A volunteer asking for something unreasonable, possibly because he has no understanding for the religious role of a hijab, that you can simply decline, maybe explain and surely get sorted by talking to someone else, or at worst just walk away in disgust, is very different than experiencing police abuse and force, being helpless and restrained, isolated from your friends and family for hours.
Not to dismiss that event, still pretty fucked up, but not the same order of magnitude.
If taking your hat off was required for the picture, then she should also have to take her hat off. If taking your hat off was optional, then she should be able to keep her hat on.
I would look at this from a different point of view -- give people recourse against this kind of nonsense. Reduce the barrier for people to rightly protect themselves and help them wherever necessary.
The threshold for ruining people's lives in general needs to be higher than hearsay. But we're often quick to disregard that when it fits our own world view or hits closer to home.
Why is this crap making it to the top of ycombinator? I am perfectly happy seeing SXSW not screw with Austin for a week. This guy was probably detained for suspicion of a crime. Austin cops have their problems but are not particularly bad in any regard. Austin is a very safe city and one of the few to not have any "mass shootings" in recent history. Austin's big problem is the gentrification brought on by class conscious geeks constantly moving there.
> Why is this crap making it to the top of ycombinator?
Because SXSW is one of the most important events of the year for launching digital products that are not games? Lots of regulars of this website (myself included) are part of product launches at SXSW.
It's also a diversity-related story, which has been becoming an increasingly important topic for HN.
Yes, but there is no real story yet. People do legitimately become detained for things. It sucks, but thats what happens when you show up to demonstrations etc which the author aludes to previous in his twitter feed, but not the one quoted in this message. It is Travis County, the liberal mecca of Texas. People are not being oppressed for their views there. He did something to have the spitmask put on him.
If you were to reference the anti-gun propaganda which went over mass shootings in recent history, Austin is distinctly lacking for a city of its size. Yes, there have been shootings. Charles Whitman is the famous one.
If you're saying that dividing cities into "safe" and "not safe" requires an arbitrary threshold, then yes, it's arbitrary where you set the threshold. But even then, you can non-arbitrarily label cities as "safer" and "less safe" when compared to each other.
But if you mean that the concept of "safe" is arbitrary: Safe means that there's a lower chance (not zero!) that I'll be on the receiving end of crime. Less chance that I'll be put in the hospital (or in the ground) or have my stuff stolen. That translates into less worry and less attention that I have to pay to keeping myself safe. (It does not mean that I can pay no attention!) That "less worry" and "less chance of being injured or killed" are not arbitrary. They make a real, concrete difference in my life.
I was more hinting at the idea that places that are "safe" for one group of people (often white middle-class people) are incredibly unsafe for other groups of people.
If safe/unsafe is dependant on who you are, then calling a place "safe" or even "safer" needs lots of provisos.
Anyway, bad choice of words. In retrospect "safe is a relative thing" gets closer to what I mean.
Wow, I don't know what happened at SXSW, but this Twitter conversation is a disaster in itself.
Mr Spandex @Manfeelings90 12h12 hours ago
@strobist He was treated EXACTLY how he wants his
opponents treated. He helped create this Culture of
fear over "harassment"
0 retweets 0 likes
--
Be Just & Fear Not @SuperNerdMike 21h21 hours ago
.@francesc Did you try spitting on the cops by chance?
0 retweets 3 likes
Reply Retweet
Brussel Sprout @TheIxxer 21h21 hours ago
@SuperNerdMike can I take bets that he got drunk, belligerent. Police came,
he called them bigots and spat at them. Now he cries oppression.
1 retweet 5 likes
Be Just & Fear Not @SuperNerdMike 21h21 hours ago
@TheIxxer Let's make a pool.
0 retweets 4 likes
Caffeine Commissar @CaffComm 21h21 hours ago
My money is not on trusting the guy who made his profile picture look like
he has a halo.
