If one person a month (12 a year) is shot by the police when a beanbag gun, a taser, a warning, or anything else or nothing should have been done, it’s already a problem to be solved.
@fragbot: #57 is horrifying and terrifying… how can you bandy about a number such as 100 (or almost ten a month) as if it were low? That’s what I mean by “desensitized” to violence. It’s incomprehensible that you wouldn’t consider 100 so horrifying it floors you and makes you want to call your congressman to demand action.
I clicked on the link. My guess was 10 and just clicking “under 18” there were 16 deaths of minors. 48 people were unarmed. 40 were women.
The numbers seemed staggering to me instead of problematic. It made me want to cry for our country.
I was assaulted more than once when I worked at an IPV shelter and we were all trained in deesculation. Did it stop every situation? Obviously not, but even 20 year old me was able to stay calm enough to hear if someone was yelling.
If your nerves aren’t calmer than a 20 year old, unarmed woman working alone, you don’t deserve to be a cop and you sure as hell shouldn’t have a lethal weapon on you.
To the extent that police misconduct reduces citizen trust of the police, it makes the job of police harder and criminals easier. Since non-lethal police misconduct is far more common than lethal police misconduct, but generates far more personal and friend/relative anecdotes to reduce citizen trust of the police even though it is rarely reported in the news, the small number of lethal cases that may be police misconduct that are reported are like the tip of an iceberg.
Law and order are best protected and served when law-abiding citizens trust the police, providing effective assistance (reporting crimes, giving witness reports, etc), rather than fearing all contact with the police to the point that victims and witnesses are afraid to help the police catch criminals.
I had jury duty this week. As the jury was being selected, the judge asked the potential jurors whether they would believe police witnesses. I didn’t get called up, but if I had been, I would have had to say I don’t trust the police.
This is why the police need to get their house in order. I’m white, and I grew up in a leafy suburb where the police were our friends. I used to trust the police. Now I don’t, because I’ve seen what the worst police officers do, and I’ve also see that all the other police defend even the worst officers. I’ve seen the lying. I’ve seen the videos.
This is a problem. If suburbanites stop trusting the police, we’re in trouble. The police need to fix this, and they need to fix it now.
The automobile death rate in the US is several times that of Germany, a country that still has no speed limits on some sections of the autobahn. Due to poor driver training, poorly maintained cars, substandard roads, and road rage, tens of thousands of people die needlessly in the US, each year at the rate of almost 100 per day.
@MYOS1634, your voice must surely be hoarse from talking to your congressman about this ongoing, needless and preventable tragedy.
He was holding a pipe, not brandishing it. There was ONE of him. There were how many officers? Two or more? They could have physically overpowered him IF he was aggressive–which he hadn’t been yet–without ever pulling a gun. They could have BACKED UP for doG’s sake. There was no immediate reason to force a confrontation. De-escalation should be their primary goal.
It is unlikely that police officers would want to get into hand-to-hand combat against someone holding a potentially deadly weapon. However, since they obviously had access to a less-likely-to-be-lethal ranged weapon (Taser) which one of the officers actually used, that makes the decision use the gun by the other officer at the same time suspect. Of course, even before that, it is certainly possible that they could have handled the situation better before it got to the point of “apparently threatening person holding a potentially deadly weapon getting too close”.
@hebgebe: not sure what your point is, but if you’re concerned about road safety, your best bet is calling the mayor’s office or state representative but most importantly writing your local paper and organizing with your neighborhood or local community organization.
That’s quite possible, but Hispanics come in all races, from white with light hair/eyes to brown skin to black. It’s impossible to know just by seeing a name. I’m Hispanic with a common Hispanic maiden last name. My younger brother and I are often asked if we are Italian. My older brother looks like the typical middle aged white guy. My younger sister looks like your average suburban white woman. My daughter has blonde hair and blue eyes.
I fall on the side of wondering why using a taser wasn’t the weapon of choice. This seems pretty senseless considering that they had less than lethal means of dealing with this man at their disposal.