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The New York Times is reporting that last year had more shots fired by police officers in more than a decade. On top of this 16 people were killed by NYPD officers; 30 more were shot; dogs were shot at 24 times; 13 officers were shot (no deaths); and officers were killed by their own firearms.
This said, for a city of millions, it doesn’t seem all that bad even though the individual cases are surely tragic within themselves. The numbers for 2013 are going to be interesting for the city because it is the last year ‘stop and frisk’ policies will be implemented by police officers. This was a controversial policy used against primarily African American males under the age of 25 the last few years and mainly ended up costing the city money for arrests made for petty crimes like marijuana even though white males are most likely to be armed within the city.
If the numbers related to violence drop, those in favor of the ‘stop and frisk’ policies to be ended will point to their opinion, while if they increase, those for the policies will point to their direction. Should be interesting to see.. It will be an interesting year.
I’ve written about mayors that are arrogant, have an addiction to crack-cocaine, and still somehow end up to keep positions of power before (Mayor Barry) but Rob Ford has seemingly one-uped him. They both even have managed to have videos of their intake of crack surfing around (the Rob Ford one hasn’t surfaced but many sources say that his people got a hold of it first) but Rob Ford officially has a video of him going crazy during a council meeting in Toronto. The meeting, of course, was to decide what limitations of power would be applied to Mayor Ford but after he literally went after one of the members, he could be looking at much more than limitations.
From the video, it doesn’t look like he was going to hit anyone but he did manage to yell and scream and then force through council member, knocking her to the ground as many jumped to help her out and separate Rob Ford from her. That is bad enough if you ask me..
Regardless, the Toronto news channel’s anchors were commenting the entire time and while all of this unfolded, they seemed pretty horrified. I can’t get over how bad this video looks.
A California father has gone to his state’s media outlets after he says Google failed to remove an image of his dead son’s body. Google takes countless numbers of photographs because they literally have the ambition of putting our entire world’s imagery online. This said, it isn’t surprising that there are various anomalies, surprises and unintentional images caught in the process, I just didn’t expect that murder scenes would be one of them. Its pretty easy to bash Google and say something along the lines of, ‘how did this get online?’ but when you consider their overwhelming amount of photographic data, it isn’t if they can proof every single close up image of a random land mass.
Google say’s that they are working on this predicament now and that normally don’t accelerate the changing of their satellite’s imagery upon request but I’d say this is a pretty reason is to do so. The father himself said the photo “brings back memories” and when you look at it, while it isn’t graphic, its obviously a body recovery scene. You see a couple of police cars, people standing near them (cops), and off in the distance, a pretty chilling figure or silhouette of a body isolated on its own. I’m not going to speculate if the father was looking up Google imagery of the scene where his body was found or if someone let him know of its existence but it doesn’t seem as if he is going to forget about it anytime soon now that it is a story of national and local media.
http://agauvin1.wix.com/violenceinmedia
My website features topics specifically related to violence depicted in the media.
Here is a pretty crazy video showing the reaction of a white supremacist finding out he is 14% black on what seems to be some sort of talk show in Europe. To make matters worse for him, the hosts are black and completely (and deservedly) embarrass him, saying phrases like ‘congratulations my brother’ and giving him a high five which actually reluctantly did. The funny part is that he looks like a typical European American but apparently he under estimated biology and the diversity of society.
If I was a white supremacist, I don’t see how I could end up in that situation. Also, if I was so obsessed with race and whatnot, wouldn’t you think that type of person would take the time to research and understand that more goes into family roots than just the color of your skin? I guess hes so blinded with hate that he never even bothered. Regardless of his enlightening news I’m sure he’s finding some crazy way to spin it in his head that he is still purely white.
