@Hunt sure, but presumably you’re someone without physical and cognitive disabilities. Not so in this case and likely in many others.
Also from scout’s link:
Deplorable.
Yeah, so what? That’s a meaningless statistic without some context.
@Hunt We weren’t there, you and I might have dropped the pipe. This person could have been extremely upset. The officers were in charge, since they were the ones carrying assured, lethal, firearm weapons. This shouldn’t have happened. This person needed protection and was killed just as the Student at Georgia Tech and the person in MN that called police to try to protect a person she thought was being assulted in the alley near her home. All of these officers made a huge mistake that killed the people that they are hired to protect.
@Hunt , I hope that I would react that way, but who knows? If i was genuinely just going about my day and not aware that I was doing anything wrong, how would I react? I’m not trained like the police are supposed to be trained. Who knows how quickly someone processes a situation and reacts. We’d all like to believe we will ritualistically make the correct choice. When someone has a disability, who knows how long it take to process. Add in any mental issues and that is another challenge. Again, these types of interaction seem to be handled by British police without killing people.
I agree in the sense that the taser seems like it would have been more than sufficient in this situation. However, we don’t really know the full story yet, AND the media is biased, so they will try and frame the cops as the bad guys here. If the investigation shows that Sanchez was killed for no good reason, then absolutely, throw the book at this cop. Let’s not jump to conclusions without knowing the full story.
The police had no way of knowing he was deaf. The father had committed a hit and run and had driven back to his home after the hit and run. The OP’s quote left out that important fact. The police were there because the father had committed a crime. (It’s unclear to me if the police were in some sort of hot pursuit or following a tip or what). The father put his developmentally delayed deaf son in that situation.
I’m not saying that the police were justified in shooting. All the facts are not known.
Some reactions on this thread are scary to me, because it sounds as if many posters feel this is normal, that nothing’s amiss when a guy (deaf or not) is shot because he was holding a pipe on his own porch.
Imagine the guy really was threatening and scary: what could he do with a pipe from a distance?
So, there was no direct danger - but a refusal to obey orders. He was shot because he didn’t get on the ground after dropping the pipe. If an officer yelled at me like that I’d be terrified, being held at gunpoint regardless of who holds the gun is terrifying to me, and I have no idea whether I’d react “right”. (I’m afraid my reaction wouldn’t be the “expected” one, based on experience when stressed I don’t do what most people do: I probably wouldn’t walk toward the source of my fears, but then again I might to reassure myself I have nothing to fear since this is a police officer whose whole life goal is to protect me.)
In short, whether the guy was threatening is beside the point, he was not going to singlehandedly kill two officers by walking toward them with a pipe. We don’t know if the guy was brandishing the pipe or just holding on to it, but the article makes it clear neither pfficer could have been hurt or hit with the pipe since they were 15 feet away when they shot. Shooting in self defense is supposed to be done when the officer is in direct danger, not when someone doesn’t obey orders.
Do you guys really think what happened is a normal police response? Have we become that desensitized?
It’s not normal to have hundreds of people shot in a democratic country - it happens in countries where the police is untrained or corrupt, and American officers aren’t either.
It’s not normal for police to shoot as a regular occurence. Most police officers are taught pulling your gun is a big deal and a last extremity - what happens afterwards that makes pulling your gun a reflex rather than a carefully weighted exception?
Other countries also have criminals, gangsters, random people who may or may not be threatening, yet you don’t hear of such things happening anywhere else, not with regularity, not without a huge public outcry.
The first step is to recognize there’s a problem, then go about fixing it.
I’m not advocating beat officers working without firearms like they do in Britain, that’s not part of our culture. Yet we may have to learn about what other countries do that leads to fewer officers using weapons in non-lethal danger situations.
It’s not a matter of the police as an institution - but of public health or public safety, making officers better at their jobs - it’s figuring out why some officers shoot, why shooting is considered normal, why if they feel they must shoot they shoot to kill not to maim/disable, what other actions should be taken first, etc.
Who is saying that the shooting was justified? Some of us are saying that all the facts aren’t available, but that at first glance (to me) the tasing seems reasonable, but the shooting doesn’t. Note that the articles don’t say that he dropped the pipe before being shot, and he left the porch and was approaching the officers when he was shot.
I’m waiting for all the elaborate explanations of why the police were justified in killing that kid at Georgia Tech – who was NOT wielding a knife, but was holding their arms at their side, with a CLOSED multi-tool in one hand. Just because a mentally disturbed young person is trying strenuously to commit suicide by cop (without actually acting in a threatening way) and says “Shoot me,” doesn’t mean the cops have to oblige them. And yes, we do know enough facts to draw conclusions, so that knee-jerk excuse isn’t available.
