The thing is, people are so dumb, they charge people to enforce law who know nothing about law.
Cutesy video, but the technical lawyer (I know he’s just having a bit of fun) neglects to acknowledge the incident happened outside American jurisdiction. He’s applying American jurisprudence to foreign jurisdiction.
Uh, no.
There is a wide range of US law governing the conduct of US citizens abroad.
https://www.bu.edu/globalprograms/manage/legal/us-laws-abroad/
The fact that an action is overseas is not ipso facto an immunity from American prosecution.
Edit to add: even better link
Addendum: The extraterritorial application of American law to American citizens is a little squishy in some areas. There are crimes for which Congress explicitly provides for extraterritorial applicability (human trafficking, financial fraud, certain types of bribery, etc.). In other categories, the written law is silent, and judicial proceedings have established the jurisdiction as local in case law. In some areas, the precedent is inconsistent, and depends on circumstance, both of the specific incident and the interests of relevant enforcement.
The upshot is, Indy may or may not be safe from US charges, give or take the level of news coverage, the attention of the public, the aggressiveness of the prosecutors, and so on.
The original point still stands, though. Just because something happens outside US borders, that doesn’t mean, by itself, that American authorities have their hands tied.
https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1333&context=facpub
Later, the United States Supreme Court declared that American law provides that legislative and judicial jurisdiction in criminal matters rests solely with the legislative and judicial branches of government of the state or country in which the crime is committed. Stating the a contrario logic of the same concept, the United States Supreme Court held, “[a] local criminal statute has no extraterritorial effect and a party cannot be indicted in the United States for what he did in a foreign country.”
It’s seems pretty murky and I’m certainly no lawyer or expert, but that wasn’t my point. My point was that the lawyer didn’t discuss what we’re discussing right now.
That’s fair. The lawyer breezed past a significant nuance.
The deputy that shot him gave him a ride home literally hours earlier.
ETA: Extra info from the article and bodycam footage:
“He’s got a gun to his head,” the deputy says.
He tells Brown to “drop the gun” and to stop walking towards him.
That’s when a series of gunshots ring out. The deputy continues telling Brown to drop the gun and show his hands before providing Brown with medical aid. In the footage released by the sheriff’s office, Brown is blurred out.
“HE MIGHT POSSIBLY SHOOT HIMSELF (with a telephone), SHOOT HIM!”
Meanwhile, in our nation’s capital, there’s apparently so little crime to deal with that the cops have taken up drag racing.
I clicked on your link, read the article, and then noticed this article about high school students “auctioning” black classmates???!!!
What . the actual . fuck?
And we wonder why people of color are more likely to get shot or roughed up by cops. White assholes like the ones in this Bubbaville town probably flunk out of community college and then sign up to be a cop.
It’s hard to believe but sometimes actually reading what was written helps a good bit–you will note I was saying that American police train with firearms and spend more time training in mitigating risks from firearms as compared to British police who spend more time training to deal with knife crime. I didn’t pick Britain out of a hat–other posters referenced it because you can find videos online of British police disarming a knife assailant without use of a firearm.
FWIW, British police do not routinely train with firearms. Britain has a system in which AFOs (Authorised Firearms officers) are used for situations and scenarios in which firearms are needed or believed to be needed. Regular constables are not routinely AFOs, some British police departments require AFO status if that department frequently needs deployment of AFOs, for example the Ministry of Defense police are all required to be AFOs, the Northern Ireland police are all required to be AFOs.
New Zealand, probably because it’s a smaller country with maybe less specialization, does not have its officers routinely carry a sidearm on patrol. But all of their officers are trained in using firearms and regularly carry the holster in case they need to holster a firearm on a case by case scenario. NZ police generally carry a firearm in a locked container in their police vehicle, and they can choose to unlock the container and holster it if they feel it is needed. This is a controlled process–any opening of that box has to be explained and justified to command. But since all NZ police could theoretically need to use a firearm, they all receive firearms training. I did not know this until today–but what I knew before today is that most British police are not in this situation, in Britain specially trained police who are trained in firearms are called in on a case by case basis, and regular constables are not ordinarily firearms trained.
So finally going back to what I said–American police with a finite amount of training time, more of that time is put into firearms usage and mitigation than in training on how to deal with a knife assailant using non-lethal methods (also simply, American use of force doctrine explicitly holds that a knife is a lethal weapon and should be met with lethal, not less-lethal force, that means a firearm not a taser.) Contrast this with British police who assuredly receive more training in dealing with knives.
I am not sure why everyone felt the need to “correct” me saying American police receive “more education” than police in other countries–I never said this. Or that American police receive more firearms training than [Insert Country Name OTHER than the United Kingdom], I never said that. I specifically said, in response to a poster musing about why is it British police can handle knife assailants without a gun–that British police are trained to do so, American police are instead trained to use firearms and receive much more firearms training than British police. Thanks.
