We cannot (from the video) see what Yanez was seeing. We cannot see what Castile’s hands were up to. Because of this, we can draw no conclusions on whether Yanez acted appropriately.
I don’t know if he did. Neither do any of you.
mmm
I’ve said this so many times in this thread that I’m gonna save it in a Word document so I can just copy/paste it from now on:
I think Yanez screwed up badly, and contrary to the jury, I believe he should be serving a prison sentence for manslaughter.
Yes, Castile had to act perfectly with no mistakes to have survived that encounter, and that’s an unacceptable burden to place on members of the general public. There’s no justification for what happened to him.
Nonetheless, given that the police are generally better armed than the people they encounter, the consequences of a mistake are naturally going to be higher for the person on the business end of the barrel. There’s not much you can do about that, unless you are prepared to start executing police for the mistakes the make, or send police out on the job without a sidearm.
Much has been made of "the talk’ given to black children by their parents; I think it’s a talk every parent should have with their kid, regardless of race, letting them know that cops are heavily armed and trained to be somewhat paranoid, and in order to minimize the odds of a tragic misunderstanding, you need to THINK during a police encounter so that you don’t do something that gets misinterpreted as any sort of threat.
I’m not sure how the FBI quantifies it, either; I figured they’d have pretty reliable data, though. Here’s the link to the most recent report (2015): https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2015-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-and-assaulted.
One note: The FBI apparently collected data from 11,961 law enforcement agencies to build this report. This wasn’t all law enforcement in the country; a notation in the report says that the agencies served 241 million people, or roughly 75% of the population. This somewhat skews the odds I posted earlier; according to the FBI’s report, the rate of assault was 9.9 for every 100 sworn officers. So in a given year, an officer had almost a 10 percent chance of being assaulted. Granted, roughly 80 percent of those assaults were with hands or feet, not weapons.
In the details of the report, it notes that 9.5% of the officers who were assaulted with a gun were injured.
As assault can be as little as knocking an officers hand away when he places it on your shoulder, I am actually surprised it’s not a bit higher.
Thanks for the additional information. Personally, I’d love to see the stat for “% of firearm assaults in which the firearm was discharged”, but I doubt that’s readily available anywhere.
The fact that anyone thinks it’s a good idea to have “the talk” with their children so they don’t get killed by the cops is a pretty fucked up place to be.
What about the “talk” that apparently no police officer gets in their training. That they are the ones heavily armed and should not be paranoid, because 99% of the time the civilian is not up to anything nefarious, that this is maybe their first encounter with law enforcement and might be acting funny because they are nervous. . .etc
mc
Bear in mind this is based on the FBI gathering information from law enforcement agencies. I’d bet that there are a lot more minor “assaults” that happen that just aren’t reported, because it’s not worth the hassle to write up a report about John Doe slapping a cop’s hand off his shoulder.
I was pointing out that people are charged with assault for as little as that.
I am sure that many minor assaults of that sort go unreported, but that such are reported at all (in an unknown number and frequency) probably skews the numbers. By how much I don’t know if it is possible to know.
I think it would be great if any police officer reading this discussion could post to talk about what sort of training they actually do receive on how to approach their interactions with the public.
Would you then agree that there probably more incidents of police aggression and/or brutality than are being reported?
Stands to reason. Dash-cams and body-cams have shed some light in this area, but I’m sure there’s a lot more that goes undocumented – as has been the case for decades.
to be fair to police, many of the “official” procedure manuals do not stress the dangers of a traffic stop (such as this one from the International Assoc of Chiefs of Police)
But almost all of the “industry” websites do.For example
So at a minimum they are getting a mixed message.
mc
Really? Suppose Castile was reaching for (or appeared to be reaching for) his gun. Yanez still would have had no justification?
mmm
never mind.
I hate to see that they tried to smear the victim here based on THC metabolites in their blood. Its scary how little the police / public actually understand a naturally occurring chemical that I use to cure cancer on a daily basis.
I feel so terrible for his girlfriend and daughter. They are never going to be right after this. The cop will go on with his life.
I really don’t know how well the numbers show things. I’ve seen clips where, for example, an elderly man was charged with assault with a deadly weapon because he had a cane. We also see a lot of cases where the police initiate the encounter and then charge the “suspect” with resisting arrest and assaulting the officer.
I’ve read some ongoing report in the Salt Lake Tribute and the police in Utah reevaluating their approach to violence. According to one official, some time back (several decades, IIRC), police noticed that that they were getting hurt too much, so they started to increase the training. He said that while fewer police get hurt now, more civilians also get shot.
As a response, Utah has started to implement a project on deescalation by cops. They begin training the officers on how to handle it in a way which didn’t lead to shootings.
One such example was a officer who confronted a guy going around to people homes asking if he could shovel their walks. Some people complained, the officer talked to the man who then suddenly hit the officer with the shovel. The cop shot and killed the man. It was ruled as a justified shooting, but the official pointed out that there were other options for the officer. Retreat some first, for example. It’s obviously impossible to prevent all officer shootings, but it can reduce them.
An expert was being interviewed on NRP’s Up First podcast and pointed out that juries are often letting police off the hook for any fear, and not any reasonable fear.
Your argument falls in this.
As the guy with the gun, it was up to Yanez to control the situation. He needed to be clearer on what he wanted Castile to do.
Can not comment on the video or incident, not enough there to fairly say anything, i can’t see what the cop is seeing.
I can tell you how i get pulled over though.
Pull over, shut off bike, put out kickstand.
Hands behind helmet, head down.
Tell the officer i have a handgun on me, and i can not reach for anything he might want with out going near it, how does he wish to proceed.
Then i sit like that until he decides, which usually results in “Sir, for yours and my safety i am going to restrain you at this time with handcuffs”
Yay fun.
No i’m not black.
I’m a white guy with a pony tail wearing black leather garments on a motorcycle a cop would consider a chopper (which it isn’t) going home at 12:30am from an IT job, but he don’t know that.
I’m not convinced that “appearing to be reaching” for a gun should be considered enough to give a police officer a reasonable fear for their life, especially when the person’s behavior doesn’t demonstrate any malicious intent.
I don’t know what was going through Yanez’s mind during the traffic stop, but based on the video – no, I don’t believe he would have been justified even in that scenario.
In the space of five or six seconds, Yanez goes from appearing to be fairly calm and talking with Castile, to drawing his gun and shooting seven times. The only way I would consider his actions justified is if Castile had actually drawn a gun and began to point it at Yanez.
Consider, as well, that Yanez knew there was a passenger and a small child in the car. His actions endangered them as well. Even if he thought Castile was a suspect in another crime, he showed terrible judgment by firing into a car containing innocent bystanders.
“He MIGHT be reaching for a gun” doesn’t justify the use of deadly force by a police officer, in my opinion. I suppose I could concoct a scenario in which that might be the case, but based on what little I know and have seen, this wasn’t it.