Sure, the expectation would certainly depend on what type of employee is operating the camera. Was is just a technician or was it a cop.
If the questions aren’t asked of the police department then they aren’t answered.
I’m not sure that the Memphis police monitor questions on the SDMB.
Supposing that a hypothetical person operating a remote camera could be in trouble for theoretically not contacting the police to stop some other police from beating someone is just getting a little too silly for my taste. YMMV.
I haven’t read most of this. This particular incident has hit me even harder than others and really that’s saying a lot. Tyre Nichols is pretty close to the age of both of my sons, and my daughter for that matter. I’m not a person of color, but what I saw and heard on that video did stuff to my insides. I could hear my sons screaming like that, and I just couldn’t watch or listen to coverage for a while.
I hope everyone involved gets hard time for everything they did or did not do.
I wish that the whole system could be dismantled and rebuilt into what modern policing shoud be: “To Protect and Serve,” everyone. Right now it’s more like some sort of wild hunt/bounty/ with a combination of the worst most violent culture hiring the worst most violent predators.
<Posted in another thread but it’s more appropriate here>
Representative Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY) comes to the obvious conclusion of why Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten to death: too much police accountability thanks to the “far left”.
Note also zero pushback from the presenters on MSNBC. That network, like CNN, seems increasingly to want to give silly right-wing rhetoric a free pass.
Here’s a Twitter thread from a former law enforcement officer about her training. This is the problem, not lack of training, or lack of a college degree, or hiring a few bad apples. The system trains good people to be bad cops.
I’ve pasted the most powerful part below:
I have been taught to yell “stop resisting” and “drop your weapon” after firing a gun, because bystanders will remember you said it and their memory will automatically reverse the order of the events to make it make sense. Their testimony will support yours, because of this.
I have been told to “loosen up and have fun, it’s fun! Why are you so serious?” When doing a shoot/don’t shoot scenario training.
I have been told that deescalation techniques will get me and other officers killed and as a smaller LEO, I was justified escalating my use of force faster than my colleagues because I was always in danger so I should use it.
I’ve been told my only job is to go home at night.
I’ve been told all of these things in formal, controlled and regulated Police Academies. I have gone through 3. I have heard some of these things more than once.
When I questioned these things in my third academy, and stated that they were inconsistent with the ethics of policing, I was kicked out of the academy on my last day. I had completed and excelled at all the graded tasks, but was told “you aren’t what we want in our force.”
It was on Twitter so it must be true?
…you’ve been provided with a “Twitter thread from a former law enforcement officer about her training.”
It is obviously anecdotal, and I don’t think anyone has suggested otherwise. You are free to believe them, or not.
Sorta, someone who failed the Police academy, and is a former National Park Ranger, not a National Park Service Law Enforcement Ranger. So, not Law Enforcement. So, she failed to become a LEO Ranger, thus perhaps some bitterness.
I can tell you that Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) does not teach any of those things. Mind you, having been a Park Ranger (not really LEO) “I’ve been told my only job is to go home at night.” is kinda correct, in that “you aren’t cops, don’t risk your life trying to be one, your main job is to go home safely at nite”.
I’m not questioning if it’s anecdotal. I’m questioning it’s authenticity. It would hold meaning even if it’s anecdotal.
And to be more specific, I’m not saying it’s false. But to take something as fact because it’s on Twitter isn’t a very high bar of information accuracy.
…I mean:
you do realize that the policing in America absolutely sucks, right?
I don’t need someone who “failed the Police academy, and is a former National Park Ranger, not a National Park Service Law Enforcement Ranger” to tell me that.
The evidence for policing in America absolutely sucks, is…
:: waves hands ::
Absolutely-fucking-everywhere.
I mean: just look at this.
(Actually you may not want to click on the link: contains video and words about another police shooting last week)
And while the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center may (or may not) be teaching these things (because anecdotal experiences apparently don’t count for anything any more, including any that you may want to share with us) America has about 18,000 different police agencies at the moment, so unless you can vouch for all of them, I have no reason to not accept the anecdotal experiences of this USAF Veteran.
