I keep wondering when enough people are going to realize that our police officers might become a little bit slower in pulling the trigger if we didn’t have 300,000,000 guns in the hands of our citizens.
Where did you see that she had a gun? This is the second woman who’s only “offense” was to report a crime via 911 that he assulted in two years! According to the article linked above he didn’t even get out of the fricking patrol car before shooting her! This is crazy!
@roethlisburger Minneapolis has a law requiring the body cams. If there isn’t time to turn one on, the camera is supposed to be activated ASAP after the officer uses force.
See http://www.startribune.com/aclu-assails-failure-of-officer-to-turn-on-body-camera/434991553/
She died of one gunshot wound to the abdomen. Neither officer turned on his camera.
@jonri are you saying that niether officer had time to turn on thier camera after one of them shot an unarmed women in her PJ’s from the comfort of the passenger seat of the patrol car? Something is very wrong here!
@3scoutsmom No, I did NOT say that.
It does look like the fact that the race of the officer and the person shot do not align with the usual stereotypes and expectations may have slowed the usual jumping-to-conclusions from both the right and left.
Probably because Americans are so fearful of crime that most will tolerate mediocre policing out of such fear (after all, if criminals are believed to be all around, it is easier to believe that the person encountered by the police is actually guilty no matter what). Crime has fallen considerably since the peak of the crime wave in the early 1990s, but people polled by Gallup mostly think that crime has gone up almost every year since then.
Ok. Piecing together snippets of info my best guess is that explanation will be that woman approached police car with object in her hand. Shooter yelled at her to put gun down move away. She was startled by the screaming and his wrong belief she had gun and didn’t react quickly enough. He fired. It was cellphone in her hand. " tragic misunderstanding ".
@3scoutsmom Are you referring to my post #20? I didn’t say she had a gun. I was stating an opinion that the police might not be shooting so many innocent people if they weren’t so afraid of getting shot themselves in the line of duty. I think what actually happened was something like post #26. If we didn’t have 300,000,000 guns in the hands of our citizens, the police might be more successful in doing their jobs without taking innocent lives. I realize that some of these shootings are gross and blatant negligence or outright disregard for human life, but many of them, IMO, happen because the officer misjudges the situation thinking the person is armed, and reacts too quickly out of fear (Tamir Rice, Philandro Castile, et al). Add to that the number of other accidental shootings (toddlers with guns killing many more people/year on avg in the US than terrorists), and 30,000 homicides by guns/year… Well, let’s just say I’m not a member of the NRA.
By all accounts an amazing person
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4705886/Justine-Damond-s-life-gunned-US.html
The family need answers.
Regarding the high cost to taxpayers because of lawsuits and settlements, I am reminded of columnist George F. Will’s observation at the height of the Los Angeles Police use of force controversies in the 1990s. There were so many victorious lawsuits against the LAPD and substantial compensation to the plaintiffs that Will opined that stubborn L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, who was not a fervent supporter of civil liberties, should be fired for his financially burdensome incompetence.
If a police officer is so terrified by a woman in her nightgown with a cellphone, he is in the wrong occupation.
I have no idea why there aren’t effective non-lethal weapons that police can reach for first. On a call like this, where a woman is being sexually assaulted, why would you be in such fear that you might shoot the victim or the caller? It’s not like someone was reported with a gun. Killing someone should not be your first instinct.
26 - I think if there was some reason that the public could understand (like I thought her cell phone was a gun), we would have heard it by now. More likely, this is a cop who should have been fired (3 complaints in 2 years) but wasn't because he was viewed as a symbol by the Somali community.
She called to report a possible sexual assault in progress, was wearing pajamas and holding a cellphone, and police still “saw a gun”??? Seriously???
You’re misunderstanding my post. I was responding to Post #26. IF there were some sort of semi-‘reasonable’ explanantion LIKE the officer mistook a cellphone for a gun, then the public relations people for the police would have made a public comment to that effect already.
Given that no such ‘explanation’ has come forth yet, two days later, there must be no explanation that won’t make the police officer or the Minneapolis police force look terrible in this case.
I suspect the guy was a bad officer given the number of complaints in such a few years but was not let go. He was a sort of role model in the Somali community.
If I had just shot someone, I would probably not turn on my bodycam, either because I had time to think and thought, “bad idea!” or because I wasn’t composed enough to do so. I would be more surprised if the officers had turned their cameras on afterward.
I listened to the mayor’s remarks. She said that they have a certain protocol for investigations, which requires an independent investigation. This one is being conducted by a state agency, not by Minneapolis. Apparently silence by the local police force until the state completes its investigation is part of the protocol–which makes a lot of sense to me.
