Works great until some cop drops a single tablet of oxycontin on the floor of your car because he doesn’t like your attitude, then you become a “dealer”.
I would prefer all drugs were legalized so the dope dealers were places like Target and Safeway and maybe Bongs R’ Us.
No, a real man stands by his words unless they have unfortunate consequences.
“No, I didn’t say your butt looks big, I said that those expensive designer jeans make your butt look big! Totally different!”
That someone was waving a fucking gun around. Did you somehow miss that part, the whole reason they were there in the first place? They didn’t just randomly see some black kid and decide to shoot him, they received a report of someone waving a gun around. Said someone’s first instinct on being stopped by the police was to go for that gun.
Oh, and can we please ditch the nonsense about only having two seconds to respond? You are all bitching about the police driving up so fucking close to him, don’t pretend he didn’t notice them.
It’s a nasty trend in these threads to twist everything into whatever looks worst for the police, rather than just observe what was there. Simple observation suggests that the police may have had the right to shoot him, in self defence, so unless evidence surfaces that they didn’t, case closed. Hopefully anyway, as long as the law there works the way it should, there’s still some places who expect people to prove they were acting in self defence :smack:
He wasn’t waving the gun AT THE COPS. Was he?
Having a gun is not license for summary execution.
Even if the kid had had a real gun, it does not follow that the cops had the right to kill him. He didn’t pull out the gun, he didn’t wave the gun at the cops, he didn’t threaten them. And we know for a fact that he wasn’t actually reaching for his waistband to pull out a gun and shoot the cops because he didn’t actually have a real gun.
Do you own a gun? Do you ever carry a gun? If someone called the cops and told them you had been waving the gun around earlier, would they be justified in pulling up to you, jumping out of the car and immediately opening fire? Based on the fact that you had a gun?
Or to put it another way, suppose the kid had a real gun. The cops pull up, and reach for their waistbands. Would the kid be justified in shooting them in self-defense? After all, they had guns, and were reaching for their waistbands, that’s enough to put him in justifiable fear for his life, isn’t it? Or do only cops have the right to shoot first and ask questions later?
If I had been reported as brandishing a gun, had something that looked like a gun in my waistband, and reached for that when the police told me to freeze, then yes, they would be.
Oh, and they didn’t immediately open fire. They responded to him not just ignoring their commands, but doing the one thing that could legitimately have caused them to perceive danger.
You know what? I simply don’t believe that so many people here can’t see that this shooting at minimum may have been justified. It’s absolutely obvious that the police’s story is, again at minimum, plausible. What’s happening is that people have seen a child killed and, for purely emotional reasons, want to blame anyone other than the kid, regardless of the actual facts.
Such intellectual dishonesty is unpleasant at the best of times, but when doing so makes you falsely claim someone is a murderer, it’s sickening.
One could argue that this shooting is evidence that such a fear is indeed justifiable. Who wants to be the next Tamir?
Seems to me the 2nd Amendment lovers more than anyone who should be shitting bricks over this. If anyone can be shot dead by the state over the mere suspicion of carrying a gun, then everyone who owns a registered gun is vulnerable to this kind of insanity.
“Oops! Sorry I shot you, guy! But when I looked up your license plate number, I saw that you’re a registered gun owner. So logically when you reached over to get your wallet, I assumed you were going to get your weapon and shoot me. Why don’t you keep your wallet in your lap like normal people do, guy? Why did you make me kill you?”
Second Amendment supporters should be alarmed. Those that aren’t racist hypocrites, anyway.
And so should good LEOs, because it’s their jobs that will be harder and more dangerous for the cowboyism of their colleagues.
Can you simply believe that what appears to be the majority of people on these threads not only don’t find it “absolutely obvious” that the police story might be plausible, we find it ''absolutely obvious" that this is an unjustified shooting by any stretch of the imagination. Police should not shoot a person, even if that person is armed with a deadly weapon, unless they reasonably believe they have no choice. “perceiving danger” is not enough. I’m sorry people shoot police officers. It’s a terrible thing. That fact, however, does not create a reasonable threat of death every time they come across a boy with a “gun” in his wasteland.
But, this has all been explained to you multiple times, and you choose to dismiss all arguments as merely “intellectual dishonesty.”
[Moderator]
Telling other posters to fuck themselves is a violation of the Pits language rules. Please avoid doing this in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderator]
I don’t understand how anyone could, after viewing the video evidence, honestly believe the kid was reaching for waistband.
