If you answered my question, I missed it. Feel free to point it out to me. Once again, why do you assert things as factual that you couldn’t possibly know are true – in this case, that Rice tried to threaten police officers?
It wouldn’t be bad to just admit it, if it’s what you believe - the occasional police officer who murders someone is the price society has to pay for policing in general and it’s overall a good deal for society.
Good heavens why?
I would think that any rational person would agree with this. It’s literally impossible to screen for all bad apples; some will get into the barrel no matter what.
The point of disagreement would come when you talk about whether we should make any effort at all to punish the crimes of murderous policemen and whether efforts to that regard are possible to implement or could possibly be an effective deterrent against future police misconduct. Well, that and you find some people who think it never happens because shooting a socially disadvantaged person isn’t a bad thing. Those people exist too.
I honestly thought that went without saying, but that’s not what this whole argument is about. This is about people falsely claiming that certain cops have committed murder when they haven’t.
Oh, and something about Donald Trump.
As to the point you make, if we want to maintain some sort of order in society, we need to have some way to enforce that. And no matter what safeguards you put in place, some people will abuse the power they are given to enforce that, whether it’s the sort of petty brutality Trump endorsed, or whether it’s murder. Any time there’s a reasonable suspicion someone has abused their position, it should be investigated, and if sufficient evidence is found, they should be tried and convicted. Where I seem to differ from many people in this thread is in thinking that said evidence should exist before conviction.
The officer who shot him claimed that was the case, and the grand jury that saw the rest of the evidence believed him. It’s the most likely situation. Were it not, there would have been a trial.
It’s not proven beyond reasonable doubt, but it doesn’t need to be, as he’s not being accused of a crime.
We have discussed this at length in other threads.
No, the officer claimed that Rice made a movement that he took as threatening. The officer didn’t say “Rice tried to threaten me”. Those are very different things. The officer didn’t go so far as to try and ascribe evil motives to the child he killed – why would you?
It’s not hard to be specific and accurate such that one doesn’t ascribe evil motives to children for no purpose whatsoever. You can be entirely accurate in describing the facts of the case without pretending to know that the child was thinking evil threatening thoughts when he did whatever he did.
You know, I honestly feel you catch a lot more crap than you deserve, so I feel bad pointing out that this is the most naive thing I think I’ve ever read here.
But I’m going to anyway, because this is really the most fucking naive thing I’ve ever read here. Do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny too?
If it hadn’t received so much publicity, and we hadn’t heard from members of the grand jury, I might well agree. But it’s clear in this case there was a thorough investigation that didn’t find enough evidence to go to trial.
If the grand jury had thought there was a reasonable chance of conviction, they would have sent it to trial. As they didn’t, it’s pretty clear that they didn’t think it likely the officer was lying when he said he believed his life was in danger.
Perhaps you can cite me calling his thoughts or motives “evil”? Rice appeared to be reaching for his gun - that’s a threat. It may have been unintentional, but as he’s not being accused of anything that’s irrelevant.
I completely agree with this. It is further bullshit that they get extra laws written to give them additional protection. Why is assulting a cop a different crime than assulting anyone else?
Also cops convicted of any felony should have mandatory life terms in general population.
No. Cruel and unusual, and by design. It would be as bad as letting someone into general population and then hanging a child molester jacket on him. We do stuff like that in retribution, we degrade ourselves.
Anyone defending the murder of Tamir Rice is so devoid of common sense and humanity as to baffle us.
Facts: Cops raced up to a kid known to have “a gun, possibly a toy.” They stopped the car almost as close to the kid as they could, got out of the car and immediately shot him dead.
During the few milliseconds between the cops opening their doors and pulling their triggers, Tamir’s arms probably moved a bit — that’s normal for someone who’s been startled. Whatever he moved his arms for, we know the purpose wasn’t to kill the cops: His gun was a toy, remember?