And I’m also waiting for one single person to come up with a reasonable excuse for shooting the man in Oklahoma City, when the cops DID know he was deaf because multiple people were shouting at them that the man couldn’t hear what the cops were saying. Oh, they were so focused (read: panicked) that they had tunnel vision and couldn’t hear what anyone was saying? That’s an excuse, but actually being deaf isn’t?
Many? I can’t find one.
Posters have said that, given the facts in the article linked (some of which are probably wrong) the taser was likely justifiable.
You never hear the whole story, or the accurate story, in the first reports. But if he was walking toward the officers holding a weapon, how close do they let him go before they respond with force? 12 feet? 10 feet? 6 feet?
^that’s my point: why do we feel that a guy with a pipe 15 feet away is so threatening it’s understandable he’d get shot if he didn’t drop the pipe? Holding or dropping the pipe, leaving the porch and walking to 15 feet away of the police… even pulling out a gun seems a completely abnormal reaction.
I agree we need context (there may have been pipe attacks in that neighborhood for instance, yet he was 15 ft away so why not wait till they could evaluate intentions?) Even a taser doesn’t make sense to me. It means that if you don’t do what the police tells you to do immediately when they tell you to, find the police’s normal reaction is to taser you?
(I’ve never had any encounter with the police, except once when they stopped their car because they decided the road I was on wasn’t safe and they drove me home, but a taser sounds like a torture object that burns all your nerve endings in a similar manner to the Algerian War’s “gegen” system. I can see using it when you fear you’re going to be killed yet don’t want to kill the other person.)
Note that less-likely-to-be-lethal ranged weapons have existed for decades, such as the bean bag round that can be used with a shotgun:
http://www.policemag.com/channel/weapons/articles/2002/03/punching-bags.aspx
https://www.officer.com/tactical/less-lethal/less-lethal-ammunition-projectiles/article/12143124/understanding-less-lethal-options
From the AJC article linked earlier:
That’s information that wasn’t in earlier articles. GT Police do not carry tasers, but do carry mace. In this situation, it certainly seems that they should have tried to deescalate and that they should have been able to resolve the situation without firing their guns, and that 4 of the 5 officers were on that path. I don’t know what other information will come to light.
Watching Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary on Vietnam and they indicated that after the killings at Kent State, 58% people polled thought the response (ie., shooting) was appropriate. So I guess the understanding of “appropriate” shooting has long been very… broad.
A better question is why these sorts of things get so much press. Ask yourself the following: “what percentage of shootings are unjustified?” and write down your estimate and then go to the following link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016
and page through some number of them (I did the first fifty), keep track of the ones that seem unreasonable to you, calculate the percentage of unreasonable shootings, and extrapolate to the number of them/year across the US population. I would then ask three questions: how close was your initial guess to a more informed observation? If they differed substantially, do they change your opinion? Do you still believe the issue is as prevalent as the reporting time it receives?
Note: the data underlying the Wapo infographic is available at the following link:
Initial flippant observation: Americans are a diverse group–71 choices of weapons including a flagpole and an air conditioner.
They get press because innocent people are being murdered by the people charged with protecting us.
When someone calls the police for help and ends up being shot, that’s worthy of getting some press.
When a cop tells his partner, “we’re going to kill this guy” and ends up doing just that when that guy is on his knees with his hands in the air surrendering, that’s also worthy of getting some press. Then when the judge finds that same cop not-guilty, that’s also worthy of press.
When an unarmed guy selling cigarettes on the sidewalk gets choked to death by a cop, that’s worthy of press.
When a young woman holding an unopened pocketknife is confronted by five cops then shot to death, that is also worthy of press.
I don’t think it’s a valid question at all to ask why these things get press coverage.
Should 100 unfortunate events/year across ~325M people get as much press as they do? A sense of proportion is necessary.
It has been mentioned repeatedly that police should use deescalation techniques in potentially violent situations. However, psychiatrists and nurses have extremely high rates of assault by patients, and they are TRAINED to deal with distressed individuals. One figure puts 50% of nurses report having been assaulted at work.
Perhaps Greek life hazing deaths shouldn’t be reported on, either. After all, there aren’t that many of them compared to all the people who are in Greek life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Tim_Piazza
Or maybe some things are so awful that they deserve to be discussed no matter how often they occur.