@SuperNerdMike @TheIxxer
... that's rough. Do these people know something I don't? Or is this really what Twitter gets like once you get exposure?
Yeah, it's pretty awful. It's one of the only social platforms where your experience gets significantly worse the more popular you are. You can't even untag yourself or "ignore" replies to tweets you're tagged in. Even if you block someone, Twitter will still put replies to their tweets in your notifications and timeline if the tweets have your handle in them.
I think this is what the internet is like. When someone tells a story that people don't believe, people don't nod their head and try to avoid the conversation like they do in real life. They make fun of you and mock your attempt to tell a self serving story.
Sometimes people on the internet are right, sometimes they are wrong. They are not saying anything here that they wouldn't have said if they heard this story in real life, the only difference is that they are saying it out loud where everyone can hear it, instead of in a private way to their close associates.
Think about the analogous situation in the physical world:
Someone comes into a large room we are all in, and announces very loudly to everyone "I JUST GOT ARRESTED FOR BEING DRUNK AND IT WAS NOT BECAUSE I WAS DRUNK, THE POLICE ARE RACIST"
People are laughing, and some comments can be heard among the people in the room like "YEA, RIGHT", "THAT'S WHAT THEY ALL SAY", "THANKS FOR THE UPDATE", etc.
I don't think we would really think the comments were that inappropriate. When you go into public and broadcast something, it is perfectly acceptable for people to disbelieve you or make fun of what you said.
I've never known anyone who acted reasonably have a spit mask put over their face. Only place I was arrested. I was off the charts drunk and treated 100% fairly. Long hair and all. Just because some John Oliver show etc, doesn't mean Texas is all the same. Nor can you take the behavior of one volunteer and extrapolate to the rest of Texas. I honestly expect higher discourse from this news aggregator site.
Anyone's story about 'why they just got arrested' is probably not one you can really take at face value.
People who did nothing will usually say they did nothing.
People who committed a crime or were very unruly or unsafely intoxicated will also usually say they did nothing.
Let's not start sharpening the pitchforks quite yet.
This could be a ridiculous and completely unjust situation!
However, it could also be that this person got very drunk while partying and did something stupid, and either remembers it incorrectly (see 'drunk') or is terrified of losing their job and wants to set the narrative.
Everytime I've been to jail, there are newbies in the holding cells that cry "I didn't do anything" and can't believe how horrible and mean all the CO's are.
And everytime, if and when I go to First Appearance with them, it turns out they very much did something quite illegal that got them arrested in the first place, and its almost always something then did not want to discuss while they were whining in the holding cell.
If your are new to jail, every fucking hour seems like an entire day and the powerlessness of the situation seems beyond comprehension.
BTW, it designed like that so, you know, you don't ever want to come back. That's the whole point.
Well you know, lifelong addiction is a real bitch, and every instance of jail was due to it in one form or another.
It took me 25 years and utterly wrecked relationships with my brother, closest old friends, and my lovely ex-wife to start to begin to see the light.
None of them really talk to me anymore, even though I've been pretty much clean for years now.
I drove for 18 years on a suspended license that I was unable to get reinstated for 5 years at time because I spent the ticket money on dope. Many of my arrests were due to driving issues, but certainly not all.
It's been a real mess, and I'm tired. Maybe someone going down that path will read this and think about what I'm saying.
Holy crap that's a tough one. My dad was a serious alcoholic, I've seen from the front row what addiction can do to you and your relationships with others and if anything that taught me in the harshest way imaginable to a young kid to stay away from stuff that I'm not equipped to deal with even in moderation. My dads funeral was a 'small'
affair. As in, the only people present there were two friends from his student days, his wife and my sister, me and my eldest. Everybody else either didn't want to come or was told to stay away by his wife. For someone who got to be 69 (in spite of all the booze) you'd expect a few more people to show up but his relationships with the rest of the world were so bad that he died quite lonely.
