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Does it need to be said that ANY unarmed black men should not be killed by police? Or that ANY killing is ‘significant’?
Also, does it need to be said that cops are not supposed to kill guilty people either?
Oh, and btw, we have been defunding schools for many years…
Absolutely.
Since police are not required to report these killings to a national database and lie about many/most/all (unknown) of them anyway, it’s impossible to say what amount it is, and “significant” is relative. What is certain is that police are much more likely to kill than be killed. Police should not be judge, jury and executioner. I do not defend police killing anyone unless they need to in defense of their lives. Defense of their ego doesn’t count. The best thing that has happened in policing is the proliferation of cameras everywhere and citizens being willing to step up and record the police misconduct.
In Brooks case, a taser isn’t deadly in the hand of a fleeing subject. This is another case of a poorly trainer officer making a deadly mistake for which he should be fired at the minimum. He will at least get the due process he denied Brooks.
OF COURSE nobody should be killed by police–innocent or guilty, any color of the rainbow. Punishments for crimes should be handled by the justice system. But while we are “should’ing” on police, nobody should ever commit a crime, resist arrest for the crime, or assault police with a deadly weapon!
(By the way, I’d still like to hear your opinion on the Rayshard Brooks incident)
The reason ‘significant’ matters is simple: when bad things happen, the frequency of those events has to be considered when determining the response. In country of 300+million, you could find a thousand things to protest if you want to. Are we protesting texting and driving? (It wouldn’t be hard to take steps to help prevent these deaths) Are we protesting the sale of cigarettes? Suicides of vets? How about furniture tipovers? If we descend into anarchy every time someone does something bad, we can kiss civilized society goodbye.
Terrible things happen sometimes. There have been some terrible incidents regarding police brutality, but the numbers just don’t point towards the narrative of ‘open season on black men’ by police. “ACAB” and “defund the police” is an extreme over-reaction and one that will result in far more harm than the reasonable and incremental changes that should be taken.
Wow, you are getting farther and farther off base. Police represent the power of the state. If the government doesn’t reign in police excess then it’s a state sanctioned killing. If is were the occasional lone wolf looney tunes cop who slipped through the system it would be another matter. Instead it’s is systemic racism with LEOs of all stripes in charge of keeping it that way. To compare a furniture tipover or a suicide to a cop murdering someone is ludicrous.
I didn’t say it didn’t matter, I said law enforcement hides the numbers. And it’s not just cops, it’s ICE, state and federal prisons too.
Funny, if no one ever committed a crime the police would be out of a job. That would be great. The fact is that people will do those things and dealing with them in a rational and professional manner is the job of the LEO. Killing people for resisting arrest is excessive force. If that’s what we want as a society let’s pass laws saying so. Extra-judical actions by state agents are anathema to our current values and under current law. Apparently you prefer the kind of systems they have in Saudi Arabia, Syria or China.
LEO’s who can’t do the job should quit.
The officer is charged with murder, it is not an ‘incident’. Dismissing these egregious acts of violence by police as ‘incidents’ makes us realize how much more education is needed…
Would you prefer this statistic be reversed? Criminals often don’t just throw their hands up in their air and give up. When someone runs from the police, they make a choice that increases the risk for themselves (as well as the officers and general public). “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”.
A taser is considered a deadly weapon in many states, including Georgia. I’d like to see how you’d react when an inebriated person turns and points a weapon at you. It’s easy to sit on your chair and armchair quarterback how this officer should have reacted.
I keep hearing this suggestion that the officer just have just let him go. Is that really the precedent we want to set? “If you resist arrest successfully and steal a cop’s weapon, they’ll just let you go!”. Or that they shouldn’t have even arrested him in the first place – “Drive drunk – it’s ok, the cops will just call an Uber for you”.
I fully agree that bodycams and other recording devices/people are one of the most effective means available to ensure the truth is known. In this case, it lets us see someone who has committed a crime resist arrest, assault a police officer, and threaten/attempt to shoot him with a deadly weapon. It shows two police officers who treat this person with respect and kindness, until that person makes another poor decision.
I find it interesting that nobody is bringing up the decisions made by Brooks which led to this situation.
That is EXACTLY what should have been done. Thank you for reminding us what ‘defunding the police’ means… to citizens.
Which is one reason why I never worked in the field although my Bachelor’s degree is in Criminal Justice. People who are given guns and badges need to be rigorously screened, intensely trained, and constantly re-trained and monitored. I don’t need to armchair quarterback, thousands of cops have done it for me. Let me explain using this statement of yours:
Often. Great, precise term. LOL. So you’ve indicated that you don’t think most police use excessive force/shoot fleeing suspects/kneel on them for 9 minutes/etc. I agree, most police do not. Most police (I don’t know if that’s 51% or 85%) are competent. The incompetent bedwetters who use excessive force should be fired and in many cases criminally charged. They are a danger to the public and to their profession.
Now to come back to this:
How I would react is irrelevant. However I’ll tell you. The one and only time a drunk person turned and pointed a weapon at me, no one died, no one was shot or stabbed.
Yes. This is not a binary choice. “Let him go or shoot him.” They already have the car and have ID’d the subject. If the officer is unable to pursue the subject or it would be dangerous to do so you let them go and issue a warrant for their arrest. Your speculations on how most subjects will behave worse because the cops stopped using deadly force are unfounded.
Why would we? It’s irrelevant. I don’t know how else to say it: the officer failed at his job.
@doughpat: While I would agree with you that Brooks made some very poor decisions that led to his death, my concern is the response of the officer. He was running away, but his car was there - one would think that once he sobered up, he would have come back for it and could have been arrested then (or have it towed and arrest upon retrieval). It shouldn’t be a capital offense to park in drive through lane of a fast food restaurant - it might not even be criminal, but civil.
