Are there any cases where the police shot a white motorist who was armed and licensed to carry a concealed handgun?
I was trying to keep this as GQ as possible.
Thanks,
Rob
One that comes to mind
Dylan Noble was not armed but acted as if he were.
How about unarmed WHITE man with his back turned?
Here is one where a white man was shot while unarmed, lying on his stomach, with his hands behind his back.
I guess another question would be - are there 8 times as many such cases as would be expected by demographics?
That one is a bit less straightforward than it appears. The Scott family sued the Metro police but later dropped the lawsuit.
This guy wasn’t shot, but the police officer involved apparently felt that he should have been:
You’d need to correct for the encounter rate: if green people get stopped by the police twice as often as purple people, they have twice as many opportunities to get shot while reaching for their driver’s license. And that difference in encounter rates could be linked to racism or it could be that greens and purples actually behave differently on the road. (Or maybe the greens simply drive more, on average.)
Here is a rather thorough overview of the scientific literature of the topic of racial differences in police encounters in the US.
[QUOTE=that article]
Summary: There is good data that police stop blacks more often, both on the road and in neighborhoods. Studies conflict over whether the extra stops are justifiable; likely this varies by jurisdiction. Extra neighborhood stops are most likely neighborhood-related effects rather than race-related per se, but the neighborhood effects do disproportionately target black people.
[/QUOTE]
So if we assume that police officers are 100% non-racist in deciding whether to shoot someone for mentioning their CCW permit, you would still expects blacks to be shot more often than whites, per capita, because they have more police encounters in the first place.
Dropping a law suit doesn’t change the facts. Maybe they dropped the lawsuit because of (or fear of ) more bullets flying ?
Police kill people of all races for a perceived lack of compliance. It’s all a bullshit statist game, honestly. If you’re simply walking down the street, no crimes committed, and the police stop you and demand ID, you should have the right to tell them to sod off, and they should do so and you should be able to keep walking. But the cops perceive this as “having something to hide” and if you persist, your chances of being killed go way, way up. This is the fascist bullshit Americans live in. And make no mistake, they are more interested in your compliance than any real violations of law, which they so often do not know.
Safe to say that your day in court also will not go very well, as “circling the wagons” is an extremely common tactic for law enforcement and district attorneys/judges.
This article from a Las Vegas newspaper goes into some reasons why the family dropped the suit. No surveillance video was available and without that evidence, the “qualified immunity” provided to the police would mean that they would probably lose the case.
Telling LEO’s to “sod off” does not sound to me like a smart tactic, regardless of the color or your skin. It seems to me that common courtesy would be to comply with the LEO’s request. This is not due to a fascist state, buy the responsibility of law abiding citizens to help law enforcement perform their job since better enforcement of the laws benefits all of society. Even unjust laws; there is no better way to get unjust laws changed but through the courts.
Now, if you want to live in a society where courtesy to others, even if they may be employed by law enforcement, is not only not expected, but that the converse, discourtesy, should be expected, well, that doesn’t sound like the kind of society I would want to live in.
IIRC (IANAL) the specific case law says the police can stop you if they have reasonable suspicion, and can demand your name (but not physical ID) if they are investigating a complaint and you fit the description. Once they stop you, they can do a “Terry stop” (pat you down for weapons) if they have suspicions that you may be packing. What constitutes reasonable is up to those same courts that habitually acquit officers. Plus, telling the police to “sod off” and walking away would probably satisfy some jurors as “he was behaving erratically and unusually - maybe high on PCP”.
As for the demographics of stopping people, unless DWB is a heavily enforced rule, total stops for whites are still a helluva lot more than blacks. (I sincerely hope that is the case).