If its true then sign me up for Native American Lives Matter. I got no problem with there being more than one of these under that circumstance.
No, what we need is something that says all lives matter… and stop the violence. Everywhere.
But… you can find a link to Native Lives Matter at this site: The Police Are Killing One Group at a Staggering Rate, and Nobody Is Talking About It * Or… google for other sites or cites. There are quite a few 
I really don’t want to be an ant or a bee but… they make their societies work. We only have one planet (hive). We need to rejoice in our differences and recognize our sameness.
And have no more poverty line (I’d prefer a “living line”… where you can afford food, shelter, health and a few carefully chosen luxuries that could change month to month to week etc… as long as you work for it or meet certain guidelines. If you don’t meet the guidelines… you get food, shelter and health.) This… I understand… is probably never going to be feasible but it’s something worth striving for.
My people had it… but we also had “the elders went for a walk during famine winter/springs” and we were a bit Communistic in that we shared what we had with everyone. That only works in small groups where you can feel good knowing that your extras made that person happy. The further from you the smaller the sharing and the less feel-good one gets (a generalized thinking… I know people who give to only 1 charity and get great satisfaction from it).
*I don’t have a cellphone so don’t use Twitter.
A move towards the waist band is all that is needed. Somebody else reported Rick pointing a gun. It is not clear if the police dispatcher told the officers that it could be a toy gun, but the officers were responding to a report of someone waving around a gun. When they arrived at the scene, the suspect reached towards his waist band as if to draw the gun, which was indeed in his waist band.
Requiring the police to have psychic powers so they can tell which guns are real and which are not is not a realistic expectation IMO. YM apparently V.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll repeat an excellent link to an excellent interview of a Baltimore ex-cop.. I hope that all who are confused or misinformed about police behavior listen to the interview. Yes, listen to it.
I’ll ask those defending the Tamir Rice killing whether the police could have acted differently had saving the life of the “suspect” been a priority. (I put “suspect” in quotes because in police diction the word usually means “perp.” But in this case Rice, just a kid playing with a toy, was never more than a suspect.)
“all that is needed” ? “All that is needed” ? If we didn’t know you were an intelligent and compassionate observer your words would suggest that a police goal might be to get an excuse to perform a “good clean kill.” I recommend you double-check your phrasings in future.
The possible death of a police officer is a very bad outcome. But so is the death of an innocent civilian. It is baffling that you think “psychic powers” would be needed for the cops to foretell their actions would cause the death of Tamir Rice, whehter he was guilty of anything or not.
I commend you for taking back your false assertion that the video showed Rice reaching for a gun or gun-shaped object.
Maybe the video is consistent with a “move towards the waist band”, but it’s not at all clear in the video. Considering that what the video does clearly show proves false multiple assertions by the officers, I see no reason to accept this particular one as true at this point.
The investigation is ongoing, so we’ll see.
Psychic powers would not have been necessary to not drive up within feet of a kid whom reports say were armed.
No, that’s a silly interpretation. The police goal, or one of them, was not to look for an excuse to kill anyone, but to determine the threat level on a split second notice of someone reported to be waving a gun around in a public park who, when confronted, apparently reached for the gun.
Which part of “so they can tell which guns are real and which are not” did you not understand?
Regards,
Shodan
Is there research on how much goodwill can safely be given to a person who might have a concealed weapon?
It seems to me that this could be a question with something like a factual answer – in a universe where the kid has a gun in his waistband, and is reaching for it, it’s either safe to wait another half a second or it isn’t, based on how long it takes a human being to remove a weapon from a concealed place, aim and fire.
Hopefully everybody agrees that it’s a terrible situation that a kid ends up dead under these circumstances (since “all lives matter,” after all), but doesn’t the question of the responsibility of the police come down pretty much entirely to whether or not the officer can safely give the situation another second or two to play out? I don’t know enough about gun battles to say for sure (since “nothing” isn’t enough), and I’ve heard plenty of times that a person with a knife can cover X amount of ground in Y time, and that it’s more ground than you think, faster than you think, so I don’t know that my guesses are worth anything. So what do the experts say about a kid who may be making a move toward his waistband, with no gun yet in sight? At what point is it now or never?
