Chromebook) or Internet Explorer (Windows/Windows Phone). Firefox and its companion software works everywhere on virtually every platform. It's free as in free software and no bigot ceo can end that.

The solution here -is- to hit the Mozilla corporation in its pocket book and it's correct; not using Firefox can eventually have an effect but it also has significant collateral damage. Not searching -through- the search bar in Firefox has the same effect; the Mozilla corporation makes a significant amount of money via google searches initiated in the in-browser search bar. Corporations can be pressured, they have bottom lines to worry about and even the Mozilla corporation isn't immune to bad press. I fully endorse exposing their current CEO for who he is and what he's done and for taking action against the corporation but... the Free Software / Open Source movement is a natural ally of the equality movements.

I disagree that we should take action by telling people not to use Mozilla and therefore disagree with OKCupid's call to action.

Capricon XXXI 2011! (2 of ???) Live Band Klingon Karaoke (Now with more Leia!)

Capricon XXXI 2011! (1 of ???) Live Band Klingon Karaoke

Heh.

Capricon (www.capricon.org) rocked, and my favorite part.... the live band Klingon Karaoke of course with Sing With the Band!

First Video is up, more to come!