I’m not criticizing people for posting to the thread. I’m criticizing the over-the-top outrage over the one-in-a-million happenstance that resulted in the woman discussed above being wrongfully kept in jail for three months.
It means no such thing. In the first place, it wasn’t legal in the sense that laws had been passed with the intent to make it happen, and in the second place the only reason it was technically legal is that such an occurrence is such a rarity that no one ever thought to create laws or establish policies to prevent it. So no, it isn’t going to be systemic, just like it’s never been systemic. The reality is that it simply isn’t possible to foresee and write policy procedures for every possible contingent under the sun. It isn’t even possible to think of them. Shit happens. Like I said, get over it.
Pity this happened to an innocent woman, and not to you. Of course you’d be back on the board to whinge incessantly about it if it happened to you, but at least we’d be spared your stupidity for 96 days.
Texas man (with a name ending in “z”) leads police on a chase through the Houston area, shooting at them and damaging their windshield. Eventually, they capture him. Good thing he was not black.
I’d say it’s a good thing the guy whose name ends in “z” didn’t engage in threatening behavior within mere feet of the police, like most of the other guys who’ve been shot.
It’s one thing to shoot a guy who’s in your immediate proximity who appears to be reaching for a gun vs. a guy who shot at you and missed a few minutes ago and then ran off somewhere, where he could then be chased down by a police dog and captured.
So as is the case in most of these ‘if he’d been a black guy he’d have been shot’ instances, this is a case of false equivalence (i.e., not the same thing).
Yeah! Like playing with a cap gun in the park! Or heading back towards your car! It’s a good thing this guy who opened fire on the police didn’t do something scary like that.
What’s the point? SA has already shown that if you bend the rules of logic a bit…OK, a lot!..and squint, some of these cases are not as bad as they appear to be. Which, by his rules, means that all of these cases are bogus and can be dismissed out of hand.
When an Asian-American reporter asked for clarification, Hatfield replied “Do you understand English, darling? Do you understand English?”
For those who say fire officials are not law enforcement and a cop would never behave this way, I say “Eat shit.” I do admit that the story might be better placed in SRIOTD since the probability Hatfield is voting for the GOP is somewhere upwards of 99.9%.
Do you think Hatfield was unique and a total fluke? Or do you think it’s possible that there might remain some small but still significant number of Hatfield-like assholes in charge of police and fire departments in some small communities throughout the country? And isn’t it possible that there’s a larger number of Hatfield-light types, who have similar feelings but are disciplined enough to not voice them aloud on tape?
In a nation of 300+ million people, I am sure there are small numbers of people who believe anything. How significant is that number? Not possible to determine without knowing what it is.
Is it possible that there is a small number of Muslims who are plotting terrorism? Sure. Is it possible that there is a larger number of Muslims who sympathize with the terrorists, but don’t mention it? Sure. Therefore we need a ten thousand post thread digging out every incident that is, or can be made to look like, an example of Islamic terrorism, so we know how to regard Muslims.
But there’s no history of Muslim terrorists in control. 50 years ago, do you think Sheriff Bull Connor was an anomaly, or were most Southern sheriffs like him? I think most probably were pretty close to him, and a good portion of non-Southern sheriffs were too. I think Hatfield is just the same kind of guy. So it seems a very different question than yours about Muslims, unless you think that there were never significant numbers of Hatfields or Connors in charge of police and fire departments in the US.
There are going to be all types of all types, there is no question about that. The problem is when we start putting racists like that into positions of power.
If a bigot had driven by the accident and said the same thing, no one would care (except his family or friends that may have overheard his hateful comment). But because it is a person with actual power to affect things in the community, it is important to care what he does with that power.
So the relative danger to the public (or to it’s individual members) isn’t really the issue. Muslim terrorists present a greater threat of large-scale danger and to totally innocent people than do these cases of alleged or actual police misbehavior, but the Muslim terrorist issue gets hand-waved away while the focus is kept on the police because…authoritah?
Well, considering this thread is entitled, “Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians …” and not “Controversial random shit that pisses you off,” yeah, because of authoritah.