She said that she has no more knowledge of the status of the investigation than any other citizen.
Given that the woman was in her nightgown, and they were inside the cops car and not in immediate danger (even if she pulled a gun, for example, it would take time, pulling a gun is not like quick draw in westerns), they would have had time to turn on their body camera, the fact that neither did, especially the guy in the passenger seat who was furthest away, seems to indicate to me they didn’t feel immediately threatened. If the woman was yelling at them hysterically or whatnot, given they were in the car, not to mention she had no visible weapon, they were not in an dangerous position.
So why did the cop shoot? He panicked IMO, he got freaked out, maybe she was acting weird to him (IDK), but he panicked. It isn’t an excuse, but if the guy had other incidents of excessive force to me that shows a pattern, not of someone who is gun happy necessarily, but someone who is prone to panic, which is not a good thing. Unless they can come up with some kind of smoking gun, some sort of reason why the cop would feel threatened, his actions not only killed the woman in question, but also endangered his partner as well, it is completely unsafe to fire across like that with his partner in the front seat (and if the partner felt threatened, how come he didn’t pull his gun and shoot? Not like the guy in the passenger seat from the accounts I read saw something that guy couldn’t) and shows a serious lack of judgement to me. Panic IMO is also behind a lot of the cops shooting minority people, it isn’t that they hate non whites per se IMO, but rather that they harbor the notion that the community they are in (often poor or working class areas with problems) is dangerous and the people are likely to do violence and such, and therefore are very liable to panic if things get even a bit tense, when you are on a hair trigger already it leads to tragedy IME.
Someone asked why juries are loath to convict cops, it is because most people realize and see that the cops, to be honest, are on the frontlines, that they face things many of us wouldn’t understand (obviously depends where you live, my local cops at best face obnoxious squirrels, cats that climb trees and probably spend their time giving tickets for dogs off leash and people whose lawns grew too tall:). It is partially why in the Amadou Diallo case in NYC the cops got off for killing an unarmed man, it was because they were in a dangerous neighborhood with rampant drug dealing and violence and guns and they were on a hair trigger (they also got off because part of it was the fault of the NYC police department, the cops were part of a street crime unit but they all were inexperienced, and they didn’t have an experienced supervisor there which they should of, and they panicked). And unfortunately cops still have the thin blue wall of silence mentality, that even bad cops, corrupt cops, are cops and part of the “Us” not “Them”, even if bad cops are one of the reasons people don’t trust the cops and cooperate with them.
@roethlisburger :
The Justice department, if they decide that police departments are routinely depriving civil rights, or if they feel that law enforcement is otherwise in trouble, could issue rules requiring cops ot have body cameras, the same way that the Justice department can review police departments and if they decide there is a culture of civil rights violations, like the Rizzo era Philadelphia department or the LAPD under Gates and his predeccesors, they can step in and put in place federal monitoring and issue rules as well. Whether they would do so for all police departments in this country is moot, they could, but likely they would do it on a department by department basis as needed, I doubt they would bother with my local cops whose big problems are obnoxious squirrels, traffic lights out of order, car accidents and giving tickets to people whose lawns are too high or whose dogs were off the leash or something.
I think that the Minneapolis PD is gonna have a lot of explaining to do, why they don’t require the cameras to be used, or in this case, why if it was a situation they thought was getting dangerous, neither turned it on, and they also are going to have to explain why a cop on the force 2 years had so many complaints against him but was still out on the street, at least until the incidents against him were checked out
From what I have read, the investigation is being handled by an independent state agency. So the Minneapolis police/city are not in charge. They do not have the ability to go public with info at this point. Presumably info will become public when the investigation is complete. At that point, a decision to charge (if appropriate) should be made.
At this point, we have an instant society. Everything is expected immediately. But when there are formal protocols in place, those must be followed before info is made public. Often times initial reports are wrong. Sometimes overcoming those incorrect statements is a challenge (they seem to live long after evidence is shown proving them false). And when police put out statements that are positive to the position of the officer involved, people complain the police are cherry picking info to share. But all the info isn’t available so what should they do? Wait until the investigation is completed or release info piecemeal?
I understand the family wants information. I feel bad for them in a time of loss. But there are protocols in place to be followed.
According to information provided by Minneapolis officials, the cams are supposed to be turned on BEFORE approaching a situation in which there might be conflict. The “as soon as possible afterwards” language applies to situations where conflict arises out of nowhere, and the officer has to react immediately.
Since these guys were called to investigate a possible sexual assault taking place right then and there, they obviously should have turned on their cams before pulling up to the site. Not to mention their cruiser cam.
Independent investigations do not necessarily have more positive results for victims’ families. At least that has been the experience in Wisconsin so far.