Juno News - June 01, 2020


We can denounce the killing without the anarchy

Mentioned
George Floyd Eric Garner
Enough is enough – reopen the economy! Is regulation the answer to Big Tech censorship？

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

206.65

Word count

1,379

Sentence count

70

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the death of a black man in a police choke hold, the media and activists have been quick to point the finger at both sides of the issue. In this episode, I discuss the similarities between the George Floyd case and the Rodney King case in Los Angeles, California, and the protests in Toronto, Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'd like to chat with you for a few minutes on a few observations I have about the protests,
00:00:09.360 the riots, the violence that are engulfing a number of cities in the United States,
00:00:13.680 and a couple here in Canada, as we see solidarity protests spring up. My comments focus largely on
00:00:19.580 what I would call the inertia of narrative, how there are certain individuals in the media,
00:00:24.860 activists, and so forth, who take a story and they go, I'm gonna make it fit this mold. I'm gonna make
00:00:31.060 it head in this direction. I think a lot of the elements to this story are almost identical to
00:00:36.600 the 1992 Rodney King LA race riots, and it's interesting that we have that script in our head
00:00:43.100 about how these things play out, and we almost expect now things to go along those lines, and you
00:00:48.340 hear the same arguments, the same rationales from both sides, the same sort of debate unfolding,
00:00:54.280 and it's unfortunate. I don't think it had to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way,
00:00:58.840 and I don't think that's the correct case, because when you see this video of George Floyd,
00:01:03.180 now there are some videos that people go and protest about. You look at the video and you go,
00:01:06.760 I don't know, it's unclear what's going on. There's clearly mistakes on both sides. They said this guy
00:01:11.280 had or didn't have a gun, and you go, I don't know. And me, I never really write about those
00:01:15.180 things broadcast on them, because it's just unclear. You don't have the full facts. This situation, well,
00:01:20.300 I guess you don't have the full facts, but you look at it and you go, this is not good. Certainly
00:01:26.080 seems like this should not have happened, and this man should not have wound up dead at the end of
00:01:31.120 it. So this is a bad situation, and people are right to be frustrated about it, to be outraged
00:01:35.920 about it. I also don't like the disproportionality of it, by which I mean, by which I mean, the guy goes
00:01:42.380 into a store, and he's a little bit drunk, I guess, allegedly, he's a little drunk, and then he has a
00:01:47.500 $20 bill to pay, but it's a counterfeit $20 bill. And then all of this suddenly transpires at the end
00:01:52.980 of it. Look, I'd understand if he had hostages, it was some guy doing a terror attack, but I don't
00:01:57.720 know. This does not fit at all. It reminds me, actually, of one of the incidents that the Black 1.00
00:02:04.040 Lives Matter movement was frustrated about a couple of years ago, Eric Garner. This was a gentleman who
00:02:08.500 was just standing at the side of the road, and he was selling cigarettes, reselling them. So he bought a
00:02:14.040 pack, and then he would sell individual smokes, which, okay, I guess that's against the law in
00:02:18.980 that state, and they don't want to do it. But they brought in a bunch of officers, and they did a
00:02:22.560 chokehold, and then the guy's dead at the end. You go, excuse me? Like, I know right here in Toronto
00:02:26.920 where I'm at, if I call and say there's been a property crime against me, they're not going to show
00:02:32.120 up. You know, cops don't even police regular things anymore. So I'm kind of like, why were they even
00:02:37.820 policing the Eric Garner situation, the George Floyd situation, right now anyway, let alone so
00:02:43.860 heavily handed policing them that you find these two guys wind up dead at the end of it. I think
00:02:49.980 all citizens are right to say, we got a problem with this right here, because, you know, the police,
00:02:56.080 they work for us, they answer to us. So by all means, make your voice heard. And I would like to
00:03:00.980 leave it at that. I would like to say that I don't like this George Floyd incident, and there needs to
00:03:04.860 be justice, because this was not right. But then we have the problem that people are now looting,
00:03:10.820 they're being violent, burning down a police station. So then we all, when we're talking about
00:03:15.120 this issue, have to go, yes, I'm, I'm frustrated with that killing of that man. It shouldn't have
00:03:18.740 happened. But hold on, let's now talk about the many, many more hundreds, thousands of crimes
00:03:24.460 that have transpired in America in the past couple of days that are supposedly justified by all of this.
00:03:31.460 And this is where things get very strange. You see a lot of the mantras are stop killing us,
00:03:37.760 and police are killing us and so forth, referring to black Americans, African Americans saying, 0.93
00:03:43.060 don't kill us. Well, you look at the facts, the statistics on the ground, and about every year 0.87
00:03:48.480 in the United States, there are about 250, 300 black people who are killed by police. And then there's
00:03:55.520 about 400 to 500 white people who are killed by police. So more white people are killed by police 0.93
00:04:02.420 every year than black people. A lot of people probably wouldn't know that statistic. Now, 0.91
00:04:06.840 of course, the caveat is when you adjust for population, because there's a lot more white
00:04:10.860 people in the U.S. than black people, you realize that actually black people technically have a three 0.96
00:04:16.360 times more likelihood of being killed by police. Now, every police murder of a person is unfortunate, 0.89
00:04:23.780 unless, you know, some of them, you don't know all the stories. I mean, there are times when a person
00:04:27.400 has a gun. They're out there, they're, you know, they're being the bad guy, and the police have to
00:04:31.840 kill them to stop them from doing their bad guy thing. And we accept that. There are also cases 0.98
00:04:37.180 when we look and we go, I don't accept that, like George Floyd, like Eric Garner, and like a number of
00:04:41.880 stories that have involved Caucasian people who have been killed by police that do not get amplified by
00:04:47.540 the media and do not cause protest movements, even though these are very questionable circumstances
00:04:52.840 as well. So I think it's fair to say one is too many. When someone was killed by the police or
00:04:58.040 wrongly killed by the police, it's certainly fair to say one is too many. But also, when you're looking
00:05:02.700 at a country of 340 million people, and you're talking about 250 people, 400 people killed a year
00:05:10.260 by police, it's also not a large number of people. So this police stop killing us, well,
00:05:17.380 there's not large numbers there. So one has to wonder, why are people endorsing the mass looting
00:05:25.600 and violence that are going on saying, well, you know, people are frustrated. They've been seeing
00:05:29.060 this for years. They've been seeing people killed for years. Yes, they have. And one is too many.
00:05:33.940 But it's not like it's open season out there, and every cop out there is gunning down several people
00:05:40.140 a month. So the narrative plays a major role in this. And this is what I mean by the inertia of
00:05:45.420 narrative, that people kind of are familiar with how they think it should be and how they want it
00:05:50.420 to be. They lock into their roles, and they move forward, and they roll. And then you've got these
00:05:55.740 two camps. Well, you've got a bunch of camps, but you've got people who are basically saying, yes,
00:05:59.980 this looting is justified. You have to listen to these people's concerns. And others saying, no,
00:06:03.940 there's no justification. Bring in the cops, and let's shut this all down. And it's unfortunate,
00:06:08.860 because as I said at the beginning, the George Floyd killing, not a good thing at all. And people of 1.00
00:06:13.540 all walks of life should be saying, we demand more for police who are public servants, who are paid
00:06:18.920 by our tax dollars, and they answer, and they report to us. And yes, you should be holding them
00:06:24.160 to account. But unfortunately, that opportunity that could have been unifying has been lost now,
00:06:29.140 because the narrative is, for whatever reason, endorsing this mass carnage that is happening
00:06:34.920 all across the United States in these various cities. It's very unfortunate, and it didn't have to be
00:06:39.980 that way.