Another unarmed black guy shot by cops -- this time the cop is being prosecuted.

The BBQ Pit
421

Of course they were.

The fact that Groubert would say something so… well, visibly untrue, suggests that AT THE TIME his perception was simply not accurate. I am not sure he’s lying, I think maybe he was simply paranoid and terrified. It’s entirely possible that watching the tape is is either stunned by what he sees or undergoing absolutely mind-bending cognitive dissonance. People can see and remember things weird when they’re paranoid.

Again, as people have helpfully explained and posted detailed links to, police officers are being taught that they should be scared of ordinary people during traffic stops, despite ample evidence they have little to fear. (On the other hand, police officers are in far more danger of being hit by a car during a traffic stop - something I’ve noticed they are often terrifyingly cavalier about.) Groubert’s reaction might have simply been the inevitable outcome of the “every citizen is your enemy” training that’s becoming so common in police forces.

422

My point was that the statistical analysis was faulty, or at least irrelevant to whether or not a cop should react to a perceived threat. The cop did not need to pull his gun and fire. That fact has nothing to do with the statistical on the job risk of being a cop, and everything to do with the individual situation the cop was in.

If the situation were different, the statistics would be the same, but the need to pull his gun might be very different.

423

The point of the statistical analysis is the effect on the mindset and training of police. They falsely perceive they are in an unusually dangerous profession or that traffic stops are dangerous so they approach encounters with a bias towards using deadly force.

424

Do you think that if they did not take the precautions that they did to control potentially dangerous situations, that the fatality rate for police officers would go up? If so, then you’re saying that the precautions they use, treating situations as dangerous, are directly responsible for some reduction in the death rate, in which case you’re arguing that precautions aren’t necessary, because their precautions work.

As an analogy, let’s say that high rise skyscraper construction workers all started needing to be tied in with safety lines and it reduced the death rate on those scenes 90%. You could then say “oh look, it’s barely any more dangerous than any other profession, clearly we don’t need those safety lines”

425

If I read the numbers correctly, the decrease in cop fatalities tracks reasonably closely to the overal decrease in violent crime over the past couple of decades. This would be a point against any particular change in training as a factor.

But in any case, training on how to legally justify shootings after the fact, for example, is not about increasing officer safety. And nothing this cop in particular did made him more safe.

426

Precautions—specifically including the state of mind if the cop as he approaches a situation—have to be balanced against the fact that those precautions increase the risk of the cop harming an innocent person. This is less true of roofers and construction workers and that’s why the analogy is invalid.

Yes, cops have to be trained to be a little less careful of their own lives because that makes it safer for the people around them.

427

It might, but

  1. As Acsenray points out, safety precautions like fall arrest equipment or hard hats don’t have the negative externality of unarmed people getting shot. Safety harnesses don’t pile up Oscar Grants and Johnathan Ferrells.

  2. Reducing a workplace hazard from “really rare” to “even more really rare” is perhaps not worth the enormous negative consequences of making police officers opposed to the people they’re supposed to serve.

  3. As iiiandyiii rather pertinently mentions again, you have to go through some really huge contortions to explain how training cops to justify shootings after the fact does anything to improve anyone’s safety.

Again, one has to wonder why police forces are now - even with the traffic stop being a relatively safe event - emphasizing the use of deadly force against anything remotely surprising, but are putting so much less effort into teaching cops how to avoid getting hit by cars, thought it happens more often than getting shot at traffic stops. Taking precautions against being hit by cars, like the simple idea of approaching a vehicle on the side away from the road, would save lives with no negative side effect.

428

I think I’m just spelling out what’s being implied here, but this is reason #73000 to be skeptical of the “Michael Brown charged Darren Wilson” story.

I think he’s seen it. And yes, his story is consistent with the idea that he just approached the entire thing as a life-or-death situation.

429

From what I’ve seen/read, yeah, someone (evidently) would. :slight_smile:

430

I would be quite amazed if Groubert has not seen the tape by now. It’s the primary evidence against him after all.

However, the story as linked indicates Groubert’s claims “he kept comin’ towards me” was spoken on the scene, immediately after the incident took place. This isn’t some excuse he cooked up after he was arrested, you can hear him say it on the tape, right there at the gas station. I think it’s likely that at the time he said it, Groubert might really, honestly have thought that had happened. Hell, he might even have formed that memory after the shooting. People’s memories are very, very unreliable, especially in stressful situations.

431

It would probably be smapti himself.

432

It’s also consistent with what Groubert said to Jones after shooting him. ‘You jumped out of the car’ and whatever other nonsense. He assumed the situation was much more dangerous than it was, which affected his perceptions. Then he acted on those.

