Daily thread for news/updates/discussion of George Floyd protests - June 17

This Seattle protest zone is police-free. So volunteers are stepping up to provide security.

Core to the zone is a vision of a self-governed community with no formal policing. Instead, volunteers, many of them avowed police abolitionists, have begun to organize their own safety force.

Among other incidents, these volunteers have confronted a man throwing apples and threatening punches, a car driving toward a large crowd of pedestrians and a vehicle circling the block repeatedly and taking photos. Volunteers say they have engaged with armed visitors from outside the city who came to the zone convinced that Seattle needed saving from left-wing agitators.

They have defused fights, protected store windows from vandals and handled mental-health crises. Protesters rushed to douse the flames when a lone arsonist attempted to set fire to the precinct early Friday. The director of an LGBTQ resource center publicly thanked sentinels from the protest zone Sunday for their assistance watching over a broken window until plywood arrived, attributing the incident to a mental-health or drug-addiction issue with a person who regularly sleeps in the center’s doorway.

Revealed: officer who killed Rayshard Brooks accused of covering up 2015 shooting

In August 2015, Rolfe and two other officers opened fire on Jackie Jermaine Harris, who they chased after he was caught driving a stolen truck, the Guardian can reveal after reviewing court documents on the incident.

However, the shooting was not reported by the police involved. Harris, like Brooks, is African American.

Harris rammed a police vehicle and officers shot at him several times inside the truck, striking Harris once and collapsing his lung. Harris survived and later pleaded guilty to charges including theft, property damage, fleeing arrest and damaging a police vehicle.

Judge Doris L Downs, during a 2016 court hearing, called the case a “disaster” and said “it’s the wildest case I’ve seen in my 34 years here.”

Downs said she was so troubled by officers failing to report the shooting that she wanted the matter investigated.

“None of the police put in the report that they shot the man – none of them. And they sent him to Grady [Memorial Hospital] with collapsed lungs and everything, and the report doesn’t mention it,” Downs said.

Europe said U.S. influence had waned under Trump. Then Black Lives Matter protests rocked the continent.

“When things come out of black America, we see them. Then there’s an attempt at a boomerang throw,” said Gary Younge, a sociology professor at the University of Manchester, who has written about his experience as a black Briton traveling the American South. “Everybody sees George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner,” he said, referring to other victims of police violence. “And there’s a hope that if we throw that out there, and we highlight it, that it will come back and hit people on the head about the things that are going on here.”

There are signs that the European protesters’ demands are gaining traction.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his country’s “Black Pete” blackface Christmas tradition needed to come to an end. The Belgian Parliament approved a “truth and reconciliation” commission to reckon with a bloody colonial past. The spokeswoman for French President Emmanuel Macron wrote an op-ed — presumably with Macron’s knowledge and approval — saying her country should revisit its refusal to collect statistics on race.

[...]

The power of the U.S. tumult to change European minds is a testament to the enduring power of American culture in the world, analysts said. It is difficult to imagine police violence in France sparking protests in Germany, for instance.

But the discussion about race and black lives in Europe may also have been made possible precisely because it originated elsewhere, Younge said.

“America is taken notice of by white Europeans in a way that black Europeans aren’t always. And so we leverage that in order to shine a light on the things that otherwise would be ignored,” he said. European societies “still assume that they are white countries to which black people have come, and the black people are visitors who have no right to influence the conversations.”

[...]

But partly because European police kill many fewer people overall, the focus of protesters here is broader. They point to discrimination that denies black Europeans educational opportunities, housing and jobs. They decry their governments for, at least until now, failing to recognize that racism is even an issue within their countries.

George Floyd's family appeals to United Nations for justice

The family of George Floyd made a dramatic appeal to the United Nations today for the world to hold the United States accountable for police brutality and systemic racism.

Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, addressed a special meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland via video address, telling the assembled diplomats “my brother tortured and murdered on camera is the way black people are treated by police in America.”

“I am my brother’s keeper” Floyd continued. “You in the United Nations are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. I am asking you to help me get justice.”

The special session was held after 54 African countries called for a discussion on the “current racially inspired human rights violations, systematic racism, police brutality against people of African descent and violence against peaceful protests” in the United States. The two-day debate will continue tomorrow at 9 a.m. ET, after which the Council’s 47 members will vote on whether to establish an independent inquiry into U.S. racism and police brutality.

Some brand related ones:

PepsiCo to drop Aunt Jemima name, criticized for racist history; Uncle Ben's under review

Mars Inc says evaluating changing Uncle Ben's brand image

Conagra Brands Announces Mrs. Butterworth's Brand Review

And here's a decent article I stumbled upon via MetaFilter that talks about these problematic brand logos: https://shoppeblack.us/2020/05/brands-and-slavery/

Inside The Dangerous Online Fever Swamps Of American Police

Cops have a far-right media ecosystem of their own, where they post racist memes, spread disinformation and call for violence against antifa.

MLK Labor Council Expels the Seattle Police Officers Guild

The MLK Labor council voted to boot the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) from their politically powerful network of unions during a lethally tedious meeting on Wednesday evening that was blessedly Zoom-bombed by anime porn. (I did not get a screenshot of that moment, but my DMs are open.) Tensions ran high, and an absolute disregard for the mute button reigned.

I've been working through some UE4 tutorials by a guy, and today he posted this video without commentary from the CHAZ in Seattle.