Before anyone else misconstrues this, let me make clear. Nobody (AFAIK) called SenorBeef a racist. He was told that his perspective on the situation, and his advice on what to do, fails to take into account that black people in America face a different set of factors that influence these kind of interactions.
I added the idea that people also vary from one another along a dimension of anxiety, which also makes it problematic for him to extend his ability to remain calm and rational enough to make only deliberate and pre-announced movements to everyone else.
SenorBeef is the one who turned all that into an accusation of racism.
He didn’t act too slowly. I do think the pattern of “hesitation, sudden action” does resemble a sort of fight or flight response, which is what would’ve made me very alert in the first place. But he definitely takes his actions too quickly. And more importantly, he bucks expectations. The cop expected him to put a hand in his pocket - going back into his car unannounced is what made him react that way.
Oh please, that wasn’t disingenuous, that’s hyperbole. What Hentor did to my quotes is use them to try to misrepresent my position. I simply exaggerated your implication that I’d shoot the guy due to an itchy trigger finger into I’d shoot anyone due to an itchy trigger finger.
And no, I don’t think that’s slicing things fine at all. Cops are trained to react to threats appropriately. I think the victim’s defiance of expectation here would cause a reaction on most cops to escalate the situation to take control of it. Drawing their weapon, shouting at the guy to get out of the car or get their hands up. But that’s a far step away from actually shooting someone.
Shooting someone is an absolute last resort. It’s something you do when you feel like, if you don’t, you or someone else is going to get seriously hurt. Suspicious actions will make you escalate the situation to re-assert control over them, but that’s a far cry, not a “thin slice”, from deciding that someone poses enough of a threat to you to end them.
I think escalating to regain control of the situation is justifiable here, but shooting was not, by a long shot. Drawing your weapon and being prepared, yes, but an actual threatening motion or obvious presence of a weapon would be needed to escalate further.
I’m not bragging, I’m claiming the default. The vast majority of cops wouldn’t shoot the guy in that situation, and I wouldn’t either. Unlike most people, I’ve actually faced a situation in which I had to make a decision like that, and I handled it gracefully, as the vast majority of cops would. I have no desire to shoot anyone and would actually go quite out of my way to avoid it unless absolutely necessary. I don’t know how to get internet tough guy out of that.
Aversion to victim blaming is almost at cognitive dissonance levels in this thread. The guy could’ve made other choices about how he approached the situation that would’ve improved the outcome. Choices that are pretty much universally recommended and would be universally beneficial.
But the simplistic view is simply that we cannot examine the role the victim’s behavior may have played in this incident no matter what.
If I don’t lock my doors, it’s not my fault that my house got robbed - the blame for the action is still on the burglar. And yet one might reasonably suggest to me that I should lock my door. That isn’t victim blaming.
He said this:
I don’t know what that’s getting at. Do you? He’s suggesting that biological differences in reaction to anxiety play a role in differences in behavioral outcome from people. Is he then saying that the fact that the victim was black somehow affected his behavior?
“fathom biological differences in axiety…understand differences associated with race” seems to be suggesting that those both play a role in the behavior of the person who has those traits.
He made a bunch of weird statements on race that I didn’t really understand. It seems like he was trying to do some sort of race baiting with me, when I’m not interested in race nor did anything I’ve said so far have anything to do with it.
I think the word “blame” is pretty loaded and useless one here.
If the question is: “Were there any actions the victim could have taken to lessen his likelihood of getting shot”, and if the only possible answers are “yes” or “no”, then “yes” is almost certainly factually correct. BUT, a much better response is “wait, THAT is the question you are asking about this situation?”.
Throwing the word “blame”, and the even more loaded phrase “victim blaming” around, doesn’t really clarify anything.
If you were a black parent and you saw this video, I imagine your first response would be “holy shit that’s fucked up”, and your next several responses would be variants of “man I hope that cop gets fired and prosecuted” and “I hope that guy recovers OK”, and after a while you might get to “I hope that lapel-cams and dashboard-cams continue to be used by all cops all the time because they help bring horrible incidents like this to light”. But eventually you might get down to “hey, I’m going to go triple-stress with my kids that if they interact with cops they should not just be polite and calm with cops, but SUPER-polite and SUPER-calm”. It’s fucked up that we live in a society where it’s necessary for people to teach their kids that, and even more fucked up that it’s more necessary for some people to do so based on the color of their skin, but are you NOT going to teach your kids that just because on principle it shouldn’t be necessary?
