I don’t disagree, in principle. By all accounts and the composite video, the cops reacted much too quickly with lethal force in the Rice case.
But even a 13yo, especially a black kid, should have known better than to sit around waving a realistic pistol and pointing it at people, even in the most childish pow-pow manner. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but I’ll repeat my statement: Fuck around with a gun/like object in public, and you are limiting the options of those around you, in and out of uniform. Bad shit is likely to happen to you.
These words are the problem. You so cavalierly point out that a black person - a black teenager, even - should know better. Know better why? Know that the police will target them for the color of their skin? Kill them if they get the chance?
It’s amazing the way in just a couple of words, you blame the victims for the racists operating in a racist system.
Change the gender, change the crime.
“But even a 13yo, especially at attractive girl who looks older than that, should have known better…” To what, wear that short dress and dance that way in that neighborhood at that late hour?
Sorry, kid. You live in a world of shit where your skin color will get you killed. And if you don’t know any better or make one mistake, you wind up dead and it’s your fault.
Sorry, but fuck that noise. If that’s the status quo (and in many communities it obviously is) then we change the status quo.
Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was lynched. By your logic he got what he deserved because any black kid who dared speak to a white woman should have known better. And that’s deplorable.
I think the biggest issue, and I have experience with this in a different context, is that it doesn’t matter how few bad apples you have if the bad apples are tolerated. Even if 1% of your bad apples are tolerated and protected, your whole organization goes bad. Whereas if you have a culture of accountability and honor, then your organization will thrive even if a lot of bad actors join up.
Police need to stop treating IA as an enemy and police unions need to stop protecting bad cops. It would also be nice if we didn’t have an informal “union” of activists whose goal seems to be protecting very bad people from getting shot when they do very bad things.
The reason the blue line or other forms of official corruption are so dangerous is that it signals to many that it’s pointless to trust or work with the system.
Bullshit. Many cops are black, including some cops involved in these incidents. Are they racist? South Africa was an apartheid country, a country in which the separation of races was built into the law The US is not.
You know there were black police officers in apartheid South Africa?
The participation of some black people on the state-power side does not indicate that a state system is not racist. The personal attitudes of individual low-level officers aren’t even that important; as adaher and others have said, the key is in how the organization as a whole operates.
I wouldn’t call it apartheid though. Jim Crow was similar to apartheid. What’s going on now is just normal racial disparities that are common to most, if not all, countries.
We can’t bring Tamir Rice back to warn him of this possibility, but we could’ve damn well taught the officers’ (who killed this child, no questions asked) their important lesson. That is, suspect(s) deserve to be allowed to surrender.
Let’s say you have a suspect who flat out killed someone, maybe even unquestionably shot someone (ala Dr. Schultz did to the Sheriff in Django Unchained). Do you think such a person deserves to have the chance to give up? Isn’t surrendering a basic right? Shooting Rice ~2 seconds after arrival on site (literally no questions asked) removes any meaningful chance at surrender. It also exposes you (in this case) to killing non-armed and playing kids.
As a kid I KNOW I’ve played with BB guns and such. Outside, goofing, and all that. I’m fully confident that if I was put in a similar situation I would be dead. There is nothing I could do (in ~2 secs) to prevent being shot -and left for dead- like Rice was.
No. You are extending the notion of “rights” into nebulous territory and watering down the very notion of what the concept means.
If I go bonkers and shoot up a Burger King, and cops arrive while I am still covering a crowd of people, procedure probably includes an attempt to get me to surrender, but the only “right” I have earned is that to be shot down to protect others.
Yes, it depends on the judgment of the guy or gal in blue or khaki or green that we elected (in the broad sense) to do this job for us. And a million times a day, s/he doesn’t egregiously shoot first with inadequate judgment. We need to keep an overall perspective as much as we need to find a way to reduce these shootings to as close to zero as is humanly possible.
It’s quite a tangent (in some ways - not in others) but you could substitute “teachers” for “cops” in a lot of these discussions about poor training, unsuitability for the job and the deep-set siege mentality that leads to extreme us-v-them situations jealously guarded by the unions.
And since better education is the root cure for nearly all societal problems…
Do you believe that the immediate widespread danger and the knowledgeably proven murder that you have crafted above is in anyway comparable to Tamir Rice? It’s like if when talking about the right to not be tortured and someone brings up a classic “ticking timebomb” scenario where you know of an immediately deadly threat that justifies torture tactics.
Yes, I believe in your above scenario -in which there is a wild shooter who is killing/process-of-killing bystanders- that they can be shot without prior warning/chance to surrender. However, that is not, AT ALL, the issue here. This is about the bag/tag shooting of Tamir Rice. Not your “ticking timebomb” like scenario.
That’s not what he’s saying. While I agree with you that if that’s the status quo, then it needs to be changed, people also need to take prudent and reasonable precautions appropriate for the situation.
It would be patently dumb for me to go around with a bunch of money held in my hand outside ofthe nearby mostly black and low income apartment complexes. Shouldn’t be that way- I ought to be safe from robbery or molestation, no matter how much money I have.
But that’s not how the world works. Someone would almost certainly jack me for that cash, and probably violently. So the *smart * thing to do would be to hide that money away in some fashion, or not even carry it if you have to go through that area.
THAT is what Amateur Barbarian is getting at. It may not be good, it certainly isn’t fair, but in this day and age, black people of any age, really need to be fully aware of how to deal with the police. Anything else is stupid and negligent.
So, let’s shift the discussion to the evils of teachers’ unions. :smack: And should we broaden the inquiry to include racist plumbers, and homophobic pastry workers?
The fact is that, in modern America, police have “the job” of killing citizens on the vaguest of suspicion. Might it be reasonable to hold them to a higher standard than we hold plumbers and teachers?