https://wgntv.com/2018/11/11/multiple-wounded-in-robbins-bar-shooting-police-say/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/news/ct-sta-robbins-bar-shooting-st-1112-story.html
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/news/ct-sta-midlothian-police-shooting-lawsuit-st-1113-story.html
Four others were shot in the incident, none of them by police.
Another story of an officer arriving on the scene who immediately starts shooting. I suppose better hiring screening would solve this. It’s a shame we still have to be scared to legally carry a firearm.
Better screening and better training. The emphasis should be on de-escalation. But of course, since courts have repeatedly declared irrational fear of a black man to be a perfectly good reason to shoot him, it will continue.
What @Consolation said.
It’s often mentioned that the “good guy with a gun” is vulnerable to being misidentified as a bad guy by police.
When we teach kids how to take on school Invaders (last resort), we have to specifically teach them to watch out for being considered the bad guy when law enforcement arrives since they have no idea at that point who it is. I like to think we have at least a few seconds to say something and be heard, but maybe not. Unfortunately, I suspect color matters.
But things overall are getting better in Chicago https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-homicides-data-tracker-htmlstory.html
And from the article you can see, that yes, color matters.
It’s good to hear that homicides are down in Chicago. I was there a couple of weeks ago. It was hard to watch the evening news! Oh, my gosh, so many sad stories, including a porch balcony that collapsed and seriously injured five people. I think it would be tough to be a news announcer in that city for very long.
This is such a tragic story.
It’s an improvement but still an appalling number. The big news here in Toronto, which has a slightly larger population than Chicago, today is the 89th murder of the year and that ties the highest number ever in the city.
When oodles of people worried that we would let our son go to Amman, Jordan for a Study Abroad (and go there ourselves to visit him), we decided to get some comparison numbers for them to think about. Since we live in PA, we used Philly as a comparison city - it worked nicely since Amman was the ancient city of Philadelphia, but we had to use the number of homicides for Jordan as a whole as we didn’t find it just for the city.
Population of Philly, PA - 1.5 million
Population of Amman - 4.0 million
Statistically, it was much safer in Amman than Philly. H even started to tell people who said they would “pray for our safety” to “please do as we have to go through Philly (PA) on our way to and from there” - then give them the stats.
Americans are very used to crime and our perception of the world is very skewed from reality.
Even after telling my dad the stats - point blank - he still said, “I can’t believe you would let him go there. I thought you were the smart one of the family.” Ok… He had a great time his semester and we enjoyed our two weeks. We’d happily go back.
The security guard who was shot was wearing apparel clearly marked as security at the time:
It’s a horrible situation and doesn’t look good. But there are many conflicting versions of the events. We may want to wait on the complete investigation to draw conclusions.
The newscast I saw of this incident showed so many people who were so saddened and perplexed at what they had witnessed. I am saddened and perplexed.
I am now, after all of these reported shootings and killings, and all of the conversations about them, completely unsure my boys are ever safe when they are out in the world.
This incident is incredibly awful no matter what the specific details are - the major details are known. It has me really modifying what I’m going to be telling the kids at school the next time we do one of these drills. I already tell them when we have the shooter safely disarmed that we hide the gun rather than keeping it pointed at them 100% because law enforcement won’t know the person holding the gun isn’t the shooter. Now I’m thinking we also put a human barricade between the door and the suspect/holders just to cause LE to wait those few seconds for an explanation. There’s no way I’d use a lad of any sort of color to hold a suspect.
Quite honestly, it also doesn’t give me warm fuzzies when I think about all the armed citizens “protecting” us out there either. This type of mistake is as bad, or in this case worse since the innocent man is the only one who died, as the original shooter. I can easily envision it happening with folks less trained than LE.
@Waiting2exhale I don’t know how the parents of young black men can even begin to deal with this. Or how they dealt with it in the past, before the rest of us started becoming fully aware of it. It’s not like this is a new thing, even though many were blind to it. I am so sorry.
We MUST achieve change in our society.
Same for our son in Lebanon. We had a great time in Beirut! The chaotic, crazy driving is the only thing that worries me for him there. There are churches right next to mosques in downtown Beirut. They co-exist quite nicely.
@Consolation I don’t think Black parents have come up with a solution to raise our young men in a way that will protect them from everything. My son got pulled over for the 1st time recently (forgot to turn on his lights after dark) and his 1st instinctive feeling was a fear of being hurt or killed. He followed the instructions I gave him when pulled over (Well lit area if possible, Hazard lights on, Music off unless low playing church music, license and registration out before officer reaches the car, hands always visible, follow officier’s instructions and stay calm), but it hurts that my son’s 1st thoughts were so terrifying. Our household has tried to give my son the tools to make it and pray daily for him, but I mourn for the security guard and his family because things can go badly even if you follow the rules and do everything right (feeling that same pain from the recent mass shootings).
You know, @Consolation, when I first started actively commenting in these threads there was a very similar discussion.
I don’t know if was a comment from you or @carolinamom2boys to which I responded, but I know my comment was something along the lines of how I haven’t exactly been worried about such an encounter with my son (the oldest at the time was at the center of my thoughts), though I did have him walk the neighborhood every now and again to make sure that neighbors became familiar with his face and presence.
Well, there is a sense of bone-deep concern I have much of the time now, and the persistence of these senseless killings finds me waking to - and walking in - a kind of everyday terror which only rises to my throat and jumps out of my mouth when news of the latest slaying is made known.
Then I remember that, yeah, this t h i s [transpose, moms and dads] is not normal.
Is there any wonder that this stress is showing up in the health of black women.