Police officers often have to make split-second decisions and those decisions should always favor life for both the officer and the offender. The police philosophy to “keep firing until the threat is removed,” too often results in the death of an offender without the benefit of a trial. We would not tolerate a judge who walked into the courtroom and saw a disorderly defendant and sentence him to death, yet that is what the police often do.
One of my friends with dark skin color is against BLM and other anti racism organizations. He used to be involved in them, but he got out.
His Main complain is that these organizations do not want to accomplish anything, their leaders only want to be in the centre of attention, and polarize to justify their existence.
He keeps sending me links and clips. This one is a bit older but really explains the problem with BLM and other Organizations like this:
Nothing wrong with McWhorter offering an alternative view, any ideology should be able to stand up to challenges. However, when there are a handful of serious thinkers on one side of an issue and thousands on the other side of the issue, it should mean something.
Interestingly, McWhorter’s take on the current problems is less concerned with racism and more concerned with policing. He makes the very good point (that I’ve also made here in the last month) that police kill more white people than black people. It is in everyone’s interest to radically reform the police. From a recent article:
"This is not to say that race has nothing to do with policing issues in America. Black people are disproportionately more likely to be pulled over for drug searches, a disparity that, interestingly, disappears after dusk when officers cannot easily identify the race of a driver. Black people are also more likely to be verbally abused by police during interactions. Contrary to his expectations, Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found that while white men are actually more likely to be killed by cops, black people are more likely to be handcuffed, pushed against the wall, and treated with weapons drawn. Blacks are still somewhat more likely than whites to suffer physical and verbal abuse from the cops even when the behavior of the suspect is taken into account. Findings like these contribute to a general sense that cops treat black people as an enemy.
Racist bias may well play a role in these statistical discrepancies in treatment. Certainly, this perception was as central to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri as the shooting of Michael Brown. If, upon close examination, that turns out to be the case, then this must obviously be addressed. The acrid relationship with police is among the main reasons that so many black people feel like aliens in their own nation. If a new generation of black people could grow up without the sense that the cops are their enemy, America would turn a corner on race and finally break its holding pattern.
Police officers are too often overarmed, undertrained, and low on empathy. Some police officers are surely racist and act like it. But it does not follow that white cops routinely kill black people in tense situations out of racist animus. This scenario may seem plausible—I believed it until only a few years ago. But there are times when facts are counterintuitive, and it is important to get the facts right and to analyze them with clear eyes and a clear mind (the enlightening work of criminologist and ex-cop Peter Moskos is helpful in this regard). Rhetoric has a way of straying from reality, and to get where we all want to go, it is reality that we must address."
It’s important to consider that the movement has changed over the last 5 years. Criticizing them as a 2 year old entity in 2015 as “not doing anything” is lazy and easy.
But interestingly no one wants to talk about the elephant in the room.
They all talk about “the police”.
But there is no “the police”. It’s a small part of the police causing problems. It’s the lowest educated, lowest paid segment.
What can anyone expect from these people?
There is only one solution. Increase quality of people by increasing wages.
While many people go into law enforcement out of a desire to be of use to society and protect the populace, it’s inevitable that professions like policing and the military also attract a segment of the population that wants to feel powerful and have authority over others. I would suspect that some of these racist, brutal cops were actually bullied as children as opposed to being bullies themselves (although I’m sure there’s many in that camp as well). A uniform and a gun and the prospect of being able to detain and subdue, by whatever means, to strut their authority around and have others fearful of your power, would be appealing to those people.
I agree that a pay raise for the police may attract a better, more intelligent class of people, but what I really think needs to happen is that the racists and brutalizers at the top need to be routed out and those wanting to become police be thoroughly vetted to determine what their underlying attitudes and beliefs and emotional make-up are.
I agree that low wages in the US are a problem for everyone. If blacks weren’t mired in poverty they were have fewer problems with the police as well.
From my own association with future policemen while at the university in the late 1970s it seems to me that many of the people who are attracted to police work have authoritarian personalities. They aren’t attracted to the job to serve, they are attracted to it because it makes them feel powerful.
Morally bankrupt late stage capitalism?
doughbrain, they had him ID’d. They could impound the car. They knew where to find and arrest him in the future. It’s long past time to stop this combat control mentality with police, and for a different model of public safety.
The BLM started as push back against American police again and again and again and again treating U.S. citizens like black lives don’t matter… and the response was “YES THEY DO – BLACK LIVES DO MATTER.”
The white teen who shot nine worshipers at Mother Emanuel church in Charlston didn’t get a knee on his neck when arrested – he got a Burger King treat on the ride to jail. He was treated like his life mattered.
This double standard by police (white lives matter, black lives do not) may not be universal, but it is quite common and it has been going for hundreds of years in America. During the 1921 Tulsa massacre the local police disarmed the black residents of greenwood, and didn’t disarm the whites – some of whom were in kkk robes… and then the police backed away as the slaughter and arson destroyed this almost-entirely-black community. Clearly the police on that day decided that white lives mattered and black lives do not.
Whatever his motive – Bezos’ message would not have come from an American corporate leader 100 years ago or 150 years ago or for most of the 20th century and before. It is a most welcome welcome signal to Ameican racial dinosaurs that their epoch is coming to an end.
Thanks @Sparky_O_Reilly, and welcome to the Forum. BUT I’m afraid that until we, again, have a President and VicePresident, that can actually say the words “Black Lives Matter” and mean it, the progress you describe is stalled.
Pence continues to be a sycophant to Trump. He has sold his soul to the devil.
