And not just cops, but any yahoo with a gun who can claim his gun use was defensive, hmm? :dubious:
Isn’t it though?
Before I continue, I would like to state that nothing I say below should be interpreted to justify or defend the actions of the police officer in this shooting. This cop was a paranoid lunatic who shot an unarmed man who did nothing wrong.
This is a terribly faulty analysis.
Let’s say I’m a roofer, being a roofer is dangerous, more dangerous than being a cop, but still statistically not all that dangerous. Death rate is 40/100000 workers per year. Let’s say you work 200 days on a roof per year, that’s one death per 500,000 jobs.
That doesn’t mean I don’t take precautions, like setting up proper ladders, harnesses, and other safety gear. I avoid working in the rain, and take special precautions for dangerous jobs. If a particular action appears dangerous, I don’t do it, or I use my experience to find a safe way to do it.
It’s the same with a cop, you can’t ask them to ignore a perceived risk because their chances of death are “low”. One of the reasons death rates are low is that they don’t ignore risks, they identify and account for them. In all dangerous lines of work, people assess risk and change their behavior accordingly to reduce that risk. In police work, “reducing risk” also tends to put others at risk, so it’s by necessity a balancing act.
Are roofers authorized by the state to use deadly force against other people in order to carry out their duties? Do the rational precautions taken by roofers create a likelihood of grievous injury or death for the people they interact with on the job?
Why are those two mutually exclusive?
No, not at all, which is why roofers and loggers and crab fishermen can be as paranoid as they want about safety, while policemen have to moderate their safety precautions in light of the other people affected.
This guy didn’t, he overreacted to something he perceived as a risk. A roofer overreacting to a perceived risk is a weenie who takes too long to get a job done.
I think that’s a good summary of the issue, but I don’t agree. The cop in this situation can be totally fucking wrong and do the worst thing possible in the situation, which is actually the case here. But even though the cop was totally wrong, his actions were based on a misunderstanding. If we were to advocate for changes in behavior in both parties that lessen the possibility for misunderstanding (and the cop here could’ve easily told the guy to stay outside the truck unless he asks for permission or a dozen other things to reduce the ambiguity or surprises in the situation), then these sorts of situations are less likely to occur. If we’re interested in reducing the possibility of something like this happening again, it’s not useful to turn a blind eye to one of the pieces of the puzzle, even as we fully acknowledge one side was within the range of acceptable and understandable behavior and one isn’t. We can attack the problem from all possible directions to lessen the chance of something bad happening, and there’s no implicit assumption there that all actors or all possible actions are equally wrong, because they aren’t.
That’s simply not true. Advice to predict the future between two arbitrary choices is not useful advice. Saying “go to this gas station, not that one, because somehow in the cosmic jumble that will short circuit the chance of having a cop shoot you” is not useful.
However, saying “always act slowly with cops and deliberately, and make sure you’re not going to do anything to surprise them, and let them know they retain control of the situation and you’re cooperating and non-threatening” is simply good advice applicable to all situations in which you interact with the police. You can see ahead of time that it’s likely to lessen the odds of an altercation with the police.
Again, this is a simplistic binary view on blame. Let’s ignore this particular instance as an example. What if we looked at a hundred or thousand different altercations with the police and it turned out that basic advice like announcing your actions ahead of time would’ve prevented a significant number of them? Then does that advice become useful in the aggregate if we’re not worried about blaming a specific victim in a specific instance? Or are we deliberately turning a blind eye to what behavior could be changed on the other side to reduce the chance for miscommunication as a philosophical position that even the slightest hint of “victim blaming” is a thought crime?
And if a million people take a vaccine, none of them get polio. They have a 0/million chance of getting polio after getting vaccinated, so why even bother to get vaccinated? Look how low the odds are!
You’re discounting the degree to which handling the situation as they’re trained to is already reducing the number of deaths from traffic stops, and suggesting that we can throw away that training because it happens so little.
Oh please, this is idiotic.
A) Discussion on a message board, in a sub-board specifically designed for hostility like the Pit, is not the same situation is a potentially legal armed confrontation by a long shot. Are you saying that if two cops have a few beers on a Sunday and passionately argue whether some historical football team was better than another, and it turns angry, then both are unsuited to carry a gun in a professional capacity even if they’re otherwise exemplary professionals?
B) I’m not saying I’m a fucking superhero for acting slowly and deliberately and stating my intentions to the cop ahead of time. How in the world could whatever I say on a message board possibly have an impact on that? Do you think I’m lying, and that I don’t do that?
