If word gets out that you are gonna get show anyway, fewer and fewer people are gonna comply with demands.
Well there is always a reaction time that it takes to change your behavior–for example stepping on the brakes of your car because the car in front of you is slowing down. I think that might be the reason the kid was shot: the kid was swinging the gun in his hand, the officer thinking the kid was going to shoot the gun at him so he shoots–before the officer has processed the fact that the kid has thrown the gun away.
I’m pretty sure that word is out!
I’m sure he’s had a hard day, having to hire a lawyer and all. He’s the real victim here.
I’m sure his concern for dead kid’s family is earnest.
Fucking hell. That was hard to watch.
It’s the kind of reaction one expects from cops who’ve been trained to think of the people as their enemy.
Do you see that this isn’t just about personal racial animus?
You’re the one who brought up black men living in terror of police and violence on black bodies (paraphrased). I’m the one who said it wasn’t always about race even when the victims are black. So I’m not sure what you think you’re proven in asking me that question.
Race can be involved even when there’s no personal racial animus involved. Someone can be reasonably afraid for their life even if the cop who shoots them has no personal racial animus.
I can’t believe I’m having to explain this stuff to you. Yes, it’s about race. That doesn’t mean it’s just about personal racial animus.
I get that you want to reduce everything to racial motive or injustice, conscious or otherwise. I’m not even disagreeing with you about the fact that systemic racial injustice exists in the current justice system. But I consider each incident separate of such judgement. I don’t know (and neither do you) that Wright was killed due to some subconscious racial bias on the part of the cop. Similarly, I don’t know that subconscious racial bias played a role in the death of this 13 year old kid. All I am reasonably confident about is that these cops used poor judgement and may not be well suited for their jobs in making these life & death decisions. That may be training or character or many other things. But it doesn’t all have to boil down to whatever it is you think it boils down to.
As to whether it’s reasonable for each of these victims to be in fear for their life… I honestly don’t know. I think each one attempted to run from the police primarily to avoid arrest. Whether fear of being shot was part of their emotional calculus at the time, I honestly can’t tell. It certainly played a role in the confrontation with the Army Lt. But in each case, as with so many others, it’s hard to compare what may or may not have happened under different circumstance with different cops involved. A news story was cited above by Typo_Negative about a white man assaulting a cop and not being shot is a good example of this. How do we know whether the officers involved in that incident weren’t just better people who would have chosen not to shoot Wright or this kid under similar circumstance? Isn’t what they chose not to do the exact thing we say we want to see happen in so many similar cases?
There are a lot of assumptions being made by you and others. I can understand the temptation and I can even see where it may be appropriate. But not as a default. Which is what I trying to avoid doing by treating each case on its merits as best as I can from a lay person’s point of view.
The question is, how does the person being detained know that these are “better” people who would not shoot them?
They don’t. That is why they are in fear for their lives.
Although I would have to say
While this may be true, it should be a concern that there are people who are willing to risk their lives in order to avoid the dehumanizing and outright torture that goes on in our “Justice” system.
As long as you realize that you are seeing it from a white person’s point of view.
I want to preface this post with one of my pithy sayings:
Statistics should always be the beginning of the conversation – never the end.
https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/27/racial-disparity-police-shootings-unchanged-over-5-ye
Black people were killed at 2.6 times the rate of white people (1,265 total killed); and Hispanics were killed at nearly 1.3 times the rate of white people (889 total killed). Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).
All of these cases have to be looked at individually, but we shouldn’t take our eyes off of the aggregated statistics. It’s an iterative process.
But the stats I quoted from the article above are deeply troubling.
By “trainers” who hammer home the “one of us is going home tonight” philosophy. They show the clips of those police who were assaulted and say “this is what awaits you out there today!” They preach the catchphrase of Sgt. Jablonski in Hill Street Blues, “let’s do it to them before they do it to us”.
And the LEOs are being told to expect that many of us out here are just waiting to do it to them if given half the chance. I would not be surprised at all if among the personal and virtual LEO communities there is a widespread current of “they’re coming after us! they’ve declared us the enemy! it’s open season! any call is an ambush waiting to happen!” being reiterated and reinforced.
So for some of these LEOs, the suspect can’t even “drop it” fast enough. The decision to apply deadly force is already made from the start – not necessarily maliciously, but out of a conditioning that any hesitation = death.
The above passage shows me you’re still not getting it. In a larger sense, it doesn’t matter if those cops have personal racial animus or not. The entire law enforcement system is set up to devalue Black bodies and Black lives – from the training to the culture to the blue wall to the personalities that are recruited and more. It wasn’t set up to protect and serve Black people. It was set up to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful – and one of their interests was feeding and serving the racial conflict and fear – both whites’ fear of black people and Blacks’ fear of law enforcement (and of white people). The individual feelings of individual cops barely matter. As long as they’re okay with this system – and if they’re not, they’re probably not cops – it barely matters if they’re personally racist, any more than it mattered if a Japanese-American internment camp guard hated Japanese people.
We’re not going to fix this by weeding out the racist cops. A good and fair system would function even with personally racist cops – because the system would hold their behavior in check.
But also by their daily treatment by the public. I don’t seek out video of police interacting with people. Just not a matter of interest for me. But one popped up on my youtube feed on a sleepless night so I clicked on it. In the video, a cop approached a lady in her car (white Karen type) to warn her verbally that he saw her texting and looking at pictures on her phone while driving. She immediately began to mouth off to him and do pretty much everything she could to piss him off verbally. I thought he showed remarkable restraint in not shooting her.
Now, imagine that multiple times a day, every working day, for years. It’s gotta leave a mental mark on a normal person to be constantly dealing with abusive behavior from people who did something wrong and then refuse to co-operate or become outright argumentative and abusive.
I’m not trying to justify these clearly wrongful shootings. But I don’t know if cops are getting the mental support they need to continue to do their jobs without becoming very angry and broken inside over time.
When I think of “re-imagine policing,” I think of dramatically more pre-hire psychological screening and infinitely more ongoing mental health evaluation, counseling, and support.
That is definitely a part of the necessary and effective police reform.
People piss me off on a daily basis, and it takes no restraint on my part to not shoot them.
Wow, exactly. @QuickSilver, do you want to rephrase there? Or are you really on the verge of murder every time someone verbally berates you?
You’ve the makings of a model police officer. You should apply.