I explicitly endorse her statement that your position, in which you possess a preternatural ability to show nerves of steel and therefore everyone should be able to assess and plan for the reactions of others, appears to be born of an ignorance of the reality of others, including in particular, black people.
[Quote=Senor Beef]
You idiots all sound like you’d deliberately quickly reach into your glove box unannounced just to say “I can do whatever the fuck I want, and to say anything otherwise is blaming the victim”
[/quote]
Ah, looking back at it in the cold light of day I can totally see how not-antagonstic that was. Clearly it was crafted to foster positive exchange of viewpoints, especially when paired with the completely reasonable restatement of others’ point of view that you concluded that with.
You have been shown southern; you have been shown white; the remaining reference is to people who are part of the jury pool in SC. Do you need that reference re-posted, you pathetic asshole?
One thing that really puzzles about all the exhortations to move slowly, be calm, etc., etc. during police encounters is that they place the responsibility for managing those encounters of the very people who have the least experience in dealing with them.
I’ve been driving in the United States for 14 years, and i’ve been pulled over exactly once (the officer was very nice, and let me off with a warning). Many people never get pulled over even once, and the vast majority of the population probably only finds themselves in this situation a few times in their lives.
Cops, on the other hand, come into contact with members of the public, especially those driving vehicles, hundreds or even thousands of times in their careers. If i were a cop, and if i were worried about the dangers of sudden movements, i would think about what i could do to minimize such incidents, and the misunderstandings that might arise from them.
Here’s a possible way to handle the situation that inspired this thread:
Pretty fucking simple really. Takes an extra five seconds, and puts the burden of controlling the situation—before it reaches “Shoot another Black Man” stage—where it belongs: on the shoulders of the professional police officer.
And anyone who watches the video, and argues that the guy looks like he’s going for a weapon, is fucking delusional. Either that, or they believe that any effort to reach into a car in order to get something can reasonably be interpreted as “going for a weapon.” Because that’s exactly what it looked like to me: the guy turning to get something from the car, exactly as he had been told to do.
The other day, i stopped at the gas station to fill my car. After exiting, i realized that i had left my credit card in the center console, so i turned and reached over to retrieve it. Filmed from outside the car, my movements would have looked identical to those of the guy in the video. I’m glad some of your superheroes weren’t standing by with your weapon at the ready.
Oh for fucks sake, saying “you idiots [who believe this thing]” is an attack on that idea, saying someone has a stupid belief. Saying “you are a moron” is saying someone is of sub-average intelligence, a direct and personal insult.
An apologist who says the cop jumped the gun, was unjustified in shooting, and was deservedly fired and taken up on charges?
Listen, look at the early pages in this thread and look at the utter rampant stupidity directed at Smapti from people who are so averse to victim-blaming that they go to ridiculous lengths to make blame entirely binary. That’s the stupidity that made me participate in this thread. I otherwise don’t care.
I’m not generally an apologist for law enforcement, and in fact I’m actually probably one of the board’s more outspoken posters on being against the militarization of the police and issues of the encroaching police state.
How anyone gets anything “tough guy” or “racist” from me from my posts here, I have no idea.
What the fuck are you talking about? When I say that when I’m pulled over, I act slowly and deliberately and communicate my intentions to the officer, I’m bragging about my “nerves of steel”? How in the world does that advice somehow specifically not apply to black people anyway?
If you can find anything even fucking vaguely racist in my posts in this thread, you are detached from reality or simply have extremely poor reading comprehension. Nothing I’ve said is racially tinged, nor did anything I suggest for interacting with the police require “nerves of steel”
To me, a lot of it comes down to the use of words like “should”. If Smapti says “you should always move slowly and carefully around cops and verbally tell them what you are doing and keep your hands visible when at all possible”, does the should mean that that’s the everyday reasonable way that every good citizen is expected to behave, kind of like “you SHOULD recycle”? Or is it “here is a set of actions that you can take which might very slightly increase your odds of survival in the extremely unlikely and unfortunate situation in which you encounter an incredibly irresponsible and trigger-happy cop”? If it’s the second, then there’s probably some technical truth to what he’s saying. But it certainly sounds like he’s saying the first. And of course in any case he’s focusing on the actions of the person who was unambiguously the victim, which is problematic for a variety of reasons.
