Damn, I just can’t keep up.
Police de-escalate thousands of times every day. You are never going to see video of that. Its boring and nothing sensational. The reason you see videos of cops not behaving perfectly is because it is unusual and sensational. Not all cops are perfect and some are far from it. That small minority should be dealt with. Not by the mob but by the system. If you don’t like the system, do what you can to change it. Don’t paint with a broad brush.
Police officer that has admitted to letting other police officers off when they break the law thinks police officers are doing just fine.
But all criminals are bad, and we’re too lenient in spite of world leading incarceration.
Cite required.
You’re correct that you didn’t say that. It was pkbites who keeps saying that any change to the current use of force policies will inevitably lead to more dead cops.
You’re the one who evidently thinks that the only risk to civilian bystanders is from criminals who might shoot them if the police don’t gun them down first. This isn’t the case.
Here’s even more examples of police putting bystanders (and fellow officers) at risk far more than the alleged perpetrators. In many of these cases, police fired dozens or even hundreds of times indiscriminately at suspects, killing bystanders and fellow officers.
You are the one who doesn’t like news media cites and offered to “provide actual, relevant, academic cites” that will disprove virtually everything that I am claiming is wrong. So where are these studies?
And if it pains you so, replace “trigger-happy” with “excessive use of deadly force.”
Still waiting…
Apparently all that you have is your own “bare assertions” that I am wrong with nothing to back it up. At least I provided some cites, even though you don’t like them. You haven’t provided anything other than refutations.
Like what? Fewer murdered citizens? :rolleyes:
Maybe we could indeed change policies in a city or state, and see what happens.
OK, you don’t like that idea. Here’s another: maybe we could look at other countries where the police aren’t constantly gunning down their own citizens, and compare their outcomes to ours.
I and others understand that just fine. The problem is that this “reasonable person” standard does not look particularly objective. It looks like whatever the police, investigative agencies, and prosecutors think it is. There are many, many examples in which ordinary citizens are being killed by police that would fail this “reasonable person” standard, and yet the police in question are not charged or even terminated from their employment.
Glad to see that you two experts are on the same page. :rolleyes:
Keep patting each other on the back, there. :rolleyes:
I am telling the two of you as a citizen of this great country of ours that you are losing the confidence of the populace. It is evident that minorities have felt this way for years. I am a member of the demographic who is probably one of the least likely to be hassled by police (white middle-aged male, clean-cut, former military, no criminal record whatsoever), and you are losing my confidence. My default assumption is to now fear and distrust the police. When my son got his drivers license at 16 I had the “talk” with him to minimize the chance of him getting involved in a tragic outcome with the police.
It shouldn’t be this way. 
Emphasis Added
But often they are not dealt with unless caught on video. And even then it is not always dealt with.
Warning - Autoplaying video
If you are not a cop and were caughtin this situationwhat would happen to you.
pkbites, what do you think about how this cop was not arrested? If he were a civilian would you have let him go? Would your DA choose not to prosecute?
Well, it’s a meaningless hypothetical for me because I am never armed.
While I do own firearms and have a state-issued pistol permit (which also allows me to carry a concealed weapon), I don’t feel the need to go around my community armed. If I go to the shooting range, my pistol is locked in the trunk. (BTW, I’m not unfamiliar with firearms – I earned a U.S. Navy Expert Pistol Marksmanship Medal when I was in the service.)
Do you want to know why I don’t carry a firearm, even though I’m legally allowed to do so? Because when you carry around a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (Which is something I wish our police forces would realize as well.)
A secondary reason is that having a firearm on my person is far more likely to do me harm than good. Only cops get qualified immunity. If I use deadly force, even if justified, I’m far more likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Secondly, having a gun on my person might just get me killed by a trigger-happy cop during a traffic stop.
Back to your hypothetical: what exactly does “behaving in such a way that you think he might have a weapon and is about to use it against your child” look like anyway? Because I can tell you right now that “might have a weapon” is pretty vague. If it turns out that the guy is unarmed and I shoot him, and my only defense is that he looked threatening and I thought he might have a weapon, I will be going to jail – because only the police can get away with that kind of behavior with their qualified immunity.
Nevertheless, I’ll concede the hypothetical and answer your question: yes, I would wait. Just like I think the police should wait.
This answer does not preclude me (or the cops) from drawing my own weapon and ordering the person to put down their weapon. But no, I would not be the first to fire. Nor should the cops.
I am glad that we started this conversation about a very serious issue in America.
Policing needs to be vastly reformed.
I have another question: What do you think about a lot of police officers, especially ***white male police officers *** who have turned extremely political since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
A lot of them decorate Blue Lives Matter flags around their cars, police precinct stations etc.
A lot of them are leaning heavily towards President Trump and the GOP, even in deep blue communities they serve, like NYC, LA, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago.
What do you think about it?
I don’t like it; a police officer should put politics aside and serve everyone; both political parties politicized the BLM movement, a lot of white cops don’t view it lightly. A lot of them on Instagram and social media, especially the younger ones, are trying to bridge gaps between civilians and police, but we will see how it will work out.
What can we do about that tho?
Almost all of those were ruled justified, of the minute’ amount that weren’t almost all of the officers faced consequences. Where is the problem with an officer saving his own life? There is an undertone here that seems to suggest that it would be better if criminals killed 1000 cops per year instead. Some of you are real swell guys.
Relax, Chisquirrel.
It’s far worse than you can imagine. I let regular people off as well. Because I head up a Focused Patrol Team I make about 400% more traffic stops than your average officer. Therefore I tend to hand out far more written and verbal warnings collectively than I do cites. Which, per my departments SOP is within my discretion to do. But I’m sure you’ll post that I’m not doing my job.
