Also, beyond that, ever heard of not immediately shooting to kill? Like, I dunno, maybe fire once, aim for the leg, try to down the guy? Pull a taser? Apply pepper spray? Call for backup that can defuse the situation without pumping 16 rounds into someone who is not known to be an immediate threat to you or anyone around you?
I’m rather at a loss here, honestly. What, so it’s okay for cops to use deadly force (and make no mistake, this cop shot to kill) on a criminal who may or may not actually be a threat to anyone just because that criminal won’t immediately surrender? If I’m caught breaking into a car, and I decide to hoof it instead of giving myself up, is it just my own damn fault that the officer decides to empty a full clip into my ass, most of it after I hit the ground?
No, I’m sorry, this is ludicrous. This person was murdered. This would not have happened to a white person. Not like this. And the fact that it took a year to even press charges? Grumman, stop defending this. It doesn’t reflect well on you.
Oh, I think it only applies to a “certain type” of criminal. Here’s Grumman on the case of a teen who damaged a police car with a knife and was walking away from the scene under surveillance by several police officers, without attempting to injure anybody:
Yup, folks, being a lone black teen with a pocketknife who breaks into cars and when confronted by police, damages a police car and then tries to get away is grounds for immediate execution. Being a white insurrectionist and fraudster who incites an armed mob standoff with federal officers who are legally confiscating property that you forfeited by thieving the use of public lands while evading payment of your legally assessed fees makes you “look like the good guy”.
Another reason bringing up black-on-black crime is a dodge of the actual point of Black Lives Matter – black criminals who kill black people are usually found and prosecuted, often very harshly, and go to prison or to death row. The black victims of black criminals seem to matter, at least far more so than black victims of cops (in the cases when the shooting was not justified), in terms of the response of the justice system. This may be changing, to some degree, with cameras, but the blue wall and code of silence still seems to be strong, encouraging good cops to keep their mouths shut about any bad behavior of bad cops.
Though, in my opinion, being a “good cop” requires more than just not mistreating people – it requires one to speak publicly against the blue wall and code of silence about the behavior of bad cops, naming names, and the like.
Wow, that op-ed piece is pretty flawed. The quoted part is largely the meat of the argument, and it’s a false premise. The fact is that most individuals have about 0 power to affect the behavior of criminals, which is what a cop has become when he shoots a suspect without reason. One might as well say that bank robbery is tacitly approved by the majority. Your counter argument may be that we control the police - but we control the system of police, not the individuals that have become criminals. I’d like to fix about a million things about the system. It takes time to change it, and there’s other things to fix besides trigger happy cops and the code of silence, and new things are showing up broken all the time. Idiot cops will still shoot the wrong people for the wrong reasons even if we get the system to a nearly perfect state.
The rest of the article is complaining how the drug war has affected minorities more than it has affected the majority. That’s a valid complaint, but it’s entirely another subject. Persons in the drug economy were perceived as the “other”, no matter what their race, so they were easy to demonize. As that population has become more visible, the stigmatization has become less common, and the offender has been getting treated more sanely as a result.
Re the OP:
If I have a problem with the BLM movement, it’s that they don’t pick their battles at all. It’s a blanket movement that doesn’t seem to have good judgment on where or who to protest for. In general, disrupting someone else’s event makes you look like an asshat. If you aren’t looking to sell your looks or zippy charm, there’s such a thing as bad publicity. BLM has an actual reason to exist, and ways to generate attention that don’t alienate folks who are already on their side. They should probably do the hard work necessary to capitalize on them if they want to have a net positive effect.
After quickly reading about this Missouri football issue, I can confidently state that there is no issue that conflicts with being a good student.
In this event, these kids knew that they held a lot of power and then they exercised that power (through protest) to force their president’s resignation. End of story. You might feel that these kids should’ve not protested, but hey…Not your choice. These college football players had all the talent/respect that they need to make such powerful decisions.
I hope they learned a valuable lesson in power/politics and wish them well.
They didn’t have power because they were good students, but because they were football players and the college stood to lose money if they refused to play.
Depends on what lesson they learned. When once they graduate (assuming they will) and fail to catch on in the NFL, they won’t have the same leverage in the real world. “Fire the president of my company or I won’t do my job” doesn’t have exactly the same ring, especially with the ongoing decline of unions in the US.
