Ever noticed how in most of these case the gun itself is black. So there. Vindicated !
Well, why don’t they? They don’t KNOW the suspect doesn’t have a gun. And because of the laws of this country, it’s trivially easy for anyone to get a gun. Therefore, the safest play for today’s police force is to immediately yell “He’s got a gun” since, you know, there really isn’t any downsides, even if the suspect does not have a gun.
It’s not quite clear to me whether you’re really stupid, or intentionally obtuse. Given your general habits and demeanor on this board, I’m inclined towards the latter.
I’ve made my position clear. If you want to keep responding without addressing the issue in any substantive fashion, have at it.
Nope, but they yell it just about every time they shoot someone, even if all they have is a phone.
I don’t see your point.
First, you say -
Then you ask -
There’s no downside, but they don’t do it. It would seem to the logical mind (i.e. someone not like Czarcasm) that your analysis is incomplete, because it does not match the known facts.
The police, in fact, do not routinely yell “He’s got a gun” when they encounter a suspect. That would suggest that there is some factor that does present a downside. What do you think that might be? (If, indeed, any kind of thought went into your analysis, which has not been demonstrated.)
Obviously morons on the SDMB (hi, guys!) will say ‘even if the cop says he saw the gun, and even if it is shown fairly conclusively that he had a gun, that doesn’t prove he saw the gun’. But I don’t see what can be done about that - ‘cops are always wrong until proven right, and also after’ is an article of faith rather than reason-based, so derisive laughter is the best or only remedy.
Regards,
Shodan
None of the above.
No, you actually haven’t. Do you think the fact that a gun was found is evidence in favor of the notion that the cop saw the gun?
Regards,
Shodan
The problem with this line of thought is this: In this instance, the cop says “He has a gun”, shoots a guy, and the guy does, in fact, have a gun. You would say - See? The cop was right. How he determined that the guy had a gun is irrelevant, since the guy had a gun.
In another instance, a cop said “He has a gun” and it turned out, the guy DIDN’T have a gun. And you say - so what? The cop thought he did, that’s enough to shoot a guy.
There are no times where you say “Yeah, the cop was wrong” Now, I don’t think everyone can be right every single time. But whether or not a shot suspect has a gun, if the cop says “he has a gun”, you consider the cop correct, even if the cop only “thought” the guy had a gun. In the past, maybe it could be considered. But nowadays? With body cameras and cell phones cameras and numerous videos of cops outright lying, planting drugs, beating people, kicking people and then lying about it, to shooting a god-damned person who is laying on the fucking ground with his hands in the air saying “Please don’t shoot me”, there comes a time when maybe you don’t take a cops word for it 100% of the time.
At least hold cops to the standard that they have to identify a fucking gun before being so scared for their life that they shoot a guy in the back running away. Or a guy laying in the street begging not to be shot.
I grew up in in Loudoun. Lots of poor people interspersed with the millionaires. And yeah, quite a few cops who believe a black person driving a nice car is probably a drug dealer.
I think I see the problem here.
You keep presenting this as a problem, but he sees it as a “win/win” situation because the only people adversely effected or all those undesirables that probably deserve what they get.
…“he’s got a gun” appears to be the new “stop resisting.”
Yeah, I don’t get that. We should be moving toward “Try to shoot less people” and working towards ways to avoid shooting people. But others try to hold on to the most tenuous evidence that requires the shooting of people. I just don’t get that.
You don’t get it because you are projecting. The people holding onto tenuous evidence are the cop-haters, and what they are holding onto is that which they want to use to condemn cops.
We see it in this thread. There is no evidence whatever that the cop lied about seeing the gun, conclusive evidence that the crook had a gun, and that constitutes evidence that the cop did not lie about seeing the gun. Yet you-all are squirming around trying to spin “the cop was right” into “the cop was wrong”. You accuse me falsely of saying that all shootings by cops are justified. It would be much closer to the truth to say that you say that no shootings by cops are justified.
Still waiting for a response to my earlier question. You claim that there is no downside to the cops saying “He’s got a gun” every time they confront a suspect, yet cops do not say “He’s got a gun” every time they confront a suspect. How do you reconcile that contradiction?
Regards,
Shodan
That’s easy: Not all cops are murderous pieces of shit.
Because they are stupid and haven’t thought of it yet?
This only holds up if you believe the mere possession of a gun warrants being shot. What if the guy legally possessed the gun?
Well, apparently the real cop-hater here is you. You’re pretty much saying that all cops are murderous thugs who are always looking for an excuse to kill suspects to be sure they’re not a threat.
As others have said many times over, vast majority of cops are reasonable and humane people who want to make the society safe and fair. Not you obviously.
And some cops just forget to yell it.
( Edit, damn, double-ninja’ed. )
Then I’m sure you’re aware that it hasn’t been that long, really, since western Fairfax County, let alone Loudoun, was basically rural, and Dulles Airport was in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, growth has exploded out there in recent years, especially as western Fairfax became a high-tech corridor in the late 1990s, and people moved into Loudoun because it was close to those jobs, and housing was cheaper. But I’ll bet most of the cops in Loudoun County grew up in Loudoun as it was >30 years ago. They grew up thinking of DC as a distant drug- and gang-ridden urban hellhole full of black people doing nasty things to each other. And conservative media (Fox, Rush, etc.) still spread the propaganda that whites who go into the big cities where all those black people live are taking their lives into their hands when they do so.
But I’m sure Loudoun County cops wouldn’t be inhaling any of that; they’d be watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and listening to NPR.
So you’re saying that a lot of blacks buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis at that/those dealership(s)? And if not, what’s the connection?
Often the suspect is white.
Question for Stephoan and the other cop lovers 'round these parts.
Were these guys in the wrong?
Obviously not - those weren’t real police, and shooting them in self-defense was fine. However, since they identified themselves as police if they *had *been real police then shooting them would have been bad. Also, if they had been real police the firing upon the occupants immediately upon entry would have been fine, because as it turned out the occupants were actually armed and the police would have justifiably been in fear for their lives.
I don’t know why you are having a problem with this.