(Post shortened. Italics added.) Thanks for giving us a succinct summary of your post.
(Please note how unimaginative, useless and unamusing this tactic is.)
doorhinge, that was a direct, generally coherent and answerable response. I’m grateful for the confirmation that you’re capable of that, and I’d like to encourage such efforts in the future.
I’ll try to find it for you. I know it was linked in the giant concurrent thread, but I’ll start with my friend Google.
I’m saying that the best practice for investigators is to discourage or prevent the premature release of evidence and/or witness accounts, in order to reduce the probability of influencing uncollected testimony (unconscious bias, collusion or other).
You know, there is a thread which goes over all the witness testimony in the grand jury proceedings, including the account by the witness who eventually admitted she hadn’t actually seen what happened.
You could try reading it.
Quick update for doorhinge:
I’m talking about Witness 40 from the grand jury documents. Here’s the sequential journal entries submitted by the witness that should peg any reasonable person’s bullshit meter. You’ll probably find the entries plausible.
Here is a story about Witness 40 (identified as Sandra McElroy) from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You could find many others in a Google search if you’re concerned that this might be a biased source. -And I’m generally speaking to any reader here, as I don’t expect I’ll convince my current interlocutor about anything, and I really don’t care if I do.
The Christian Science Monitor comments that many countries’ cops don’t need guns.
Of course this wouldn’t work in America because … – Remind me again, Why? Benghazi? Uppity thugs and hos that don’t know their place?
Not for any, or even most changes - just the fucking idiotic changes dickheads like you are demanding, which would remove the right to self defence and the right to a fair trial from cops, preventing anyone from wanting to, or even being able to, do the job.
You urgently need to learn to read for comprehension, and learn to stop straw-manning every fucking argument you see. You won’t of course, for two reasons. Firstly, you’re too fucking stupid, and secondly, you are unwilling to challenge your views for whatever reason. You are at least as bad as Smapti for that, and don’t even have the defence of being at least somewhat correct.
Many countries don’t have a universal right to bear arms, ready access to firearms for anyone with the money to buy one, a multi-billion dollar lobby that actively fights against laws that would keep guns out of the hands of criminals or the mentally ill, a large demographic insisting on the right to openly carry and brandish guns in just about any public place, and a culture that teaches that the police are corrupt and out to get you and that it is perfectly OK to use deadly force to resist them.
Because literally no-one in the UK carries a gun as a matter of course. Because we are (for whatever reason) far less violent a country than the US.
Well, fewer black people, obviously.
[/sarcasm]
Bwa-ha-ha…
Personally, I think it’d be great if cops got fair trials, where all witnesses (including and especially other cops) told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18501855&postcount=4752
[Quote=Steophan]
The alternative is a world where we don’t actually have policing at all. The idea that a handful of killings of innocent people - most of them accidental - should mean we stop trusting the police and instead embrace anarchy is absolutely ridiculous.
[/quote]
You may not be aware of this, but there is actually a record of the things you write here.
And as you will observe, your stupidity in that post is followed by posters who are not me observing the gaping flaws in your thinking. You should consider that the problem here may not be my reading abilities.
Sarcasm noted but just for data’s sake:
US: White 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61% (July 2007 estimate)
UK: White 87.2%, black/African/Caribbean/black British 3%, Asian/Asian British: Indian 2.3%, Asian/Asian British: Pakistani 1.9%, mixed 2%, other 3.7% (2011 est.)
But basically it’s more cultural than anything else. There isn’t really a “Great Britain, Fuck Yeah!” mentality here in the same way “America, Fuck Yeah!” exists, and guns are part of that.
Thank you for the stats, Gyrate.
I agree that it’s broad cultural differences, which probably do include nationalism and the American ‘cowboy’ mythos. I was just kinda riffing on Steophan’s *completely nonracist!*© thesis that American black culture promotes violence due to some fundamental but *completely nonracist!*© divergence from the rest of American culture.
A polite and serious question: Do you believe that your debate opponents are advocating removing from police the right to self defense and right to a fair trial?
If so, do you think other people share your opinion of what your debate opponents believe?
And finally, if so, could you identify other people in this thread who might be able to support your interpretation? (To be clear, I’m not asking why you believe your debate opponents think this way, I’m asking if you could identify other individuals in this thread who you believe will have reached the same conclusions as you.)
I’m still trying to guess whether Smapti is a corrupted computer-program like Steophan, or more of a Vulcan Dr.Spock-logic kind of guy, perhaps trying to make Sense of Asimov’s 2nd Law of Robotics.
