Police should not shoot in all* potentially *dangerous situations. That may marginally increase their chances of getting shot, but should also significantly decrease the chance of shooting someone who doesn’t need to be shoot.
Not true on two counts. No guy called the cops. If you mean the guy who call 911, he referred to the gunman(fakegunboy) as a guy, not a kid.
But both cops weren’t given this important piece of information. What they “knew” was that there was a real gunman they were responding to.
I’d like to add that I wonder how obvious this benign situation of a 12 year old playing with a toy gun was to the 911 caller given he determined an emergency, even after a significant amount of time for observation.
So I’ll give the cops the benefit of the doubt on that score, but what I’ve recently learned about these two cops not even attempting to give first aid and making the victim wait 4 minutes is inexcusable. There’s got to be serious consequences for that criminal irresponsibility.
That’s correct. But in situations where the perceived danger is both imminent and serious, such as when someone who is carrying what can reasonably be believed to have a gun reaches for that gun.
This isn’t someone being shot for holding a wallet or a sandwich, it’s someone being shot whilst reaching for an almost exact replica of a gun.
Coming into this thread late, all I see is a debate that ends at the moment of the shooting. The evidence points out that after the kid was shot, the police did not not render any first aid to the kid which might have saved his life. They did nothing. Not until four minutes after the kid was shot when a police detective and an FBI agent arrived was any first aid attempted, and it was too late.
In looking at the totality of the event:
[ul]
[li]The police arrive right next to the kid, putting the officer in the passenger seat in immediate danger.[/li][li]The kid is shot within two seconds after the police arrived.[/li][li]The police rendered no first aid to the kid.[/li][li]First aid was only rendered after two other LEOs showed up, four minutes after the fact.[/li][/ul]
The kid was 12 years old, probably with just enough street smarts to get him in trouble (which happened) but still way too immature to understand the totality of his actions that day or what brought to the event that day.
The police appear to have been too hasty arriving at the scene, and too hasty in making life-death decisions. People seem to zero in it was a rookie cop who fired the shot, but seem to forget it was a seasoned cop who was the driver who immediately escalated the event by driving right up to the kid.
Anybody could kill me, at any moment. Anything could kill me, really. Barring extraordinary circumstances (You’re in the Centrafican republic, and he belongs to the army of the lord, he’s in the middle of a killing rampage in his middle school), a 12 yo, even armed, is extremely unlikely to try to kill you. The main risk is that he’ll kill you (or somebody else) without meaning it, because guns are fucking dangerous.
That’s not a risk that warrants being affraid for your life, especially if you’re a police officer supposedly trained to handle volatile situations. That’s absolutely not a risk that warrants shooting the kid.
They should treat a situation according to the actual danger involved, danger that they are 1) supposed to be particularly apt at assessing 2) supposed to be willing to face in their line of work.
What they’re not supposed to do is to killing everything that moves as soon that they have the slighest hint that there might be the slighest danger possibly involved.
If they dare driving their patrol car, they should be able to dare facing a 12 yo who might or might not reach for something that might or might not be a weapon.
Replace “someone” by “some 12 yo”, please.
I don’t know the exact odds of confronting armed 12 yo vs taking a shower. I guess I would assess the kid more dangerous since I don’t think a second time before taking a shower (although I pay attention to how I enter it), while I would consider the 12 yo pointing a gun around worrying. But I would consider neither a life-threatening situation.
The idiot cops shot an innocent twelve year old because they couldn’t figure out how to get a toy gun out of his hands. The kid’s twelve. This means he’s stupid. He’s stupid because all twelve year olds are stupid. That is the nature of the twelve year old. When I was twelve I did all kinds of stupid things. In a single month, I broke my glasses twice, ruined my best dress, lost my mom’s favorite pair of earrings and forgot about a major social studies project. I almost got hit by a truck crossing the street because I was dumb enough to read and cross the street at the same time. My eldest tries to do that sometimes unless I remind her not to.
I routinely have to get our local twelve year olds to stop doing dumb things. One of them thought it was funny to throw rocks at my tree because he saw a squirrel there. I called his mommy and she grounded him. I didn’t call the damned cops and tell them it okay to shoot the kid.
Some of you are defending some deeply stupid cops who murdered a twelve year old and it is just baffling to me. The cops aren’t twelve. They had other ways of handling this situation rather than fear based murder of an innocent kid. They need be fired rather than defended. The kid was stupid because he was a kid. The fucking asshole cops have no such excuse.
Cops do follow procedures and I see similarities with way I was apprehended by the cops when I was under suspicion for robbing a convenience store.
All of a sudden I had a cop beside me to pull over which then parked in front of me with another cop car parked beside me and a third parked behind me. This was no ordinary traffic stop. Lights flashing all around me and bull horn demanding I show hands. Several cops now just outside my door with guns drawn. I very carefully followed instructions to extricate myself, and allow the indignity of their hands doing their will with my body. I was not going to give them any excuse to shoot me. Even though I’m white, I considered the possibility of getting shot very real.
That was 15 years ago, and I’m glad I complied, I’m glad I didn’t give the cops a hard time and Im glad for the additional years that I preserved for myself.
That is where my advice comes from
I wonder what the math is in circumstances like this with the 12-year old kid with a gun-like object. What percentage of 12 year old kids who are spotted with a gun-like object actually have a gun, as opposed to a toy?
It would make me awfully reluctant to shoot at a 12 year old kid – would I rather risk a pretty low chance of being shot (assuming that, most of the time, when a 12 year old has something that looks like a gun, it’s not a gun), or shoot a 12 year old? I’m pretty sure I’d rather risk the low chance of being shot by a 12 year old. I’m not sure if life as a killer-of-a-12-year-old would be better than life (or possible death) risking a somewhat low chance of being shot by a 12 year old. Maybe another reason I’m not a cop.