I don’t think it is either safe, or not-safe. It is a matter of probabilities.
There are roughly four outcomes for a situation where someone goes for a gun. Listing them in decreasing order of desirability -
[ul][li]Nobody gets shot.[/li][li]No innocent bystanders get shot.[/li][li]No police get shot.[/li][li]The suspect doesn’t get shot.[/ul]Implementing a policy where the police are required to wait and see if it is a toy gun is going to increase the relative frequencies of the different scenarios, and it will depend on how common it is that a suspect reaches for a toy gun as if it were real vs. reaching for a real gun and showing that it is real by firing it. [/li]
Keeping also in mind that the gun in the Tamir Rice situation had been altered to make it look real. Thus a policy where the police have to wait to be sure, and can’t judge the realness of a gun by sight but have to wait until it is confirmed in some other way, means officers are going to get shot more.
It depends on how much you value the life of a suspect over the lives of police and bystanders. If waiting until the police are actually fired upon before returning fire increases will probably reduce the number of times people with toy guns get shot, but it will probably increase the number of times police or bystanders get shot, when the police guess wrong.
And a policy that says “wait and see before returning fire” is not IMO practical. Because you are asking police to stake their lives on being able to recognize a toy between the time when someone grabs for it and when he shoots.
“You are required to wait and see if the gun is real on a split second notice. Guess wrong, and we will send a nice wreath to your funeral” is a policy that makes it difficult to find recruits, or to train for.
Regards,
Shodan
I respectfully disagree. I think you need to shine a light into these areas in a specific way, in order to make such changes and benefit all. It doesn’t deny that all lives matter to do this.
Tamir Rice was the child who was killed within seconds of the police car driving up to him. He was playing in the park.
I never heard anyone defend this killing before by any rationale.
Are you kidding?
Right. But the question is, what are the probabilities? I understand what the dilemma is. What I’m wondering is on what basis do we determine that the Tamir Rice situation had crossed over into better safe than sorry territory.
I, and presumably others who feel that based on the information available, this shooting should not have occurred, believe that it doesn’t increase the probability of the bad things happening by an intolerable amount to wait at least some amount of time longer than they waited here. I think the probabilities at the point where a “suspect” “goes for his waist” are hugely in favor of the police not being hurt for at least another half second. I assume that when the hand starts coming out of wherever it went, the probabilities start getting much scarier.
And, y’know, since we’re talking in terms of probabilities… which is more likely, or which seems to happen more frequently – “suspect” “goes for” something that turned out to be not a gun, and is killed anyway, or “suspect” “goes for” something that isn’t obviously a gun, and is killed, and it turns out it was a gun, and he was about to kill someone? Right? Because, like, it is relevant to the analysis that so many people are said to have been going for the gun, and they really weren’t. It’s all well and good to imagine the scenario where this really was the guy trying to get the drop on the officers… but we’re always having this conversation in a context where the other thing happened.
For the Rice shooting, something – poor training, poor policy, or poor decisions by the police officers made them drive up to within feet of Rice rather than try and approach from a distance. So even before the cop drew his gun, the police officers took actions that increased the danger to both themselves and to Rice for (what appears to be) no reason whatsoever.
Tell me if I’m wrong but they pulled up and one of them immediately jumped out, crossed around and shot him summarily.
What is the controversy under discussion?
IIRC from the vid, they pulled up within feet of Rice and shot him as the cop exited the car.
Yes, he was playing in the park. With a gun which had been modified to look real. Then when the police pulled up, he apparently reached for the gun.
No.
I don’t have any more hard figures than you do. Part of my point is that whatever the figures are, it is going to be a hard sell for any policy that says “police have to wait and see before they shoot” because it is asking to make a rather fine distinction on a split second’s notice.
Than they waited here? Sure. But we have the advantage after the fact of knowing that the gun was an Airsoft pistol.
