Well, Sacramento is the capital of California so I do not think it is unreasonable to suppose the city’s newspaper has experience covering what goes on in the legislature and reporting on proposed laws. They could still suck at it but lacking any other information it is reasonable to suppose they know what they are doing.
Add to that the paper has earned six Pulitzer Prizes among numerous other awards so maybe they have some real reporting chops.
Just saying…
Do you mean when there is, in fact, a threat of deadly force? If so, you do realize that the “in fact” part may not be determined until some point in time long after the incident is over, right? If it turns out the suspect was only pointing a cell phone after attempting to break into an occupied house at night the “in fact” part wouldn’t be there. Would you have it that cops must be 100% certain that it is a gun, then 100% certain the suspect intends to shoot at him with it? The “necessary” standard presents the same problem, Who determines the moment deadly force becomes “necessary”?
The “reasonable” standard refers to beliefs that an officer has that are based on objective observations. Reasonable belief is what the officer believes and, importantly, why he believed it. “All a cop has to do is say he felt threatened” is a common refrain. It is simply not true. He must articulate why he felt threatened and his reasoning is subject to judgement by prosecutors and juries. If you are not willing to listen to the explanation, in detail, of why an officer acted a certain way be sure to mention that should you be called to jury duty.
If it were not an officer’s life on the line but, instead, your child’s, what standard would you like to see applied to the officer’s actions? An actual deadly threat to your kid or a reasonable belief that such a threat existed? And don’t say “Cops get paid to subject themselves to greater threats” They do not.
Just because there are videos where a clearly armed person is not shot by the police doesn’t mean that it would not have been legally and morally justified. You’d have to know the details to determine why the officers didn’t shoot. Unfortunately, people seldom care about the details. They see a video on social media and reach a conclusion. The hell with the facts.
Yes they do. I don’t get paid to subject myself to greater threats, which is why I don’t chase criminals down or pull people over for speeding to affect a citizen’s arrest. The police DO get paid to do that.
Seems like a time for “Don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”
Because then you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes.
Are you saying cops get a pass on their actions unless you’ve been a cop?
This is contemptible.
If it were always possible to tell at a glance, even under low-light or high-stress conditions, then all such shootings must be deliberate rather than accidental - the cops could easily see that it was a cell phone/BB gun/Airsoft pistol altered to look real and fired anyway. Is that what you believe?
Actually, that has happened in a few cases.
Regards,
Shodan
The current equilibrium is that what you just described doesn’t just happen to fleeing burglars, but also to kids at playgrounds, people at traffic stops who get asked for their ID, people in their own backyard… That seems kinda not okay.
(emphasis mine)
You’re right on that. There needs to be * a lot* more tragedies by hands of law enforcement before there will be an appetite to curtail the military arm of white folks.
That’s odd. They sure kill a lot of white people for being “the military arm of white folks”.
Both of these objections are discussing the same problem, that an officer may have to make a rapid determination about the nature of a potential threat. This is always going to be the case, regardless of what the legal standards are. To the best of my understanding – and I haven’t looked at all the details – the intent of the proposed law is to raise the standards under which lethal force is justified on the basis that currently the standards are just too low, and the record shows that it’s often just too easy to mistakenly (or even maliciously) use lethal force when it wasn’t necessary and get away with it.
The evidence for that belief is abundant (just one random story here) and it does appear that standards are higher in many other countries. California appears to be trying to align itself with these higher standards in the interest of public safety (in some jurisdictions, considerable justification and bureaucratic paperwork is involved if a police officer merely unholsters his gun).
So I think I understand what California is trying to do, and I sympathize with it, but I do see a drawback. The problem is that all these other countries with higher standards for use of lethal force don’t have the incredible gun proliferation problem that the US has, which poses real dangers to the police. Even for something as mundane as a traffic stop, you never know when some yokel is going to pull a gun and start shooting. Not meaning to drag yet another gun debate into this thread, but that’s a significant fact that fundamentally changes the dynamics of how police have to interact with the public. Any unusual action by a driver in a traffic stop can be – and occasionally has been – lethal to the driver, and no doubt at times lethal to the unfortunate police officer.
Reality or even internal consistency rarely matters to racists. Besides, the fashionable belief is that white lives don’t matter, so why know or care how many are killed? They don’t matter.
I believe cops often fire before any item whatsoever is produced (or, in fact, exists at all).
See I’d be tentatively OK with giving an officer a pass in a given investigation if there actually *were *bad visibility conditions, the suspect *had *something in their hands and *was *waving it around etc… ; provided the officer doesn’t have a history of shooting people. That’s fine. No law or policy will ever eliminate accidents, poor judgement calls, mistakes. I don’t expect cops to be superhuman.
