Yes, I’m criticizing the way things are, but I’m also exhorting and encouraging that we do better as a country.
I can’t imagine what you disagree with here. Are you saying it’s wrong to urge the US to be more like the UK and Japan in this particular characteristic?
How do you know? Maybe the cops could have done better in many of these circumstances. Maybe they weren’t always racist, but maybe sometimes they made mistakes that, had they acted better, they could have avoided a circumstance that lead to the use of deadly force. Maybe they went into a house when they should have called for backup. Maybe they responded to an obnoxious suspect by escalating tension instead of de-escalating. Maybe a million other things. They have an awful track record of accurately reporting things when it comes to the possibility of reflecting poorly on police. It’s entirely reasonable to be skeptical when the cops say that they did everything right, considering their history. And it’s entirely reasonable to advocate that they do better.
The implication by Chronos was that cops that cannot avoid situations where their life is in danger then they are somehow not qualified to be a cop. Part of a policeman’s job is to put themselves in these situations but we do not require them to actually die. They may use lethal force if it is justified, and the overwhelming majority of times when they use lethal force, it is justified.
If a cop has to take down a shooter spraying people with an AR-15, don’t you think that he deserves to retire?
Except that the actual stats say that this is pretty damn rare. Shockingly, life is not a cop show. We shouldn’t make policy based on the assumption that every half hour period of a cop’s life is full of exciting adventure.
This still has a “you have no possible way of even pretending to prove this assertion” smell to it.
A death by police is about half as common as injury by lightning. So yes, pretty damn rare.
Of course we should base our policy of what cops should do when their life is threatened based on the premise that the cop’s life is threatened. Our policy cannot be that a cop has to just stand there while their life is being threatened.
" This still has a “you have no possible way of even pretending to prove this assertion” smell to it."
Of those 1000+ deaths of civilians by cops, 87% of the victims were armed. Doesn’t that present pretty good evidence that the vast majority of police killings are justified?
I’d encourage him to study harder.
But personal advice is not the same a public policy. Work harder, learn more, study more, try harder, be better than everyone else is always good advice on a personal level.
And anyone, even those that belong to traditionally oppressed out-groups, can be wildly successful if they are among the best and brightest members of that group.
But good personal advice makes for lousy public policy. Because public policy needs to address the needs and concerns of those that aren’t necessarily the smartest or hardest working or most ambitious. Public policy needs to address the needs of everyone in the community. When there are only enough opportunities to serve half of the community, the answer has to involve more than telling everyone to try harder to make the cut.
My preferred approach would be to split up the police by task and equip them appropriately for the task they end up doing. AKA “Defunding the police”.
This is extremely good evidence if we assume that all gun owners are murderous criminals, and that all knife-owners are literally impossible to stop without employing lethal force.
And a cop killed by a suspect is even rarer.
By armed, that means only that there was a weapon (not necessarily a gun) somewhere near them at the time they were shot to death(assuming that it was not planted, of course). By these stats, Philando Castile was “armed”.
That’s not what the cops keep telling us. They keep telling us that their #1 priority is going home alive at the end of the day. If that’s true, then how can it be part of their job to put themselves in danger?
I think he was using that as an analogy. You might be having a different debate than everyone else.
First, that is not what defund the police means. At least not until after everyone realized how stupid defunding the police was. Defund the police meant pretty much what pro-lifers mean when they say defund planned parenthood. I.e. cut off their funding.
How would you equip a regular patrolman any differently than they are equipped today?
“This is extremely good evidence if we assume that all gun owners are murderous criminals, and that all knife-owners are literally impossible to stop without employing lethal force.”
Really? You think that this is only good evidence if everyone with a gun is a murderer?
“And a cop killed by a suspect is even rarer.”
Do you think there ought to be parity between the number of police killed by civilians and the number of civilians killed by police?
“By armed, that means only that there was a weapon (not necessarily a gun) somewhere near them at the time they were shot to death(assuming that it was not planted, of course). By these stats, Philando Castile was “armed”.”