That’s delusional. It didn’t happen. The cops made it up, because after you shoot a 12 year old kid, you have to have some sort of explanation and “it looked like he was reaching for his waistband” is a statement that, absent video evidence, cannot be argued against.
Except in this case we have video evidence, and nothing of the sort occurred. They didn’t yell at him to freeze, they just pulled out their guns and shot him, because they heard from the dispatcher that a dangerous man with a gun was threatening the neighborhood, and from that information decided that the best course of action was to put the active shooter on the ground without giving him time to act.
Except there was no active shooter, there was no dangerous maniac with a gun, there was a 12 year old kid.
Again, assume the kid had a real gun. The shooting was still unjustified because–get this–having a gun doesn’t give the cops the right to shoot you first and ask questions later. The fact that this particular gun wasn’t a real gun is a red herring. Having a gun doesn’t give the cops the right to shoot you.
This kid did not have time to freeze, he did not have time to reach for his FUCKING WAISTBAND, because only way their response makes sense is that they decided as they arrived they needed to take out the shooter BEFORE he had any chance to respond, because giving the shooter a chance to respond just meant giving him a chance to shoot back. They weren’t going to give him a chance to respond, it was too dangerous. So roll up fast, and before the shooter knows what’s happening, he’s on the ground. That was the plan. This is obvious.
So the cops later statements that they yelled at him to freeze, or that he reached for his waistband are obvious lies, once they’d calmed down and realized they’d executed a kid with a toy.
The problem is not that the cops made the wrong decision in the 1.5 seconds between pulling up and shooting the kid, when he made some sort of movement that they interpreted (either justifiably or unjustifiably) as threatening. They didn’t make any such decision, they had already decided what to do, which was to shoot him as soon as humanly possible without giving him a chance to respond. And this of course was not because they wanted to lynch a negro kid to impress their klan buddies, but because they somehow believed he was a Columbine-style spree killer.
And even then, there are plenty of active spree killers who were ACTUALLY ARRESTED ALIVE.
And I find it fascinating that most of the replies to my link imply that they are okay with cops confiscating and destroying public video because one of the subjects may have been a drug dealer.
Just focusing on this one point. Because the video shows his arm moving towards his waistband. Yes - it did happen. I’m using this version of the video for reference. At the 1:03 mark, the kid is shown clearly with his hands reaching to his waist area. The police car is already there. They stutter the video a bit so you can see what he’s doing. He is reaching for his waist.
Looking at that video two things jump out at me.
- The cops roll up fast and shoot quickly but on the other hand, Rice doesn’t hesitate to find out what they want. He reaches for the gun pretty fast.
- Even after Rice has been shot, the cops keep their guns trained on him and appear to be very concerned that he may still be a threat.
I would like to pile on about how ridiculous this thread is. When the video came out, I actually thought to myself that this was a case in which no one could deny that the police officers acted recklessly and negligently, at best. I guess I’m just naive, as we actually saw someone partially faulting Levar Jones for this shooting, so it’s possible to spin anything if you believe it enough.
[ul]
[li]The officers clearly lied in their report about telling Tamir Rice to put his hands up three times, as he was shot immediately after the police arrived. I find it unbelievable that anyone is taking their statements at face value, now that they are proven liars.[/li][li]If the boy was actually an active shooter, the police recklessly created a very dangerous situation by driving to within a few feet of where he was sitting (I mean, wtf?).[/li][li]Even if he was reaching for his waistband, which is far from clear in the video, he never got his hand on his toy.[/li][li]Assuming again he was reaching for the toy, the most likely scenario is that he was trying to drop the toy, in order to show the officers that it was not a real weapon, but in fact a TOY. How else would he ‘disarm’ himself?[/li][/ul]
What is wrong with this list? All of these statements would have to be false in order to justify this shooting (not to mention the fact that no fist aid was administered). I mean, you guys don’t have to defend literally every police shooting that occurs. Police officers make mistakes, too. It is not an indictment of the entire system, FFS.
Are you contending that he had fooled himwelf into thinking he had a real gun?
He may have fooled himself into thinking that if he got his gun out the cops might be fooled.
Maybe he thought the cops would drop their weapons and he would jump into the squad car and get away. A scenario he’d probably see played out on TV many times.
I think we can all agree that kids can have some unrealistic ideas.
Adults too.
LOL, wut?
You don’t say?
Is this the new angle? The child was a complete imbecile?
Hmm. Maybe. Plausible? In the least bit likely? At all connected to reality? No, no, no.
But you’ve quite the imagination there.