Horrible, horrible situation.
Somewhere I read about the complaints against the shooter, and at least one of the three resulted in a lawsuit:
“According to the Office of Police Conduct Review, Noor has had three complaints filed against him, two of which remain open. Another was closed without discipline. Noor has been sued once in his short career with the police department, stemming from an incident on May 25 in which he and two other officers went to a woman’s home and took her to a hospital, which the woman alleges constituted false imprisonment, assault and battery. According to the ongoing lawsuit, the officers claimed they had reason to believe the woman was suffering a mental health crisis — which she denied — and Noor “grabbed her right wrist and upper arm,” exacerbating a previous shoulder injury in the process.”
I have witnessed two police officers taking a friend of mine who was suffering from a breakdown and was intensely paranoid into custody on the side of a road in order to take her to the hospital. They did not resort to force until other measures had failed–this situation had been going on for almost a week–but they were ultimately forced to manhandle her into the cruiser and handcuff her. They did this skillfully and with only the degree of force required. To this day she completely denies that she was mentally ill. Please trust me: this was not the first episode, and she definitely was. So on that one, I tend to cut him some slack.
Surely if the noise was so loud then someone else in the neighborhood would’ve have heard it? I would have to emphasize that this is a good, and very residential area, not an urban wasteland where gunshots are commonplace.
“Noor had his gun in his lap at the time, according to the source.”
You’re dreaming. People want accountability for all public causes of death to verify if they are accidents or not. I remember the DC Metro accident from a few years ago when everyone jumped to the assumption that perhaps the driver had been on her cellphone when her train had crashed into the one ahead of her. She had not, and she died too.
It’s not an accident when someone gets shot and killed like this.
Well, now we know how Noor will get off.
Wondering what the justification will be for not turning on the lights so that they could SEE in the dark alley. Not to mention not turning on the cameras when summoned to a potentially violent crime in progress.
He’ll walk. And shortly people will be here to explain why it was all her fault for knocking on the SUV to get their attention, if that’s in fact what happened. Of course, if she had shouted to get their attention, that would have been reason to kill her also. Her fault entirely. SHould have stayed in her apartment and minded her own business. /sarcasm
And of course, some want to turn it into a discussion about race.
This is about on the job incompetence having deadly consequences.
The Castile shooting was VERY suspicious. This one even more so. Who’s next, an 80 year old grandmother?
Both of the shootings were in reasonably benign areas of MPLS/ST. Paul. If cops are that jacked up going into a situation in those areas, what must they be like going into rougher areas of town?
^^^Damond felt safe enough in the neighborhood to run outside in her pajamas to try to help a stranger.
This wasn’t a dark alley as some might be picturing in their heads.
“There are three lights mounted on telephone poles along that route plus nine motion-detector lights on garages, and neighbors said the alley is well-lit at night.”
The state is in charge of the investigation of the actual shooting, but the city is in charge of looking into whether proper procedures were followed responding to the call. And no one is pretending they were.
http://www.startribune.com/after-justine-damond-shooting-chief-harteau-returns-to-city/435651393/
“To me, the real problem here is that a cop with 21 months of experience–and THREE complaints in 21 months, which seems high to me–was partnered with someone with one year of experience. I don’t care how well you are trained; street experience counts for a LOT. I’ve been in situations in which a rookie cop escalated the situation and acted like an idiot and a seasoned partner stepped in and calmed things down.”
That is very true, @Jonri, and this is often the cause of problems with cops, when inexperienced cops are put into tough situations without experienced partners or supervisors being there. Amadou Diallo was killed (the famous 57 shots) by a team of street crimes unit cops, and that unit was made up of all inexperienced cops, both to the street crimes unit and the force as well, and they panicked. More experienced cops have been through a lot of experiences and can judge better when they are in danger and they aren’t (and I have friends who are cops, including one who is a SWAT team member that deals with things like takedown of drug dealers in places like Newark and Paterson here in NJ). The city ran into this when they started this pressure point operation that based on stats, they flooded high crime areas with cops and many of them were cops newly graduated from the academy. Pairing a cop with a little less than 2 years experience with a guy with 1 year is a recipe for trouble IMO.