433

Well, maybe so, but we are told time and time again that police are supposed to be ‘trained observers’. That Officer Groubert’s observations are at such variance with the facts, and that the variances just happen to be on the side of legitimizing his case…well, I’m not thinking he gets any break for being under stress, especially if, as seems the case, most of the stress was self-inflicted.

434

No-one is arguing that police officers should not take precautions. I’m arguing that “shooting an unarmed civilian” should not be considered a “precaution”; it should be considered an absolute last resort that occurs only after actual precautions—measures that actually reduce the chance of shootings—have been followed and have proved ineffective.

Earlier in the thread, i offered a possible scenario for how this officer might have approached this situation in a way designed to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding. I also said that i believe the burden should be on the officer to do this, given that police officers are the ones who are in such situations on a regular basis, while members of the public generally are not.

In response, you said:

But why in the hell should we, and police departments, only be taking such lessons AFTER this happened?

If contact with the general public is as potentially dangerous as you and the police would have us believe, why wasn’t this cop ALREADY trained to approach the encounter is such a way as to reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding? Why wasn’t he ALREADY trained to caution the guy about moving too quickly? Why wasn’t he ALREADY trained to ask questions that would enable him to learn where the guy’s ID was?

I don’t like the idea of a world where we only learn lessons about policing AFTER a cop has gunned down an unarmed civilian who was following the cop’s exact instructions. And given that so many police forces emphasize the possible dangers of contact, i don;t understand why some departments apparently haven’t formulated any precautions except “Go for your gun early and often.”

435

True. Human visual memory sucks in general even without the psychological angle, which is why witness identifications are so often wrong on finer details (and sometimes on big ones). Best to have multiple witnesses and be able to identify certain basic elements (or, in this case, video; without video, the victim here’d likely be fucked). False memories and memory suppression is a real thing, whether it be a situation where someone has had a crime committed against them, or has committed one … even if just of criminal negligence, e.g., parent who leaves kid in car and later honestly remembers X and swears up and down that X-Y-Z did or didn’t when it in fact did not or did.

That this cop has fixed a false memory in his mind isn’t unusual; it’s protection against something that, once admitted, would destroy the sense of self of most. Humans tend to need to avoid admitting when they’re wrong about something absurdly petty. Imagine what goes on in the mind of someone who’s just shot and, but for luck (and really bad aim), might’ve killed someone?

436

Panic fire. The police officer was panicked, believed he was under deadly threat, and that governed his actions from the moment he started yelling. It’s worth noting that less than a year ago he was involved in a shooting where the suspect was stopped after a car chase and fired on both him and another police officer and the officer underwent counseling, possibly for PTSD.

The point to me isn’t the shooting, the point to me is that this individual doesn’t have the correct temperament to be a police officer, perhaps because of the previous under fire incident he was involved in.

We should be doing mandatory psychological screening of those who want to be police, those who graduate the police academy, and at least twice yearly (if not quarterly) assessments of every officer on patrol. Twice yearly or yearly assessments for detectives or those who work exclusively at the precinct. Monthly or weekly assessments for a year or two for any officer involved in a deadly force or shooting incident.

As important, we are militarizing our police, and that needs to stop. We should be trying to NOT hire former combat soldiers (noting that not every soldier is a combat soldier) for these jobs. Yes, they bring firearms and tactical training, but with the possible exception of former Military Police, they are also significantly more likely to bring PTSD and/or a likelyhood of escalation of force. They have trained for, deployed and spent time in combat. Combat is about overcoming your opponent and almost everyone (even children) is automatically considered a threat higher on the force continuum than they are in the civilian world. That mindset, reinforced by months or years of harsh living environments were you are trained to be paranoid/suspicious of everyone not in a similar uniform, has a long term ability to affect your outlook on everything, particularly your interactions with the public.

As a qualifier, I spent five years in Iraq and Afghanistan. I spent that time continuously (excepting R&R vacations). I have nothing but huge respect for everyone who served there and some of my very close friends from that time were and are 11Bravos, 0311’s etc etc. I’m no hippy-dippy type. But almost without exception I would be reluctant to have them act as police officers, because they have not and do not live the concept of deescalation of conflict. They have and do live the concept of overcoming by force. First and fast.

Which makes them good at SWAT and small unit tactics, and not that good at just about everything else police do. Given that SWAT and felony stops are about 1% of what police do, that’s not a good ratio. Bodyguards? Hell yes. Cops? Not so much.

