Another shooting and protest

Parent Cafe
21

Apparently, the assumption being mentioned that the victim failed a sobriety test may not be true. Witnesses say the police never administered a field sobriety test.

Naturally, in this day and time, with the police confronting a young African-American male in a public space, many witnesses filmed the encounter on their cell phones. It looks like that fallacy and rush to judge the victim may not prove to be true.

The assumption that he failed a sobriety test came from the police. We cannot forget that in their first report, the murderers of George Floyd said he resisted arrest. That was assumed by some to be true until video proved otherwise. I think we should all withhold blaming the victim in Atlanta until we see more video evidence of the encounter.

22

The Atlanta police have released the body camera footage of the administration of a field sobriety test. It is republished on CNN.

23

If you pull up the statistics, it will present a different picture.

About ten million arrests per year? About 1000 result in a citizen being killed.

Yes, these videos are very upsetting. Yes, there is a need for some reform. Yes, there are bad cops and also cops just making mistakes.

The news coverage does not necessarily equate to reality.

We will continue to see videos of cops killing citizens. Because? 10 million arrests per year.

24

Thanks. I just found it thanks to your tip.

Hard to believe that after patting him down and ensuring he had no deadly weapons, that the police decided to shoot a fleeing man in the back.

25

This. I don’t see what more needs to be said. Thank you.

26

Perhaps the police shouldn’t have been called in the first place? Could someone have helped the gentleman by waking him up and getting his vehicle to a parking space? Honestly from what the majority have written on this thread, it sounds like most of you wouldn’t have been threatened by him, so why would any of the people at the Wendy’s?

27

Sure, that would have been great if they handled that differently. Who knows if anyone tried before calling the police. Haven’t heard that mentioned so don’t know. Apparently the police had to bang on the car door several times before opening it/he responded.

The timing of this incident just adds to the reaction. The optics are pretty bad. You don’t shoot a fleeing person in the back.

28

I saw a clip of the interaction early on. He admits that he was drinking, but doesn’t want to use a breathalyzer. He says his sister lives nearby and he can just walk to her house and leave his car at Wendy’s. He says he “doesn’t want to be in violation of anything”.

His death really did not need to happen.

Let’s not forget that there was no moving violation, he was not on a public street. I think about famous people and politicians who refuse breathalyzers after a traffic stop. They are taken to the police office and charged. Or not charged and we wonder how many buried DUIs are out there. That could have happened here, but there was no traffic stop!

29

No, the teens working at fast food places are not expected to deal with nonresponsive people in the parking lot. Perhaps this person would not have been violent, but there is no way to know that ahead of time.

30

However, while officer-involved killings make headline news and social media, there may be a much bigger iceberg below that tip, in that non-lethal excessive force or other misconduct by police officers may be far more common, and do a lot more to shape public opinion (suspicion) of police. Different recent surveys* suggest that more than a quarter of Americans felt that they (or family member) have been treated unfairly or harassed by a police officer. Not surprisingly, black Americans were more likely to say that they were harassed by a police officer.

Obviously, if many people are primed to distrust police through widespread negative personal experiences, it is not surprising that when a more egregious case (someone dying) occurs and is publicized, the reaction can be quite large.

31

This is what I was saying. Why not just move the car and drive him home. Or bring him to a hospital. Or call a loved one to get him. I know police can’t be baby sitters but what if social services had met the police there and helped this man out in a different way?

We need to change what we are doing since what we are doing isn’t working. It’s that simple.

32

This is pretty much only in the movies where cops fire warning shots. Bullets continue to travel until they hit something and firing a warning shot in a densely populated city could kill or injure an innocent bystander.

33

9ft. is not the range of a Taser. The maximum range of a taser, depending on the model, can be up to 25ft.

34

Unless you live in a very small town, like a real life version of Mayberry, the police don’t act as the Uber service for people who had too much to drink. In many states, including Georgia, you can get a DUI in a parked car.

https://dui.drivinglaws.org/resources/can-i-get-a-dui-for-sitting-in-a-parked-car-while-drunk.html

35

Not a chance we’ll come to an agreement on this one.

But a guy who punches an officer and runs isn’t going to be any easier to arrest when you come to his house later. And since he punched a cop, they are not going to let it go. If he had gotten away, they would have come to arrest him later.

But since he’d know they were coming he could set up a hostage situation, booby traps, or who knows what. So stopping him then and there was the right choice. Sad, but right.

He had a chance. He didn’t need to create the battle that killed him. Probably he would have gone to jail to sleep it off and not been charged, or maybe he could have bargained down to not much punishment. Police do a lot of social work, and this could have been the way things went. Often it is. Not the officers’ fault that Brooks decided to fight it out.

There are cases, probably more than we want to know, when a relative comes to pick someone up who was sleeping in the car or driving drunk, and the drunk gets right back into the car after the police are gone and gets stopped again. Whose kid are you willing to sacrifice to Brooks going back to his car and driving drunk if the police had just turned him over to a relative?

36

Oh no, no, no, no, no. A LOT more needs to be said. For example, the fact that there are 10 million arrests a year in a country of 300 million people. That is one person in thirty being arrested every year. There are, today, 77 million people with criminal records.

That is a LOT of arrests, and a LOT of criminal records.

In the USA, there are about 1.2 million violent crimes reported per year, and about 7.7 million property crimes. Now, of the violent crimes, only 46%, or about 550,000 are solved, and only 17% of the property crimes, or 1.31 million or so. So every year the police solve 1.9 million crimes (at least officially), and arrest 10 million people.

Basically, the fact that people look at 10 million arrests and 77 million police records, and think that this is normal is mind boggling, IMO.

BTW, the rate of people killed by police per 100,000 is higher in the USA than in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Iran, Angola, Columbia, Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, and Kenya. It is higher by far than any other Western country. It is more than four times as high as Canada, 40 times as high as in Germany, and 100 times as high as in the UK.

Lest we claim that the reason is that crime is higher here, which is why more people are killed by police, crime rate in the UK is only about 20% lower than in the USA.

Black men have a much higher rate than that to be killed by police.

Finally, claiming that police are not deadly because they are making so many arrests that 1,000 people killed by police is a very small proportion of all arrests is ludicrous.

It’s like claiming that a car isn’t dangerous since it breaks down 90% of the times you drive it. So, relative to other cars, a smaller proportion of the breakdowns result in injury or death.

37

How do we know this? Does the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Iran, Angola, Columbia, Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, and Kenya all publish numbers on how many are killed by police each year? Do you have a primary source for each of those countries?

38

How about we award the Nobel prize awarded to whoever invented the cell phone camera? Cause stuff like this has been going on forever - the only reason we are even talking about it is we finally have evidence to push back on the official police version.

Two interesting pieces on why “the system” is so bad:

Medium: confessions-of-a-former-ba*d-cop

washington post: I used to be a police chief. This is why it is so hard to get rid of bad cops

Google them if you are interested in some insiders perspective

39

The autopsy report: He died of 2 gunshots to the back, causing internal organ damage and excessive blood loss.

Interesting- they just showed more body cam video. Apparently they asked him to pull out of the drive through line and into a parking spot. It initially took them about a minute to wake him the first time and then when he pulled into a parking spot he fell asleep again, which is when they did the breathalyzer. He did not know where he was- thought he was on a different street and I think in a different part of town (hard to hear). They told him he was too drunk to drive home safely (don’t know the results of the breathalyzer) and then went to cuff him. They said the the officer had undergone training in several pertinent areas (can’t recall the names at the moment) in the past few months.

40

Here is an opinion from a different retired police chief:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/11/floyd-killing-police-must-change-former-detroit-chief-column/5341884002/