For fuck’s sake indeed. If people want to bash opinions rather than the people holding them, they usually say something like, “You guys are espousing an idiotic opinion” rather than “You guys are idiots for espousing this opinion.”
You are an idiot if you can’t see the difference.
And if this was all you were saying, no one would be giving you shit. But that’s not all you’ve been saying, is it? Because why else would people be giving you shit?
If multiple people are misreading you, maybe you need to consider that you aren’t communicating effectively.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
To me, a lot of it comes down to the use of words like “should”. If Smapti says “you should always move slowly and carefully around cops and verbally tell them what you are doing and keep your hands visible when at all possible”, does the should mean that that’s the everyday reasonable way that every good citizen is expected to behave, kind of like “you SHOULD recycle”? Or is it “here is a set of actions that you can take which might very slightly increase your odds of survival in the extremely unlikely and unfortunate situation in which you encounter an incredibly irresponsible and trigger-happy cop”?
[/QUOTE]
It’s meant in the second sense; it is interpreted in the first so as to maximize the opportunity to take offense.
These pretty well sum up my feelings about this case.
I’m lucky enough to live in a country (Ireland) where your average beat cop is unarmed, and frequently, unseen, and it’s still a basically peaceful and orderly place (now). So of course this kind of thing doesn’t happen here. But then I remember that cops in Germany, France, pretty much all of Europe, are armed, and these kinds of things don’t happen there, either.
I mean no personal offense to Americans, but your country is at present a real outlier in social terms relative to its peers. You get the worst of both worlds - the repression of a police state and extremely high rates of personal crime and violence. Nothing Mr. Jones did in the video would’ve drawn police firepower in Lyon or Copenhagen or Frankfurt. Only in America do some of you guys quibble over the details - it doesn’t matter. This is a crazy state of affairs.
The thing is that the conclusion – the relevance or the importance or the point or whatever – of making the statement “they could have done something differently” is never stated. The Smaptis never say that the reason that it matters is that all people should act like that all the time, or that people who don’t act like that have failed morally or intellectually and deserve reprobation for it.
They just make the statement and then wait for somebody to make the obvious inference about what the significance is, then they play defense. I never blamed the victim; all I said was they could have done X, Y and Z, and that would have resulted in A, B, C. They never say so what.
Shodan is demonstrating this now. How dare you people draw the obvious conclusion of what I’m saying, when all I’m doing is making a factually accurate statement. It’s a PSA that I’m delivering coincidentally during a discussion of a high-profile situation in which my prescription for the victim’s behavior was not followed.
Even if it went down the way SenorBeef said, the cop STILL handle everything wrong. If he thought the dude was up to something, the next step in the escalation of force would have been to draw his weapon, point, and turn that Cop Voice of Authority dial up to 11. Not shoot. Until you see an actual weapon in a person’s hand, shooting them is never ever the correct response, in any police department in this country. The cop was just wrong, period.
It’s almost like you don’t even know what you yourself have posted here. How else should we interpret this other than a claim to being “extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic” in the face of real threat?
And the point is, that’s all well and good and if everyone were you, there *might *be less instances of jumpy cops shooting people. However, many people are, in fact, not you. Some possess qualities like normal levels of anxious reactions in the face of real threat, and some possess higher than normal levels of anxious reactions in the face of real threat.
Still others are pigmented differently than you, and in a way that differentially draws the attention of law enforcement. Pretending like your solution is equal to theirs is to ignore the fact that their interaction starts out fundamentally different from its inception.
It’s fucked up advice from the start, because the reaction to events like this must not be “how do we calibrate everyone to be like Senor Beef” but how do we calibrate the police to not be like this particular cop.
I’m reading at least one of you, but multiple ones with varying retention of past authorship appear to be responding.