It looks - by your writing - as though you've come out the other end of this and are on your way to a better life, congratulations, it must have been extremely hard to get to where you are today, I don't think my dad would have been able to achieve what you have done no matter how much time he would have had.
I am sorry to hear about your Dad, and its very ironic in a way...both of my grown sons are super careful about substances so I think I get what you are saying.
I often think the only silver lining to the wreck-that-is-my-life is that I left such an ugly imprint on them both that neither of them really touch anything "evil", and I am incredibly proud of both of them, as I am sure your Dad was of you.
Yeah whew...thank you very much for your kind words BTW. To tell the truth the hard part isn't staying totally sober these days, the hard part is trying to find a place in society for a 50yo man who has none of the obvious material trappings of a successful life and a whole shitstorm of dirty laundry that is only a Google search away.
Before we turn into an angry mob, can we try to wait until more facts come out about this? Remember what you have heard so far is only one guy's side of the story.
In a different tweet the author said that it was for public intoxication. Austin is a big college town and throwing young guys into the drunk tank for public intoxication is a pretty common thing in these type of towns. And I am willing to bet that most people who are thrown into the drunk tank think they "did nothing wrong".
A reasonable explanation is this guy got a little tipsy and the police thought he was drunker than he was, threw him into a drunk tank to sober up, put a spit mask over his head in case (or because) he was being belligerent or he might puke, then released him once he was clearly sober.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is fair treatment. But for anyone who has spent years living in a college town populated by tens of thousands of drunk 20 somethings, it is at least understandable why the citizenry would want police to respond this way. It is also far from a sign that the US is racists as a whole or an (extra) reason we should be afraid of Trump which the author seemed to suggest in other tweets.
If they're spitting, sure. But the OP seemed to imply that they just thought they would vomit. People have died due to suffocating on vomit with these things on.
If anybody is acting rashly here, I think it's probably the police officers who profiled him, threw him in jail, put a bag over his head, and then charged him (after 2 drinks) with "public intoxication", because " we're racist" isn't an official charge.
But please keep calm, internet, I'm sure the police were in the right.
People shouldn't stay calm. Every time anyone accuses the police of anything we should immediately believe them and start shouting about injustice on the internet.
Nobody who has been arrested has ever been guilty, and filling up every public forum with accusations of injustice the instant we hear any rumor is a mature and effective way to fix the problems in the world.
It is completely reasonable for you to condemn the the police and assume they are guilty of near criminal behavior and bigotry based on the unsupported story someone you don't know personally is posting to Twitter. Most of the time people who just got out of jail are telling the truth, and we should just assume whatever they say is true and start calling for people to lose their jobs.
In fact, every time anyone is arrested then later say they are not guilty, all the police in the entire world are automatically racists.
This is exactly the problem. The police are obviously not always in the wrong, but when people automatically assume that, regardless of what victims say, the police are in the right, that's why nothing changes. Nobody is calling for anyone to lose their jobs based on a tweet, we're calling for people to pay attention, listen to the victims, and make sure this sort of behavior is investigated and that people are held accountable.
You said yourself in the comment I replied to that these police profiled him because they are racist, and that he did nothing wrong.
Since you don't know the person that was arrested (I assume), and you don't know the police who arrested him, you must have some more general way to know that the police here are racists that are profiling him, right? Maybe you know that they are racists because you know all police are racists? Or is it just police in this Country or this State or this City? Maybe 'all police on the night shift' are racist? I don't know how you knew they were racists, but you said it, so I assume you are reasonable to believe it, and there must be a logical way that you figured it out from information you know is true.
As for how you knew this person was innocent, well, since you don't know him, didn't witness any of the events, and only know 'a person was arrested and said it wasn't their fault', the logic from above must apply. You must have made a logical inference that he is innocent. How do you know it?
