You have not presented any evidence that in all 1000 shootings a criminal was not using or threatening to use deadly force or cause great bodily harm. What amount of police shootings in a country with 330 million people and an equal number of guns would you expect? This is not the same statistics you’ll find in other countries that have a different culture.
It’s not a perfect system given that ratio. And law enforcement does constantly look for better ways to do things. But I suspect that many on these boards would be more satisfied with more dead or injured cops if it resulted in fewer people being shot by police.
Of course not and I hope the way I worded it conveyed it. He did something stupid and it spun out of control.
We had a police chase a year ago. The driver reminded me of Duante. He had a criminal record which included the use of a gun and it involved threatening someone. the police chased him to a point and backed off. He continued on and struck a vehicle hard it enough to tear the engine out and kill the driver. He also died.
Did he deserve to die because he resisted arrest and was chased? No. Did he create the situation that killed him. Yes. In this case the police backed off so it was all his doing but the main point is that he did something stupid and dangerous and it spun out of control.
We’ve changed police training to include backing off high speed pursuits. It’s just common sense that we improve training as a result of past experience. There will never be a perfectly trained “anybody” and that includes police.
Nothing stops people from being stupid and nothing stops people from making mistakes. The latter is always going to be more likely when the decision time is reduced.
As I have stated in other threads I almost always back off on pursuits. I just don’t see the percentage in continuing. But it’s my choice to make.
Departments that went to a no chase policy, to no shock, found their incidents of violators fleeing increase by multitudes. So there has to be a balance.
In that situation I too would have used my Taser and if I didn’t have one that day I would have used OC and expanded my baton ready for use.
However, and I have said this before, I have to wonder what would have happened had Potter not given the Taser warning and just shot him outright?
He had priors, he had a warrant, he was actively resisting and trying to drive away in a potential 2 ton weapon. A case might have been made that she feared for her partners life. Given those factors, and Potters years of training and experience considered, lethal force may have been objectively reasonable. She may not have even been charged with anything, and if so she probably would have had a better chance in court and certainly a better chance under appeal if convicted.
But this is not what I said. You aren’t reading in good faith. I said he was responsible for creating a situation that presented a danger to the police around him.
We shouldn’t forget that he was pulled over for expired registration (at a time when – because of COVID – the policy was not to pull people over for expired registration) and an air freshener hanging from his rear view mirror:
I really don’t see the relevance of that to the Potter trial. Whether or not the initial stop was justified, once they identified him and discovered there was an open arrest warrant for a weapons violation, he certainly should have been arrested. And it was during the arrest that all this transpired.
Bias in who gets stopped is a separate problem. But it’s completely irrelevant to what happened after he was identified. They didn’t try to arrest him because he was a black man driving a car, they tried to arrest him because had an arrest warrant.
Maybe we could find that out from the information entered into the national database of law-enforcement killings. Or rather, maybe we could, if more than a third of law-enforcement killings were ever even entered into that database.
It’s not relevant to the arrest and the Potter trial, no.
As a separate matter, we should look into police bias in who gets stopped. But he wasn’t arrested just for being a Black man driving a car on some bullshit charge.
Whatever the flaws in policy on who gets stopped, if after they have been identified it turns out that they are a wanted criminal, are you suggesting they should be allowed to go free?
But does the ratio of racial make up in a particular area not also affect the ratio of the race of people detained and/or arrested? If I worked in an inner city district would it not stand to reason that a majority of contacts I made would be people of color?
About 80% of my arrests are of white males. And about 90% of my warrant arrest comes from traffic stops. Take away traffic stops for even minor offenses and the apprehension of wanted suspects drops like a rock.
I work nights. A huge majority of the time I have no idea the sex nor race of the person I pulled over until I get to the window. How does your alleged bias fit in my situation?
Black drivers are 20 percent more likely to be stopped by police, relative to their population, compared to white drivers, according to research last year from NYU and the Stanford Open Policing Project. Once stopped, Black drivers are as much as twice as likely to be searched, despite being less likely to be carrying guns or drugs, the research found.
We’re still talking about a rate that’s adjusted for the population characteristics.
Shroff and his colleagues also measured the disparity in stop rates before and after sunset. They found that black drivers made up a smaller share of those stopped at night, when it’s more difficult to discern the race of a driver, which suggests that racial bias may influence stop decisions. For example, in Texas, about 25 percent of drivers stopped right before sunset were black, compared to about 20 percent just after dusk. The analysis found the same basic pattern across all the stops in aggregate. Overall, the data showed about a 5-10 percent drop in the share of drivers stopped at night who are black.
To be clear, @pkbites : this is aggregated data across large sample sizes:
Data from 21 state patrol agencies and 29 municipal police departments, comprising nearly 100 million traffic stops, are sufficiently detailed to facilitate rigorous statistical analysis. The result? The project has found significant racial disparities in policing. These disparities can occur for many reasons: differences in driving behavior, to name one. But, in some cases, we find evidence that bias also plays a role.
So what happens to an officer who says “screw that” and pulls over a white driver with tags expired beyond 6 months. The driver turns out to have a warrant for a serious felony and also just assaulted someone. A dangerous person taken off the street.
Does the officer get disciplined, demoted, or even fired?
What happens when a driver is observed with expired tags, a loud muffler, and a Fussbuster on his windshield isn’t pulled over by an observant officer and then a mile later he drives though a red light because he is intoxicated and kills 6 people in a mini van. How is the public going to react to that?
See how something like this can bite you in the ass?
Whatever problem you think there is passive enforcement of the law is not the answer.