Oh please, there’s no way you’re not being disingenuous here.
The response you’re quoting was in response to Marley23 saying that he hopes I’m not a cop, because he feels that I’d be trigger happy.
And I said quite the opposite, I’m not prone to this sort of panic. Neither are most cops, as we can tell by the fact that we don’t have 1500 people dying per day in these sorts of incidents.
So I was saying that though I would regard his movements suspiciously, if I were in that cop’s shoes, like most other cops, I would not panic and start shooting at the guy. That’s not exactly a giant leap nor a big act of bravery. I’m just saying I’m not as prone to panic as an obviously unfit cop. Oooh, what a brag.
You’re trying to conflate that attitude by suggesting that my separate statements about always being slow and deliberate and communicative with officers is what I’m referring to with my statement about being in the position of the officer. Those things were so obviously separated that there’s no way you can conflate the two except by dishonesty.
So I’ve contributed
A) When I interact with police, I communicate my intentions and try to be slow and deliberate as to assure them that I’m no threat
B) Someone accuses me of being trigger happy and hoping I’m not a cop because then I would shoot anyone I pulled over, EVEN THOUGH I HAD JUST SAID HE WAS A BAD COP AND ACTED OBVIOUSLY INCORRECTLY.
C) I say that actually, no, I’m not prone to panic like that cop and I wouldn’t have started shooting in that scenario.
Somehow you are trying to turn that into “oh you’re bragging about how calm and rational you are, because you’re better than that black guy right?!?!?” when I wasn’t even talking about the fucking role of the civilian in this situation with those comments.
So unless you’re some sort of stone-hearted tough guy, your natural reaction when being detained by the police is to make as many threatening moves as you can?
For fuck’s sake, saying “slow down, communicate to the officer, try not to act hostile” is not some fucking navy seal shit that only the truly hardcore can do. It’s pretty much the advice written by everyone - the ACLU, police organizations, etc.
Again you seem to be operating under the lie that I’m saying the cop acted properly. I said he was right to be fired and go to trial. How can you infer from me an unwillingness to see cops to be better trained and/or screened? Except that, exactly as I detailed earlier, if you have a simplistic binary view of blame then you infer that if I think the victim could’ve handled the situation better, then he must be the one to blame and the cop gets off scot free.
Nope. When you wrote “I’ve actually been in some situations where there was a real threat and I’m actually extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic” I took that to mean that you were saying “I’ve actually been in some situations where there was a real threat and I’m actually extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic.”
So, you were saying “I’m actually extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic” in a situation wherein you are hypothetically a cop, but otherwise you’re not “extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic”? Because I cannot discern anything from this that is not a claim that you are a generally extremely calm and rational person not prone to panic.
To bring this back to the point, your advice to remain calm and rational and not panic may be limited by your perspective as a person who (at least situationally?) is extremely calm and rational and not prone to panic.
And furthermore, your fail to account for other stark contextual differences from yourself that pertain to this interaction, foremost among them being a black man.
But, if you meant something else, than I say truly you have a dizzying intellect, and it’s too many for me.
Okay, good, that clarifies it. I thought that perhaps you might just be really dense, but it’s clear now that you’re lying. I laid it out even more simply than it was in the first place, and you ignore that and continue your lies.
Marley’s statement towards me was that I’d make a bad cop, because he presumably mistakenly thought I was advocating that the cop was right for shooting someone.
In fact, I’ve been in situations before in which I was armed and someone presented a very real threat, and I handled those situations quite well. This is analogous to the cop’s role in this incident. I’m saying that I’ve actually been in a situation in which someone presented a greater threat to me than this victim did to the cop in this scenario and I remained level headed.
This little aside is irrelevant to my advice on how to speak to cops when you’re being detained. This was only specifically in response to Marley’s accusation that I’d make a bad cop.