I tend to agree. However, the problem is with the criminal justice system itself, and even that is a misnomer as we don’t have a top down system. We have a random collage with many moving parts which change from case to case.
At the outset, there is simply no way to give every guilty person a harsh sentence (or so we don’t argue, a “fair” sentence). Unless the State is willing to give my client a sweetheart deal, I am going to start filing motions, picking through the evidence trying to exclude this or that. Even in a seemingly open and shut case, this takes time. The State doesn’t have that time. It’s an assembly line; clear this case and on to the next one. In order to do that, they have to install the revolving door.
Next there is pushback to this. In keeping with the spirit of the thread, something horrible and unusual happens and the political powers that be demand that Something Be Done. Some guy who had 9 prior DUIs wrecks and kills a family of four in their minivan. Some guy who was arrested 6 times prior for beating his wife kills her this time. The captain of the high school football team overdoses in a Wal-Mart bathroom.
The political powers that be put pressure on the police, the prosecutors, the judges to Do Something. They pass laws which condition grant money on coming down hard and having Zero Tolerance on these things. There are new administrative rules and new laws passed. Now you aren’t arresting drunks swerving all over the road. You arrest a guy that had a few beers at lunch because you sure as hell aren’t letting him go and have that come back on you if he wrecks. Instead of arresting wife beaters, you are playing marriage counselor to two drunk people who are arguing and then hear that one pushed the other. Oops. Off to jail. The kid with the weed that you formerly would have confiscated and told him to knock it off? He has to go.
So now in this cramped system where they were pleading people out left and right, there are real fights on the cases that involve the political issue du jour, leaving even less time for every other crime.
The guy that snatches purses left unattended at the mall gets even less attention from the criminal justice system because there is no politically powerful group that is demanding that purse snatchers’ heads be placed on platters.
And as I said, there is no top down analysis of the entire system to ensure any form of fairness. Some people get extremely light sentences, some get draconian sentences. It is not even internally consistent. In my state, the penalty for soliciting sex from an underage person on the internet is twice the penalty for actually having sex with an underage person. In what universe does that make sense?
I could go on, but in short, the system is driven by the phenomenon we see in this thread. An extreme example is taken and it is alleged that the entire system is like this so we need new policies based on the extreme example. And since the system was actually not like the extreme example, the new policy fails miserably.
But we’re not arguing that virtually every civilian that kills someone else is completely justified in their actions and any idea to lower the number of deaths will result in a situation where
I honestly don’t give a flying fuck if you let your buddies off. I also don’t give a flying fuck that you think police are real swell guys.
Remember when that random dude was passed out in a Taco Bell parking lot and was murdered by cops in California?
Oh wait, it was JUSTIFIED, because he had an unloaded handgun in the vehicle (which officers knew and commented on before blasting him away)!
The problem is that there are 1,000 dead people.
The problem is that 1,000 cops had to kill someone because they feared for their lives.
The problem is that this ONLY HAPPENS HERE.
The problem is that you think 1,000 deaths at the hands of law enforcement is normal. justified. appropriate.
It isn’t.
The problem is not that they were shot. It was that they were presenting a danger to the public and to the police. As mentioned earlier, that is not a problem with the police, cherry-picked anecdotes notwithstanding.
Regards,
Shodan
Since 2015, the Washington Post has been keeping a real time database of fatal police shootings. What they have found is that
Which sounds good. If the police shoot and kill someone, that person should be a threat to the public and the police.
However, because they have 4,400 shootings in their database… the “vast majority” leaves 285 people shot and killed who were unarmed, and another 155 people who were “armed” with toys.
These people are dead. People who, by definition, were NOT a significant danger to the public, were NOT a significant danger to police, because they were unarmed or carrying toys.
We have engineered a society where this is thought of as normal. About 100 people a year shot and killed by police who had no weapons to harm anyone with.
Adding a link would have been nice…
In regards to the anecdotes, so it’s a numbers game like for every 500 justified killings then the cops are allowed to shoot 1 unarmed person in the face?
Or are you claiming everytime a cop shoots someone it is by definition justified.
It is a problem when citizens are being shot by police. The mission of the police is supposedly to “protect and serve [the public],” not to terrorize and murder the populace.
And I don’t want to live in a society where the police are given free reign to execute anyone they think might present a danger to the public and the police.
I was trying to see if I could find some data to see if the number of police shootings of civilians has increased over time (or not). The problem is that there isn’t a whole lot of data on this. As this 2016 BBC article states:
The same article notes that we do have data on the number of police killed each year, and it has dropped dramatically since the 1970s, even as the number of police have increased markedly:
Over the last five years, the number of civilians killed by police has hovered around 1,000 people per year. The Washington Post has been tracking this since 2015, and it is getting much more attention in the last five years or so, as discussed in this excellent Nature article.
Actually, it is a problem with the police. I came across this intriguing factoid in the Independent:
So retraining of police can make a difference, despite the protestations of police and their defenders in this thread that the problem is not with the police in the U.S. To the contrary, I think that is exactly where the problem is.
However, we are never going to fix the problem with policing in this country if we don’t first acknowledge that there is a problem to fix.
No, both suggestions are ridiculous.
It’s a numbers game insofar as the fact that police in America make more than 10 million arrests per year (cite). Of those 10 million arrests, the police shoot about a thousand people. Of those thousand people, the vast majority are justified by any common-sense or legal definition. The fact that all you have are cherry-picked anecdotes going back for years, as a justification that there is anything like a serious problem, means that it isn’t 500 to 1. More like 10,000 to 1.
You should move to America, then.
Regards,
Shodan