Thought he was on his back during the gunshots in the videos I saw. I also thought they had control of his left arm (and might’ve had a cuff on it too), but they weren’t able to get control of his right. Or one of the two officers didn’t see that his right was also under control. I can’t see where his right hand was when he got shot, can anyone else?
Is it out of the realm of possibility that he was trying to grab the pistol in his right pocket when he got shot? I’ve been told on a traffic stop to get my hands away from my pockets, and I wasn’t pulled over on a “guy brandishing a gun” call. I’m not blaming these two officers for fearing the worst when the guy they’re wrestling around on the ground with, who they were told was waving a gun at people, keeps trying to get at his pocket.
As to why they weren’t able to flip him to his stomach, per his East Baton Rouge Parish rap sheet, he was 5’11, 300+ pounds, and actively resisting. Plus the Tasers weren’t gaining his compliance for whatever reason. You try rolling him over. I’m sure they’d have gotten there eventually, but it looked on the video that it was going to take awhile.
To clarify, since Loach evidently thought I was asking several other questions, my question is whether these officers appropriately used distance and cover and the techniques of de-escalation to avoid this kind of result. These principles generally apply to the initial contact and orders to comply, not to how to behave once you’re in a wrestling match.
Specifically, the weight of expert opinion seems to be that if you suspect a guy has a gun who is not immediately threatening any bystanders then you approach from a distance using cover. You begin the interaction calmly. When you give orders to comply, you give the suspect an opportunity to comply before giving a superseding order or using force. And you recognize that failure to immediately comply should first be met with efforts at de-escalation rather than force.
Do the various videos show this one way or the other? Or is all we have the interaction that begins when the tasers are being fired?
I think it’s tough to criticize police (and suspect) conduct when it has already gotten to the point of split-second decisionmaking. Humans aren’t very good at making good decisions in the moment of violent struggle. They’re especially bad at it when strong biases are at play. Good policing avoids that as much as reasonably possible, so I’m curious what, if any, efforts were taken here to resolve the situation before attempting to achieve compliance by use of force.
Both videos clearly show that he was supine (i.e. lying on his back), not prone.
His hands weren’t yet clearly under the control of the officers.
The police weren’t called to investigate a guy selling music CDs; they were called to investagate a man threatening another man with a gun. He did not have permission to threaten anyone with a gun.
Imagine you’re a cop, and you see a guy matching the description of someone who recently threatened a passer-by with a gun. You approach to talk to him. Based on the call, you suspect this guy probably has a gun somewhere on him - and he’s fidgety, won’t keep his hands away from his pockets. Based on reasonable suspicion, you have the authority (and you want) to frisk him for your own safety, but he won’t let you. He keeps pulling away, disobeying orders to stop. He won’t keep his hands still.
Now what do you do? Do you give him a chance to get his gun out? If he does, someone is definitely going to get shot. Might be him, might be you, might be three or four innocent bystanders. You do not want anyone to get shot, so you’ve got to keep this guy from reaching for his gun. You tackle him, you taser him, you try with all your might to get his hands under control. But this guy is big, strong, and he’s as jacked up on adrenaline as you are. After tackling him you can’t get him face down, you can’t get his hands under control. Your partner sees the guy’s gun. And you still can’t get his hands under control. If he gets his hands on that gun, someone is going to die. You take out your gun and point it at him; it’s a threat used in an effort to compel the guy to comply, and it’s also a “I have to be ready to shoot this guy on a moment’s notice” in case he doesn’t. And then finally his hands get too close to his gun. Throughout this encounter he hasn’t given any indication of willingness to obey lawful orders.
What do you do? Do you wait until the guy actually wraps his hand around his gun? Points it as someone? Pulls the trigger?
His hand is inches from his gun-pocket, and it’s headed in that direction, and you and your partner can’t stop it. If not now, then at what point does it become permissible for a cop to use deadly force?
This was not an execution; it was self-defense and/or defense of bystanders. Unless you think the suspect was just trying really hard to take out his gun and hand it over to the cops.
What you are describing is a situation in which cops have an unlimited right to shoot anyone for any reason. They could just straight up murder people in the street and then claim, “I thought he had a gun and he wasn’t submitting and I feared for my life.”
I should also point out that this is, essentially, an accurate description of the situation as it stands now. Cops murder or abuse people with alarming regularity and are consistently given the benefit of the doubt.
If your point is - and I don’t see you saying anything else - that cops can just make stuff up and use that as justification, then no matter what justification you allow you can say “cops will just claim X is what happened”. The only alternative would be to never allow any cop to shoot anyone ever.
In this case, though, the notion that the guy had a gun and was not submitting to arrest is not based on the cops just claiming that, but is backed by plenty of other evidence, and appears to be accepted by everyone familiar with the incident. So it’s unclear how whatever point you’re making applies to this incident.
From the video, I don’t think you can say he was “going for his gun”. He was trying to be subdued and flailing around and fighting back. His hands were all over the place, and they would likely have gone near his pocket in the struggle. But that would have been incidental and I don’t think he was trying to reach for his gun.