C) I’m not actually raging here at all. What suggests I am? What have I posted that indicates I go into rage fits that make me incapable of doing such complex and heroic tasks as telling the officer whenever I’m planning on reaching into something?
This is a particularly stupid line of personal attack.
Because just as the advice “treat all men as potential rapists until they prove otherwise,” will lead to really awful interactions with men, the advice “treat all police officers as if they’ll shoot you if you give them reason to” leads to terrible interactions with police officers.
Then I don’t know what point you’re making.
We don’t expect cops to ignore the risk. We accept them to accept and bear the burden of the risk. Better a cop on duty get shot than a cop mistakenly shoot an innocent person.
What misunderstanding? He didn’t shoot the guy for reaching into the car – after the guy reached into the car, the cop ordered him to get out of the car. He didn’t shoot the guy until he got out of the car, as ordered, and continued to fire as the man backed away with his hands in the air.
How on earth is this a “misunderstanding”?
The cop didn’t suddenly pull out his gun and shoot the guy when he got out of his car. He was in “I think I might need to fight for my life” mode when the guy reached into his car. That’s when he drew his gun, started running to take cover behind the car, and screaming at the guy. After that, it was just adrenaline-filled horrible judgment when he went ahead and shot the guy anyway without further provocation. But the key point in this, the thing that got the cop on edge and ready to shoot, was the guy reaching into the car, not the guy getting out of it.
The misunderstanding is that the cop clearly thought the guy was going for a weapon. Obviously, it was a huge error in judgment and is in no way a justification for the cop firing, which was a HUGE ERROR BY ANY STANDARD, but the cop misread the guy’s intentions, and hence, a misunderstanding.
You have no idea what his mind set was initially. He could’ve taken one look at him and decided he looked threatening. He could have been amped up from something else and that’s why he approached the guy in the first place. He could’ve been on a razor’s edge from the start.
I don’t know either. But don’t act like you do either.
How does continuing to fire while the guy is backing away, arms in the air, follow from such a misunderstanding? How can continuing to pull the trigger while the guy has hands in the air and backing away possibly be ‘misreading the guy’s intentions’? How could his intentions possibly be any more clear?
You have the luxury of watching and replaying the video at your leisure from the comfort of your own home before deciding the cop had no right to misunderstand.
The officer in the video didn’t.
What the fuck does the “right to misunderstand” mean? Are you saying the cop shouldn’t be prosecuted for shooting this man while he was backing away, hands in the air?
No, I’m not.
I’m saying that his misaction is understandable.
But that’s a bad analogy. Barring lesbian separatists, everyone has to interact with men dozens of times a day for their entire life. If you adopt an attitude that makes all such interactions awkward and uncomfortable but somewhat safer for you, then that has a HUGE impact on your very existence.
Doing the same thing for interactions with cops, which happen maybe once a year on average or so, is not at all comparable.
I agree that it’s important that a reaction of “well, clearly you should be super duper careful with interacting with cops” shouldn’t be our ONLY reaction to this incident. It shouldn’t even be our FIRST reaction. It shouldn’t be one of our first ten reactions. But that doesn’t mean that it’s bad advice, nor does it mean that there’s no possible way that the victim could have acted differently that would have kept him from being shot (and in a predictable way, as opposed to the randomness of just going to a different gas station).
A key difference for me is that I view this situation as “the guy acted TOTALLY reasonably, well within the bounds of how people ought to interact with a cop. He could have been even MORE calm and cautious and in this case, tragically, he clearly should have been, but the way he was acting was completely correct” vs some other situations we’ve discussed which ended with cops overreacting in various ways in which my view is more “well, that person was acting in a suspicious or provocative fashion… that doesn’t mean that it’s right that X ended up happening to them, and we should investigate the systemic issues that contributed to it, blah blah blah, but they were stupid to be acting that way from the start”. In both types of cases, we can look at it and say “we should figure out how to reform the way cops (in general and in specific) are trained to interact with people, since there’s no reason that the situation should have ended up escalating the way it did”, but in the first type of case I have MUCH more unreserved sympathy for the victim.
uh huh. Is that why he’s been fired and criminally charged?
How is it understandable to pull the trigger multiple times while they’re backing away with hands in the air?
I understand why he reacted the way he did.
That doesn’t mean his actions are justified or that he shouldn’t be prosecuted for them.
No, you understand why he acted that way based on your interpretation of what he was thinking and responding too. Unless you spoke to him or have an interview describing his mindset you don’t know. For all we know he was having a flashback or some other issue and the victim’s actions had nothing to with it, or nothing logical.
You’re putting the event through your own interpretive lens as much as anyone.