How do you know that the police here are racists that profiled this person who did nothing wrong? If it is based entirely on the evidence that this person said they did nothing wrong, and that the person tweeted that they were arrested for no reason because the police are racist, well then you must believe everyone who says they didn't do it and that police are racist (or at least the ones that work for Google? or that use Twitter? I'm not sure how you were able to solve this, please let us know.) In that case it would imply that all police are racists, since all police arrest people who later claim to be innocent.
He is a white male, the tweet about having a boyfriend probably means he is gay however i doubt that he was in drag singing it's raining men when he was arrested so it doesn't look like the police could even profile him for that.
Police should not be accorded any presumption of correct behavior or professionalism. Any use of force by state actors should be treated with maximum skepticism.
>Before we turn into an angry mob, can we try to wait until more facts come out about this?
Okay but do yourself a favor and look up Austin PD, Art Acevedo, and co. before you rush to their defense. They're not exactly shining beacons of virtue. Frankly, I am confused as to how Acevedo can survive an election in Austin with all the shit he and his deputies have done over the years.
Just to alleviate your confusion, Acevedo can survive an election, because Chief of Police is an appointed position in Austin. He isn't on a ballot anywhere.
Just to alleviate your confusion, Acevedo can survive an election, because Chief of Police is an appointed position in Austin. He isn't on a ballot anywhere.
I thought this is what we wanted it? The ability to point at someone claim they're a harasser/suspicious and get them bagged and tagged? Have I missed the memo were that's not the modus operandi of recent efforts for combating harassment?
i was hit by a cop in his car in austin walking home from dinner with my so
he slammed on his brakes the moment he realised and the first thing out of his mouth was, 'sir! back up onto the curb!(to my so) sir! sir, have you been drinking?'
my so and i replied, 'WHAT?! you hit me, there is still 10 seconds on the walk clock!' pointing at the crosswalk clock for our direction.. the cop ran his red light
the next second three other cop cars sped onto the scene blocking the traffic in three directions
all of their officers got out of their vehicles and rushed over to the officer who hit me and asked him, 'what's going on here?'
then he walked them out of earshot and was gesturing wildly with his hands and pointed at us
i walked over to their kafka'esque huddle and stated, 'why are you asking him? he's the one who struck me with his vehicle'
they asked for 'my version' of the story then if i needed an ambulance to come and take me to the er, and i said i would be unable to afford an ambulance and hospital stay so they said, 'well, then everything is fine here' and all four officers got in their cars and drove off
leaving my so and i in the middle of the intersection of 7th and melina confused and infuriated
if i was alone i'm sure i would have been bagged as well for following the rules of road but finding myself under the bumper of a red light running cop
the fact that this was during sxsw 2014 had previously been uninteresting to me
..edit, said 'last year' but i lived in austin in 2014, yup, time flies
86 comments
[ 59.0 ms ] story [ 2386 ms ] threadAustin & Texas have a lot of problems.
Not to dismiss that event, still pretty fucked up, but not the same order of magnitude.
> but not the same order of magnitude.
Systemic abuse magnifies the scale of individual incidents.
If taking your hat off was required for the picture, then she should also have to take her hat off. If taking your hat off was optional, then she should be able to keep her hat on.
Because SXSW is one of the most important events of the year for launching digital products that are not games? Lots of regulars of this website (myself included) are part of product launches at SXSW.
It's also a diversity-related story, which has been becoming an increasingly important topic for HN.
> It is Travis County, the liberal mecca of Texas.
There are lots of liberals who act in racist ways.
What does that even mean?
If you're saying that dividing cities into "safe" and "not safe" requires an arbitrary threshold, then yes, it's arbitrary where you set the threshold. But even then, you can non-arbitrarily label cities as "safer" and "less safe" when compared to each other.
But if you mean that the concept of "safe" is arbitrary: Safe means that there's a lower chance (not zero!) that I'll be on the receiving end of crime. Less chance that I'll be put in the hospital (or in the ground) or have my stuff stolen. That translates into less worry and less attention that I have to pay to keeping myself safe. (It does not mean that I can pay no attention!) That "less worry" and "less chance of being injured or killed" are not arbitrary. They make a real, concrete difference in my life.