Interesting that Missouri has not applied to fill a spot in a college bowl game. They’re not automatically eligible and the coach is retiring , but I suspect there’s a lot of bad chemistry on the team from the strong arming tactics. It’s highly unusual for a team to turn down a bowl game, even a minor one.
For all you know they could all be wonderful students. What we do know is that they are hard-working, disciplined, and cunning enough to recognize that they are in a rare/unique position to wield their influence in school politics. Kingmakers. For all the empty talk of how ‘respect needs to be earned’ or how the public ‘doesn’t respect protesters.’ Few ‘respected’ students, faculty, or staff have the power to offer the president’s head on a platter.
The students were just following the urging of the crybaby grad student Jonathan Butler with his hunger strike. Keep in mind there were many other issues making the president unpopular and with a target on his back besides the supposedly racist incidents.
They could be, but it doesn’t make any difference.
The reason they got what they wanted is because the school would lose a million dollars if they refused to play football. My point was that they will not have that advantage, probably, at any other point in their lives.
You are probably the first person I have ever heard say that college football players have no sense of their own importance.
They didn’t get what they wanted because people respected them. People were going to lose money if they didn’t give them what they wanted. Once they are no longer playing football, they’re not going to have that lever. Unless they acquire some set of job skills that will make them as valuable to the enterprise who hires them as they are to the football team.
So if the lesson they learned is “we can get what we want if we can hit them in the wallet”, well and good. That is certainly something worth knowing, if you can bring it off. But you usually can’t bring it off. If the lesson they learned is “we can get what we want by protesting”, then that is something different. Because I care rather less than nothing both about the Missouri college football team and the BLM protests. And if they say “I will protest until I get what I want”, they better not hold their breath until I give in.
“We DEMAND justice and we’re not going to do X until we get it!!!” really depends on how much I want them to do X. If I care about X, that’s one thing. If I don’t, well that’s nice, son - now piss off. I’m late for my nap.
Unless the cop was in the car at the time. Was there a cop in the car at the time? If you are in a car then an assault on the car is considered an assault on you.
Was there a cop in the car?
If he used force or threat of force to commit those car-jackings, it is reasonable to believe that he could be a threat to others, but probably not while he is being pursued by cops. What is he going to do, take hostages?
You forgot “even if the people you are shooting are young black males.”
Its not like the victims are demographically evenly distributed.
Do you not comprehend the difference between propaganda and reality? I said that Bundy’s standoff mirrored folk heroes like the miners at Eureka in ways that would make some people think he was the good guy sticking it to the man. That does not mean I support him, it means I was trying to diagnose why other people would.
Yeah, I got it. By that logic, Laquan McDonald “looked like the good guy” because he “mirrored” folk heroes like the antisegregation protestors who stood up to police in the southern US. Pfffft.
Really? I’d like to see a cite for that. In any case, none of the cops who were there when McDonald was actually damaging the cop car seem to have considered him enough of a threat to warrant shooting him.
I’m kind of appalled at this videogame approach to law enforcement that several posters seem to be promoting: “if the suspect did x, y or z, then he broke a rule and it’s okay to shoot him”. What cops are supposed to do is avoid shooting people, even criminals, unless they absolutely have to in the face of imminent deadly threat.
Not faff around with hypothetical scenarios along the lines of “oh well the perp might have turned violent on the next street corner and attacked somebody” in order to use the back of a fleeing suspect (who hasn’t even injured anyone) for live target practice.
Well the “privileged” they’re fighting against are people with parents. And newsflash, there’s nothing wrong or privileged about it. Just like there’s nothing wrong with staying in school. There are all kinds of behaviors that help a child grow into a productive adult just as there are efforts that harm that process.
None of them are difficult to understand or engage in.
I’m making the argument that, in many cases (and perhaps most), law enforcement treats black-on-black killing very, very differently than cop-on-black killing, and that is a bad thing.
Uh, yes, you are. You’re the one who introduced the term “proper nuclear family” into this debate.
I pointed out in a previous post that what the BLM website actually seems to be talking about, namely “objecting to the prescription that family structure has to be nuclear”, is not the same thing as “attacking” or “protesting the nuclear family” itself.
So, Magiver, I ask again: what did you mean by a “proper nuclear family”, and why are you dismissing, e.g., extended/multigenerational families from consideration as family structures that “would help”? And why do you think that saying that the nuclear family structure ought not to be the required model for all families is somehow tantamount to “attacking” or “protesting” the nuclear family?