So far I haven’t seen anyone argue that cops shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves when in imminent danger.
There’s been plenty of people saying that the police shouldn’t fire at someone threatening them with a gun. It’s hard to get much more imminently in danger than that.
Liar.
Except they don’t all go to juries, do they? And even when they do, the jury instructions are extremely biased.
Which isn’t really an answer, is it? Because all the cop has to say is that he was afraid and suddenly it’s “justified”, right?
Perhaps we need to start by removing all these police officers who are so utterly terrified of wallets and cellphones that they (and you) believe it justifies murder.
And at that, you really didn’t answer my question, so I’ll rephrase it:
How many people need to be killed by police each year in the United States before YOU start to say “there’s something wrong here and we need to change this”?
Because many of us have passed this point and you clearly disagree.
Ha ha no, you explicitly said exactly that. That even though that old guy was pointing a gun at him, the cop shouldn’t have shot him.
You do realise that people can actually read what you write, right? That it doesn’t just vanish when convenient for you?
I’ve posted this before – here are some of the numbers:
Police in the United States killed more people in March 2015 than police in the UK have killed in the last 115 years.
Here’s how the per-capita math works out:
The US has a lot more gun violence than the UK – the US has about 9000 gun murders per year, and the UK has only about 30 gun murders per year – adjust for population, and we find that the US has about 60 times the gun homicides per capita of the UK.
But this is not even close to the difference in killings-by-police: 12 months * 115 years * ~300 mil/~60 mil = 6900… multiply that by ~2 (the US killed about 2 times as many in March 2015 as the UK killed in the last 115 years) and the US has about 14,000 times more killings by police per capita than the UK.
How about per-gun-murder? Back of the envelope math… US police kill more than 200 times as many people per gun murder as UK police kill.
There is way more going on here than just a difference in gun amounts, or gun violence.
I don’t think it’s reasonable that, in the US, police officers find themselves in mortal danger 200 times when corrected for the difference in gun murders greater than the UK. I think it’s far more likely that in the US, police officers are just more likely to draw their weapons and fire their weapons, and more likely to claim after the fact that they were in mortal danger.
And in many cases I don’t blame the cops – in many cases, this is how they are trained – to act as if they are mortal danger when, sometimes, they are not.
Shithead. What is really happening is that people are aghast and disgusted by the frequency with which cops are shooting people before they even know what, if anything, they are being threatened with.
The standard for shooting someone cannot be “I was afraid of what might possibly be.” That’s okay only for pussies and racists. The rest of us are demanding that the standard is that one responds to reality, not to fevered imaginings.
No, only the ones where there’s a good chance of prosecution. Like for all other crimes.
Yes, obviously, the jury instructions, like the rest of the trial, are strongly biased in favour of the defendant. Like for all other trials.
No, wrong. For reasons that have been repeatedly and exhaustively stated in this and many other threads, this isn’t true. He has to have been afraid, and that fear has to have been reasonable. Simply saying it doesn’t get him off the hook.
Nothing justifies murder, that’s a contradiction in terms. But yeah, if some cops are *unreasonably *unable to tell the difference between a wallet and a gun, in the dark, at a distance, when confronting someone they have reason to believe is violent, then remove them.
Perhaps you could volunteer for the control group, so we can see how easy or hard it is. Of course, it wouldn’t be a perfect control, because you wouldn’t die if you got it wrong.
There’s no fixed number. That’s not how it should work.
But then, I’ve repeatedly said that things need to be changed. Strange how you keep ignoring that… Better mental health treatment would help in a lot of cases, reducing the number of unpredictably violent people that the police have to deal with. Body cameras will help, by making it far easier for us to decide if someone could reasonably have been considered a threat. And people need to act respectfully, not confrontationally, when dealing with the police. Change on all sides.
You seem to think that the police are deliberately shooting at people they know aren’t a threat, and that if they’d just stop everything would be fine. That’s bullshit.
I’m glad you posted this bit, at least.
Honestly, we do. We are a nation of pants-wetting fear sponges. It is the most parsimonious explanation for our gun culture, our race relations, our foreign policy…
Liar. Quote me saying that. While you’re at it, try to quote the original article saying that he was pointing the gun directly at the cops, at not just around the corner and down the hallway. Read the article on how the cop was able to get up to the weapon and disarm the old man, you idiot.
Ah, another fuckhead who thinks they should wait until they’ve been shot until they can defend themselves. When you know whether or not someone’s actually going to shoot you, it’s too fucking late.
That would be the “rest of you” excluding the police, the courts, the lawmakers, the public who vote for those laws, right? And anyone with a bit of common sense who would realise that defending yourself only makes sense before you’re dead or crippled.
Anyway, I’d far rather those I care about are live pussies that dead pacifist liberal cunts.
[my italics]
Yeah, you need to drop a taser next to the body and make sure there’s no cell phone video.
You are a disingenuous idiot. What else but the cop was he pointing the gun at down the corridor, was it a fucking firing range? The cop disarmed him because he (correctly, fortunately) judged that the man wasn’t actually going to shoot him, and wanted help. Which is in many ways, as I’ve said, a brave and admirable decision, but not one you get to say anyone with a gun pointed at them should make.
And I’m not quoting posts again that you made and I quoted yesterday. You, for some unknown reason, think that it would have been a better outcome if the cop had been shot that the old guy, and you’ve as yet not explained why.
Yep, that might well work. One reason I strongly support body cams.
Which will give people more protection from the police than from ordinary people. But I don’t accept that it should be any harder for a cop to claim self defence that anyone else, which should mean that to prosecute them, you must prove it wasn’t self defence.
The better outcome is when the cops spend more then two seconds actually analyzing the situation, then decide on a course of action that brings the least amount of harm to everybody involved. I’m sorry there wasn’t enough bloodshed in this situation to satisfy your needs, but I’m sure a situation will pop up soon enough where you will be able to once again spout your “He had no other choice but to empty his gun…then reload…then empty his gun again! That Girl Scout might have had a weapon hidden in that box of cookies!” type of defense.
Four? Have you seen pictures? She could easily pass for six!
You’re not “glad” about the other numbers I posted? Don’t you think the difference in police shootings are relevant to this discussion?
To be fair, he had been watching Men In Black just before the event, and she was carrying a book on particle physics.
Just like Steophan. Wait, no, not Men in Black. Steophan was watching black men, through a tiny gap in his drapes, while praying and fingering his weapon.