Again? I already did, but I will do it once more. I explained the reason I put it in quotes, is because that is not simply a mistake. A mistake would be seeing another large black man across the street and it looks like dorner and they mistake him. Or writing down the wrong license number. But…
Opening fire on a vehicle when you cant see who the hell is even in the car, without even giving any type of warning or command…is not a mistake.
This is not a police state where police can go around opening fire n people they don’t know who they r firing at
Or the other alternative is they kind of could see the women and for some reason opened fire.
Either option is not explained away by the word mistake.
They knowingly disregarded police policy firing on immocent citizens who do not come close to description of sjspect and the law by doing so, …shunning the protocol they are sworn to follow is not a ‘mistake’
Do you think that happened or not? Why won’t you give a simple answer to that question?
The word mistake isn’t intended to explain anything away. It’s intended to describe a situation where the cops screwed up. There are small mistakes and very big and stupid mistakes; the big ones don’t magically turn into ‘that can’t be a mistake.’
Marley, hello. I already answered your questions. I cannot read the minds of the officers involved, all I know is that they are trained not to just open fire especially if they don’t know who they are firing at
If they couod see who they were firing at, that’s only known by them.
Here is an example of what a mistake is, and what a mistake isn’t. A mistake would be if your walking by a stranger and you bump into him,…it would not be a mistake if you grab a stranger by the collar and break his neck…
One is a mistake and the other is not a mistake. Randomly opening fire upon innocent citizens whom identity you haven’t a clue, and with no warning or directive given first, is not a mistake. You don’t have to agree with me. You think its simply a mistake for police to open fire on people whom they can’t even see who the people are…(or if they could see, that’s another story but gravely bad and not a mistake)
I have a higher standard, (and so does the lapd wich is why the officers have all been suspended)
If they had copied down the wrong license number that would be an oops a daisy, made a mistake, knowingly defying police protocol killing innocent people is not
It sounds like the difference between a mistake and a non-mistake is some arbitrary level of importance that you’re not explaining. I’m not defending those cops or saying this is no big deal. I am saying that I’m sure they didn’t shoot at the wrong people knowing they were the wrong people. If you can’t read their minds, you can’t imply that maybe they did that on purpose.
It seems what you are saying is that they could not see who the hell they were firing at, (obviously, since there is no way to mistake TWO elderly women for a single large black man)
Also, you haven’t factored in the issue that they gave no warning, no directive, they simply opened fire.
On innocent citizens whom they couldn’t see:eek:
Assuming they have been extensively trained and tested in police protocol for the most critical situation like this, they deliberately disregarded police protocol which is why its not a mistake
Doing something knowingly and deliberately is not a mistake. Its a very primary thing, identify in some fashion, and then give warning or directive. Its not like they did it without knowing, and later said “oh shit, were we supposed to find out first who we were firing at?”
It is if you do it because you’ve misunderstood your circumstances. I have argued what you are arguing in the past because I’ve preferred to save the word for unintentional actions, but this is a legitimate definition of mistake. They opened fire on purpose, but they didn’t intend to shoot civilians. They blew it and they’re lucky nobody was killed. That said, it sounds pretty obvious that the cops panicked and opened fire on vehicle they thought looked like Dorner’s. Implying that maybe they shot at two random women for no reason doesn’t make sense.
You keep saying the same thing without acknowledging the fact they did not issue any warning or give instructions or any command to surrender
They simply opened fire
I just read they did the same to David Perdue, a skinny surfer kid in torrance, they did the same thing, without seeing who the hell it was, they opened fire without any sort if warning, instructions etc
He was darn lucky he wasn’t killed
Thems not a mistake. Its intentional not to identify who the hell your dealing with ( is it the suspect, a pregnant mom, a retired teacher, ?). And then on top of not identifying who the hell they pulled over, they simply open fire with no prior warning of any sort, .l
If you can’t understand or have some reason not to acknowledge this is not simply a mistake, keep believing that if you want to. Its something most people just know, that police can’t drive around opening fire on people without knowing who they are,and with no warning
Seem of the neighbors are outraged where they witnessed the cops shoot the two women, Richard Goo a resident stated incredulously "how could they mistake two elderly women for a large black man?
You are pretending Marley’s saying something he’s never said. Additionally, there is a way to mistake someone: you can’t actually see the people involved. I don’t know if that’s the case here so don’t go off the rails and start accusing me of defending people I’m not actually defending. I’m simply pointing out your mistakes in the post.
It is justified because it wasn’t a mistake. It was a case of ‘we’re so goddam frightened for our lives we’re just going to blast the shit out of anything we don’t like the look of.’
