And of course, it’s difficult to find cases of unjustified police murders where the officer got caught.
Obviously.
But given how many officers get away with murder when their actions are caught on camera, given how hard you have to work to get a cop convicted of anything even when they confess to the crime, as Saint Cad pointed out in post #251, it should not come as a surprise when you read articles like “The Police Killed My Unarmed Son”.
David Grossman is a popular and successful provider of training to US police departments on the use of force.
That can’t be legal, right?
To be fair, the suspect was leading them on a high speed chase. If he hadn’t been put down right there, he may have made it another 4 or even 5 feet.
I am sure the officer can justify it as being in fear for his life.
I just meant the threat, but damn, you’re probably still right.
(And in case some people have trouble telling, this is a joke.)
Today it may be a joke. But given the current atmosphere and the administration’s feelings towards the press, I would actually be more than a little concerned if I were that reporter.
You know well by now that that’s not what happened. No murders were excused, killings were thoroughly investigated and found not to be murder. That is what happened in practice, what you are describing only happened in your fevered imagination.
Action against them shouldn’t be based on number of complaints. It should be taken if the complaints are investigated and found to be legitimate.
You, and others in this thread, have shown that cops sometimes lie. Why is it so hard for you to understand that other people sometimes lie - especially if those people are criminals being arrested. You don’t trust cops, I get that. But it’s silly to trust them less than career criminals.
Another case where the article makes clear that there was no case to answer. It went to a Grand Jury twice, and there was no grounds for a trial. Justice, despite the claims of the mother in the article, has happened. What hasn’t happened is what she actually wants, unjustified revenge for the unfortunate but non-criminal killing of her son.
It’s fully understandable that she wants that. What is not understandable or acceptable is that other people, free of emotion and in possession of the facts, should want that. Your hard-on for punishing cops for perceived (but not actual) crimes puts you at the same moral level as a 1930s redneck who liked lynching niggers for perceived insults.
Actually no, you are worse. The victims of lynching were simply neutral, trying to live their lives. You want to punish those who are risking their lives to make your life, and everyone else’s, better and safer, because you refuse to look at the actual facts and events that have happened. That’s inexcusable.
Agreed. It is difficult, especially since cases of unjustified police murders are quite rare, compared with all police shootings, and even more so when compared to the number of times people are arrested without police shooting anyone.
There are something like 800,000 police in the US, and they arrest millions of people every year. In the one-in-a-thousand cases where the police shoot someone, 95% of the time the shooting is not only justifiable, it isn’t even questionable. The perp shot first, or was attacking people, or otherwise making it obvious to anyone except a Black Lies Matter activist that the perp was demonstrating why US cops carry guns in the first place.
The case in the article is a cop who shot someone who declined to obey police orders, who the police believed had a gun. The cop in question went before two grand juries, neither of which returned an indictment.
Can you please describe the specific ways in which you want to change the grand jury process so that the cop would be convicted of murder (or manslaughter, which is what he was charged with)? Should we dispense with the presumption of innocence? Should the cop not be given the assistance of counsel? Should the jury instructions include “don’t believe a word the defendant says”?
Or if the grand jury determines that there is not enough evidence to proceed to trial, should the judge just say “fuck this noise - he shot a black kid and he’s white so he gets twenty years”?
Regards,
Shodan
And you continue to not understand what I’m saying, despite me explaining myself at length. You continue to play these absurd semantic games, wherein a cop who got away with murder by any reasonable definition was cleared by a jury because they were afraid for no good reason.
Wow, and here I thought I had carefully selected a bunch of cases where I didn’t have to take the word of a criminal being arrested. Like the Philando Castile case. Because there, there was no criminal, nobody was getting arrested, and there was video footage of the whole thing. 
C’mon.
And if you honestly believe that, I hope you also believe that the cops are your friends, and cooperate in every way you can. I hope you don’t take your right to shut up seriously. After all, the cops are your friends. The justice system is fair and rarely makes mistakes.
Right? Right?
In case it’s obvious, I don’t think that’s always true. I think there are some cases where the justice system fails. Miserably. Where it is unjust, unfair, inconsistent, and unreasonable. Dealing with cops is one of them. Dealing with poor minorities is another.
It’s really hard to get a jury to convict a cop of, well, anything. At least part of that has to do with people like you and Hocus Pocus, who seem ready to rabidly defend the police and the justice system no matter what evidence you’re going against, no matter how damning the videos are. Because people are likely to take cops at their word, and believe all kinds of mythmaking about how great cops are. When I talk about murder, you seem to be either intentionally misrepresenting me, or incapable of imagining that I could think that either the jury or the law was wrong to not convict an officer of murder in a case where we watched video of said officer shooting an unarmed, fleeing civilian in the back, then trying to plant evidence that would justify that obviously unjustified shooting. This is not hard to understand. The way you’re arguing, the SS officers at Auschwitz were not guilty of murder. And if anyone thinks that analogy is unfair or offensive… Well…
…Wow. Just wow. Keep digging, I’m sure that barrel-bottom we lost track of is down there somewhere. With the drilling equipment you’re using, you shouldn’t have any trouble if you hit bedrock.
Grand juries are biased in favor of police. No huge surprise; the DA works closely with the police, and there’s an incentive to keep the peace there - if the cops think you’re against them, they’re less likely to help you when you need help. So they do what they can to avoid indicting cops. This is not new or controversial; grand juries indict civilians at absurdly high rates, and police officers at absurdly low rates.
