Should I even bother to respond to a post so mind-bendingly, almost certainly willfully, stupid? A black hole of ignorance sucking this website’s slogan into another universe?
The problem—if it isn’t already so apparent that it’s sitting in your lap and tongue-kissing you—isn’t that more Gavers weren’t killed. It’s that it is proof that police can show enormous restraint when they’re being attacked by white people, as opposed to when black people are running away, or reaching for their wallets, or being little kids playing with toy guns, or resisting arrest in a non-threatening way.
The cops in this incident were not dealing with an individual. They were dealing with a large group of people who all knew each other. It doesn’t take enormous restraint to refrain from firing into a crowd.
I could see the cops feeling a need to hold their fire if, say, one person in that group of eight were attacking them. Then there’d be a very good chance that they’d hit someone innocent. But pretty much all eight were on the attack.
I could also understand their restraint if the attack were over in sixty seconds. But it was eight minutes of repeated barrages - these free-range savages would raise their hands as if to surrender, and from that position, throw punches as the cop approached to cuff them.
Fighting for the cop’s gun - not sure what else to say.
Either these cops were exceptionally cool under attack compared to cops involved in various recent incidents, or the Gavers’ color saved their worthless hides.
I dunno… decentdiscourse’s post reads: “If this had been a minority band of whackos, all of them would be shot dead”, emphasis mine. That part may just be hyperbolic as ISTM even dirty police are not into actually *massacring *people.
Single-suspect takedowns where they may feel they can get away with it (except for those meddling kids and their cameraphones)? Sure, Hell, look at the news. But I don’t think regular patrol/beat (i.e. not SWAT/antiterror) police would even have an idea of how to mow down a whole group of people efficiently w/o hurting themselves and bystanders and creating larger chaos. Because generally speaking as soon as shots are fired and someone’s down, the riot scatters.
In this scenario had it been a different group we can believe it highly likely the intervention would have been more aggressive and shots fired a lot earlier in the confrontation. Can’t deny that. It’s the “all of them would be dead” that’s unrealistic IMO.
Nor does it take enormous restraint to refrain from firing into a crowd where it’s likely (or one thinks it’s likely) to wound or kill one’s fellow officers.
I certainly don’t think they should have turned it into a shooting range. But it seems a good example of how to lose control of a small crowd. I would hope most similar situations would be brought under control faster and with more order than that clusterfuck. Whether that means earlier pepper spray, taser and drawn guns I’m not familiar enough with techniques to provide a solution.