If safe/unsafe is dependant on who you are, then calling a place "safe" or even "safer" needs lots of provisos.
Anyway, bad choice of words. In retrospect "safe is a relative thing" gets closer to what I mean.
And I agree that "safe is a relative thing".
Sounds about right.
I have myself similar problems but for different reasons.
https://twitter.com/francesc/status/709161902631424004
It is what Twitter is like when you get some exposure unfortunately. Trolls, racists, etc. come out of the woodwork.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/opinion-trump-latest-pied...
Sometimes people on the internet are right, sometimes they are wrong. They are not saying anything here that they wouldn't have said if they heard this story in real life, the only difference is that they are saying it out loud where everyone can hear it, instead of in a private way to their close associates.
Someone comes into a large room we are all in, and announces very loudly to everyone "I JUST GOT ARRESTED FOR BEING DRUNK AND IT WAS NOT BECAUSE I WAS DRUNK, THE POLICE ARE RACIST"
People are laughing, and some comments can be heard among the people in the room like "YEA, RIGHT", "THAT'S WHAT THEY ALL SAY", "THANKS FOR THE UPDATE", etc.
I don't think we would really think the comments were that inappropriate. When you go into public and broadcast something, it is perfectly acceptable for people to disbelieve you or make fun of what you said.
People who did nothing will usually say they did nothing.
People who committed a crime or were very unruly or unsafely intoxicated will also usually say they did nothing.
Let's not start sharpening the pitchforks quite yet.
This could be a ridiculous and completely unjust situation!
However, it could also be that this person got very drunk while partying and did something stupid, and either remembers it incorrectly (see 'drunk') or is terrified of losing their job and wants to set the narrative.
Everytime I've been to jail, there are newbies in the holding cells that cry "I didn't do anything" and can't believe how horrible and mean all the CO's are.
And everytime, if and when I go to First Appearance with them, it turns out they very much did something quite illegal that got them arrested in the first place, and its almost always something then did not want to discuss while they were whining in the holding cell.
If your are new to jail, every fucking hour seems like an entire day and the powerlessness of the situation seems beyond comprehension.
BTW, it designed like that so, you know, you don't ever want to come back. That's the whole point.
Seems to contradict
> I have been locked up over 20 times in my life.
Now going on the assumption that you did not want to go back it looks as if that alone is not enough to stop it from happening.
It took me 25 years and utterly wrecked relationships with my brother, closest old friends, and my lovely ex-wife to start to begin to see the light.
None of them really talk to me anymore, even though I've been pretty much clean for years now.
I drove for 18 years on a suspended license that I was unable to get reinstated for 5 years at time because I spent the ticket money on dope. Many of my arrests were due to driving issues, but certainly not all.
It's been a real mess, and I'm tired. Maybe someone going down that path will read this and think about what I'm saying.
It looks - by your writing - as though you've come out the other end of this and are on your way to a better life, congratulations, it must have been extremely hard to get to where you are today, I don't think my dad would have been able to achieve what you have done no matter how much time he would have had.
I often think the only silver lining to the wreck-that-is-my-life is that I left such an ugly imprint on them both that neither of them really touch anything "evil", and I am incredibly proud of both of them, as I am sure your Dad was of you.
Yeah whew...thank you very much for your kind words BTW. To tell the truth the hard part isn't staying totally sober these days, the hard part is trying to find a place in society for a 50yo man who has none of the obvious material trappings of a successful life and a whole shitstorm of dirty laundry that is only a Google search away.
In a different tweet the author said that it was for public intoxication. Austin is a big college town and throwing young guys into the drunk tank for public intoxication is a pretty common thing in these type of towns. And I am willing to bet that most people who are thrown into the drunk tank think they "did nothing wrong".
