I have seen a lot of disturbing content on the internet and this video bothered me more than almost all of it. It took me several hours to shake it off. That police officer is a serious piece of shit and should not have the position he does. I hope, for all of our sakes, that he is fired and can never find another position in law enforcement.
Regarding the jury that found him innocent, this is completely understandable given the decision in Graham v. Connor and how it has been subsequently applied to police excessive force cases.
So the defense can show that small 5 second clip just before the shooting where the deceased right hand swings behind him out of the officers sight and ask the question “would a reasonable police officer be afraid if a criminal had their hand out of sight like this?” If this question can be answered yes when taking no other information into account (i.e. the 10 minutes before this instant, the nature of the call that brought the officers to the location, any other information about the officers or the civilian), then current law says you have to find the officer innocent. This is the current law based upon the supreme court case above and it is why so many of these cases are decided on the part of the officers when brought before a jury; a judge has instructed the jury that this is the criteria that they must use when reaching a verdict.
My feelings are similar in that this is one of the most disturbing videos I’ve seen - it reminded me of the Philando Castle shooting. In both cases, the detained men were trying to comply - they were going out of their way to comply with the officer. None of it saved them. That’s what’s so scary about this. The officers had the situation completely under their control. There was absolutely no reason for this to happen at all. The only reason it did happen - the only reason - is because the officer’s conduct made a cooperative suspect terrified and made his fatal outcome increasingly likely with every command made in a voice of agitation.
To my eyes it almost seemed like they were looking for an excuse to shoot. How in the hell do they expect someone who is rightfully terrified to do exactly what they ask when what was asked was confusing and difficult. Five shots from a rifle at close range because the guy was reflexively adjusting his pants? Ridiculous. And the mindset of that cop is disturbing.
I respectfully disagree - I think it is absolutely a training issue and I think it’s critical that we see it in this respect because there are thousands of other departments across the country, and there is no way to be confident in their training either. What’s needed are some uniform standards. I’m sure they already have standards but whatever they are, they’re insufficient. By comparison, federal law enforcement agencies generally are pretty good, all things considered. They have standards, resources, training, and most importantly, mechanisms that provide oversight. Local departments need those same things.
Culture is also a factor, but I think that if you improve the standards, then the culture will change over time. Training is really behavior modification. Good training changes the way people behave and it ultimately changes how they think they should behave in a particular situation. The tragedy in this video started years before the night of the killing. It started with a department that trains officers to protect themselves first and that civilians who get killed are collateral damage. This mentality equates the police with the modern military. It’s extremely dangerous and this has to change.
It’s not just that individual cop; it’s potentially many more cops. What the officer did was unconscionable, but there’s a more fundamentally important question that needs to be answered: how on earth did he ever get to the point where he and his colleague think that this was the appropriate response? It wasn’t a rogue cop by himself - he had a partner with him. He had a video camera. He knew his actions would see the light of day. He wasn’t making an effort to conceal anything. He responded to a situation and he acted. He and his partner were obviously led to believe that this was how to respond to the situation, and that’s the scary part.
Based on this incident, it seems to me that these officers weren’t trained in any way to assess the threat until they could first be absolutely, 100% sure that the threat was completely eliminated. The classic “Shoot first and ask questions later” line of thought. It seems that “I was afraid” is actually a professionally-sanctioned justification for using deadly force against citizens and it’s a pretty effective defense against blatantly criminal abuse of civil rights. The scary part is that there’s no real accountability. A department can simply distance itself from its actions by blaming the individual officer in question, but what changes in terms of training and changing the behavior of other officers? It’s disturbing enough that this officer got away with killing a man for no reason at all, but what’s potentially more disturbing is that perhaps nothing changes in the Mesa police force. What, then, is preventing this from being repeated?
On the other hand, so far my (few) encounters with Mesa PD have always been totally professional. Even when I was a young guy with a muscle car. The officers almost apologized for giving me a ticket!
I don’t know this for sure, but I speculate that this is what leads juries to find police officers not guilty. The jury is likely instructed that from the police officer’s perspective, with the way the city/state trains the officers, the officer was doing the absolutely right thing to fire at a suspect with a hand near their waist. With training as described in the Atlantic article, the defense attorney can establish that the cop had not gone rogue and acted counter to their training. It’s probably impressed upon the jury over and over that the situation their deciding upon is in no way comparable to, say, two guys getting into an argument and one whipping out a gun and shooting the other.
I have absolutely no problem in theory with a jury being instructed to see things from the police officer’s point of view - that’s valid application of the law.
What’s utterly invalid are the standards of behavior and protocols of assessing a threat that are being judged, that simply moving your body the wrong way can be interpreted as a mortal threat. This goes back to training, and I’m afraid that without specific statutes and federal oversight, we will continue to see more of these incidents, and some might even be more outrageous than what we’ve observed in Mesa. The standard is that simply being afraid, being startled is a legal defense for officers killing civilians. It’s yet another byproduct of our increasingly authoritarian society, with the emphasis on public security over individual rights.
More like Barney Fife. Sounded like the cop was looking for any excuse to blow the guy away. A Harry Callahan knew exactly how many bullets he had left in his pistol. A Harry Callahan was a calm and in-charge kind of cop. These guys were nervous little twits like Barney Fife.
Well, that’s pretty bad training then. If a person moves you just don’t make your gun empty. You’ll shoot ONCE !
What the heck it is with these American cops. In Europe a cop can get through his career without shooting even once in the street. And if they need to shoot it’s most likely a single non-fatal hit. But an American just shoots away until he’s out of ammo ( and essentially unarmed ) - which is bad in every way. In the worst care all his colleagues join in panic and a guy trying to prevent his pants falling ends up dead with a dozen or more bullets in his body.
Life After Deadly Force: What it’s like to survive being shot by the police is a good-sized article at VICE detailing the lives of 4 people who were shot by police. There are videos for each person as well as a text entry. There are also a fair amount of pictures, so there’s quite a bit of content at that link.
I suspect that people disinclined to ever give the police a critical eye won’t want to read these words, see these videos, but I leave it here in hopes that some will have an open mind and be willing to see the consequences of our current system. For those already concerned (and/or alarmed), this will offer little solace but perhaps some weight to the scales tipping in favor of reforms.
There are also other relevant stories linked after this one:
Its been a while, since I’ve been in this thread. Have we reached the conclusion that that “cops killing blacks” problem is really a “cops killing poor people” problem yet or do we still think its MOSTLY because cops are racists?
No, I think most are in agreement that it is mainly training, largely screening, helped substantially by the culture of no snitching.
The racism certainly doesn’t help, but it’s more of a third or fourth order factor. As noted several times, a cop is not more likely to shoot a person they are interacting with because of their race, but they are more likely to initiate an interaction with them because of their race.
Personally, while I do thin that racism is a not insignificant factor, I would rather down play that angle a bit. As long as whites think that it is only blacks being shot unjustified by the police, they won’t care. If whites realize that they are in just as much danger for being killed by a bully with a badge, they may actually care to work to reform the police.
Even when you correct for socio-economic status, crime rates are higher in majority-black communities than for majority-white. Cite. Police tend to kill violent criminals, and violent criminals are disproportionately black.
