Yeah, because lengthy explorations of topics are always a much worse response than knee-jerk one liners and platitudes.
Sadly, we have come to the point that part of the training is “presume the suspect’s armed and willing to kill you” with a large unspoken portion if “he who hesitates is shot”.
It’s all an Ouroboros manifestation.
Cops shooting Blacks. Blacks advocate cop killing via social media and everywhere possible. Cops get executed by Black males while sitting in their cars. Happening every week these days.
Cops get nervous. There is a percentage of cops who are very Barney Fife-ish. Jumpy, nervous trigger fingers, especially around Black males, especially while in hypervigilance mode due to the nationwide call for cops to be killed and we see that carried out followed by nervous cops who overreact and kill Black males who call for more cops to die etc etc etc…
Round and round. You will lose when you fight the law. Advocating violence is not the answer. Police procedure reform is what is necessary.
Reform from the same cops and politicians who claim all the shootings are justified and that body cameras are an unnecessary invasion of privacy and nothing needs to change because everything is fine, all those people were criminals and the cops were in fear of their lives?
ETA: And that have a rep for actively excusing and covering up violations of existing procedure? Never mind anyone who may disagree with the third sentence above…
Really? Because everything I’ve read is that being a cop us pretty safe job, got a site?
Freethought Blog Says:
In fact cops don’t even rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What exactly is more dangerous than being a cop? For starters, a trash collector is twice as likely to die on the job versus a cop, fishing is 7 times more dangerous than being a cop, and logging workers, nearly 9 times more dangerous.
Here are occupations more dangerous than being a police officer. Number of deaths per 100,000 employed:
image: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/chart-3.jpg
Logging workers: 127.8
Fishermen: 117.0
Aircraft pilots: 53.4
Roofers: 40.5
Garbage collectors: 36.8
Electrical power line installation/repair: 29.8
Truck drivers: 22.8
Oil and gas extraction: 21.9
Farmers and ranchers: 21.3
Construction workers: 17.4
The majority of police deaths are not as a result of violence in the line of duty either, most have occurred accidentally rather than feloniously. Most police officers die, not in some heroic high speed pursuit of a child murderer, but in routine traffic accidents.
Read more at Top 10 Most Dangerous Jobs in the Country: Police Officer is NOT on the List - The Free Thought Project
It is? Because this list of officers killed in the line of duty in 2016 has only 53 deaths, only 21 of which are attributed to deliberate gunfire, and it seems very unlikely that all of those 21 were “executed by Black males while sitting in their cars”. In fact, it’s evident that at least several of them weren’t:
One cop-killer suspect is a white teen
Suspected killer of two cops is a white senior citizen
Cop killer is middle-aged white male
And so on. A fairly high percentage of these 21 cop shootings in 2016 seem to have been committed by rural/suburban white males. So I don’t see where you’re getting your “cops executed by Black males sitting in their cars every week” claim.
10 police officers shot, three dead, in a shooting at a Dallas anti-police demonstration.
This may need its own thread.
Yikes. Snipers.
Abominable.
Excavating - let me try to explain why the training is the way that it is. In almost cases of police use of force the cop is reacting to something the suspect has or hasn’t done. The cop has to observe this, recognize it for what it is, consider his options and then act. This may take some fractions of a second up to a second or more. In all cases the cop is behind the curve. If, under the circumstances as he reasonably believes them to be, the cop thinks the suspect is going for a weapon he is justified in using deadly force. Because of lag between the suspects actions and the time the cop acts the courts have found that the threat need only be imminent, not immediate. In other words, if the cop waits to be absolutely certain the suspect has a gun the suspect may very well shoot him before he can act. That is an unreasonable expectation even for someone who “signed up for risky job” (a mantra I’ve repeated too many times). Similarly, once a cop starts shooting he may very well be shooting as fast as he can, maybe 4 or more rounds a second. If you thought someone was trying to kill you wouldn’t you? BTW, handgun rounds are pretty ineffective at stopping a human being instantly. Now that the cop has started shooting and the suspect has gone down the same reaction lag takes place. The cop has to realize that the threat is no longer there, decide to stop shooting and then actually stop. Again, this takes time. Meanwhile, more rounds are being fired. Some may end up in the suspects back or top of his head. Its not uncommon and it doesn’t mean that the cop intentionally fired excessive rounds. Its just the way humans act when under life threatening circumstances.
Hell, nobody’s life needs to be threatened; too much stress in any given situation can do the same. I recall an off duty cop who temporarily lost his head in a road rage incident. Fortunately for everyone involved, he realized he had picked up his sidearm for no good reason and put it back down before he pulled the trigger.
Breaking news from Missouri: A suburban St. Louis police officer was “ambushed” during a traffic stop Friday and shot at least once, wounding him critically, authorities said.
“Ambushed” sounded to me as though the Police Chief meant that the shooter lay in wait for the cop or lured him in to the traffic-stop situation in order to shoot him. But according to the article, the shooter seems to have got out of his car and shot the officer from behind while he was walking back to the squad car after the stop, which was for speeding.
The Valdosta GA police officer shooting, on the other hand, does sound like a clearly deliberate ambush, as the shooter seems to have called 911 with a property damage report and then fired on the officer who arrived to respond to it.
Simply jumping out of the car to shoot the cop in the back fits at least one definition of “ambush”.
Just some interesting data. I guess this data could be used to prove whichever point you happen to want to prove.
When I see data that shows police are more likely to escalate against black people at every single step of the force curve except shootings, I assume that the data is wrong. The simplest explanation is that police lie about encounters with black people that result in shootings and don’t bother to lie about encounters that don’t result in shootings.
My take on the article is that police would have to lie about shooting at all for your suspicion to be true. I don’t see how that could be the case.
Shit like this is why black people are fed up with the police and the criminal justice system.
Does anyone doubt that if there were no video, that guy would go to prison? Does anyone doubt that for every incident like this caught on video, there are orders of magnitude more that aren’t?
I love how the officer continues to repeat his story of “we asked for ID and he didn’t want to show it” over and over and over and assuring people over and over “it’s all on video”… some people think that if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes true.