A reasonable explanation is this guy got a little tipsy and the police thought he was drunker than he was, threw him into a drunk tank to sober up, put a spit mask over his head in case (or because) he was being belligerent or he might puke, then released him once he was clearly sober.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is fair treatment. But for anyone who has spent years living in a college town populated by tens of thousands of drunk 20 somethings, it is at least understandable why the citizenry would want police to respond this way. It is also far from a sign that the US is racists as a whole or an (extra) reason we should be afraid of Trump which the author seemed to suggest in other tweets.
But please keep calm, internet, I'm sure the police were in the right.
Nobody who has been arrested has ever been guilty, and filling up every public forum with accusations of injustice the instant we hear any rumor is a mature and effective way to fix the problems in the world.
It is completely reasonable for you to condemn the the police and assume they are guilty of near criminal behavior and bigotry based on the unsupported story someone you don't know personally is posting to Twitter. Most of the time people who just got out of jail are telling the truth, and we should just assume whatever they say is true and start calling for people to lose their jobs.
In fact, every time anyone is arrested then later say they are not guilty, all the police in the entire world are automatically racists.
What are you talking about?
Since you don't know the person that was arrested (I assume), and you don't know the police who arrested him, you must have some more general way to know that the police here are racists that are profiling him, right? Maybe you know that they are racists because you know all police are racists? Or is it just police in this Country or this State or this City? Maybe 'all police on the night shift' are racist? I don't know how you knew they were racists, but you said it, so I assume you are reasonable to believe it, and there must be a logical way that you figured it out from information you know is true.
As for how you knew this person was innocent, well, since you don't know him, didn't witness any of the events, and only know 'a person was arrested and said it wasn't their fault', the logic from above must apply. You must have made a logical inference that he is innocent. How do you know it?
How do you know that the police here are racists that profiled this person who did nothing wrong? If it is based entirely on the evidence that this person said they did nothing wrong, and that the person tweeted that they were arrested for no reason because the police are racist, well then you must believe everyone who says they didn't do it and that police are racist (or at least the ones that work for Google? or that use Twitter? I'm not sure how you were able to solve this, please let us know.) In that case it would imply that all police are racists, since all police arrest people who later claim to be innocent.
Okay but do yourself a favor and look up Austin PD, Art Acevedo, and co. before you rush to their defense. They're not exactly shining beacons of virtue. Frankly, I am confused as to how Acevedo can survive an election in Austin with all the shit he and his deputies have done over the years.
> apparent reason other than "public intoxication"
> I had 2 glass of bourbon
> Thanks, Texas!
I've been drunk in Austin myself, and it's pretty scary to think that I could have been detained. Probably won't visit again.
he slammed on his brakes the moment he realised and the first thing out of his mouth was, 'sir! back up onto the curb!(to my so) sir! sir, have you been drinking?'
my so and i replied, 'WHAT?! you hit me, there is still 10 seconds on the walk clock!' pointing at the crosswalk clock for our direction.. the cop ran his red light
the next second three other cop cars sped onto the scene blocking the traffic in three directions
all of their officers got out of their vehicles and rushed over to the officer who hit me and asked him, 'what's going on here?'
then he walked them out of earshot and was gesturing wildly with his hands and pointed at us
i walked over to their kafka'esque huddle and stated, 'why are you asking him? he's the one who struck me with his vehicle'
they asked for 'my version' of the story then if i needed an ambulance to come and take me to the er, and i said i would be unable to afford an ambulance and hospital stay so they said, 'well, then everything is fine here' and all four officers got in their cars and drove off
leaving my so and i in the middle of the intersection of 7th and melina confused and infuriated
if i was alone i'm sure i would have been bagged as well for following the rules of road but finding myself under the bumper of a red light running cop
the fact that this was during sxsw 2014 had previously been uninteresting to me
..edit, said 'last year' but i lived in austin in 2014, yup, time flies