But they are doing these things as Police, so it is not the same as organized crime. At all. Not at all. Because yeah, I got nothing.
…It’s hard to believe but sometimes actually reading what was written helps a good bit-because you will note that I addressed this in the post you are responding too.
But this is just typical American exceptionalist bullshit. The entire point of bringing up the UK example was to demonstrate that pulling a gun and opening fire wasn’t the only option available here. That there are different ways to do things, different ways you can train police, that might lead to different outcomes.
“But that isn’t the way we do things here because you have more knife crimes than we do” isn’t a rebuttal to that point. Its an excuse. The same way many Americans insist that Universal Healthcare doesn’t work when it works all over the world. You aren’t special.
This again goes towards my point. We know exactly the police firearms policy here in NZ. Any gooba can spend a few minutes googling it. But we can’t do the same with the US. You have over 17,000 differerent agencies governered by different federal, state, and local laws and by laws, policies and procedures. You can see what we do. But you can’t speak on behalf of the US police. You can’t make claims about what they do and they don’t train for. Because they aren’t a monolith.
You use the word mitigation.
That’s a weasel word. Designed to make the police feel better about what they do. Let’s be honest here. It’s about self-preservation and threat elimination. Kill or be killed. The risk matrix is all-out-of-whack. And its this that is being trained to many police in the US.
You can’t ignore that in comparisons to policing around the world. The differences you are talking about here (policing for guns as opposed to policing for knives) are merely cosmetic, incidental. The motto for the police in NZ is “Safer Communities Together” (The unofficial motto is “Always Blow On the Pie.”) with values based around professionalism, respect, integrity, empathy, diversity and the treaty.
The LAPD motto is “To Protect and Serve” and one of the core values is “Reverance for the Law.” Part of the NYPD mission is to " to enforce the law, preserve peace, protect the people, reduce fear, and maintain order."
The difference between US “police” and the UK police, or the NZ police, or the Australian police or the German police or the Fijian Police or almost every other police force in the world is much nuanced than just “knife training.” They simply operate under a different paradigm, one motivated by fear and reverence for the law. And it’s that nuance that you are missing.
I never claimed you did.
I see you quoted me but the text you typed has no logical or rational association to anything I typed, so I’m not sure who you are responding to, I wonder if you’re confused or just typing a blog post? Not sure. Either way I wasn’t offering justifications, never said I was. Explanations and justifications aren’t the same thing. What I can say is that a cop in Columbus trained the way American police are trained, is not going to benefit from training he didn’t receive, should have received, could have received if he was a cop in another country or etc. I also don’t believe you can train him with a time machine to prevent the tragedy in question, or hold him to the standards of training he didn’t receive.
…I see you didn’t quote me but the text you typed has no logical or rational association to anything I typed, so I’m not sure who you are responding to, I wonder if you’re confused or just typing a blog post? Not sure.
What I can say is that a cop in Columbus is trained the way American police are typically trained, is more likely than not to buy into the same deadly paradigm that most of the cops in America have bought into. A paradigm that has a risk matrix that isn’t centred on mitigating deaths of the people they interact with but on stoking fear, blue lives matter and an unhealthy reverence for the law.
And that the difference between how a cop in Columbus is trained to deal with knife crime and how a cop in the UK is trained to deal with knife crime have very little to do with how much more likely people are to end up dead during an encounter with the police in America than they do almost anywhere else. It materially makes no difference. [warning links show police shootings] You just don’t see scenes like this happening as often anywhere else. When you have police standing over obviously dead people pleading with them to “drop the screwdriver” and “raise their hands” and then a few minutes later debating whether to cuff them that all has nothing to do with an emphasis on gun training over knife training. That’s just bad training. And its endemic.
And? I’ve never said anything that materially disagrees with this.
That depends on the goals. Your assumption about the end goals of policing may be incorrect. They say their motto is “To Protect and Serve”, but you will notice a signal lack of subject in that phrase. Whom/what they are protecting/serving may not be whom/what we were inferring. Perhaps their training is entirely appropriate and only problematic because we noticed that is does not comport with what we believed it to be for.
Any chance it’s a cookbook ?
This one gets better, and begs the same old questions about who we’re hiring, what we’re teaching/training them, and whether or not they’re being evaluated by mental health professionals often enough:
Not something the police did, but rather the prosecutor:
Texas resident Caron McBride recently discovered that she had been charged with a felony for an unreturned Sabrina the Teenage Witch VHS tape from 21 years ago. McBride found out she was charged with felony embezzlement of rented property in March of 2000 while running into a problem with the DMV when she was trying to change her name on her license.
I really hope that nobody pulled a muscle while reaching for that ‘felony embezzlement’ charge. What a load of shit.