I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s all the excuse they need. I have a friend (white, middle-age guy) who was minding his own business in his pickup truck waiting in the school parking lot for his daughter. He was surprised to see a cop rush up with pistol drawn. After nearly pissing his pants and being screamed at, showing his ID and being scared for his life, the cop told him that a white guy had just robbed a nearby bank and escaped in a similar pickup truck. Mind you, white guys in pickup trucks are extremely common… ubiquitous, you might even say.
You know, it’s not always about race. And sometimes there’s a legitimate reason to stop and question people. I don’t have a problem with that in many cases. Now, when someone gets shot or beaten, the hurdle of reasonableness is much, much higher.
Which nicely encapsulates this whole part of the thread, and much of the rest of it as well. Fuck the courts, fuck the police, fuck the law, fuck the DA, fuck the facts and the evidence and everything else.
I want my outrage, and I don’t care about anything else.
This thread is about controversial encounters between law enforcement and civilians, not about your attitudes and shortcomings. Please stop bringing them up; we promise to stop talking about them if you comply.
But, in the context of this discussion, can you not see a problem with the question you are asking here? Asking what the cop should have done at that point presupposes that the account that we have been given by the cop is, in fact, exactly what happened. And that is precisely what I have been questioning in my discussion of this incident.
Again, this begs the very question at the heart of my observations. There is, I will admit, little or no evidence that contradicts the officer’s version of events, and that is precisely because the only other witness to this incident was left lying on the ground with three bullet holes in him. My fundamental concern in this case is precisely that it is difficult to impossible to get the complete picture when there are only two witnesses to an altercation, and one of them kills the other. Having read all 23 pages of the DAs report (have you?), I am perfectly willing to concede that there is little or nothing in the report that contradicts the officer’s story, and I believe that, given the constraints of the law and the evidence, the DAs report and her decision not to file charges is at least defensible, and probably reasonable. It is worth noting, though, that even in the absence of contradictory evidence, the possibility still exists that the officer is not telling the truth about exactly what happened. That is the benefit that you get from having been the only witness; you know what happened, and you know what you need to say in order to reduce or eliminate your own culpability. The only evidence in the report that provides any real support for the officer’s statement is his radio communications with dispatch, but those are only audio communications, they only tell us what the officer himself was saying, and they leave plenty of room for the possibility that things did not go exactly as he said.
More generally, none of this undermines the fundamental point that I have been making here, and none of it requires “some vast conspiracy,” as you so stupidly suggest. All it requires is that we set up a system that basically takes the police officer’s word for any altercation that happens without other witnesses, and that provides police officers with the means to record their altercations but does not mandate that they turn the devices on, and provides no penalty when they neglect to do so. I concede that just about everything here, as far as we know, went by the book; my argument is that the book itself needs to be changed, and we need to put systems in place that make it less likely that officers will end up being the only witnesses to their own killing of civilians. You may or may not agree with that, but your arguments in this thread have suggested that you are singularly incapable of dealing with these broader implications.
I don’t actually have a narrative. Go ahead, look back over the posts that I have made on this issue. I have not, before this post, even drawn any conclusion about whether the officer himself was actually in the wrong. If, indeed, everything that night happened exactly as the officer stated in his interview, then I’m willing to concede that the DAs decision not to file charges was, given the evidence and the state of the law, likely the correct one. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. The point I’m making is that there are fundamental problems in the system when the main evidence that we rely on in evaluating a police shooting is the statement made by the police officer himself. Hell, in this discussion, you have shown yourself unwilling even to concede the possibility that a situation like this gives an officer both the incentive and the opportunity to lie, and in your only discussion of the body camera not being activated, you basically waved it off as an unproblematic detail.
I know that it might satisfy you to suggest that my reference to other cases is irrelevant to this one, but it’s not, because in all cases we need to evaluate the credibility of the witnesses, and into many cases it seems that police officers have their statements accepted at face value simply and precisely because they are officers. Quite frankly, one of the least believable parts of the interview in this particular case is the cop’s argument that there were too many other things going on for him to turn on his body camera. As the document clearly states, turning on the body camera requires literally a single flip of a switch. We are constantly told the police officers have the training and experience to do things that us mere mortals civilians are prepared to do; it seems to me that flipping a switch on a body camera probably qualifies as one of those things, and should be required for every contact. What’s the point of spending money on these things if you don’t even put mechanisms in place to make sure that they get used? The only possible motivation police officers have for not using them is a desire not to be held accountable in the work that they do.
