I agree with this post.
You’re correct in that anecdotes are a poor way to build any sort of constructive narrative – if that narrative were being built from scratch. But the alternate narrative you build leaves out roughly 400 years of context.
When LEOs kill an unarmed white person, it doesn’t connect with a history of reckless disregard of white people’s rights by LEOs, because that history doesn’t exist. They’re weird, isolated incidents.
When LEOs kill an unarmed Black person, it connects with a long, well-documented history of reckless disregard of Black people’s rights by LEOs. They’re anything but isolated incidents.
That’s why …
This story did get covered in this thread (its precursor) and did get several comments, so shove that shit right back up where it belongs.
You make a lot of good points, and you make them well.
But – aside from agreeing with @Akaj 's response – I’d add …
I made reference in post 1338 above to the 245 year narrative that simply cannot be ignored in trying to understand so many elements of where we are today.
I agree that the perception tide could be turned if the issue were spun in the other direction (ie, more like Fox does), but I don’t agree that it should be. That’s because of studies like this one:
This is pretty clean. Not a crap-ton of confounding variables at play here. A basic Rorschach Test: say what you see.
I’d like to see it repeated. I’d like to see it used in Law Enforcement as a screening tool. I’d like no end of tests be designed and implemented with the goal of identifying racists among the ranks.
I’d imagine that on the ‘active shooter’ training courses, it wouldn’t be too hard to determine whether Bob shoots the unarmed black guy at 3X the rate that he, or others, shoot the unarmed white guy.
If they can be identified, monitored, counseled, and managed in a way that they can be good and decent, LEOs, free from a harmful level of prejudice, then they should be. But if tests show that they harbor deep-seated, inviolable, immutable – even if totally unconscious – racist beliefs, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the profession At All.
The point is: quality should be closer to being designed in, not tested out. Ditto racism in our State-sponsored institutions – particularly law enforcement.
And taking Fox News’s approach (ie, American Exceptionalism) never makes anything better, and there’s a lot to make better in this country.
The cops can’t change 245 years of history and that isn’t their job. But we don’t need even one racist cop having power over the lives of other people – particularly over vulnerable people. Cops really are sui generis because of their potential lethality, just as the criminal justice system in which they work is sui generis because of its ability to deprive people of their liberty.
They need to be held to a higher standard because of that.
Cops have trouble obeying the laws they punish others for not obeying.
Back when I was a little younger and honkier, I had a conversation in which I expressed shock over a cop who had been busted planting either flour or something that wasn’t actually cocaine in suspects’ cars. Bad enough that a dirty cop tried to frame innocent drivers, but even worse knowing that the ‘evidence’ was never tested in a crime lab until someone finally got wise and demanded that it be tested. Her response was, “Pfff, happens all the time.”
While the Chauvin verdict was being read, Columbus, OH police showed up to a report of a disturbance and shot a 16-year-old girl to death. According to reports, the girl they shot was the one who had called police for help.
Guess what color her skin was.
Here’s the story.
Translation: We don’t want her to spend that much time in prison, God-Fearing white girl and all.
We know that waving a knife was more than enough for cops to killl a 16 yr old black girl in Ohio.
And three cops stood over the spot where she was shot, shouting “Blue lives matter.”
Damn. Just damn. 
The ASU cop is to be celebrated. If there were more like him, we probably wouldn’t have needed this thread.
Aye; that was good policing IMO.
Well, now having watched the video, she wasn’t just waving a knife, she was literally at that moment trying to kill someone with it.
Definitely an altercation going on when the cop arrived. I didn’t get audio (due to the computer I was watching it on). I’ll be interested to see what the investigation reveals.
The “Blue Lives Matter” Trio, OTOH, need to be fired. Now.
Loveland police officer Austin Hopp approached Karen Garner on June 26 after employees at a Walmart called to report that Garner tried to leave the store without paying for a T-shirt, a soda, a candy bar and wipes.
The employees made Garner return to the store and leave the items but called police to report the incident. Hopp found Garner walking along a road nearby.
Garner has dementia and sensory aphasia, which impairs her ability to communicate and understand, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed last week about the incident.
Really. I mean, what could they have been thinking. Damn.
I just watched the video as well. Here’s what I saw: The cop stepped back the moment the girl went down on the grass in front of him. We hear him shouting. He backs up some more drawing a gun as the girl with the knife goes after the second woman in the pink jumpsuit standing by the car. Then he shoots the girl with the knife.
My thoughts are that at no point is the violence directed at him but he continues to back up. He has opportunity to step in and physically restrain the attacker. Instead he uses that time to draw his weapon. There are at least two other cops on the scene who would immediately assist him if he acted to restrain the attacker. Instead, because a gun is drawn they step back for safety and at least one other cop draws his gun as well.
Now, perhaps it’s down to training that the cops immediately step back and draw their weapons in such situations. That seems instinctively wrong to me. Especially with so many bystanders so close by.
I’ve tried going back in this thread, but I can’t seem to find the link to this video you all are talking about here. Could you link to it again please?
I don’t like how he handled it, either. I don’t think, however, that he committed any crime you could possibly convict him of.
I mean, he’s not very far at all from shooting the other girl by accident, for one thing.
It seems to me an opportunity existed here to stop the attack without killing her. But as you allude to, that is not how cops are trained anymore. They are trained to see the public as the enemy and to be ready to kill them at a moment’s notice.