But that’s really not what is at stake here nor what gets peoples’ goat. What does is officers shooting suspects who are moving their hands towards a pocket or waistband or glove compartment, shooting people running away and so on ; or the perception that it’s what’s happening (a perception that is supported by numerous incidents). Philando Castile didn’t have a cellphone in his hand, and it was bright daylight. Alton Sterling didn’t have anything in his hands, and it was broad daylight. Tamir Rice may or may not have been reaching for his toy gun - nobody will ever know what he was doing because he was shot before he could actually do anything. Anthony Hill was butt naked and empty handed when he was shot, which must have been pretty hard to spin. Jerame Reid was empty handed when he was shot. Anthony Weber didn’t have anything in his hands and was, according to the officers involved, “reaching” for a gun he in fact didn’t turn out to have. And so on…
It’s really simple : if you have your weapon drawn and trained on someone, you’re going to be able to shoot them before they can reach then pull then point then shoot at you (or anyone else). I don’t care if you’re trying to arrest Wyatt fucking Earp, *nobody *can out-draw someone who’s already drawn. So you wait until you’re sure that’s what’s going on, not what you think is about to go down or what you fear might happen. And if you can’t, find another job.
Another factor worth bringing up here: being a police officer is not an unusually dangerous job. Like, we often act like putting officers more at risk would be completely untenable, but being a police officer is less dangerous than such jobs as garbagemen (more than double the mortality rate), drivers (slightly less than double the mortality rate), and fishers (about ten times the mortality rate). And the real danger of policing isn’t getting shot by suspects - it’s traffic accidents. Only about 30% of police deaths in the line of duty are homicides. You could make it far harder for an officer to draw their gun and up their road safety and it’d probably be a wash.
Nobody gets paid enough to die because you aren’t 100% certain that they were justified in defending themselves.
Yet you want to come on these boards and babble about how it should be done because you know better, right? Another unmarried marriage counselor. :rolleyes:
The current system of judging each individual case, while not perfect, is still far, far better than what is being suggested by that legislation.
That legislation, if passed, will have the effect of some officers not using force when they should, resulting in more dead/injured officers, more impudence by the criminal element, more early retirements to get the hell out of an insane system, and less quality people going into the law enforcement profession. It also seems to fly in the face of Graham v. Connor as well as the standard of qualified immunity.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that in decent light and within the usable range of a pistol that almost anyone can tell the difference between a gun and a cell phone.
Nor is it unreasonable that if an officer has his gun drawn and is yelling like a lunatic at a suspect that the suspect may act twitchy because they are crapping their pants and adrenaline and fear has shut down their decision making capacity. Frankly, the only reason a professional would be yelling like we’ve seen in some of the videos (Mesa hotel shooting comes to mind) is because they want someone to act twitchy so they can shoot them.
This proposed law removes “reasonable” from consideration and substitutes “necessary” instead. Whether or not there is decent lighting doesn’t enter into it.
Again, a cop is chasing a burglary suspect. The cop corners the suspect and yells “Put up your hands!” The suspect stops, turns to face the cop, and reaches for his waistband, and the cop fires. Was that use of force “necessary”?
And no, you don’t get to decide based on whether or not the suspect was really reaching for a gun or reaching for a cell phone. The cop doesn’t have access to that knowledge. All he knows is that he has a split-second to decide, and if he decides wrong, he dies.
“Reasonable” is based on the facts known at the time. “Necessary” brings in Monday-morning quarterbacking.
‘That use of force wasn’t necessary because it turns out it was really an Airsoft pistol modified to look real’ is Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Regards,
Shodan
If the suspect was unarmed, the answer is “no”. And the correct reaction is “what a tragedy, the police killed another unarmed man without good reason”.
Forget the burglar. The burglar is already toast without turning around; cops can already legally shoot at dangerous felons who are fleeing. How about the kid at the playground? How about the random civilian running away for no apparent reason? How about the man at the traffic stop trying to comply with conflicting demands?
In each of these cases, lethal force absolutely was not necessary, and the death of the individual is a tragedy. But as it currently stands, the police has very little incentive to take even the mildest of risks - in fact, doing so can lead to officers getting fired even when they were right not to shoot. They don’t have to weigh the choice of “don’t kill, potentially die vs. do kill, potentially be on the hook for murder”. This makes shooting to kill far too attractive of an option - especially for a job with a low mortality rate. Your odds of dying of homicide as a cop on duty is actually lower than the general population baseline.
There’s another option when the cop decides wrong, y’know - the person running away (or the kid on the playground, or the man with a cell phone in his backyard, or the man at a traffic stop with his wife and kids in the car) dies. False positives are just as tragic as false negatives in this case. But our justice system currently barely cares at all about false positives.
Imagine it wasn’t a cop. Imagine it’s just you. Walking down the street. You see someone. They give you the stink-eye, then reach for their pants pocket. In response, you shoot them. It turns out they didn’t have a gun, but were rather reaching for their cell phone.
There is not a jury in the world that would consider this justified self-defense. And yet, with cops, this is good enough, even if the cop literally just told the suspect to produce identification.
Aren’t you the guy who thinks cops shouldn’t give other cops speeding tickets? Yeah, you should be listened to when it comes to what cops should do :rolleyes:
Plus, I hope you don’t go into any thread that discusses something that you don’t do for work, since apparently, according to you, only people who are cops can discuss how to stop cops from shooting unarmed people.
And I, and a lot of other people, say it’s NOT better. So what?
If it results in less unarmed people being shot and killed by the police, then I’m for it. Don’t be a cop then if you are so scared from a guy reaching into his pocket that you shoot him.