Shooting up a vehicle without any grounds was not a mistake, it was a deliberate choice that put reacting to a theoretical possibility of a threat way above any concern for ‘protecting and serving’.
From the LAPD’s reputation, it was less a matter of them being panicked, and more a matter of the media actually paying attention when they act pretty much like they always do. They’ve been out of control for a long time.
You seem to have a very specific and weird definition of mistake, which seems to equate calling something a mistake to saying it’s “okay”, I don’t think anyone is saying that.
If I go to the bar after work tonight, drink 15 shots of liquor in 2 hours and then drive home and run over a woman pushing a baby stroller I’ve made a huge mistake. That doesn’t mean I haven’t committed a crime, and it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be punished–harshly.
From what we know about the newspaper delivery duo that the LAPD shot up, is it appears the police reacted in panic to a truck coming towards the house of their protectee at an early morning hour (which is when newspapers are delivered), and overreacted. They made a mistake. But their mistake, and this is said with the caveat that until there is an investigation no one including you or me, has any idea the full particulars, appears to have violated at a minimum their departmental use of force guidelines and quite likely criminal statutes relating to negligence and improper handling of firearms, reckless endangerment etc. So when we say it is a mistake, that isn’t us saying we don’t think they should be punished, either at the police department or criminal court level.
But when you put mistake in scare quotes, it seems like you’re saying something else, like you’re basically saying they knew it wasn’t Chris Dorner, and shot up old Hispanic women because they felt like. I don’t find that credible based on what we know right now.
See, this is again a weird definition of mistake. The very first definition of mistake I see on dictionary.com is:
And that is how I’ve always understood it. If a soldier in a warzone sees someone and decides to shoot, and ends up killing someone in a friendly fire incident, that was a bad decision, a deliberate decision that was bad–a mistake. If I choose to invest money in a company that is heavily in debt with falling revenues and company goes bankrupt and I lose my investment, there is no denying I made an active decision or that it was deliberate. But likewise I don’t see why you wouldn’t call it a mistake. Basically, it’s something to me, that if you knew what the outcome would be, you’d most likely decide differently.
That’s different than if I strangle my wife because she’s cheating on me. I’m not doing something there where I would act differently if I knew it’d result in my wife (hypothetical) dying. I’m deliberately killing someone and the outcome I want is my wife to be dead.
The LAPD who shot up the two newspaper delivery people, almost certainly didn’t “want” to be involved in an incident in which they shot up old women who weren’t Chris Dorner, and if they knew the outcome of their actions before taking them, they probably would have acted differently. Their intent was to neutralize what they believed to be a threat.
And if you deliberately chose to drive into them, just like they deliberately chose to fire on an unidentified vehicle an unidentified occupants, that would be a ‘mistake’.
Some choices are mistakes…in baseball you can commit an error because you make a bad choice about how to try and field the ball.
I don’t really understand this weird argument you and Tollhouse want to have about the definition of mistake. The way I see it, if everyone is in agreement that:
LAPD didn’t know they were two old women delivering newspapers
LAPD violated police norms in firing on a car in the way they did
LAPD should investigate the matter and refer it to disciplinary hearings, and the local prosecutor should have an independent investigation
It would appear we’re arguing about the dictionary and not the substance of the issue.
Right, but just like a friendly fire accident–a soldier deliberately choose to fire, but would not have fired if they had known it was their comrades. I think without further evidence it’s a safe assumption the LAPD would not have fired if they had known it was two old women delivering newspapers.
All of that being said, in most war zone friendly fire accidents the shooters have made mistakes leading up to their decision to fire (often the soldiers getting shot have as well, but that isn’t as relevant in a police–>civilian interaction), but that doesn’t mean the soldiers wanted to kill their own guys. The police made a choice because they thought they were acting in defense of their lives and the lives of their protectees. But it violated police norms, they hadn’t even ascertained who the target was, did not issue commands etc (assuming the stories we’ve heard are true.) To me, it seems just like a friendly fire incident–a bad choice or decision that the soldiers would not have made if they knew who they were shooting at, but still a deliberate decision to shoot. Nothing in the dictionary definition of the word mistake says “an unintentional action”, but rather instead an error in action, judgment, or opinion–I don’t see how that is not the perfect word for the situation.
There is a world of difference between a mistake and callous indifference. A soldier firing at anything that moves and hitting his own guys can be either. When it is done with regard to nothing but their own survival, even though they know their own troops are out there (or in this case that people drive vaguely similar looking vans) then that is callous indifference to the consequences. It is not an error.