Zimmerman doesn’t need the gun in his hand to threaten Martin sufficiently that Martin’s attack on Zimmerman could be construed as self defense. For example, if he was wearing his gun in a shoulder holster, and that holster was beneath his jacket, and he threateningly moved back his jacket, revealing the gun, when he asked Trayvon what he was doing there, then that would be a threat.
Oh, please. The longer you make this argument, the more convinced I am that you don’t need Trayvon to have a motive. His skin color is enough.
No, it isn’t “more reasonable”. Dee Dee heard the exchange with Zimmerman on the phone and didn’t mention anything about the threatening way the question was asked in her testimony. I see a couple of obvious possible reasons for this:
it didn’t actually happen like that.
or
the prosecutor, during his questioning of Dee Dee, neglected to highlight that Zimmerman threatened Martin first, thus justifying his assault on Zimmerman.
I leave it as an exercise to our readers to determine which of those (or whatever additional possible reasons they can think of) is most likely.
Yeah, I’ve realized that I’m not gonna convince you at all, so why bother trying? You determined that George Zimmerman was a fine, upstanding gentleman, and that Trayvon Martin had it coming, a very long time ago.
Maybe we can continue this discussion in a Pit thread, but to be honest, I don’t know if I can muster up the energy for that. So fine. Keep believing that Trayvon Martin was a violent, deranged man, despite showing no sign of that personality at any time prior. Keep believing that George Zimmerman did the right thing by putting him down, and that he’s made Florida a safer place by killing such a dangerous criminal. And keep telling yourself it’s not because he’s black, if it makes you feel better.
He didn’t know anything, was my point. He didn’t know who he was after, who else was in there, if the perp was armed, what the perp was wearing, how many other kids there might have been, or if there was a robot in the closet. He didn’t know anything. Why was he charging into the house? Poor policing. Bad decisions.
He had to… he had no choice in the matter? Who told him to do this? YES: IMO the officer should have tried to determine what was going on before he charged into an unfamiliar close quarters area to face unknown assailants.
None of that happened. Please try and stick with actual events, not hypothetical events. Bringing them up adds nothing to the discussion unless you are prepared to present evidence of having been in the officer’s head doing the shooting or you have Rick’s portal gun, and I doubt either of those is the case.
Nothing I’ve written has recieved a response from you or anyone else showing that what I wrote was contradicted by the video, and, in fact, I’ve accepted your summation of the video without reservation thus far. Trying to bring up that I don’t want to watch a human being be needlessly slaughtered is hardly a good debate tactic, and has no bearing on the things I’m saying. The cop did a shitty, reckless thing because he was spectacularly bad at his job. A law-abiding citizen is dead.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you think this cop saw a random house, ran inside, and shot the first person he saw?
… OK, that did actually happen, but that was a different case, not this one. In this case, the cops entered the house for two reasons: 1) the victim’s wife called 911 when the assailant broke into their home. 2) when police arrived at the house, they heard a series of gunshots, then silence. At this point, then ran towards the house to provide assistance, when 3) they encountered an armed man. They warned him to drop his weapon. He did not do so and instead flicked his flashlight to point at the policeman in front, who then shot him.
So to answer your questions – he knew he was after an assailant who had broken into this home, because the victim’s wife told him so when she called 911 (or more accurately, she told Dispatch, and Dispatch told him). He rushed in because he heard gunshots, and wanted to prevent the intruder from killing the people who live in the house, or apprehend him if he had already done so. No, he didn’t have perfect information, but in the real world, you never do
My point with the hypothetical is not to claim it actually happened or to explain what was happening in the officer’s head, but to suggest that a policy of “sit outside and gather information until you know exactly what has happened” isn’t in the public interest, since in any number of scenarios it could lead to greater harm as the cops sit around and gather information while criminals are committing crimes.
Also – on review of both the footage and some of the articles – the cops were actually outside the house, approaching the front door, when the shooting occurred. They were walking down a path that leads to a porch (which I mistakenly thought was a room). The “cabinet” I thought was blocking the door is actually the door itself – it has been knocked down, but something is propping it up at an angle, making it look like the door has more volume – hence why I thought it was a cabinet rather than a door.
The second video on the link below doesn’t show anyone being “needlessly slaughtered”. It pauses just before the officer fires his gun. If you watch the second video on the page, from 33 seconds in to 48 seconds in, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about without seeing anything graphic. However, I do understand that this might be disturbing, so I pulled the video up on my computer screen instead of my phone and will provide as full and detailed a description as I can:
30-36 seconds: the officers are approaching the house down a path that leads to a porch. The front door has a metal security door, which is wide open. The wooden door is completely off its hinges and leaning forward with the bottom still in the doorway. There’s a lamp that’s fallen across the leaning door, making the entrance somewhat blocked.