This is how policing is often taught. (Warning, contains disturbing police abuse footage)
"Don’t be afraid of getting sued. Everybody gets sued. Just a chance for overtime. Be afraid of being successfully sued."
Its all there. All on camera. Captured five years ago.
It’s authentically a person. They’ve been on the platform since 2017, their posts don’t read like a bot, they have an organic following.
You…don’t have to take what they say as fact?
Pretty much all information is at a very low bar right now, everywhere. And if you were to ask me who I’d be more likely to believe: Katie Sponsler on Twitter, or any single police department PR spox, I’d choose Katie Sponsler every single time.
Anecdotal. Almost worthless. There are almost 700,000 LEOS in America. In order for you to have a point, you’d have to come up with 7000 cites in order for it to be one bad cop in 100, 700 for in in a thousand, but maybe there is 70 recent cites, or one in ten thousand. Bad cops make the news, like Mass shootings* or attractive blonde females being abducted. Doesn’t mean they are prevalent. The news covers what they consider newsworthy. If you watch the news you’d think crime is way up, whereas crime is mostly down.
In my entire 20 year career I only personally knew of one bad LEO, fired but not indicted for taking small bribes.
- as most people consider them, not a drug gang shootout with one dead and three wounded.
And dont take this out of context to say “DrDeth says police misconduct isnt a problem”. Of course it’s a problem. Just exaggerated by the press. Mass shootings with assault weapons are a problem, even tho they are only about 1 or 2% of all homicides.
https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=senior-theses
https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/20/us/police-brutality-video-social-media-attitudes/index.html
…hold on a second:
You do realize that:
That this is anecdotal, right?
I’d like to see you explain the 800 million dollar overtime bill for the NYPD without going near the word “corruption.” Because you name the agency, I’ll find you enough stories about them to comprehensively prove just how systematically bad at their job they are, how corrupt and racist they are to their core, and how its been like that for pretty much the entirety of its existence.
Although that would be getting a bit off topic.
On topic: I accept your anecdote. I have no reason to doubt you. And you’ve given me no reason to doubt Katie Sponsler.
Speaking only for myself, the problem is not whether the allegations are true. It’s that what I’ve read (and seen) of police culture gives me no reason to doubt that they might be true.
Correct, because the number of deaths is only one factor among many in whether something is important and/or newsworthy.
In the case of gun crime, there are many reasons why some 18-year old walking into a school, club or church and blasting dozens with an AR-15 is more important to report than the hundreds of small separate incidents around the country.
By analogy, it’s like if a American 747 airplane blew up in the sky every week. Yes, the news would report that, and people would be asking why this only happens in the US. It would be fatuous to point out that more people were dying in the totality of road accidents that week.
And it’s even more stark in this instance. Are you suggesting that the media should have headlines of “Officer does his job today”? That’s not how anything works.
Or are you suggesting that they should just have more deference to officers in general, in which case I would argue they already do, to way too high a degree.
I mean, the situation sucks, but going by the article and my layman’s ignorance of proper police procedure, it’s not obvious to me what the LEOs did wrong in that situation.
~Max
Did you see the part where they shot a guy who had fallen out of his wheelchair and was trying to run away on his stumps?
From the article…
He had been “dealing with a lot of depression” over the loss of his legs in an incident around a year ago, she said.
This may have been a “suicide by cop” situation. But that doesn’t mean they should have gone along with it.
I don’t see anything in the article that suggests he was fleeing.
I’m also not saying they were justified though. He had a knife and mobility issues. I question how much of a threat he was to officers with pistols. Reports are that he threatened to attack, but not that he actually did so.
This is why they need to send a mental health crisis expert and not paramilitary folks to these incidents. Or at least include someone with expertise in handling such an incident. Not someone who only has the option of “do what I say or I kill you”.
Your ignorance doesn’t excuse their failure.
We need to expect something of the police that is above and beyond simply killing anyone who appears to be a threat.
That case seems to have involved a person who actually was a threat, as he was suspected of attacking a person with that very knife, and allegedly made threats to attack the officers. These circumstances put him in a different class than for example someone accused of petty theft who is simply seen with an object that may or may not be a weapon while trying to flee.
~Max