We need to get away from this line of thinking. A guy with a misdemeanor warrant is going to turn around and gun down 2 cops if I don’t pull the trigger right now. Or he might drive away. He’s a hardened misdemean-erator! We have to arrest him, drag him to the station, take some more of his money in bail so he can be back on the street 6 hours from now with a “you definitely need to go to court for THIS one.”
Maybe, maybe, if the cops weren’t spending their time pulling over people who didn’t write the state a $70 check, they’d have time to actually go get people who have active warrants, for serious society damaging crimes.
I am hopeful that Chauvin gets convicted so that more and more police departments stop inviting these neo-confederate cowboy vigilante ‘experts’ to train their squads and instead replace them with people who can properly inculcate them with some guiding principles on threat assessment and prioritization.
Attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the Wright family, says that in 2019, the shooter cop, Kim Potter, told two cops who had just shot a suspect to turn off their body cameras and get into separate cars.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m just glad that the criminal justice system isn’t wasting its time with victimless crimes like white nationalist mobs who try to overthrow the federal government and are focusing on the weighty stuff like expired tags and air fresheners. Maybe this will be the impetus we need for air freshener control.
Circling back to the Nazario case, I seem to recall that the officers’ reports were inconsistent with the actual events. I feel compelled to ask why is this tolerated? Why do police reports not carry the burden of sworn testimony, with the risk of perjury if lies are discovered?
She mistook her gun for her taser. When she pulled her gun, was it already cocked with the safety off, because I would think getting a gun ready to fire would feel tons different than whatever you do to prepare a taser.
From a few tweets from LAPD Wilshire:
“Critical Thinking is a perishable skill needed to manage high-stress situations. Part of Wilshire’s Roll-Call Training focuses on “staying in the moment” & not letting adrenaline/emotions control your actions. This morning our 8 probationary officers were peppered with…
questions that tested their knowledge on Uses of Force, Biased Policing, & Procedural Justice. For every wrong answer/pause/stutter they had to hit the bag 5x. The questions got tougher as the heart rate increased. We’re proud at how they handled themselves during this…
30-minute exercise. The standout today was our newest addition to Wilshire - Officer Brown. Much credit to her Academy Instructors and Training Officer Colwart. We’ll see if she can maintain her championship status after next week.”
I am not understanding why hitting something with a baton repeatedly should be drilled into officers as an automatic reaction to not knowing what to do.
I’d have to assume the idea is to train the officers to act under stress and not just stand there slack-jawed.
That they’re being trained to act violently under stress is extremely troubling, to say the least.
I feel like it’s the “cop families”–many of which look at a few years in the military as a rite of passage–that are the problem, not so much the ex-military types. Career military who then transition to law enforcement are bringing experience. A short bid as enlisted is basically all the bad influences of military culture without time to really get the good, and when it is laid on top of a family culture of “us vs them” and casual brutality, it creates the worst of all worlds.
There’s a pattern, a story: 18 year old from cop family joins the army, marries some other 18 year old also from cop family. Both had angry dads who did the same thing. They had a shitshow of a marriage because they are young and stupid and because they are steeped in a culture where his number one fear is his friends thinking he is “pussywhipped”. By 25, he’s out and a cop; she has 2 babies and works for the county. Their relationship is characterized by alcohol and violence, at home and at work, which reinforce each other. And they both think this is totally normal, because it’s a closed loop. Everyone they know lives like this. Everyone who doesn’t live like this is scorned as naïve, idealistic, weak.
I do think much more diverse recruiting and training would be a fantastic way to reform the police. Right now, it feels like a closed system, and it’s getting worse–I can’t imagine anyone not in a cop family wanting to be a cop at this point.
Most police use Glocks or similar striker-fired pistols. These pistols do not have a hammer to cock, nor a safety switch to push down. * The trigger is fairly heavy, which is supposed to prevent accidental discharge.
When you hear the cocking sound on TV, it is usually dramatic BS and inaccurate. There are still pistols that are cocked before firing, but you cannot cock most pistols in this manner.
Most police carry their tasers on the opposite side of their body. Don’t know if she did this or not.
I’d say that he felt the need to separate himself from a threat. That his instinct of running from what he felt was a life threatening situation isn’t really his fault. He’s not been trained on what to do when being threatened, unlike the cops that were threatening him.
Of course he meant to drive away. I initially wrote this with a bunch of exclamation points to imply a hysterical reaction to a man who committed a minor crime might 'drive away!" Oh noes, I must attack him with my weapons so he doesn’t drive away! If he winds up injured or dead after my attack, well what did you want, for me to let this hardened criminal* escape my grasp?
*Who thus far has committed nothing but paperwork violations.
A Taser weighs from 8 to 15 ounces depending on configuration from what the searches show. A standard service Glock 17 loaded is around 29-32 ounces IIRC.
You don’t think he’s heard, over and over, all his life, to comply with police orders? If he hasn’t, then perhaps we’ve identified a problem. My reaction to the video is that he was either trying to obtain a gun or drive away. Both very stupid ideas.
The time to complain about your treatment by police is afterwards, preferably aided by a lawyer, not while handcuffs are being applied.