A lot of abuses are written off as he-said-she-said and never get anywhere, even when the accusations form a clear pattern among many victims. There is a reason a lot of people don’t trust the cops, and don’t think they act in their best interest. For every high-profile case like Philando Castile and Walter Scott, who knows how many cases flew under the radar and never made the news? How many cases are there like Bongiovanni, where all we have to go on for years of abuse is witness statements (that get ignored, because it’s a witness against a cop, and the cop gets the presumption of trust), right up until he gets caught on video beating the shit out of a motorist to get his jollies off?
That’s just three issues that make this difficult. Any one of those would be a problem. Hell, even just the presumption of truth makes holding police accountable without video evidence basically impossible - that’s why body cameras are so important. But what’s also important is that when cops kill people because they were afraid of a threat that didn’t exist, that they be held accountable. If I shot my neighbor, the response, “I thought he was going for his gun” would not be good enough when it turned out he didn’t have a gun. It shouldn’t be good enough for the police either.
(my bold)
I started reading and first thought your post was an interesting framing of an argument and observation about disinterested parties. Then I got to the above quoted section.
The comment about "hard-on"s would be sufficient to moderate given the rule against sexualizing posters or their arguments. That alone would likely only garner a comment. However, saying another poster is worse in terms of morality than someone who engages in racist lynching is not okay.
This is a warning for personal insults.
Please do not make a habit of ridiculous analogies, especially tit for tat. This is a note and not a warning because it lacks the personalization bolded above and describes the rationale, however, I’d rather not engage in this level of hair splitting.
[/moderating]
It is my understanding that if you, as a private citizen, have charges in front of a grand jury, then there is only the prosecution’s side of the case. You are not allowed to make any statements, call any witnesses, or in any other way defend yourself. You are usually not even aware of what transpired in the proceedings. Your first chance to defend yourself is at trial.
In the case of a police officer, this is not the case. They actually do get a defense in the grand jury stage of justice proceedings, so many of them do not make it past the grand jury.
That is a specific change that I would make to the grand jury process.
I would also involve prosecutors (and investigators) from either a different district, a different state, or even federal prosecutors, as local prosecutors have too much of a temptation to make a weak case against their friends in blue.
I think if you made those two changes, you would probably see more of the unjustified shooters, the cops who are caught planting evidence, the cops who get caught raping and beating the people who called them for help, the “good” cops who cover up for bad cops, and just the cops who cuase harm to the public by simply being the wrong man for the job receive appropriate discipline, and the rest of the cops will quickly fall in line, realizing that their position is not as unassailable as they thought.
No, what is inexcusable is blind, knee-jerk defense of police officers without acknowledging that unnecessary police violence is a real problem and a preventable one. The way to make your life and everyone else’s better and safer is to acknowledge that a problem of police violence exists instead of steadfast denial. It would help promote gathering better statistics which are presently incomplete and inadequate and lead to better training and fewer innocent people shot. Using specious arguments like “juries are never wrong” in blind defense of the police only makes you part of the problem.
Juries are made of humans and humans are fallible. It is quite plausible a jury could make a stupid decision.
It’s the best system we have, but it’s preposterous to suggest it is perfect.
Do you have a cite that police may present a defense at grand juries, and regular citizens do not?
Regards,
Shodan
There’s nothing blind about my defence of people who kill in self defence, and it doesn’t apply only to the police. I acknowledge the problem, and have repeatedly (if not in this thread, certainly in others) supported the use of body cameras.
The problem with body cameras, as demonstrated by this thread, is that cameras in general don’t provide the level of evidence some people think they should, in that a video on its own is not proof of guilt. Multiple videos from different sources can be better, and the more body cameras there are the closer we could get to that. I could also see that some people would choose to wear their own, similar to the way many drivers choose to use dash cameras.
My problem with the unceasing criticism of the police is simply that, even when the actions have been fully investigated and shown to be acceptable, to the extent of having a full trial - about the most thorough investigation we ever do of someone’s actions - people are still attacking the cops. That’s indefensible.
I don’t have a cite for that, as that was not my specific claim. My claim was that they “get a defense”, and that defense is the prosecutor.
I found at least a dozen other articles or legal blogs that go on like that. Talking about how the prosecutors act as the defense, about how the officers are allowed to testify to the grand jury, and about how the grand jury is given instructions and information that are very different than the instructions and information that would be given to them had it been you or I holding the smoking gun at the end of a controversial confrontation.
Plenty were, plenty more weren’t. And many of the people convicted (not just officers, but at other levels) were convicted when laws were changed or created to allow ex post facto guilt - something that would be unconstitutional in the US, and should be considered only as an absolute last resort to extreme atrocities.
Looking at Nuremberg and other post-Nazi investigations and trials might well help educate you on what is or is not murder, and how it’s determined. There were many convicted of manslaughter, or aiding and abetting murder, or other crimes.
Your claiming every one of these killings is murder is part of the problem, as it leads to overcharging. This happened in the Casey Anthony case, where the focus on trying to prove murder lead to a lack of focus on the lesser charges, which may be why the only convictions were for lying to the police.
This, and a lot of other things in this thread, to me suggest that the police are getting the treatment they have the right to during investigations and trial, and that many others - especially poor people - are not.
If someone, cop or otherwise, claims they killed in self defence, they should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, as should anyone accused of a crime. Killing in self defence shouldn’t be considered an excuse to murder, it should be considered a fully legal act, and the standards of proof required for arrest, conviction, and so forth shouldn’t change whether someone claims they committed no crime because the killing was legal, or because they didn’t kill because they were in another country.