I don’t know about the exact proportions of risk. I doubt the ability of the police to decide shoot/no shoot based on that extra half-second.
Maybe nine times out of ten, when the police get a report of someone pointing a gun around in public, and he makes a sudden move towards his waistband, he doesn’t really have a gun. Then nobody gets shot. Then the tenth time arrives, the police wait the extra half second, and six guys walk slow with the result.
Same problem - there is no more basis for what you think is “really” happening than for someone else who says that the vast majority of police shootings are justified. There are no hard figures.
Even when there are, and it is found thatof the 109 fatal police shootings in Omaha since 2007, one was unjustified, or of the 385 police shootings in 2015, 85% of the suspects were armed with a real gun, the normal response in some quarters is “cover-up/institutional racism/blue wall of silence”.
IOW if the figures from the Post are at all accurate, almost nine times out of ten that extra half-second simply gives an armed suspect the chance to get off a shot or two.
And, as I keep mentioning, even in the Michael Brown case that the BLM folks are so exercised about, being attacked by a thug who outweighs you by eighty pounds says “justifiable shooting” to most rational people. And waiting an extra half-second to allow him to get the gun, or to get closer when he charges, isn’t going to help - just the opposite. And still we get protests and riots and shooting by people who want to believe the shooting wasn’t justified.
Regards,
Shodan
Loehmann fired two shots before the zone car came to a halt[6] and within two seconds of arriving on the scene,[
No, you are kidding.
There’s no “apparently” here. We don’t know where the gun was, and the video doesn’t show enough detail to know exactly how he moved. Since we already know that the officers’ story is bullshit, why would we accept this part of the story?
So the traditional police motto
To protect and to serve is to be replaced with “All it takes” is that a cop might reasonably feel fear.“Silly” wouldn’t be my choice of words for this change.
Interesting that you bring up probabilities and prioritize the outcomes. What was the probability that Tamir Rice wouldn’t get shot when the police decided to open fire? How much more is a cop’s life worth than the life of a black “suspect”? A hundred times? Thousand times? Million times?
The cops accepted Rice’s certain death against a slight chance that he was armed, intended to fire at them, and would get a successful shot off. Those cops were, at best, cowards.
Have you listened to the interview of the Baltimore ex-cop yet, Shodan? It should help you with some of your questions.
It’s possible that it is, but it’s also possible that it isn’t asking that. Certainly there is some extent to which police absolutely DO have to “wait and see before they shoot.” Certainly it’s a critical part of a police officer’s job to make some kind of reasonable distinction. We’re just negotiating how much. At some point, I think we all acknowledge we’re asking too much when we say “ahh, you could have held off another instant to try to process what that blurry smear of motion in his hand might resolve into. Maybe that gun is a BB gun.” It seems to me that you’re just assuming that in any particular case, we’ve crossed over that threshold, though. And without any data to suggest that it’s unsafe to not fire away at the point where a person might be reaching for something, I don’t know why that’s a warranted assumption.
Maybe. But what of it? If the police fired all ten times, as far as I can tell your rule of thumb would justify all ten shootings. That is to me entirely unacceptable. I would hope it’s unacceptable to anyone. And if there’s no data about this stuff, then we’re all just guessing, and we have to resort back to the eye test. And to my eye, these shootings seem premature. “Maybe… the tenth time” is a terrible justification for the loss of a life of a person who didn’t do anything wrong, and it simply can’t be the case that there’s no level of improbability at which we require the officer to wait and see.
And look - I’m not denying that in many of these cases, the officer is between a rock and a hard place. No matter what the facts are, a lot of people are going to have a problem with a police shooting. There’s clearly some space in between the line where a shooting, as a policy matter, becomes justifiable, and the line where a police shooting is non-controversial to the public. A reasonable policy for when police should shoot back will result, inevitably, in shootings that people say are unjustified. But the fact that people will complain about shootings that ought to be justified doesn’t mean that all shootings are therefore justified despite the complaints about them.