It took me a couple of times to read your post to find out why it seemed a bit odd to me.
Damn. Good point. Apparently my tolerance for zero tolerance isn’t zero, exactly. Zero tolerance is a complete abdication of moral responsibility and the last refuge of the unimaginative. Not my line, but I believe it strongly.
Why do you think police deserve a raise in order to do the right thing? According to a quick web search, Chicago police start at about $68k and go well over $100k, before overtime. I don’t think pay is a contributor to police misbehavior, incompetence, insensitivity and covering up for each other. My guess is that it’s due to a) attracting some of the wrong people; b) failure to screen out those wrong people; c) poor training; d) a culture of protecting the tribe/clan/gang; and e) a culture of us vs. them.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I generally support cops as having a dangerous but important job. But I wouldn’t be surprised if these cops knew who was in the car and decided to execute him.
Cop has hysterical overreaction to whatever she said to him, assaults her, then lies and claims she assaulted HIM. And if there was no video, that would be the official truth.
He beat her ass, then arrested her for battery. He must be fired and prosecuted.
And not given another job in another PD somewhere else…
How is that controversial? Police shoot armed man who is apparently pointing a gun at a passenger. Upon being shot he lowers the gun, and then police secure the weapon. It’s too bad that he was shot, I suppose, but I don’t see much controversial about the circumstances, unless there is more that you haven’t shared.
From your cite -
And, of course -
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, the picture and description doesn’t sound out of line. Maybe the video shows something else but I did not see a link to it.
(Every time she yells, the mic statics out.)
Looks like a clean shoot to me. I don’t know what the guy’s mental state was, but neither could the cops. He raised a gun. He got shot.
ETA: Well, he didn’t exactly raise it. Not threateningly, anyway. But he didn’t drop it, either.
What do you mean “he didn’t exactly raise it”? He didn’t raise it at all.
If you asked me to describe what he was doing when she shot him, I’d say it looked like he was lifting it (perhaps out of his pocket) and moving towards putting the gun on the ground, like they were yelling at him to do. That’s what the author of this piece says, too. Hell, they kept yelling at him to drop the gun after they had shot him and the gun was lying there on the parking lot asphalt.
If cops are yelling at you to put your gun on the ground, and they fire as soon as you move to do it, what choice does that leave you? I guess it’s possible he was about to actually raise the gun in a manner that would have allowed him to fire, but we certainly never see any of that in the video.
He… I dunno… presented it. It didn’t look like he was trying to put it down to me.
If it was in his pocket, he should have just raised his hands. If it was in his hand, he should have just dropped it.
“He didn’t raise it, but he was lifting it” seems like an over-fine distinction.
Regards,
Shodan
Why don’t you explain the proper way to place a weapon on the ground without touching it, then?
He was holding the weapon by the slide, finger nowhere near the trigger. If you’re going to yell at someone to do something, you don’t shoot them anyway when they do it.
I hadn’t watched the video until now. I don’t see any way that the police can say he was being threatening with the gun. He was moving slow and wasn’t raising the gun in a threatening manner. I don’t see how you can watch that and call it a good shoot. He was doing what they were telling (screaming, actually, as usual) him to do.
I guess I hoped you would be honest enough to understand the distinction I’m making, but almost two decades of experience with you on this message board should have prepared me…
I was talking about raising in the context of preparing to shoot. I’ve extracted the relevant part of the video, and turned it into a slow-motion GIF. The original video is 30 frames per second, but my GIF has been slowed to 1 fps to allow for close scrutiny. I also made a close-up GIF of his hand.
Of course, a reasonable response to this is that things are much clearer when slowed down, and the cops had to deal with this in real time. Fair enough. But the reason I slowed it down is largely to convince people of something that seemed pretty clear to me even when I watched it at full speed. It was obvious to me, watching the video the first time, that the guy was not holding the gun in anything like a position in which it could be fired, and that he was moving it towards the ground.
One of the first things that struck me from the video is that it does not look like he actually had the gun in his hand when the cop was yelling at him. I think it might have been in his right-side pocket. It looks like he reached into his pocket to bring it out.
Then, as he brings it out, look at his grip on the gun itself. It’s pretty clear that he’s holding it from over the top of the barrel, with the barrel itself apparently pointed up his own arm, and with the butt or grip or handle of the gun pointing down towards the ground. It’s not in any sort of position in his hand where he could fire the gun.
And finally, look at the motion of his hand. Yes, it comes up a little initially as he brings the gun from his side (possibly from his pocket), but it describes a sort of parabola, and is clearly headed down when we see the puff of smoke from the gunshot.
(Hope the link works.) Here’s a picture of him with the gun I captured from the link above. He’s clearly holding it by the barrel and apparently intended to comply.
The picture, though, has been enlarged, enhanced, and frozen in time. The cops couldn’t have reasonably known what he was doing. All they’d see is a man bringing up a gun.
Which is precisely what she told him to do.
She told him to drop it, not to fiddle with it.
Anyway, a little fault on both sides, but not much on either.