And it appears to be that you pulled my supposed underlying assumption out of your ass. Why don’t you try reacting to the words I actually wrote this time, instead of the imaginary conversation running through your mind?
The main issue is that there’s a growing feeling amongst all races that the cops themselves aren’t following the law, aren’t expected to, and aren’t held accountable when they don’t.
In the Tamir Rice shooting I would question how the officers got into the life or death situation in the first place.
Posters have claimed that knives are deadly to police officers within 10 feet and these officers speed up right next to a guy with a gun? Were the police officers protecting the posts from danger? Could they not have pulled up on the sidewalk or the parking lot?
The driver of the vehicle positioned the vehicle in such a way that the passenger in the vehicle had is immediately at serious risk.
As the driver of the car was in control of initial contact and his decisions led to a situation that put his and his partners life in immediate danger, IMHO, I would like to see the driver of the vehicle to be charged and hopefully brought to court for Negligent Homocide and Manslaughter.
I am not saying that Police Officers should not be able to protect themselves but in this case the driver made tactically questionable decisions that led to the death of a person.
I answered your silly question, now… When do you think it’s appropriate for an officer to use lethal force?
It’s okay if you choose not to answer, but please say so, that way I won’t think I stumped you.
You know what?
You know fucking what?
I don’t give two fucking shits what your stupid fucking asinine argument is.
This doesn’t happen in Europe.
That’s all you need to know.
This shit Does. Not. HAPPEN. In Europe.
That should be the end of the conversation right there. Fuck obeying the police. The problem is with police culture.
So “police culture” is the only difference between the US and Europe?
Alright, I’m going to make this hypothetical as narrow as possible so that you can’t possibly fight it.
As the result of a freak accident involving a time machine, the Fox News satellite, and a wizard, you have instantaneously been teleported into a public park in Cleveland, OH, dressed in a police uniform with full gun belt, where you are standing next to a parked police cruiser in front of a young man with a gun tucked into his waistband. Upon seeing you materialize in front of him, you observe him to reach for the gun in his waistband.
At what point are you justified in using your own gun to defend yourself?
Yes. Since csarcasm doesn’t seem to play ball with you I will. I believe that cops shouldn’t have started shooting until after the suspect shot first. If you don’t like this position, sue me. The police are wearing vests and have their vehicle as partial protection.
I would like to point out that most people are terrible shots, including police. So even if you have a suspect actively shooting, statistically they will hit nothing but air. In the typical police shootout, it’s not uncommon to have dozens if not hundreds of shots fired until the shootout ends one way or the other, placing the overall likelihood of getting hit by a bullet in the low single digit percentage, even at extremely close up range.
The position held by the police apologists seems to revolve around the question of what the police officers are seeing from their vantage point. The question is always “the police see the suspect doing XYZ, what should the police do?” Well, I propose a hypothesis: what police officers see from their own vantage points is always blurred by neurological factors, including the secretion of hormones by the endocrine system, one among many adrenaline, etc. So what police perceive and understand from their surroundings is no different than a run of the mill witness. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable precisely because the human brain is incapable of processing certain horrible and traumatic events, so the brain goes back to its memory banks and modifies the record to make it fit some sort of preconceived reasonable storyline (and hilariously witnesses to the same event will recount wildly different stories). It is much like dreaming, where you have the brain accesing random memory storage points, then if a person briefly wakes up after REM the brain will quickly stitch the random memories into a cohesive albeit still whacked out storyline.
In conclusion, in the legal system we have several levels of burden of proof, depending on the severity and venue. Likewise in law enforcement the burden of proof for engaging a suspect with a firearm is merely “reaching” which is far too low a level in my opinion.
The answer is and will always be: it depends.
Police can defend themselves. But they have also agreed to take on higher risk than the average person and are given a vast array of rights to offset taking that risk. They are also responsible to minimize risk to general population and to the suspected lawbreakers they engage. They are also supposed to be trained to use excellent judgement in assessing risk and responding accordingly.
How about not creating a hypothetical so devoid of context that it just doesn’t exist in the real world?
Eta: response to Sampti’s time travel hypothetical.
It would depend on the individual situation-there cannot(or at least there should not) be a single answer to that question. If there is time to assess the situation, that time should be taken. If there is no hostile or threatening behaviour prior to approaching the suspect, then maintaining that calm while approaching the suspect should be of the highest priority. Was this kid either waving the gun about or threatening anybody when they saw him? Were there reports of shots being fired? Was he running off, or staying put? Where was the dangerous urgency that told these cops that this child needed to be taken down immediately? If he had seemed to be posing an immediate danger to either innocent bystanders or those police prior to that Starsky and Hutch like maneuver they pulled which obviously initiated whatever reaction he took, the yes, lethal force would probably been justified.
I’ll take this one. I would shoot after the suspect has started shooting. Man was that so hard?
Shit actually in your ridiculous magical hypothetical I would feel that the kid would be justified in shooting me if I just out of the blue got teleported by Scotty to that very spot.
No kidding. If an armed person just materialized in front of me, I’d “stand my ground” and protect myself from this apparent threat.
What the fuck is your problem? How many times does it have to be pointed out to you that jumping out in front of the kid and shouting at him may have been a major part of the problem in the first place? Why do you refuse to address how they may have escalated the situation by how they raced right up to him and rolled out of the car with guns in hand?
And by the way, it was a 12 year old with a pellet gun, not a young man with a gun. A 12 year old isn’t even a teenager, let alone a young man, so for the rest of this conversation could you at least stop trying to distort this one small factual bit of the story? Is that too much to ask?
And those shots your suspect fired missed the cops and hit some 4 year old girl at a birthday party a few blocks away, killing her, or some old man taking a nap. Is that what we want? Or those shots hit and mortally would one of the officers. Your idea will never fly.
So the fact that the kid was 12, and the gun was only a very realistic looking pellet gun, is somehow relevant? Do you have to be 13 to be a danger to society or the cops?
Do you want to go on with your silly off-topic hypotheticals with imaginary birthday girls getting shot because, if you do, I can come up with real reports of where police bullets have gone instead of ending up in the suspects they were aimed at.
Perhaps we could agree that it’s simply a Darwin list move for anyone to reach for their gun in the presence of a police officer who just told you to put your hands up.
The odds of this actually happening are so incredibly slim that it is worth not immediately escalating the situation.
Really the fundamental question here to address is risk assessment. Just like a game of poker, a royal flush is so utterly unlikely to occur, and what hands are more likely to occur are pairs and triples. Likewise it’s worth it for the police to pause and defuse the situation with no shots fired, even if there’s a 50% chance of the suspects engaging anyway. Also your hypothetical cuts both ways: when the rules of engagement are such that the police are allowed to use deadly force immediately in all situations, their bullets also pose a risk to bystanders.
Apparent you don’t have to be 13 years old or a danger to society to be shot by cops. Yeah, for the purposes of this discussion the facts are going to matter, so try to remember that it was a pellet gun, the boy was 12, he hadn’t shot the pellet gun at anybody, then gun wasn’t in his hands before they drove right up to his face and shot him 2 seconds later whether he was reaching for said pellet gun or not, which is still in contention. Those are the facts we have on hand so far. There is speculation as to whether they shouted anything at him and, if they did, what they shout at him and when.
Once again, the facts are relevant.