My other statements, about how you should work to reassure the cop that he’s in control of the situation, and to make your actions as non-threatening as possible, really has nothing to do with how I reacted as an armed man in a dangerous situation. I never gave “advice to remain calm and rational and not panic”, as you state in your post. I only said that that’s how I reacted when I was in a similar (worse) situation as that officer.
My advice as to how to handle being detained by police has nothing to do with that aside about what I’ve done in a situation similar to being in the cop’s role. I was saying what I do when I’m in the position of the citizen’s role. And nowhere in that did I say anything about remaining calm and rational and not panicking. I merely gave the extremely common sense and obvious advice as to not look threatening.
And I don’t even know how to interpret your racial accusations. Are you suggesting that it’s useless for a black man being detained to act as non-threatening as possible, or somehow not being black affected the situation in which I was more analogous to a cop, or what? I can’t even understand what sort of bullshit racism you’re getting at.
is the phenomenon to do with the popular and persistent myth that is being a cop is a “very dangerous” occupation. Law enforcement historically has *maybe *a time or two cracked the top ten list of most dangerous professions (I’ll assume without knowing that 9/11 caused 2001 to be such a year, at least for firefighters).
This myth is so persistent that it permeates the profession and, with some people, everything they do. And clearly, there’s largely a huge problem with sufficient pre-screening and training for those who go on the job. *Interacting *with a police officer is a far more dangerous thing. Indeed, as someone recently pointed out, you stand a far better statistical chance … regardless of your race or background or place of residence … of being killed by law enforcement than by a so-called or actual terrorist.
(I’m willing to put it out there that there are more terrorists within law enforcement than there are terrorists elsewhere … very few of which would self-identify as “terrorist” or agree with anyone else affixing the label. In this and other things, it’s time for some in the U.S. government to more seriously noodle on the “domestic enemies” portion of their oath of office.)
If cops don’t want people to mistrust them and fear them and wonder why it is they don’t get the principle task of “protect[ing] and serv[ing]” the public instead of themselves, then they need to stop whining about how unfair people are and instead start cleaning their own house. There’s only so much internal affairs can do, and these officers are ignoring the regulations that indicate they need to turn in the halfwits and fullwits who are unable to properly do their job. This thin blue line nonsense is the problem, as is the “there goeth I, but for random chance or one false complaint.”
I think stories like these (along with many others having nothing to do with shootings) is why folks need to put their foot down or pull their heads out of their asses and start dealing with facts (not “facts”) and preferential grotesque justifications for humanity (which, we must recognize, as a species, escaped/eluded any Quality Control Department).
Look, do you really not see how your advice, which I quote from you thusly: “… I act slowly and deliberately and communicate my intentions to the officer” is entirely dependent upon an ability to remain calm and rational and avoid panic? Do you not get that people vary in this ability as a matter of biology?
Well, you cannot even begin to fathom biological differences in anxiety, so I suppose expecting you to understand differences associated with race would be a bridge too far.
Oh come on. If you are unable to communicate your intentions or actions, or simply not move in a sudden and threatening manner, that’s not just the normal variation between behavior, that’s into low percentage mental illness territory. The guy in the video almost certainly acted as he did out of poor judgment, not a biological inability to do otherwise. FFS.
And yes, you are lying. You took two things that were unrelated and kept trying to conflate them by merely repeating a quote out of context. That’s dishonesty by anyone’s measure. My response to Marley about whether I’d make a bad cop is completely unrelated to my advice and practices about how I act under detainment. You cannot in good faith somehow not understand that.
Wait, so there’s a biological racial difference in how people response to the police? Please explain.
Look, the reason why it makes sense to stand firm against the idea that the cop’s behavior was mitigated in any way by the behavior of this particular guy is evident in the video itself. When the guy is down and writhing in pain and asking why he was shot, the cop says “you dove headfirst back in to your car.”
The message to other cops has to be a clear and unambiguous statement that no, this was not justification for shooting this guy. (Setting aside the mischaracterization of the guy’s movement.) Saying, “well, yeah, it kind of did lead to shooting this guy” does not help future scardey cops to avoid making the same mistake that this cop did.