I’ve made it extremely clear that I think anyone has the right to defend themselves, with lethal force, if they reasonably believe they are in imminent danger of death or serious injury. What you said is not an accurate paraphrase of that, and many of my posts have made that very clear.
You want to remove that right because some people might be liars. That is despicable, it’s fundamentally immoral, and it’s contrary to the basic idea of rights.
The only way you could believe that I’m saying what you claim I am is because you either don’t understand the words “reasonable” and “imminent”, or have some sort of selective word blindness. Perhaps you should look those words up, or see an optician.
That is, for reasons that I’ve repeatedly explained, an unacceptable standard that’s not based on morality, legality, or logic. People - cops or otherwise - are not omniscient or telepathic, and to expect them to be so is ridiculous.
Just to make it clear, though, I’ve never claimed that panic is an acceptable justification. Do you also have trouble understanding the word “reasonable”?
That standard us simply wrong, and repeating it won’t change that.
Also, as should be obvious, not all killings of unarmed people are murder. Because mistakes happen. That doesn’t prove that someone had done something wrong, if the mistake was one that a reasonable person would gave made.
What is so hard about understanding the word “reasonable”? Although judging by most posters in this thread, reason is not something that comes naturally…
735 out of 987 killings (accding to WaPo) is 74% - the 88% was for people with mental health probs. So that means 252 UNARMED civilians were killed by cops in 2017. A number far too large, imho, no matter what standard you use. And some of those who were armed were not posing a significant threat.
Police officers take the job knowing there is an increased risk of danger; if they are unable to accept that risk they should not take the job. Because of that elevated risk the job comes with some rewards: they have a wider range of situations were the use of force (including lethal) is acceptable. We, as citizens, and therefore their de facto bosses, are saying that that range is broad but not unlimited. And that civilians have certain expectations of safety that even the police should not take away.
If certain situations present a significant danger to law enforcement officers; we. as their citizen boses, have a duty to both the officers and civilians, to demand changes in procedures to try and prevent these situations. . .not just allow the officers to shoot their way out of it.
No, I want them to lose the right to lie about it. We have seen evidence that they have been doing this for a few years. Evidence that has not been previously available. Evidence that suggests a long-standing pattern of behavior, going back at least several decades, probably more.
Without this clear evidence, the police will back up the word of an officer. It is a club, that closes ranks around its own. For some people, this will never really be a problem. For others, if the police take a dislike to you for whatever reason, you stand a fair chance of ending up FreddyGrayed.
I wasn’t being rude, I was defending myself from what I felt was petty criticism in the discussion. Thank you for clarifying that Stephie and his poor logic and vantage point were the focus. It makes much more sense now that you have explained things SaneBill.
Perjury is already illegal. They don’t have the right to lie about it to courts or investigators, and I very much doubt they gave the right to lie to their employers either.
We gave evidence that thus happens in a small proportion of cases, and it should be dealt with, and the people who do it punished. That doesn’t mean we can assume it’s happening in other cases.
Perjury almost never enters into it. The officer files his account, IA looks at it, end of story. In most cases, the blue wall has closed up before it can even get to the grand jury phase. Perjury means testifying under oath. If the brotherhood, abetted by Uncle DA, can smother the controversy, no one will have to lie under oath.
Perjury is illegal, yes. It is also very difficult to prove under the best of circumstances. See, when a cop shoots an unarmed person and it is not captured by bystander video, the investigation is done by other cops in the same department. "Brother cops’. The cop’s version of events is the official record and cops protect their own.
Again, Michael Slager was only convicted because a bystander got video. Notice that there is no mention of the other cop who saw Slager drop the weapon on the corpse and then handcuff it.
Again, if were not for bystander video, this would be the official version, an unquestioned legal fact.
UCBearcats, my latest post was sort of panic-reply, I wanted to clear it up quickly before you logged out. To make my mistake a bit more understandable here’s the whole chain of events.
Steophan wrote something stupid, and I thought somebody must’ve picked it up. I read the following posts but no-one had replied to it. So I started scrolling back thinking what it was, because while I remembered the idea, I had forgotten the actual wording. And when that sentence jumped to my eyes I thought I found it. The rest is history…
So, sorry, it was stupid and embarrassing mistake, but not nearly the most stupid and embarrassing thing is this thread, and I learned something.
End of hijack and back to business:
Steophan, are you out of your mind ?! 12 % ! That’s madness !!
No, but we also cannot assume that it is not happening in other cases. And when you uncover a pattern of avoidance and deceit, it does not bolster one’s tendency to trust the accuracy of other accounts.
They should be investigated, but with the presumption that the shooter is the victim of a violent crime forced to defend themselves in an unpleasant, probably traumatising fashion. Whether or not they are cops.
Frankly, these claims that people who defend themselves are probably liars and murderers is nothing more than victim blaming for the most part, and should be as unacceptable as that is in other situations.
Let’s make that very clear again. Someone who kills in justified self defence was either the victim of a serious assault, or very narrowly avoided that - or, they made a terrible, tragic but understandable mistake (as for it to be justified any reasonable person would have been capable of making that mistake) that will traumatise them for life. These people are not murderers, they are victims, and I don’t find it even remotely acceptable to make them suffer further because some other people might be lying.
In the swatting case, where we know for a fact the victim was innocent, unarmed, and not threatening the police. And we know that a reasonable person wouldn’t feel threatened because not a single other person at the scene felt the need to shoot, should we assume that the police officer who killed that innocent unarmed man was actually the victim of a violent crime?