I think we have ample documentation to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we should assume police officers are moral, brave or competent. At least, no more so than any other asshole on the street.
At the least, I’m pleased to see so many here agreeing with the Second Amendment Foundation that lawful gun owners carrying for protection shouldn’t have to fear the police. Nice to see such support in unexpected territory.
This happened over a year ago. The video has only just been released. State law requires an outside agency to review shootings, but the police department decided to do its own investigation, and found the officers’ use of force “reasonable” because they believed the guy “was armed or was reaching for a gun behind an air conditioning unit on the roof.”
So now it’s multiple-choice gun fear? “Hey, we were pretty sure that he either had a gun, or he was reaching for one behind the air-conditioning unit that was a good six feet away from him when he was shot. And if not one of those things, he definitely had a gun at home that he would have used if he could reach it.”
Watch that video and tell me that he’s not bending towards the ground so that he can lie down and surrender.
At least the victim didn’t end up dead in this case; just multiple surgeries and permanent partial paralysis in one leg.
Horrific story, and made worse because I know that the DA will never be charged with a crime, nor will anyone else involved in the cover up. And I’ll bet that at least 2 of the cops either aren’t convicted of anything or never have charges filed against them.
Wow. That’s horrible. A terrible shoot. Nothing in his hands, hands to the side, he was lowering himself to the roof when the cops fired. As mentioned above, he was quite a distance from the AC unit. It sure sounded like the cop came up with the AC unit excuse on the spur of the moment, and even he didn’t think it was plausible. The DA should be fired and the two cops arrested.
There were oral arguments before the Supreme Court today in a case that might go some way to curbing the disgraceful practice of civil asset forfeiture in the United States.
The case is Timbs v. Indiana, in which a guy was busted for selling four grams of heroin, and had his $42,000 Land Rover seized via civil asset forfeiture. A judge in Indiana sustained Timbs’ appeal against the seizure of his car, arguing that it was “grossly disproportional” to his crime, and an Indiana state appeals court agree, noting that the value of the car was more than four times the maximum fine for his drug offense. But the Indiana Supreme Court ruled against Timbs, refusing to extend the 8th Amendment’s “excessive fines” clause to the states.
In today’s oral arguments, which you can read here (PDF), the justices seemed to give the Indiana Attorney General a much stiffer grilling than they gave the petitioner’s Institute for Justice lawyer. There was also a nice little exchange that really exemplifies how many lawmakers see civil asset forfeiture as essentially an unrestricted ability to take anything they want:
Here is the naked power of the state, in all of its greedy, money-grubbing glory. It is, according to this guy, legally acceptable to take a $2 million car for a minor speeding infraction.
Well yeah, and this is the problem with letting “legal” equal “moral” in someone’s head. I mean, for all we know, that guy could post here as Bricker, amirite?
Georgia woman spends more than three months in jail for possession of cotton candy. Apparently the cheap drug tests used by cops in road stops are unreliable: Ms. Fincher’s cotton candy was thought to contain methamphetamine. Her bail was set at $1 million so she spent 15 weeks in jail. The state of Georgia finally got around to testing the cotton candy after 13 weeks, but it still took another 2 weeks to release Ms. Fincher. She is white, BTW; perhaps her arrest and long detention were to show that Georgia law enforcement practices equal-opportunity idiocy.
There’s a pattern – things like this are happening over and over again (and have happened for decades and probably more than a century, but with far less coverage than the last few years), and usually the dead innocent guy, shot by police, is black. It should be overwhelmingly clear to everyone that many or most cops in America, whether due to their own biases or biases of their training, are more likely to see young black men as dangerous, all else being equal. They may be very decent and hardworking people who, in general, are significantly more likely to have an unconscious (or conscious) bias that makes them see young black men as dangerous.
The only people who can fix this are cops and those who make policy that affects police behavior. Black people are just human – if many grow up seeing their brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, and friends mistreated (or killed unjustly) by police, they’re going to see police officers, quite reasonably, as dangerous enemies.
But in general, those in charge don’t see anything wrong. And in general, police institutions don’t appear to see anything wrong. They think everything is just fine, at least by their actions from a broad sense.
Killing lots of young black men is the status quo, and has always been the status quo, in America. Young black men are seen as disposable, and their lives aren’t seen as valuable.