No, I did not say that and Fuck you for fucking saying I said that! How fucking dare you say I said something I did not say!
My post clearly said that alternatives to the use of force used were determined to be unreasonable or exhausted. This is what “preclusion” is about.
Had a couple of Christmas drinkies there, pk?
No!!!
Maybe it sends the right message - if you don’t handle stress well, don’t go into law enforcement. Some people should not be police officers.
Well, I guess that makes it OK then? Nothing to see, no reason to change policing policies.
Sure. They take a split second to pick between killing someone and just tazing or pepper spraying them. How much discussion and consideration happens during that split second? Are you now going to say that things happen so quickly that there isn’t time for that, so going for the gun is always the right choice?
Cops and armed security guards out this way carry their gun on one hip and their tazer on the other to avoid confusion. Cross drawing takes thought, pulling a weapon the way you train and train and train for takes no time or deliberation at all.
She made a mistake that killed someone. She was a trained professional. She melted down because she knew she was in trouble.
Yes, and that’s the problem. When police are violent, nonviolence is deemed to be precluded. Police are expected to be violent menaces to society. That worries me. It should worry a police officer even more.
Moderator Warning
While I have some sympathy for you for feeling that your words were misrepresented, that does not entitle you to go on a Pit-style attack against another user while you are still in MPSIMS. Next time, take it to the Pit.
This is an official warning for saying “fuck you” to another user outside of the Pit.
I did not say that, and there is nothing in my post that a reasonable person could interpret that way.
Pro-tip: a message board works better if you read for comprehension.
As Jon Stewart once said, “you can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards.”
I have a lot of respect for the military and police officers. They do a dangerous job that I don’t have the balls to do. But part of that respect includes always being professional.
I’ve worked alongside many cops during my time as an EMT. Most of them are fantastic people doing a thankless job. It’s one of those jobs where, if everything goes right, no one says anything. If something goes wrong, it’s all over the news. And every flaw in their ability to do the job is hauled out and analyzed by everyone, including “armchair quarterbacks.”
That’s a level of scrutiny that I hope I never have to experience. So I try to look at stories like this with that in mind.
Wright’s trying to drive away was a stupid move. Her grabbing her pistol instead of her taser was a stupid move, but one that’s perhaps at least understandable. As my father was known to say, “two stupids don’t make a smart.”
It sucks that Wright died. It sucks that this officer’s career and life as she knows it are over.
There’s no one in this situation that comes out ahead.
Ok, she made a dreadful mistake. But when she realized her mistake, her reaction was: Woe is me, I’m going to jail. Did she check on the victim to see whether he was dead or alive? Did she try to get help for him?
The bitch got what she deserved.
The victim drove away after he was shot managed to get a few blocks and then died. They called an ambulance right after it happened.
Mod note: Please avoid gender-specific epithets like this.
By people who work closely with police officers every day, and the laymen who are hand fed evidence by those people.
It’s an adversarial system, with prosecutors and police on the same side 99% of the time.
By this attitude no expert in any field would be able to testify at any time for either the prosecution, plaintiff, or defense.
Most professions do, in fact, manage to police their own membership.
Like, I’m a teacher. It does sometimes happen that a teacher gets violent with a student. But when it happens, nobody (including other teachers) ever says “Oh, well, teachers are under a lot of stress; accidents are bound to happen”. Nobody ever says “Well, teachers sometimes get shot at in their job; it’s important that the teacher be able to go home alive”. Nobody ever says “The student probably deserved it”. Nobody ever says “All of the nonviolent options were exhausted”. What happens is that that teacher is now out of a job, and other teachers say “Good riddance”.
And it’s like that for most professions. Why not also for the police?
I’m not sure how you come to that conclusion, I’m talking about the prosecutors who depend on the police being responsible for charging those officers with crimes. There’s a conflict of interest there.
You also bring up a good point that our supposed experts on law enforcement use of force are all pro cop, being brought up and trained in all the same techniques that we’ve seen on display. The fact that other police forces manage their criminals with less violence is deemed irrelevant by, hm… our experts and prosecutors.
Being pro-anything does not negate ones expertise when one has shown why they are an expert at whatever they are testifying to.
On the other hand, we frequently see posts on these boards from those that have absolutely no training, experience, nor education in law enforcement who insist they know better than those that do.
My challenge to them is why aren’t they publishing their positions? Why aren’t they going before police and fire commission boards and state department of training and standards and picking apart the way things are done and showing how things ought to be done? It’s easy for someone to run their know everything attitude anonymously on line. Get in the systems face with it. Take the state training manuals and department SOP regs and actively point out whats wrong with them. Call news conferences and press releases. Let the world know you know a better way.
Let me get some beer and popcorn first!
Do other professions do much better? Medical mistakes kill people all the time and I don’t get the sense that Medical Boards are defrocking these doctors. The bar predominantly disciplines lawyers for mishandling client funds, but little else (the threshold for ineffective assistance of counsel is shockingly low). Teacher’s unions are notorious for protecting bad teachers.
You use the example of a violent teacher, but that seems misplaced. It’s hard to imagine a legitimate use of violence in teaching. But policing is inherently violence (“Law is how society implements the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence,” one of my professors liked to say). So the problem is that the police fail to regulate their own membership with respect to the legitimate exercise of their profession (and they do fail at this), but I’m not sure that it’s unique to police. And maybe the consequences of bad policing are worse than bad doctoring or bad lawyering (or bad teaching), but I’m not entirely sure that’s right.
Big country, eh? That’s the explanation?
USA: 59 fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015.
UK: 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years.
Would you prefer to compare to Canada, which is more US-like and has a lot more guns? OK, to take 2015 as a baseline again:
USA: Total of 907 fatal police shootings in 2015. Pop. 320 million that year, so 2.83 fatal police shootings per million.
Canada: Total of 28 fatal police shootings in 2015. Pop. 36 million that year, so 0.78 fatal police shootings per million.
According to one academic study, the average black man has a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by police over the course of his life.