Police: 12-year-old shot, killed homeless man
12-year-old accused in playground killing among youngest murder suspects in Michigan
The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man
Michigan 12-year-old faces murder charge after fatally stabbing 9-year-old
Granted, two of these cases are stabbings but a 12 y.o is not always harmless.
I think that’s a fair question. The fact (if that’s a fact) that that the cops responded reasonably once the kid reached for a gun doesn’t mean that that situation was an inevitability. I don’t know. I would hope they investigate fully, determine if they followed proper protocol, and if they did, assess that protocol.
Funny how all the victims “reach for their waistband” in police shootings. Every cop knows it’s the magic phrase that can get them off the hook when they fuck up. That kid was executed by some seriously stupid cops, who then stood there with their thumbs up their stupid pig asses while the kid was bleeding out.
There are some kids who kill, no doubt about that. But these situations are abnormalities. If a cop assume he’s in mortal danger every time he faces someone who might potentially kill him, because there are some recorded cases of such, then he might as well kill everybody he comes in contact with : even a 85 yo grandmother can kill you with her umbrella.
Now, what do you think would be your reaction if you had passed by this place and saw the kid (assuming you watched the video)? Would you have taken a second to assess the situation (which the cops didn’t)?Would have thought you were in mortal danger, even assuming that the kid was still wawing his gun (which apparently the cop thought even though the kid didn’t even have the gun in hand)?
Would you have judged the situation so volatile that you had to run your car on the lawn and rush out of it, rather than park it calmly and walk up to him? Would your reflex had been to reach for your gun, assuming you would have one? Or to give him a stern talking to about not wawing guns around?
I think a lot of posters in this thread are doing the same thing, seeing how often “he reached for the gun” gets repeated as the gospel truth when in fact it’s just the officer’s word. The idea that this child somehow brought it all on himself and that the officers acted reasonably would be a more comforting explanation of events. I suspect this goes double if you’re a junior fascist like Smapti (whose absence in this thread remains conspicuous) since it embeds a nice little moral tale about the importance of being preemptively subservient to authority.
I’d rather see dead cops than dead children, so the answer to your question is yes. If they don’t like it they need to find a line of work that doesn’t scare them quite so much. Or, you know, they can stop making idiotic and unnecessary decisions that increase the risk for everybody.
Assume the gun was real and he intended to use it. How many shots should he have been allowed to get off before the cops were allowed to use force?
“But the gun wasn’t real” is not a valid answer, as the cops had no way of knowing that.
“They shouldn’t have driven up so close!” is not a valid answer either.
Surely cops overreacting to a 12 year old with a pellet gun is the same thing as a a cop shooting a 6’4" 290 lb suspect who just robbed a convenience store and by most accounts attacked a police officer?
The video clearly shows the kid reaching for the gun.
I don’t find it comforting at all. I’m not happy it turned out this way. That doesn’t change the fact that a 12-year-old ought to know better than to be waving a gun around in a public place and his parents ought to have known better than to let him do so and unattended at that. The sad fact of the matter is that the instant you decide to disobey a police officer, especially if you have a weapon on you, your life is forfeit.
So its unrealistic and “junior fascist” to expect sixth-graders to have basic self preservation skills and not play with guns, but it’s entirely realistic to expect cops to be steel-hearted machines with no fear of death and utterly willing to place themselves in life threatening danger for no good reason? Sounds like your cops would make the better tools of a fascist state.
If the suspect was you…I’m confident you’d be dead. Do you honestly think you’d be able to comply (or even disobey) within that time frame? If you had:
[ol]
[li]cat like reflexes[/li][li]unwavering mental clarity[/li][li]sharp hearing[/li][/ol]…maybe, just maybe you’d be able to survive that quick encounter. Expecting such from others is mind boggling.
But as I asked earlier ( not of you ), what exactly do you think he was reaching for his BB gun for ?
As a one-child re-enactment of The Wild Bunch I’m sure he knew the toy gun wouldn’t protect him for even the second he had left to live.
It doesn’t take any of those things to not reach for a gun. Literally standing still and doing nothing at all would likely have worked out better.
Maybe he thought he could BS his way out of getting in trouble. Maybe he fancied himself a crack shot and figured he could fire a BB/pellet with enough accuracy to take someone’s eye out. Maybe he was just naive. Either way the end result is the same - the cops can’t read minds and can’t reasonably be expected to respond to a suspect reaching for a gun to wait and see where he’s going with this.
Quite frankly, in that time frame, freezing is the only thing that’s safe. Doing anything else (even compliance) can be called “reaching.”
With quite a few cops in the US these days, there IS no “safe thing”, once their gun is pointed at you. You are lying to yourself, or just ignorant.
Pulling a car to a halt next to someone and jumping out of the door shooting at someone who isn’t holding a gun, much less firing it, is not “defending themselves.” Lethal Weapon is not a guide to good policing.
Nothing about the encounter demonstrates skilled police work. Smapti’s claim that “standing still” would have been a better idea is horseshit; the cop was going to kill Rice no matter what he did, and you can see that plain as day on the tape. There’s not a moment’s hesitation; they pull up and the cop jumps out and kills him. No effort was made to assess the situation, stay back and issue orders, create distance between themselves and the suspect, give the suspect a chance to surrender, or really ANYTHING to defuse the situation.
[QUOTE=Smapti]
The video clearly shows the kid reaching for the gun.
[/QUOTE]
Your definition of “clearly” is apparently not one consistent with dictionaries of the English language. The video shows his hands by his side when the car pulls up next to him, and at his side when they shoot him.
I hope this doesn’t include fellating on demand. “Blowjob, or death!”
I know the above is sarcasm, but it’s a good lead in to the study that demonstrated that black boys are literally viewed as older than white boys.
For some ** Smaptis ** here, they don’t even need to make the demand. Better safe than sorry.
Is there audio of them yelling “Put your hands up!” three times, as they claim to have said? Now, it’s rather obvious they didn’t say this after they pulled up, because there just wasn’t enough time between the doors flying open and the shots being fired(1 1/2 to 2 seconds). Was it said over the police loudspeaker three times in a row as they were driving up to him? If he was as dangerous as they say and waving his gun around when/if they were observing him from the safety of their car, why didn’t they yell “Drop your weapon?” at least once?
Maybe they did, causing him to reach into pants to try to comply? I would really like to hear the police audio and see how it matches up with the claims.
Tell me, the cops pull up to a report of a person wielding a gun, they see the individual reaching for what they believe to be that gun, what are they suppose to do?