Yeah, but you also said he acted in a manner that could be perceived as threatening. Why aren’t you admitting that too? Show courage for your position.
Perception is highly subjective. In your analysis of What Went Wrong, you’ve totally overlooked the fact that the threshold for “threatening behavior” is greatly influenced by gender and racial bias. There comes a point that a person should stop and consider whether their armchair quarterbacking is actually promoting racism or challenging it. By failing to acknowledge that the deck is stacked against black men and that your actions, as a non-black, are much less likely to be seen as a threat than theirs–which lessons your claim as any kind of speaker of authority–your opinions become eye rolley.
There was no hesitation, and no sudden movement. That’s bullshit. There was prompt following of instructions.
Further, he didn’t get shot when he reached into the car – he got shot when he followed the order to leave the car. Cop screams “get out of the car!”. Guy gets out of the car quickly, and is immediately shot. Guy backs away, arms in the air, and the cop continues to shoot.
Sure, I agree. But he thought the whole conversation was loaded with those kinds of accusations, so might as well, you know. State what I’m doing slowly and clearly.
“Blame” is a fuzzy semantic concept. Hypothetically, if someone taunted someone and insulted them gravely, and got punched in the face, would you say the puncher was 100% unambiguously to blame and the other guy had no blame at all? What if someone just ran up to someone else who didn’t do anything to them at all and punched them in the face? Are those two incidents identical in blame because in both cases, the one to blame is the puncher? I’m not saying these examples are analogous to our situation, just pointing out that blame is a game of semantics.
The victim in this case didn’t act out of malice or deviousness or anything negative. He didn’t deliberately cause any sort of negative situation. So in that sense, he’s blameless. He did, however, handle the situation sub-optimally, in a way that potentially escalated it. Did it justify getting shot? Absolutely not. But he could’ve handled it better in a way that would’ve prevented the situation from escalating. It’s a matter of miscommunication and sub-optimal action, not a judgment of character.
How? He reached into his car. The cop pointed his gun and yelled “get out of the car!”. So he promptly obeyed this order and got out of the car and was immediately shot. The cop shot him when he was following the cop’s order to get out of the car. And then he kept shooting – he was backing away with his hands up, and the cop kept shooting.
So what on earth could this man have done when the cop yelled “get out of the car” to not get shot?
Okay, so because the guy is black, I’m inherently racist. Are you ruling out the possibility that I could have the same opinion if it was a white guy?
Fuck your sanctimonious bullshit. You may have a point on a society-wide sociological sort of level, but you are specifically accusing me of racism and you don’t have the justification at all.
Nothing. He was 100% correct in what he did after the cop yelled to get out of the car. Only reaching into the car unexpectedly was the suboptimal action. You’re asking me to justify the cop’s actions, but I’m already saying they’re unjustified. The only thing I’ve justified is to escalate the situation because of a potentially threatening and unexpected movement into the car, but I’ve already explicitly said that’s a FAR way from escalating to the point of shooting the guy. The cop was wrong at every point of this interaction.
He did nothing wrong. He behaved like a perfectly normal, innocent person. He behaved exactly as many of us think we might behave in that situation. Adding any “but” to that at all is victim blaming.
In a situation with such a power differential (cop vs citizen), so minor an infraction (seatbelt), with the perfectly reasonable actions the victim took (reached for his ID, got out of the car on demand) to have the outcome we did (poor guy gets shot four times!) is so egregious, to even bring up shared responsibility is ludicrous.
To compare it to taunting someone until they punch you so misrepresents the situation is laughable.
Sure, we can microanalyze every action the victim took, but compared to the outrageous egregious error and unprofessional behavior the cop showed, how does it get brought up in the same breath?
Someone enters in to a home on a summer afternoon and shoots the people in the house are you really going to say, “well the shooter shouldn’t have done that, but those homeowners should’ve known better to leave the door open”?
Forget it. **SenorBeef **is never going to see it your way. I don’t think he can. He would have to actually wake up in a different skin (heh) to fully comprehend what many are saying here. Doesn’t make him a terrible person, just a little out of touch.