Had the cops treated Tamir’s life as worth as much as that of a rabid dog, they could have stopped their car far enough away to feel safe and tried talking to him. They didn’t. Instead they acted exactly as they would have acted had their mission been to kill Tamir as quickly as possible.
Cops have a right to feel afraid and to react to their fear. In this case the cops placed themselves in a “fearful” situation deliberately: They parked their car so close to the poor lad that “they had no choice” but to kill him as soon as they opened their doors.
I think SteophBot’s programmers are to be commended: many Dopers probably think he’s a real human being. But his posts on Tamir Rice, like the famous scene with the replicant in Blade Runner, give it away.
@ SteophBot — which part of this didn’t you understand? What advice would you give to your programmers, when they’re preparing SteophBot Version 2, so that in matters like Tamir Rice you can fool Dopers into thinking you have humane values?
This is the kind of shit that gets to me. The blank-check nonsensical naivete. Not even of the infallibility of a jury, but of a grand jury, an entity known to have immense bias in favor of the police. You trust the system as borderline infallible, even when if you opened your damn eyes, you could see it failing right in front of you. You’re like the young earth creationist who responds to evidence of evolution by saying, “But God is right, therefore that isn’t actually evidence of evolution.”
Why do you specify “in general population”? Is it because you get off on extra-judicial (aka, illegal) punishment? If so, then how are you all that different from someone who carried out extra-judicial punishment? And, of course, there’s the whole “how to reward the prisoner dispensing prison ‘justice’” bit. And why mandatory life? Have you never heard of punishment that fits the crime? Your concept, such as it is, as elucidator pointed out, cruel and unusual.
Care to rethink and amend your comment or do you prefer to look like an unthinking and immoral jackass?
[QUOTE=k9bfriender;20384653
Cops who[plant evidence]
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/20/us/baltimore-cop-allegedly-planting-evidence/index.html), cops who will beat you and arrest you for saying something they didn’t like, cops who rape the people that called them for help, cops who shove screwdrivers up a suspect’s ass.
[/QUOTE]
Some interesting quotes from those articles
So it is legal for a cop to beat the shit out of someone sitting on a porch if the cop thinks it’s necessary?
Note that was after a rape kit was done and the Officer told his bosses three different stories.
They were not criminally prosecuted.
Anyone notice a pattern?
You may or may not be right but what you don’t admit is that the prosecutor acted more as a defense attorney than an actual prosecutor during that grand jury. The Tamir Rice case is simply a bad one to argue either side. He had a realistic toy gun but it was missing the orange identifying tip BUT you had cops immediately escalating the situation, almost forcing the situation (all 2 seconds) to turn violent. Add on that Tim McGinty who did everything he could to NOT get an indictment (see post immediately above) and you have a clusterfuck of a case.
You said he tried to threaten the code. “tried” is about intent. You didn’t say appeared to threaten, which would just be about what the cop witnessed.
If that’s not what you meant, you should have used different words. For all your complaints about being accurate in accusations, you threw this false one around (about a dead child, for God’s sake!) like it was nothing.
We all sometimes catch more crap here than we deserve, Steophan included, but in this thread he’s earned every bit of it. From the wide-eyed insistence that the dearth of successful prosecutions must mean that the police hadn’t done anything wrong, to the constant bizarre and blatantly incorrect refrain that anyone who doesn’t agree with him must want a lawless state, to his ongoing misrepresentation of the facts of the Rice case in order to support his view that “anyone” (by which one must assume he includes himself) would have shot a 12-year-old boy to death within two seconds of screeching up next to him and shouting at him, he’s pretty much demonstrated both a complete lack of credibility and a willingness to handwave away the deaths of innocent people in order to support his authoritarian leanings.
They’re not giving the results you like, so they must be biased. I don’t think so. You’re the one who us ignoring all the evidence that conflicts with your views, not me.
It’s not naive to think that people with more information than me can reach a better decision. It’s foolish to trust them uncritically, but it’s far worse to dismiss them due to your own bias.