• MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    2 months ago

    I didn't say the cops handled this well. I said they can be criticized here and we should check their story.

    “one big reason people give fake names upon arrest is that they know they are wanted for more serious crimes.” I don’t even know how that follows from or applies to this story?

    And even if everything she told them was true its not justification for keeping her in jail without trial nor hearing.

    Every country, including AES states, detains people before initial hearings in certain circumstances. One factor in deciding if they should be held in custody or out on bail is "do we even know who this person is?" You don't want a situation where you arrest someone wanted for a serious crime, they lie about their identity, and you let them go -- this is something we clown on cops for fucking up!

    I'm not saying this girl was wanted for a serious crime. I'm saying if you were to share this as agitprop without reading the article, a lot of people you're trying to agitate will come back with observations like this, because "cops let serious criminal slip through their fingers due to laziness" is basically a cliché in popular crime stories.

    • Chronicon [they/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      her being 13 really undermines this for me. That fact should have been obvious. They should have been looking for her parents not letting her sit in gen pop for 2 weeks not giving a shit, because they had the cop-out excuse of "she's unidentified and homeless" to just throw away the key. That's what makes it good agitprop, a random 13 year old girl is not a fuckin murderer (and would be highly known/wanted if she were), and even if they couldn't find her parents for some reason, she should have been with CPS not in jail.

      What an AES state might or might not do doesn't determine what I think capitalist states can do. AES states presumably have a lot less purposefully un/underdocumented homeless populations, and a lot more (and more justified) trust in government. When you put barriers in place of people getting and keeping valid identity documents you shouldn't be surprised when people start showing up without them

      I'm not on the "hope this person gets banned from 'grad" train, but I do think this wasn't a great take and certainly didn't "read the room"

      • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        2 months ago

        I didn’t say the cops handled this well. I said they can be criticized here and we should check their story.

        My disagreement with you is solely limited to whether this is good agitprop.

        I brought up how pretrial detention is used everywhere, including in AES states, because when we use stories like this to say things like "its not justification for keeping her in jail without trial nor hearing," we show our ass a bit. Lots of persuadable people out there would point out that there's a reason some people are held before trial; it's not some unique horror of the U.S. criminal legal system. We make the exact same argument when libs push "China bad because they exercise authority" articles.

        • Chronicon [they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          What makes it good agitprop is that she's 13 and the cops didn't give a fuck, it shows their inhumanity. And idk, if china holds people for weeks or months without a hearing I'd be critical of that too, generally. Not all lib "evil CCP must go" levels of mad about it, but certainly it's not ideal.

          Edit: they did give her a bail hearing. so feel free to scratch the bit about "without trial nor hearing" It was cash bail though, and it still feels like the word "homeless" was all it took for the jailers to give zero shits and throw away the key

          edit 2: ultimately what people are mad about IMO, is the fact that they felt scolded for posting about this here, which is you know, not a mixed space and not primarily/solely for agitprop. The phrasing was some shit people harboring liberal opinions about police love to trot out.

      • RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Trying to armchair theorycraft why a story about cops being fucking pigs to a minor as suboptimal "agitprop" codes to me as someone who sees themselves as a planner and manipulator, or is trying to portray themselves as 'pragmatic' with regards to signal boosting and spreading stories that serve a narrative, and tells me they have some kind of experience, real or imagined, that leads them to naturally think like this. Maybe they're doing a "how do you do, fellow leftists" thing, and their specific brand of neurodivergence and employment is making them give the game away, or maybe it's just somebody that has been told they're very smart their whole life and has never had that challenged, and never been forced to confront themselves or ever do meaningful self crit - the positioning of making this about its value as propaganda in order to play it down comes off as kinda 5D chess-y to me in a way that's either accidentally sincere or delusional.

        The inability to present any kind of thoughtfulness or empathy, the inability to read the room, to not understand why the story was posted and shared, to resist constructive criticism outright and get lost in dumb fights just comes off like exactly the kind of guy that will die on this hill because they're a fool, or because they're trying to stir shit up. Either way he sucks and needs to go to therapy or work on himself.

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          I think you're reading too much into it. They're just a cringey nerd who's insecure that no one takes them seriously in real life. They try to explain this by thinking that because other leftists act like weird cranks, they aren't taken seriously by normal people since everyone else assume they're a weird leftist crank when the real reason why normal people don't take them seriously is because they're a cringey insecure nerd. Hence the obsession with optics.