I agree with the “fight or flight” portion of your analysis. Where you fail miserably is then saying he “takes his actions too quickly.” No he doesn’t; he reacts pretty much the way most people would react to a cop coming at them. I’m sure in the myriad dealings you have police on a daily basis, your super-human empathy and nerves would cause you to act differently, but I get nervous around cops too. I wasn’t lying before when I said I had been pulled over last month. I was - it was the first time I’d been pulled over in years and I was nervous. In fact, I fully admit thinking to myself, “I sure hope he doesn’t think I’m reaching for a weapon in my glove box.”
But here’s another thing … you claim he “bucks expectations.” Not really. Take a closer look at the video. When the cop asks him for his ID he taps his back pocket with his hand real quick as if he was reaching for an ID. But then realizing it was in the cab and not his pocket, his expectation would have been, “cop wants my ID; I’d better give it to him.”
The whole problem is that wasn’t the cop’s expectation. Tough shit. Laying any - *any *- blame on the victim in this case is … do I even need to spell it out … “blaming the victim,” by definition.
The problem we have in America might be exclusive to us, here. It’s Black people driving around without using their seat belts. I don’t know what the best answer is, but this South Carolina episode seems a tad over the line. If the tough issues were easy to solve, then we’d have people running around willy-nilly solving issues.
Is it conceivable that he acted sub-optimally, and a different course of action might’ve got a different result?
Let’s think about this strictly in a thought experiment sort of way. Let’s say a totally innocent person is pulled over. But for some reason, they move very rapidly. The cop asks them for their proof of insurance, and they quickly reach into their glovebox with unnatural speed. The cop takes this to be a threatening action and pulls them out of the car. Did the victim do anything wrong? No, they’re innocent and they’re complying with the cop.
So let’s say we have the same scenario, but for some reason the victim keeps their proof of insurance below the seat. So they quickly reach into an unexpected place, below the seat, and again the cop takes this to be a threat. Is the victim to blame here? They didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just doing what the cop asked.
We could keep escalating these examples until at some point, the victim is going to make a move that makes the cop feel threatened. They won’t do it out of malice, and they won’t have done any crime, and they will have complied with the cop, and yet the cop can reasonably feel threatened.
How would the blame split go, here? Would the cop always be to blame entirely no matter what? Or could we get past the childish semantics battle over the term blame and realize that interactions in the real world are messy and ripe for misinterpretation of intent?
I’m not, in this post, arguing that the victim here did anything to justify the result. What I’m attacking is the very idea that one side must take all the blame, and that if you examine the circumstances and point out sub-optimal acts by the victim, then you’re a scumbag victim blamer. This is a serious cognitive defect that prevents you from seeing the world as a complicated place.
Look, a lot of cops I’ve seen interviewed about this case have said Jones reaching into his vehicle might have made them nervous BUT they all said it wouldn’t have made them shoot. One cop on MSNBC said he might’ve put his hand on his gun and walked behind his vehicle out of the immediate line of fire if Jones, for whatever reason, HAD come out with a gun. The issue isn’t whether anything Jones did or didn’t do caused the cop to get nervous. Different people will get nervous and feel threatened in different situations, whether reasonable to the majority of the rest of us or not. The issue is how Groubert REACTED to that nervousness. Firing his weapon. It was ALL WRONG.
So to argue about ANYTHING Jones could or should have done differently to avoid getting shot is, by default, arguing that a cop is ALWAYS justified in shooting people just because they’re nervous. They are not.
Even if we accept all of this, all it gets you is that it’s reasonable to assign some portion of the blame to the sudden-mover for heightening the cop’s anxiety. That still doesn’t mean we can assign this blame for the shooting itself.
And this is especially clear in this particular shooting – any supposed “sudden movement” or other suboptimal action was not followed by shots fired – it was complying with the order to get out of the car that was followed by shots fired. The cop pulled the trigger right after the man complied with his order to get out of the car. No one but the cop bears any blame for that trigger being pulled. And there were subsequent gunshots too. No one but the cop bears any blame for those shots either.
Do you disagree with any of these assertions? If you agree, then the man deserves absolutely zero blame for being shot.