Do you think the typical police shooting looks like the Philando Castille shooting? That seems unlikely. Or do you think that any significant portion of these victims had weapons planted on them?
You don’t know any cops do you?
Bolding mine. Welcome to the english language! Sometimes meanings change pretty fast.
No gun.
This isn’t complicated. I don’t expect patrolmen to rush in half-cocked and try to play out Lethal Weapon in real life. If the situation involves crazed mass shooters (as it so often does, pretty much daily in fact) then they can call for fucking backup.
I get that not having a gun would make it harder for cops to feel like testosterone-powered superheros (or gestapo), but I think there are obvious benefits in community relations.
Actually I thought your argument was shit and making fun of you. I apologize, that was unprofessional, and as a person who is paid to post here I’m under obligation to stay professional at all times.
As has been pointed out, the statistics you are relying on to support your opinion are dubious at best. What is not dubious is that you average cop would be a hell of a lot less triggerhappy if the average cop didn’t have triggers to pull.
By your reasoning, cops should never leave their beds.
Cops put their lives at risk merely by enforcing the law. They are not required to accept more risk to avoid shooting someone that is threatening their life.
Yes, parity. And that parity needs to be reached by vastly reducing the numbers of civilians killed by police.
Actually, I’d prefer the parity was 0:0.
Yes, I do think this.
Daughter of one.
“Bolding mine. Welcome to the english language! Sometimes meanings change pretty fast.”
No, they don’t. Words have meanings.
This was just backpedalling by people who realized how stupid their ideas were. So they redefined words that already have definitions.
" No gun.
This isn’t complicated. I don’t expect patrolmen to rush in half-cocked and try to play out Lethal Weapon in real life. If the situation involves crazed mass shooters (as it so often does, pretty much daily in fact) then they can call for fucking backup ."
So you would have unarmed cops in a country where the criminals are armed? That sounds like a good recipe for dead cops.
“I get that not having a gun would make it harder for cops to feel like testosterone-powered superheros (or gestapo)” You don’t know any cops in real life do you?
“As has been pointed out, the statistics you are relying on to support your opinion are dubious at best.”
The statistics i am relying on are from the Washington Post. Why are they making up these dubious statistics?
BTW, how do you use the quote function on this new platform?
The easy way is to select the text you want to quote, and watch it offer up a “Quote” button to click on. Click on that, and it adds the quoted text properly in your reply box. If your reply box is already open it puts the text wherever the cursor is. You can do this over and over with text from the same or different posts or whatever.
If your preferred approach is to copy the entire post and then chop it up, you can do it pretty much the same as the old way, copying the header and putting it with a [/quote] tag around each block of text. The only difference is that the open and close tags now have to each be on their own lines, with a carriage return before and after.
I always forget the carriage returns, but fortunately there’s a five minute edit window.
First of all the defund/abolish the police movement is at least 50 years old, and has never meant just taking all the money from the police budget and doing nothing else. It has always meant diverting that money to institutions that are better suited to deal with certain things than the police and relieving the police of that responsibility. It’s a destination, not the first step.
This has been explained on many occasions on this board and all over the internet, so anybody who is still quibbling about semantics is either too stupid to be apart of the debate, or is intentionally misconstruing that fact to mislead or misinform others.
“Yes, parity. And that parity needs to be reached by vastly reducing the numbers of civilians killed by police.”
So you think that our policy should achieve a balance where cops have to restrain themselves from using lethal force to defend themselves so that for every civilian killed, one cop dies?
“Actually, I’d prefer the parity was 0:0.”
I think most people agree that this would be ideal. But given the reality that criminals have guns, how do you propose we achieve this?
“Yes, I do think this.”
Do you have any evidence to indicate that a significant portion of these weapons are planted or are you just expressing a WAG opinion?
“Daughter of one.”
Are you K9Bfriender?
Does your dad plant guns on criminals or tell you that it is prevalanet?