The shooting probably happened because of a misunderstanding. When one officer says “He’s got a gun,” that can be taken as “He’s got a gun tucked away in his pocket” or “He’s got a gun in his hand and he’s going to shoot.” I think the second officer interpreted it in the latter way.
Maybe with perfect hindsight this situation could have been handled differently, but at the time it seems like the officers were acting appropriately. If a guy is suspected of having a gun and is not complying with officers, I don’t fault them for trying to subdue him with force. Unfortunately, this lead to a moment of confusion with a terrible result. The mistake I could maybe see would be by the first officer creating the panic situation by not being clear about the gun.
I wonder how many of these shootings are explained by implicit bias. It’s relatively (and unsurprisingly) frequent for police officers to be in circumstances that could justify deadly force, but they choose lesser force to deal with the situation. But subconscious and implicit bias, which have actually been measured, drive officers to be more likely to resort to deadly force with black suspects than with others, according to the data.
What’s the solution if, due to subconscious and implicit bias, police officers, on average, just see black people as a inherently more dangerous (and are therefore a bit more likely to draw their weapon, and a bit more likely to pull the trigger, than for other suspects)? Because that’s what the data seems to show.
And that’s happened, many, many times over the years. However, in many other cases it’s irrelevant, like in this case. The cops didn’t even touch their guns until they saw his and didn’t shoot until they had (IMO) good reason to do so. They even attempted to physically restraining him and used non-lethal force before escalating it.
We haven’t seen (and likely won’t) the beginning of the encounter yet, but I’ll bet at some point between the squad(s) arriving on the scene and him being on the ground they asked him to put his hands up, behind his back, where they could see them or away from his pockets. He knew he had a gun, he knew what they were getting at, if he had done that, sure, he might be in jail, but he’d be alive and no one outside the handful of people that had direct knowledge of it would have known about it.
And, for all the people that suggest talking to him first, asking him questions, interviewing etc. Not just here but in any similar case. I’m sorry, that’s like trying to stop an armed carjacker and saying ‘hold on, let me find the blue book value and we’ll start negotiations there’.
…ya know, with all due respect, these big long-ass “what would you do” posts do actually get tiresome. Because what actually happened here was that the police took a routine situation and allowed it to spin out of control.
I live in the country where the police are not routinely armed. And tackling a guy like what we saw in the video is about the stupidest of ways to handle this as one could imagine. They can’t see his hands because they tackled him. The guys hands are inches from the gun-pocket because the police lost “control of the encounter.” And as we all know: “control the encounter” is the first tenet of a cops training, and the police lost that control when they took the suspect to the ground.
The most immediate thing that can be done is to ensure that police are trained on tactics that reduce the need for quick decisions as much as possible. The studies show that the more room we make for conscious deliberation the less room there is for implicit bias. There is also the side benefit that these tactics also tend to avoid unnecessarily escalating encounters.
Beyond that, there are lots of reasonable ideas out there:
(1) Provide adequate police, investigation (e.g., witness protection), and court resources to try to close the murder clearance gap between black and white Americans so that fewer black Americans are incentivized to engage in retribution and self-protection (and therefore less incentivized to carry illegal guns which is a factor in a good fraction of these incidents);
(2) Reduce or eliminate those police practices that inflame community distrust of police so that encounters are less likely to escalate (e.g., racially targeted stop-and-frisk, officers patrolling exclusively from cars, disproportionate arrests for low-level offenses, insufficient discipline for misconduct, etc.);
(3) Train all departments on trauma-informed policing so that officers understand better the behavior they are seeing and can react appropriately, including crucially being able to judge when non-compliance is a threat and when it isn’t;
(4) Provide implicit bias training to help officers recognize when it might be happening (and, perhaps, slightly lessen it, though the studies on that are inconclusive);
(5) Pay cops commensurate with the dangerous and important job we ask them to do, which would have lots of beneficial side effects (including better cops and perhaps reduced power of the FOP which is necessary to achieve any serious change);
(6) Do everything possible to ensure that the police officer interacting with a given individual has some relationship to the individual prior to the encounter–a big benefit of community policing.
And that’s just changes in policing. Obviously, there are lots of other policy changes that could be made to reduce the factors that lead to these incidents.
Too bad they didn’t bring handcuffs. If they had they could have grabbed his hands and cuffed him. Really, they were on top of the guy and they think he has super strength, super speed, and super abilities to remove the gun from his pants, aim, and shoot, before they can react? The cops are guilty of murder or manslaughter as the investigation will bear out.
Throw him to he ground on his belly and grab his arms, shout “He’s got a gun!” when they think they see something in his pocket then shoot him several times, of course! What else could they possibly do?
…as Machine Elf recommends: maintain control of the encounter. Did the police in the video look in control to you?
Everyone in an open carry state who is carrying have their hands inches from their pocket: what should the police do, shoot everyone with their hands near their pants?
I am not arguing that the police acted correctly in this encounter, but I am seriously asking what “maintain control of the encounter” means. Your police without guns know that the other person very likely has a gun, since it was called in. What steps do they take?
Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand have proved that it is unnecessary and dangerous. Their police forces do not carry guns. We need to learn from their example. In the entire history of Iceland, only one person was killed by police. Compare that to our 558 and counting in 2016.