I’ve highlighted this post for truth. I’d also say that
U.S., in important ways, has more “caste” discrimination than places like Europe.
Where I differ with Smapti is :–
He seeks to increase this unfortunate U.S. condition by condoning police brutality.
I seek to reduce the problem, with better police hiring criteria and training. Society must also move to reduce (often racial) caste bias – a good first step is to point police hiring at lower-caste and prejudice-free.
American police does have a long history of being thugs – see Gangs of New York, etc etc. etc. Note that gun prevalence isn’t the problem per se; in several other countries guns are widely carried yet police do not draw on citizens without a real demonstrated threat.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Yes, in some cases this will mean that a cop shouldn’t shoot until after he’s been shot at. Still most rational observers might agree that standard is better than America’s:
“I raced up to the kid at high speed; my partner and I had guns pointed at him before he knew we were there. I wasn’t sure whether he was drawing on me or not – the brain can react in less than 200 milliseconds, didn’t you know? Of course, I figured the gun was a toy, but it could have been a water pistol loaded with acid or hallucinogenics, etc. And for all I knew the perp had a moll ready to give me hangnail with her tweezers, your Honor sir.”
– “It was a clean good kill. Bounty payable.”
Here’s an idea …
[QUOTE=Ann Coulter]
[I know it is against Board rules to misquote other Dopers. But AFAIK Mrs. Coulter is not a Doper so obviously satiric play is fair.]
Cops have been getting good clean kills . We’ve got it up to quadruple digits annually!
I think sterner enforcements should be played. Most of these dead are scum anyway: the petty felon on Staten Island, Trayvon Martin was a shoplifter, etc. Even the recent Texas suicide was an anti-cop agitator.
So here’s my idea. I’m setting up the Anne CouStmampth Charity. To start we’ll pay $500 for every good clean kill, to cover legal expenses, with any leftover paid into the police treasury of the jurisdiction where the clean kill occurred. Starting right now, August 1 2016 I’ll personally pay $400 bounty per clean kill by an U.S. LEO ($100-$200 for blinding, maiming).
The goal is to get contributions from you and other fine Tea Partiers and Trump supporters and raise the bounty to $5000 or more! It’s win-win! – rid the roads of scum while investing private money into police! Liberals compain about overpopulation. Let’s rid the gene-pool of feather-muckers too stupid to respond politely to police orders.
[/QUOTE]
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Yes I know the bot-like Smapti doesn’t oppose cop training. But wasn’t he the one hat thinks thugs and hos need to be fully witted in less than one second, after being suddenly awoken from a deep slumber. 
:eek: May Smapti is just a bot after all. Even Vulcans are biological organisms and understand the concept of deep slumber.
Read it? I participated in it. CNN, and other media outlets, had been very busy promoting very sketchy eyewitness testimony that promoted their pre-determined conclusion. Some people actually believed the horseshit that was being spewed on a daily basis.
Besides State investigators, there were more than 40 FBI investigators interviewing witlesses, and the final result was that Brown was a minor criminal who attacked a store owner, and a police officer. Brown was killed because he was charging a police officer. No hands up. No don’t shoot. Just a thief who though he could injure or kill a police officer. Brown made a lot of bad choices that day.
Spock was my idol when I was little, but that’s beside the point. (As an adult, I find that he’s still too swayed by his emotions in critical situations, and the new movie version even more so.)
No, I seek to reduce the problem by encouraging people not to break the law and not to fight the police and escalate confrontations when it’s not in their interest to do so.
Your words. Not mine.
And it is exactly because the concept of deep slumber exists that one needs to understand that one should never make rash, immediate gestures upon being suddenly aroused from one.
Many of the witnesses that spoke to the media were later proven to be full of shit. The LSM didn’t bother to verify any of their stories before using those stories as “breaking news”.
Some, yes. Most, no. In one thread (I’m not sure if it was this or another one) admitted anarchist MrDibble said cops shouldn’t have the right to shoot until someone has actually fired at them, and that if that vastly reduced the amount of people willing to be cops that would be a good thing. Several people have held that the police should be judged more strictly than others when it comes to self defence.
And we’ve seen repeatedly demands that videos and the like be released before an investigation is complete, something guaranteed to prejudice a trial. Monstro did exactly that a few posts ago.
I don’t think people’s intentions are necessarily to do these things, but they’re pretty obvious consequences of their views.