501–510 of 864 posts
Hope my local department is better than that.
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and being woken in the middle of the night, wearing boxers or pajamas with hands in the air, better pray that they don't happen to slip down causing you to instinctively "reach for your waistband" in order to hitch them up
This seems to me to be what happened in the Daniel Shaver case, who was drunk and in his pajamas when police (responding to a report of a brandished gun being spotted in his motel room window) confronted him. He was facedown and yelled at for ~4 minutes before being shot when officers mistook him pulling up his waistband for reaching for a weapon: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/us/police-shooting-vid... The of…
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Actually I agree, and I think most cops would agree with that too. One thing hindering that ideal is how police officers are trained to have a chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever . In that philosophy the balance is tilted too far in favor of officer safety and away from public safety. Scour the news for any "hero" story. A hero never displays concern for his own safety, he act…
>if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed. If you grew up in the US (I can't speak for other countries), I think most people, despite the media coverage, would say otherwise. There's way too many cops for this to even make sense. If even 1% of police interaction ended in a death, there would be literally millions of people dead by cop every ye…
That would go further than making excuses for the rash thinking on the part of trigger-happy leo's.
The "swatter" should be charged with 2nd degree murder, minimum, but this particular instance is just the icing on a cake in which over 1000 people die every year from leo firearm discharge, and that is due to a culture within law enforcement that needs to CHANGE NOW. We have seen this coming for over 50 years, and it's OUT OF HAND at this point. It's past time for legislative actions to have taken place.
We are absolutely globally isolated in this regard (unless you count Duterte as good company and a supporter of the sort of society America should stand for.)
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3) Anyone implying that the police need to change is labeled anti police by a large portion of the population because this has become a political issue in the US and given the current political climate of identity politics there is really no reasoning with those people.
>given the current political climate of identity politics there is really no reasoning with those people. Can I just point out the irony of saying there's no reasoning with 'those people' because of identity politics.
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Shouldn't they prepare for the most likely scenarios, i.e. it's a bogus call or misrepresented whats happening, or that the perp just wants to surrender? How often do these calls turn out to be actually dangerous? One in a dozen? A hundred? Should cops wearing body armor use sniper rifles to shoot someone on their porch several hundred feet away just on the off chance they might have a pistol in their waistband?
if you worked a job where your life is legitimately at risk then you would know that you prepare for the worst every time.
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They have to approach the situation prepared for the worst case scenario. Problem is that they typically lack the proper training and the discipline required, and act too hastily. There's also a huge problem with the whole that macho, gun loving, power-tripping culture, it just makes things worse, wrong profile of people gets that kind of job.
The worst case scenario? I’m pretty sure that is the scenario that played out. Police should be prepared to die wearing the badge, with civilian casualty being an absolute last resort. It works this way for the military. I can’t fathom why it doesn’t work this way with police.
I understand the U.N. Laws of War, official terms of engagement, and military law don't talk in terms of risk percentages, but practically that's the calculation each soldier must make. We have to be careful of how much saintliness we ask of policemen (and soldiers) else we won't be able to hire more than a handful.
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and being woken in the middle of the night, wearing boxers or pajamas with hands in the air, better pray that they don't happen to slip down causing you to instinctively "reach for your waistband" in order to hitch them up
Sleep naked
A martyr's death.
Coming from a country where the police spends more time developing people skills than doing gun practice, it never ceases to puzzle me how the solution to any situation appears to be to shoot anything that moves on the flimsiest of assumptions, then figure out what happened afterwards. Now, I appreciate that the police in the US does face a population with more guns on hand than the Norwegian police does; this surely…
I don't think it's reasonable or effective to entirely expect police to solve this problem. Here is the account from the article: Livingston said when the door opened, officers gave Finch commands to put his hands up and walk toward them. He complied for a "very short time" and put his hands back down. He raised them again, and then lowered them for a second time, Livingston said. "The male then turned towards the of…
You don't have a perspective here, you're uncritically adopting theirs, which is designed to present things in a certain way.
'the male' - not a person or a man; dehumanizing language
'turned towards the officers' - probably because he had just noticed their presence; this language implies intent
'the residence' - it's a house; unnecessary abstracting leads to a loss of valuable context
'lowered his hands to the waistband again' - do you wear pants or a skirt? then you have a waistband, and guess what, your hands naturally hang just below wait level; everyone who isn't naked and holding their hands in the air is assumed to be armed with a concealed handgun
'then suddenly pulled them back up towards those officers at the east' - probably because they were telling to put his hands up and most people lift their arms up in front of them rather than to the side as when doing jumping jacks; implies the action was directed at them without evidence
See? It all sounds like delightfully objective, but it's actually selective and subjective. You were manipulated into treating conclusions as if they were evidence.
I think probably the most effective way to solve the problem would be to make people better aware of what makes you appear threatening and non-threatening in a confrontation.
You know police departments consider hands and feet to be 'personal weapons' right? A paranoid person (and police suffer from a degree of professional paranoia) is apt to make irrational assessments of threat factors, and this problem is compounded by a deficit of integrity among some officers and police unions, so that you get police like Michael Slager claiming to be acting out of fear when actually they were shooting someone in the back for running away (fortunately he was convicted of murder, but probably only because he was caught on video).
Some of us have been insulated from violence for so long that we don't know what it looks like.
I'm not. I have a lot of experience with this. If it's alien to you then maybe join a martial arts club or visit a shooting range or whatever would broaden your experience; or don't, if you'd rather not. But insofar as you're not well able to judge this, you should absolutely not be taking the statements of people who have a vested interest at face value because by your own admission, you're not in a good position to assess their claims.
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The one time I was arrested (for illegal use of a roadway during a protest), during the post arrest search of my belongings, the cop searching made some comment about something in my bag and I turned my head (I was facing a wall) to reply, for which he immediately shoved my face back into the wall and said "You're not allowed to move - my safety is more important than yours". Keep in mind, this is in a police station…
Look up a Youtube channel called PoliceActivity . It is a collection of dashcam/bodycam videos of US police involved in some kind of shooting/assault. They are not edited down to fit a news report so videos usually last 10-30 minutes. Some show cops stealing money/drug from suspects and US media actually showed such clips in news reports. But lots of the videos show actual circumstances leading up to shooting by poli…
Why wouldn't they? They do have a choice. Of course it's more complicated than simply saying that, but it's ridiculous to suggest a cop doesn't have a choice in where they work or live or even the field in which they work. Being a cop is not compulsory and even offers more opportunities for movement than many other professions.
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As far as I’m concerned, they’re both equally liable. If this was a case of mistaken identity rather than a malicious call, we’d all be calling for the cop’s head even though it would have been the same error.
A caller just wasted the time of the SWAT unit. A SWAT unit shot an innocent man. It is very difficult for me to place both parties as "equally liable". Sure, there should be a punishment for the caller, but he didn't kill an innocent man and it sure as hell wasn't his intention to. He just didn't think of the possible consequence. In no way, shape or form does that equal to "actually put a bullet in someone innocent…