As far as the image cops have, in part that is their own fault, the culture of many police departments basically says it doesn’t matter is a cop is good or bad, if they are clean or dirty, if they are a cop, they are a cop…it is part of the thin blue line mentality, the us versus them, and it is one of the reasons cops have the image they do. I’ll give you an example, there was a case here in NYC where a cop was drinking after work, drove drunk, and ran over a young woman who had been attending a wedding,killing her. The guy was at the scene of the crash, and the cops who responded took him away and basically hid him, until the booze worked out of his system, and only then took him in to get a BAC test, like 8 or 9 hours after the crash, and as a result the cop could not be charged with the DUI, and ended up I believe keeping his job. He couldn’t be charged with leaving the scene of an accident, because he was at the scene when the cops arrived and gave a statement, and the cops who covered for him were never charged as far as I know for obstructing justice, they got some minor disciplinary action against them for violating rules on some minor things…good cops should want the bad ones thrown off the force, the dirty ones sent to jail, but it does’t work like that.
as far as @TomSrOfBoston of Boston’s claim, here is a BBC article that charts cops killed, and what it shows is what others have said, that perceptions are often based on the past,not reality. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36826297
According to this, about 50 cops a year are killed in the line of duty, but there are well more than 700,000 cops in the US, which means they have about a 1 in 14000 chance of being killed. However, cops have the image that many people do, that it is open season on them, that they are likely to be killed, and it shows in how they police. Whatever Australia’s crime rate is, the point is that Australian police are taught to defend themselves using other methods other than their guns, and that seems to be a big difference in the US. TV and Movies don’t help, where being a cop is about gunfights and taking down the bad guys, many if not most cops go through their careers never having to discharge their weapon, yet you would think it was the wild west out there. I knew some NYC cops when I lived in the Bronx (they lived in my neighborhood) back in the 80’s who worked in neigborhoods like the South Bronx and the like, when the murder rate in NYC was sky high in the 70’s and 80’s, and not one of them had ever had to discharge his weapon on the job, and they were street cops and detectives
I can’t tell if the BBC statistics are cops killed directly, or if that includes accidental deaths (I suspect it is killed directly, one article I read said tallies with the 50 a year number killed, whereas another 50 or so die in accidents, like motorcycle crashes, directing traffic, heart attacks while in pursuit, etc). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/07/12/are-most-job-related-deaths-of-police-caused-by-traffic-incidents/?utm_term=.32e6a58b11c5 is the source.
The perceived crime rate in the US likely influences the perception of crime all around, which likely influences doctrine and training in US police departments. (Actual crime rate is higher in the US than in Australia, but the general perception of crime in the US appears to be far higher than the actual crime rate in the US.) In addition, since police officers’ on-the-job interactions do involve a lot of criminals, that may just reinforce a pre-existing impression of crime all around.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/11/police-key-findings/ has this:
Presumably a police officer in the US is much more likely to encounter people carrying guns than a police officer in Australia (or pretty much any other country in the world).
Re #92 “pretty much any other country in the world”
There are lots of countries where the intentional homicide rate is higher than in the US. Looks like pretty much all of the Americas except for Canada, Chile, Cuba, Aruba, and Martinique report higher intentional homicide rates than the US.
@ucbalumnus:
I suspect they meant in the industrial world, and that statement would hold, in large part because most of the countries in what we call the industrialized world have pretty strict gun control regulations, the fact is that the US is flooded with guns, no one really knows how many are out there, it is at least 300 million, so yep, the cops are a lot more likely to face armed criminals in the US. Australia always had a relatively low rate, but in recent years they tightened up gun ownership rules and the rates went down even more…problem with central and south america is that even if they have gun laws, law enforcement there is sketchy at best, they don’t have the money or resources to effectively regulate it.
While it’s true it’s not open season on cops, it’s equally false to imply it’s open season on civilians. There’s about 1000 people killed by police every year, but less than 100 of those are unarmed. Of those who are unarmed, some carry “toy guns”, which appear nearly identical to real firearms. Not many people would be able to tell the difference between an air soft gun with a removed orange cap and a real firearm. Others are killed while assaulting the police or someone else. Some are mentally ill and choose suicide by cop. The police do need to do a better job of weeding out the bottom 0.01% or at the least reassigning them to desk jobs. We shouldn’t let that distort our perceptions of the other 99.99%.
However, with respect to homicides or attempts, a small number of incidents can create a high level of fear. This includes police officers fearing for their lives while doing their jobs, and others fearing for their lives with respect to dirty police officers or common criminals. Fear which is far out of proportion to the actual risk can lead people to take or support actions or policies which may not be desirable or effective in the actual reality.
Note that terrorism is often effective because the fear it creates is far greater than the actual effect. While ordinary crime and incidents of police misconduct are not normally planned with political motives that terrorists have, they can have political effects.
But also note that the focus on and fear of homicides can distract attention from far more common instances of lower level ordinary crime or police misconduct.
Your statement references intentional homicide rate but mine referenced guns. Though somewhat related, they are not the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate indicates that there are still many countries where the homicide by gun rate or the total death by gun rate is higher than in the US. The table also lists the number of guns per 100 inhabitants, where the US is by far the highest at 112.6.
The Minneapolis chief of police was asked to resign and has just tendered her resignation.