Well at least you now agree we were talking about different things. Why you quoted part of what I said to say what you said though remains a mystery.
That was a good step to have the police chief resign. As a business owner it is ultimately my responsibility to vet and train my employees. While my line of work is not life or death if an employee does something wrong it needs to be assessed up the chain including me.
That resignation blows my mind. But I haven’t read anything else about it yet.
Right now, it sounds like the mayor has thrown the police chief under the bus to bolster her own position.
asked to resign by who?
maybe the mayor should resign instead.
I am not big on symbolic resignations and firings. “Someone’s head has to roll!” Well, is it the right head, or is it just pretending like you’re doing something? Is there a systemic problem with the police department, because of direction coming from the top? If there’s a training or hiring issue, follow it up and retrain people, fire the people messing it up. But demanding resignations before they’ve even completed the investigations is just pretending to do something…before they even have analyzed what should be done. All political garbage.
This wasn’t just a symbolic resignation. The chief didn’t have the support of rank-and-file police officers, or of the community,or of the mayor, or of the city council. That left her unable to lead. And she lost any semblance of support when she remained out of the city on vacation, without making any kind of statement, for days after the Damond shooting. People wanted some indication that the leadership of the police department recognized the gravity of the situation and was prepared to take whatever steps may be necessary to set things right. Instead they got deafening silence, which came across as either callous indifference or deer-in-the-headlights paralysis. That sealed her fate.
Pretty sure that Canada doesn’t have a higher homicide rate than the US.
Drove by the area yesterday… It is a good area, not at all dangerous, making the jumpiness of the cop even more unforgivable.
It sounds to me like the mayor was just saving her own job first, by firing someone else. Maybe the police chief should have been fired for the other issues, and if so, why didn’t she do it before? I’m not impressed with someone trying to please the masses before a thoughtful investigation. I’ll be impressed if they actually fix their problems. Maybe it will be better with a new police chief, but seems you’d have to bring in someone from outside the system.
It does seem unusual to fire the police chief over this unless there is something in Noor’s file that indicates he should not have been hired in the first place or that he should have been fired before this incident.
There was an article in the Telegraph in which Noor’s neighbor (African-American) was interviewed. The neighbor said that Noor was a nervous, jumpy person who didn’t like women, kids or African-Americans. The neighbor said he was not surprised when he heard it was Noor who had shot the woman.
He’s Somali American. Doesn’t that by definition make him African American?
@lvvcsf I think they put it that way to make it clear that he’s an immigrant. In this case it’s also relevant that he’s Somali because there is a large and fairly recently arrived group of Somalis in that area.
Also, some Somalis don’t consider themselves to be AA since most slaves are descended from the people of West Africa and Somalia is in east Africa. Most Somalis are Muslim and consider themselves part of the Arab world (and are members of the Arab League), and most African Americans are Christian.
Many recent immigrants from Africa don’t really consider themselves to be AA either, as they associate that label more with the descendants of slaves whose families have been here since then. The census considers them AA, however I’m not sure if that’s true for Somali people.
Yes. However, people can be racist against their own race, or subgroups of their own race.
@Ivvcsf Depends on how you define African American. Some consider it a specific cultural group descended from American slaves, which would preclude Somali Americans being African American. Others just consider it another way of phrasing Person of African Descent. Personally, I typically use the first definition, due to the historical context.
Basically, we didn’t really have black African immigration outside the slave trade until after the Civil Rights Movement and the popularization of African American as a term for black Americans, who have a very well defined cultural niche in America. African immigrants don’t really fit into that cultural niche, tending to identify much more with their own expat communities, so it makes sense to make the distinction between African American and Somali American.
I just listened to a podcast that discussed whether African Americans who wear African clothing with specific tribal meaning and connection in Africa, sometimes mixing things from different areas, are guilty of cultural appropriation. Some African immigrants are annoyed by it. The range of responses on both sides was very interesting.
I read somewhere, probably the Star Tribune, that the officer had been part of an accelerated training program for people with college degrees wishing to become cops. It is unknown by me if the training in that system is adequate.
Pulling other things out of my memory (no links to provide) that he was the first officer with a Somali background and this was a really big deal. The metro area has a huge population of Somalis.
I also think I read that the chief had been on vacation at the time. I don’t know if the delay in a statement from her was due to communications.
“It is unknown by me if the training in that system is adequate.”
I would think that 99% of people with or without training would know not to shoot to someone given the same situation.
I see training as having two prongs. First is to learn your job. The second is to wash people out who cannot hack the stress.
Most shootings that I have seen, and certainly most of the controversial ones, appear to show the cops in a panic, and firing multiple shots at an already downed victim. I think it is one thing to be “trained” to be in a lethal use of force situation, and quite another to execute that training. I see to recall reading a Special Forces sniper talking about all the physiological changes the body goes through when deciding to pull the trigger, and how rare it is to have someone who can keep their wits about them when doing so.
In other words, how effective is the “training” that cops get when it comes to discharging weapons?
Was the cop in this case in panic? If so, why did he panic?
The chief was on vacation but people sent her text messages on her personal cell phone—including the president of the police union who told her it was urgent that she clarify who was the department’s “point of contact” in addressing the crisis caused by the Damond shooting. No response. But she did find time to post photos of herself vacationing in Telluride, Colorado on Facebook. The president of the police union said this was just “wrong.”
Her mishandling of this situation was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Tensions have been running high between the police department and the city’s black community for some time over the usual issues of alleged racial profiling and excessive use of force, reaching a boiling point after police shot and killed a young unarmed black man in a predominantly black North Side neighborhood in November, 2015. This led to large protests, accompanied by alleged police mishandling of the protests. Tensions were further inflamed when the then-president of the police union publicly accused a community organizer and the city’s mayor of exchanging gang signs, suggesting the mayor was somehow in cahoots with the gangs. This led to more protests directed against the police union president, who was already a controversial figure in the black community because of his vigorous defense of officers accused of excessive use of force. The chief subsequently managed to alienate just about everyone when she (rather ham-handedly, IMO) appointed the controversial by-then-ex-head of the police union to be the commander of the same North Side precinct where the Jamar Clark killing and subsequent protests had taken place, leading to even angrier protests. The mayor, who has the ultimate say on all personnel appointments including those in the police department, overruled the chief on that appointment. This led to charges by the current head of the police union that the chief was an ineffectual puppet, with the police department being run by politicians and not professionals. So by the time of the Damond killing, the chief had little support among the police officers under her command, faced strong opposition from the city’s black community, had lost the confidence of the mayor and a clear majority of the city council, and was dogged by broader questions about her judgment and her ability to lead the department effectively. In that context, five days of silence following the Damond shooting were just too much. Australian reporters covering the shooting and its aftermath expressed disbelief that the chief of police would remain silent and out of public view at such a critical time. I suspect most people in Minneapolis shared that view, and few were sorry to see her go.