He said he was “probably a juvenile.” What does that mean to you if not “kid”?
This pretty much says it all.
With the exception of certain individuals acting in a mentally disturbed way, unarmed white folks don’t seem to get killed or injured by police bullets very often.
And therefore you should never fear anything, ever, and never try to defend yourself.Because other things are also risky.
Or if he tries to pull a gun when the police, who received a report of him waving a gun around a playground, tell him to freeze. Then the likelihood that he might shoot goes up to roughly comparable levels.
Nonsense. Cars and showers are dangerous - therefore guns are absolutely not dangerous, and you don’t need to worry about them.
What kind of training do you think police have, that renders them bullet-proof?
The police received a report that someone was waving a gun around a playground. When they got there, they spotted the person reported, and yelled at him to freeze. They also pulled up close enough that they could tackle him before he either escaped, or to be able to cuff him if he complied. But he didn’t comply. When ordered to put his hands up, he reached for his gun. It doesn’t take much aptness to assess that this was a risky situation, where an officer or a civilian could get shot.
As it turns out, it was an Airsoft pistol. Which the police did not know, and could not have known, because it resembled a real pistol very closely, especially at night, and because the kid apparently removed or painted over the orange plug on the end of the barrel that the manufacturer put there. IOW the kid put forth some effort to make the gun look more real and more threatening.
Unless you have suggestions on how to make the police telepathic as well as bullet-proof, I don’t see how more training is going to help. Unless you want every squad car in Cleveland to come equipped with one of those “Guess Your Age and Weight” guys that I see at my local state fair, so the police know how old the person is who shoots them. I am sure that will reassure everyone very much.
Good, because that’s not what they did.
OK, but it makes no difference. The various cites have already demonstrated that a 12 year old is perfectly capable of shooting someone, and several have done so.
Regards,
Shodan
Really? You know for a fact that enough of it was showing out of the front of his pants that trained police officers could reasonably mistake it at that time for an exact replica?
Will you please provide a link to the video you are viewing-ours is really grainy and doesn’t provide the level of detail yours seem to provide.
Neither. I tell him that guns are dangerous and that he should put it down. I definitely don’t shoot him.
Your prefered reaction when facing a bad driver or scalding water is rational. Your reaction when facing 12 yo who might or might not be armed (shooting them) is aberrant (and abhorrant)
Maybe your not aware of, or don’t remember, the following.
When Amadou Diallo after pulling out his wallet we were treated to many photos of guns designed to appear as wallets.
So, yes people have been shot for holding a wallet . . . because it could have been a gun. There are guns that don’t even bother trying to not look like toys as well as gun; cellphones, flashlights, belt-buckles, watches, canes, pens and, well, anything you might want to imagine. And, of course, there any number of things that look like dangerous weapons that aren’t (“switchblade” combs and “gun” lighters to name just two).
So, just maybe, you might want to about how some people with actual guns live through their encounters with police while some people without actual guns die.
Damned if I can think of a common denominator that explains the result.
Armed white folks don’t seem to get killed or injured by police bullets very often either.
I look forward to the next attempted “suicide by cop” that fails . . . 'cause it ain’t possible that someone that really wants to get shot to death couldn’t get what they want.
CMC fnord!
And, again, people have been known to slip in the shower and kill themselves. Which is essentially the only thing I can answer to your whole post. You keep telling me that the situation was life threatening for the police officer, and I’ll keep saying it wasn’t. And that it turned out to be life-threatening only for the kid, in fact.
Listen, I’m stopping here. You believe a 12 yo with a gun is a danger of the kind that requires killing him immediately. I believe a 12 yo with a gun is a danger of the kind that requires a stern talking. It’s obvious we aren’t going to convince each other.
His own behavior shows he didn’t really think this was an emergency. If he really thought the kid was an armed menace, it would have been insane and stupid of him to just lollygag a few paces away from him. We see him sitting in the gazebo, watching the kid playing in the sidewalk. He wasn’t afraid at all.
Here’s what I think. The guy felt like the kid was robbing him and other’s of their God-given right to have peace and quiet. But he was too much of wimp to confront the kid himself and ask him to quit with his antics. So he summons the cops. He intentionally downplays the kid’s age and the fact that he’s goofing off with a toy so that they take his complaint seriously enough to come and handle his dirty work for him.
People need to realize that calling the police is like taking a loaded gun and pointing it at someone. Don’t do it unless you’re prepared for it to go off.
From reports I’ve read the rubber-pellet gun wasn’t his. A friend had given the play gun to him that afternoon after basketball practice, and he went out and did what 12 year old boys have done with toy guns for the last hundred years or so-played with it. Not as bad as some have been known to do, of course: he didn’t shoot rubber pellets at any people, shoot at pets, or even shoot out any windows. No, this 12 year old child just waved his toy around(he may even have been pretending he was a cop at the time-wouldn’t that have been ironic as all fuck?), Shodan, so why are you insinuating such crap about the poor child? Would any child with a toy gun have gotten such a “mini-gangsta” accusation from you?
That’s the case I was referencing. Now, if you acknowledge that sometimes it’s reasonable to mistake a wallet for a gun, which is the only reason I can think for you bringing up that sometimes guns look like wallets, how can you think it’s unreasonable for someone to mistake something that looks exactly like a gun for a gun?
Did you miss the case in the other thread about the white guy shot in (I think) Kansas? It is notable that in that case, the police waited until one of their number got shot before returning fire. My opinion is that they should stop having such a good opinion of armed white people, and shoot them when they become a threat, not mess about with tasers when the attacker has a gun.