As a matter of policy, I believe that every police officer should be required to wear a body camera, and that the body camera should be activated for each and every contact with a member of the public. I also believe that a failure of the officer to activate the body camera before such a contact should result in disciplinary action for the first offense, suspension for the second, and termination for the third. I understand that I am pissing into the wind here, and that the incredibly powerful police unions will fight back against this tooth and nail, but I think that it is a reasonable measure. Until something like that happens, we going to have assholes like you and Shodan continually shrugging their shoulders and suggesting that there’s simply nothing wrong.
This is a thread about people getting fucked by the justice system. Being mistreated, beaten, unjustly imprisoned or outright killed by the police.
It’s 15,000 posts long.
15,000 posts and, frankly, barely scratches the surface of the totality of mistreatment inflicted by the police on the non-police, and minorities in particular.
If you’re not outraged by it, you’re OK with it. Which makes you a far bigger jerk than I am.
Actually you do. You may not be capable of recognizing it, even when it is pointed out to you, but you do.
That’s your narrative - that the main or only evidence on which the DA relied was the word of the officer. And that’s false. We have the gun, we have videotape, we have the other people in the stolen car, we have the bicycle, the Tazer, the radio communications. We have, IOW, lots of evidence apart from the officer’s statement, and all of it, without any exception, backs up the statement, and none of which contradicts it in the slightest.
:shrugs:
You have zero evidence of anything wrong. That’s not me suggesting it; that’s a fact.
This is a perfect encapsulation of your dishonesty.
First, you conflate “main” and “only” as if they’re the same thing. They don’t, liar.
Second, at least half of the things you list are NOT evidence of the thing that I’m talking about, which is the actual shooting.
You say we have the gun. I’ve never denied that West was armed, but the presence of an armed suspect does not always justify a shooting.
You say we have videotape, but the only video in this incident is of West running along the street after the stolen car incident. That video is evidence that West was running on a particular street more than five hours before the iincident in which he was killed. It is not, in any way, “evidence” of what happened during Giese’s pursuit and shooting of West. It has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the shooting was justified. It’s like saying that, because there was video evidence of me running a stop sign, that same video constitutes evidence that I robbed a gas station five hours later.
You say that we have the people in the stolen car. How does that relate to the shooting, exactly? I concede, given their statements, that this is evidence supporting the argument that West was in a stolen car five and a half hours before his first contact with Giese. You got me! But can you explain to me how this constitutes, in any way, evidence about whether or not Giese’s shooting of West was justified? Especially given that Giese didn’t even know who West was, and the DA’s report doesn’t even suggest that Giese knew about the stolen car incident at all.
We have the Tazer. Great. What does that tell us, except that it was fired? Does it tell us who was standing where when this occurred? Does it tell us where West’s hands were, what he was doing, whether he was facing the officer or running from him, whether he was still or in motion?
We have the radio communications. Great. Again, as I said before, while they might not contradict the officer’s claims, they only provide minimal evidence that everything went down exactly as he said.
And again, this is precisely the point. Giese knew what he had told the radio dispatcher. He know what he had done and what West had done in the time between first contact and the final shot. And because he knew those things, and because he was the only person alive who knew those things, he also knew the best way to describe the incident in a way that would both (a) conform with the evidence that investigators would be able to use, (b) make Giese appear as though he had done everything right.
As I said in my previous post, it is possible that events happened exactly as he described. But it’s also possible that they didn’t, and dishonest bullshit about things like video and the stolen car doesn’t change that fact. I notice that you, also, seem completely unconcerned that he didn’t bother to turn on his camera. Pretty convenient for him, and for you, right?
There was plenty of “wrong” even if you take his word as gospel.
The officer went out on patrol with poorly functioning equipment. Both of the cameras he had did not record anything.
The officer also admitted that he was stopping West because of problems with break ins and “quality of life” issues in the neighborhood, not because he observed West doing anything suspicious, or was informed of a recent crime West may have been involved in.
He was also stopping him because of a missing light on his bike while riding at night.
Look, I’m one of the first to decry suspicious activities by the police, but this just doesn’t rise to that occasion. The only thing in the DA report that I found troubling was the cop describing West looking back at him as a “target glance back at him” which seems a strange to say. The rest seems reasonable to me.
I was party to a conversation with a DA, and the question was asked “what do you think of legalized weed?”
The answer was that the idea was terrible because it would prevent cops from getting illegal guns off the street. You see, when a cop stops a car, or a person, and smells weed, he gets to say “I smell weed” and have everyone and everything searched for drugs, which occasionally turns up an illegal weapon. Make marijuana legal, and he can’t search everyone over the pretext of trying to find a joint.