North Korea is a pretty surreal place when you think about what we have here in America. Recently, a nationwide execution was practiced throughout North Korea throughout several towns and cities. Over 80 citizens of the country were shot down by gunfire because of offenses consisting of the viewing of ‘propaganda’ against the country and prostitution. All of the executions reportedly happened on the same day and one of them consisted of a hand full of prisoners sentenced to death by firing squad in front of a crowd 10,000.
Apparently, Western reality television shows like Desperate Housewives are popular in the capitalistic South Korea and have unsurprisingly found their way into even the harshest communist climates like North Korea. The North regime is seemingly paranoid of any thought process from their citizens that may involve questioning and access to the outside world apparently is a catalyst. Between the ghostly highways and dreadful labor camps that have been reported from around the globe by various media outlets, it isn’t hard to see that people could have been suffering but the mass murder of a country’s own citizens is hard to read.
I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Fox Sports’ interview with Richie Incognito today. It featured Jay Glazier obviously giving premeditated questions to Incognito about the racism and bullying that supposedly occurred within the Miami Dolphin’s locker room. For one, Incognito has a personal and business relationship with Glazer, the ‘journalist’ interviewing him, which supposedly stems from MMA lessons that Glazer used to give him.
Of over a thousand text messages sent from Jonathon Martin (the player bullied) to Incognito that Jay Glazer had access to, this is what he chose to show on national television: “wassup man? lol the world’s gone crazy” and “Yeah I’m good. Its insane bro, just know I don’t blame you guys. Its just the whole culture around football and the locker room that got to me”. Sounds a little selective in favor of Incognito to me but who knows what the terms were for Incognito to even give the interview in the first place. Regardless, this interview offered nothing to gain for the public other than a very publicly controlled side to Richie’s story.
An Arizona boy’s father pulled him from school last week after the principal brought him into a meeting to discuss his son’s Halloween idea’s which supposedly nothing other than ideas for costumes that the 8 year old boy wanted to wear. You can see the drawings here and obviously they are nothing out of the realm of what you expect any boy to draw. Yeah, there is a gun but to boys, guns are cool and it is perfectly normal to assume that any of the video games hes played or movies that he has watched gave him the motivation (they were probably made for him anyway).
Regardless of this typical, innocent drawing that you would see from a kid, the principal threatened the boy’s parents with expulsion and was apparently ‘outraged’. I’m pretty sure that if I was the boy’s father I wouldn’t be too excited about having a principal like that either. I’m glad I didn’t grow up in these times where gun control and violence among our children are so controversial because I used to draw the craziest, violence-motivated battle scenes an elementary school student could imagine as a kid and I was also proud of them. I think the media is going to overwhelmingly back the father on this one, otherwise I won’t have much faith left for our main-stream media outlets anymore.
The fact that American sports fans have the potential to go borderline crazy when it comes to sports is no surprise whether its fans fighting (or killing) each other at football games, fights breaking out at little league baseball games or your standard binge drinking at tailgating parties that happen at virtually every NFL game every Sunday. The killings and fighting are often isolated, but alcohol consumption at sporting events isn’t so much and it seems that riots happening on the streets of Boston are not so much either. Back in 2004, when Boston won their first title in 86 years, riots ensued on the streets surrounding their beloved baseball field prompting riot teams to shoot bean bags into the crowd resulting in the death of a college student.
This time around, the Redsox won their first World Series at home in more than 90 something plus years and the usual drunken idiots flocked to the streets, flipping cars and dancing on top of them. Only a handful of people were arrested the night of the riot but I’m sure the number will grow because people were carelessly flaunting and posing themselves on top of the cars they just toppled for cameras (which are all over local and national media). They even managed to flip someone’s car over with someone still inside of it; if your the driver and you luckily didn’t get injured in the actual flipping of the car itself, how scared would you be to crawl out of the window of the car to be greeted by your fellow psycho path Boston fans? I don’t really get the reasoning behind destroying your city after you just witnessed its sporting accomplishment. This also happened in Vancouver a couple year ago when their hockey team lost but at least they had something to be angry about.
Andrew Gauvin 