Give them preference to be firefighters, EMTs, park or forest rangers, or any other job that doesn’t generally require much conflict resolution, but do not ask them to unlearn years of training/reinforcement in force application, with a bias towards aggressive response, that is fundamentally a part of who they are now.

There ARE exceptions, always, but these conversations must be held in general terms unless you want to try and discuss the individual merits of any one officer out of the million plus LEOs in the US right now.

As to this former police officer, I believe they’ll find him guilty of some sort of unintentional wounding type charge, in the sense that he clearly and genuinely believed his life was in danger and therefore his response was (in his mind) reasonable. It turned out he was wrong. It doesn’t make him a corrupt man, simply a man unsuited to being a police officer.

Regards,
-Bouncer-

437

I have to shrug at this, because

  1. I’ve never heard of beat cops being “trained observers” and it sounds like nonsense anyway, and

  2. I’m not defending Groubert, just explaining the context of his remarks. It’s all well and fine to send Groubert to jail, but if one wants to avoid future Grouberts, it’s not enough to send this one off to the big house. Police forces will still be training cops to approach traffic stops as terrifying deathtraps manned by evil (read: black) enemies of the state. So you’ll get more incidents like this one - many of them way more tragic that Mr. Jones’s outpatient treatment - even if Sean Groubert’s still cooling his heels in prison.

Bouncer makes the point that Groubert is obviously panicked in the video and probably isn’t the “rigt temperament” to be a cop. I will agree with Point 1, but I don’t know how Bouncer could know Point 2. Was Groubert ill suited to be a cop, or was this incident the outcome of a person who was indoctrinated and trained the wrong way for law enforcement?

Or let me present the point this way; I’m not impressed with pronouncements that Sean Groubert had the wrong temperament to be a cop NOW. I mean, we know NOW he was a bad cop 'cause we have a video of him going apeshit and shooting a guy for no reason. What would be vastly more impressive would be if you could detect who does and doesn’t have the right temperament to be a cop before this happens, and I am unaware of any police department that puts much effort into that at all. All the blame for this fiasco is going to be placed on Sean Groubert, and Groubert certainly deserves a stay in the crowbar hotel for it. But that simply makes me pose these questions:

  1. If in fact Sean Groubert was temperamentally unsuited to police work, how can we figure that out prior to this sort of thing happening, esp. at the recruitment stage?

  2. If in fact Groubert might have been temperamentally suited to police work but was trained to fear members of the public (and maybe, inadvertently, conditioned to especially fear BLACK members of the public) how should police forces avoid that?

You (Bouncer) do go into a lot of good detail that these questions ask for. The general trend of turning soldiers into cops while turning cops into soldiers is a very, very bad one. There is conflation between the two, I think, because the professions are superficially similar - uniformed, armed people, usually men, enforcing the will of the state. But they’re dramatically different jobs.

438

“As to this former police officer, I believe they’ll find him guilty of some sort of unintentional wounding type charge…”

Sadly, if that, though the behavior standard as to cop should be higher than standard as to average citizen. :slight_smile:

“… in the sense that he clearly and genuinely believed his life was in danger and therefore his response was (in his mind) reasonable.”

I won’t presume from here what he believed at the moment, but if he can establish that he was having a PTSD flare-up, I can work/live with that.

“It doesn’t make him a corrupt man…”

I don’t think anyone was suggesting he did it with malintent, but the dude was either having a PTSD moment or he’s otherwise off his rocker. (Never mind that he evidently is a shitty shot, for which the citizen can be grateful.)

439

“What would be vastly more impressive would be if you could detect who does and doesn’t have the right temperament to be a cop before this happens, and I am unaware of any police department that puts much effort into that at all.”

True.

“1. If in fact Sean Groubert was temperamentally unsuited to police work, how can we figure that out prior to this sort of thing happening, esp. at the recruitment stage?”

It’s called psychological and personality testing. But police departments want to avoid this, not only because of cost but because t*hey know that a good many people would fail the tests *, and then they’d be on record as looking the other way (assuming they didn’t “lose” the records). Currently, a police force is in a position to argue (if push comes to shove) that they didn’t know and it doesn’t matter if they’ve wilfully disregarded relevant information (except insofar as a civil suit goes, and those are difficult to win). Same goes for many employers, I dare say, and ones who don’t have the same level of immunity as police forces. Same holds true for judiciary departments as it relates to judges, or state’s attorney and US attorney offices as to prosecutors. Hear no ineptitude, see no ineptitude, speak no ineptitude, and wilful disregard as a strategy works, so …

440

Best response on the thread so far.