These stops aren’t about fixing a headlight or getting a pinch of weed off the street, they’re about getting the chance to legally search someone you think might possibly, maybe, you never know, have something illegal on them. Someone you would NEVER have the chance to search if you needed actual evidence of an actual crime they may have committed.
Including the argument for not activating his body camera?
Here’s the account of the first part of the encounter:
So all of this happened before Giese even got out of his car. Even if we accept that someone in a foot pursuit might find it more difficult to activate a body camera, surely there was enough time somewhere in here to flip a single switch to activate the body camera, especially as Giese’s own testimony talks about his growing suspicion, and it’s by now pretty clear that this is going to be a chase of some sort, with a probable arrest at the end of it.
Growing up “fit the description” was the default excuse cops used to stop you, search you, and force you produce ID so they can run your name through the system. Every black or Latino guy I have ever spoken to about these types of situations has a story about the time they “fit the description”. This range includes everyone from my teenage cousins who have recently joined the club, to both of my grandfathers who joined back in the 30s and 40s. We have ALL been there and I suspect the reason why you don’t have a problem with these types of situations is because you don’t see yourself, your friends or your family having to deal with this shit as a regular occurrence.
In all fairness most of those encounters didn’t involve a cop waving his gun around but just because you know 1 white guy who has bad a experience does not balance the scales. Until such a time as every white guy you know has had a “fit the description” conversation with a cop your post comes off as being extremely naïve and condescending to those of us who have to worry about shit like this on a regular basis.
Yes, seems reasonable to me. I cannot think of a reason why a police officer would activate their body camera while driving a vehicle chasing someone on a bike.
I would be in favor of a blanket policy that all body cameras must be activated when leaving the police vehicle, with substantial punishment for not doing that. But that wasn’t the policy per the DAs report.
More reasonably, the kid had a gun, recognized as a gun by the police officer.
I’m against cops shooting suspects when they just THINK there is a gun and it turns out there was no gun. I’m against cops beating handcuffed suspects. I’m against cops punching anybody in the face or choking someone to death.
In this instance, and granted it’s just the cops testimony, it seems like he pulled up to the bicyclist in a fully marked police car and rolled down his windows. My guess he was going to talk to the bicyclist and tell him about the lack of a headlight or whatever on his bike. That seems reasonable to me.
If you think that this is an abuse of police power, then we will just have to agree to disagree.
It’s the middle of the night, you’re Black, and a cop is chasing after you after threatening to send police dogs to take you down…just because your bike light isn’t working. I can’t think of a single reason not to stop where there are no witnesses and let come what may. :rolleyes:
As I said, if you think pulling up to a bicyclist with no headlight on their bike late at night when there is a law that requires a headlight is an abuse of police power, then we will have to agree to disagree.
You’re missing the point, of course, which is that Sgt. Giese’s unsuppoorted word for it was neither the main nor the only basis for the conclusions of the DA’s report.
The presence of the gun is evidence that West was armed, just like Giese said. It is further evidence that indicates why West would flee from the cops, just like Giese said he did. It is evidence that the shooting was justified, just like Giese said it was. The gun could not have been planted - West had apparently acquired it years ago. He was, therefore, a felon in possession of a gun, which backs up Giese’s story that West was behaving, to say the least, suspiciously.
Yes, it is evidence. Why would a perfectly innocent person run away when the police told him to stop? Answer: because he was afraid he would be arrested for stealing the bike, or the car, or for carrying a handgun in violation of the law.
Giese claimed he fired his Tazer. The Tazer was found to have been fired, To a normal mind, that would tend to indicate that Giese was telling the truth when he said he deployed his Tazer, and you don’t have to take Giese’s word for anything.
To a normal mind. YMMV.
Including, for instance, that West had a gun, was riding on a stolen bike with no headlight, and behaved suspiciously in fleeing when the officer told him to stop. Which we now understand perfectly - West was a felon, had previously fled the scene of the stolen car incident, and had a gun. West’s actions made Giese suspicious, and we now know that Giese’s judgment was quite correct - West was one of those people who you don’t want riding thru your neighborhood.
You’re correct that I don’t particularly care - the truth of Giese’s testimony is adequately established by the other evidence you prefer to pretend not to understand. Which is why the DA’s report found what it did. You don’t need videotape - shootings have correctly been found to have been justified long before bodycams existed. And that’s what happened in this case.
And that’s not convenient for me or the police - if video had existed, you would have been whining about them not having enough reason to stop the poor black kid, or simply repeating “fuck the courts” along with that silly sot Cheesesteak and the rest of the knee-jerking knuckleheads.