37 seconds: through the door, we can see a small room, on the other side of which is another door. At this time, we see an old man in a bathrobe carrying a flashlight and a gun walk across the field of view presented by the doorway, from the room that the front door leads to and through the door on the far side. He ducks behind the far wall, then peaks back. There is a light on inside the house, but outside it is dark, aside from the officers’ flashlights. Cops begin shouting for him to drop the gun.
37-45 seconds: the old man is behind the far doorway. He doesn’t have his gun up, but is keeps leaning back from behind the wall to look at the cops. They are repeatedly shouting for him to “drop the gun!” or “lower your weapon!”. Obviously, he doesn’t respond.
46 seconds: until now, the guy was leaning with his back against the wall, and was turning to peak behind it. Now he steps fully into that far doorway, facing the officers head-on. The gun is in his right hand which is at waist level directly in front of him, facing down. However, he raises his flashlight in his right hand and points it directly at the officer.
The video now pauses and zooms in on the victim. The newscaster points out that he appears to have a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
56 seconds: the video skips back a bit, then continues from where it paused here. We hear the officer say: “Robe’s got a gun!” referring to the victim, who is wearing a robe. As he points the flashlight at the officers, the video pauses, but we can hear the audio of four gunshots.
Either no police shooting is every justified and police officers shouldn’t even carry guns, or there are cases where the police should be allowed to use deadly force. This is definitely not a case where deadly force should have been used, but from the bodycam footage, I don’t see any reasonable way that the cops could have made that determination at the time.
By having a police force that is properly trained and doesn’t open fire simply because there’s a risk. The behavior of LEOs in the USA is simply appalling. And the level to which your public opinion is willing to give them a pass incredible. Even on this board extremely critical of the way these issues are handled, even among the most vocal “black live matters” activists, how willing you are to find excuses for murderous LEOs on the flimsiest basis leaves me speechless.
Yes, yes, I know, criminals have much more guns in the USA, whatever…It still doesn’t even remotely justify how often your police forces kill people, and what reasons are considered good enough, not just by the perpetrator, not simply by the general public, but even on this leftist board.
To take this example : someone said that the victim was mostly deaf. But even if he wasn’t, there are a lot of people who are. What are the procedures in place to make sure that nobody, ever is killed simply because he didn’t hear a command? What are the procedures in place to make sure that someone who is a stubborn idiot who refuses to obey a command won’t be killed simply for being a stubborn idiot? This should simply never happen. OK, it could. Shit happens. A young, particularly badly trained officer panics. A freak situation goes out of hand. Once in a blue moon someone dies who shouldn’t have. That’s how things should be. Anything less is simply inacceptable.
It’s not a matter of number of weapons in the hands of criminals. At this level, it’s obviously a matter of culture. LEOs kill people because pretty much everybody find normal that they’ll open fire for pretty much any reason (look at all the advice about how one must be super-extra-cautious in presence of a police officer if one
doesn’t want to get killed. This is pretty insane. One should feel extremely safe in presence of a police officer.) They kill people because they aren’t trained to make not killing people their highest priority, because nobody seemingly demands it. They and the public find normal that avoiding even a relatively low level of risk for the officers is more important than making sure that all the citizens they interact with are still alive at the end of the interaction. It takes an incredible level of recklessness on the part of the officer (like jumping out of a car and shooting dead a teenager on camera) for their action to be even questioned, and even then plenty of people find them excuses and they aren’t sentenced.
What “potential crime” did Zimmerman think Martin was going to commit when he first saw him? What suspicious behavior was Martin exhibiting that justified Zimmerman in following him?
Why is it that you think Martin was acting in a suspicious manner by just walking down a public street but you don’t think Zimmerman was acting in a suspicious manner by following Martin to his home?
At what point did Zimmerman question Martin on a public street? The entire incident where he was shot happened in a private place, that Martin was not a resident of.
Have you considered learning the facts of the case before talking about it?
Didn’t Zimmerman himself explain why he found Martin suspicious? Didn’t he say it was because some black people had been breaking into places? Doesn’t that sound like the only suspicious thing he was doing was being black? His only other actions were wearing his hoodie to shelter from the cold, and talking on his phone. Neither of those is suspicious.
If Zimmerman had just called, maybe you could call it overvigilance. But then he was so sure he was up to no-good that he had to follow him. Following someone in and of itself is a threat. It’s why, if you find yourself accidentally following someone, you tend to take a different route to avoid scaring them.
The phone call shows that Martin felt threatened. You don’t stop to confront someone following you unless you think they are up to something.
I don’t know the facts of the case but he had just been through an amazingly stressful situation involving gunfire and violence, presumably without ear protection. Who knows if he could even hear police instructions or even think straight?
Nobody knows how the confrontation started and how it went. From his behavior before and since, Zimmerman is obviously a dangerous nutcase. You can’t exactly exclude that he decided to make a “citizen arrest” for looking suspicious, or brandished his gun under the nose of his victim. It’s quite obvious to me that at the very least he hoped for something dramatic to happen, preferably involving a criminal and his gun.
