harmonica
Diamond Member
- Sep 1, 2017
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shot in back OR unarmed--unarmed does not mean ''NOT a threat''death by cop is extremely, extremely rare.....there are about 30 million calls for police assistance per year--not counting traffic stops ...and about 900 deaths by copI will not disagree that a substantial amount of the force used by police excessive and unnecessary. But the Black Lives Matter movement, along with other Black activist organizations, have made a habit of aggressively presuming that each and every example of lethal force used by police against a Black subject is unjustifiable -- an act of premeditated murder.When the police were hunting Dorner, they used it as an excuse to shoot two innocent women. In other words, you can always come up with an excuse for doing the wrong thing. It is why we were told in the Army that the maximum effective range of an excuse was zero.
The cops used the Boston Bombers as an excuse to run around raiding houses with armored cars. Holding innocent people at gunpoint. All because they had an excuse that too many would embrace.
There is always an excuse. It is usually nonsense.
I don't know anything about the circumstances preceding the shooting of of Stephon Clark. But if I were one of the two cops who shot him I might be wondering right now if I made the right job choice. Because if what we did is determined to be justifiable, the mood in the Black community is such that the city of Sacramento, and others, is likely to erupt into multi-billion dollar rioting, a factor which could influence the thinking of those who will be judging our action.
I’ve mentioned before about how we got here, that is the place where shooting an unarmed individual is acceptable. Mostly, it was wrong lessons from history, and good intentions. Exceptions that became the rule.
I watched a review of the famous Miami Dade FBI shootout. So many lessons were learned, and about all of them, were wrong. The biggest mistake was one of marksmanship. The agents just didn’t hit what they were shooting at. I don’t care what kind of gun you are carrying, or how powerful the ammunition is, or how many rounds you may have in the magazine, if you don’t hit the target, the baddie, then the rest, just doesn’t matter. The agents had fine weapons. Some had .357 Magnums, which are incredibly effective, if you hit the target. Two agents fired every 9MM round they had, and perhaps hit the baddie once between them. A box of ammunition went downrange and hit nobody.
The lessons learned were not improve marksmanship. It wasn’t more training to actually hit the target. It was to change weapons, and training. More fire, faster. Even now, the FBI and the cops are switching back to 9MM from .40 because it offers them even more shots from the same size handgun.
The training today is an insane perversion of the old west from Hollywood. The QuickDraw, and shooting first. The one who draws and fires first, wins is the lessons of today. We watch as our cops and agents are trained to believe if they hesitate one half of a second, they will die. They honestly believe that they have to draw, and fire fast, and keep shooting, because of the wrong lessons learned from shootouts of the past.
Instead of focusing on when to shoot, the defenders, and police use of force experts run out and explain how the cop had to fire, that he did the right thing. In the 1980’s, there were a few situations where cops shot kids who were playing with toy guns in apartment buildings and neighborhoods. It was night, or poorly lit. They saw a shape in the hand of the individual that looked like a gun, it was exactly the same shape as a gun. Those of us old enough to remember can tell about the panicked parents who rushed out to demand that the toys be made to look different, not at all like a real gun.
Some makers started to put orange tips to show it was a toy, but you get the point I hope.
We as a society heard this and thought about it ourselves. If we saw something that looked like a gun, we would think it was a gun. It seemed a reasonable mistake, and we didn’t want to destroy someone who obviously felt bad enough over a reasonable mistake. We damn sure didn’t want to go back to the bad old days when cops planted guns on their victims to justify the shootings.
We learned the wrong lesson. Instead of leaving it as the exception, it became the rule. A gun shaped object was perfectly acceptable as a reason to shoot. In fact, if you didn’t shoot, you could lose your job as a cop. Your fellow officers would know you were not going to take the action necessary to defend them. The exception became the rule.
Then it was an object in the hand. When people objected, the cops showed extremely rare items, like a cell phone that could fire .22 bullets, or a wallet like case for a tiny .22 pistol. This was the justification for the next exception that became the rule. The guy you are facing might be armed like a wannabe James Bond with a secret cell phone gun, or a wallet gun that could kill the cop. So now anything in the hand was enough of a reason to shoot, in fact, anything in the hand meant you had to shoot. If you didn’t, you would die.
The exception became the rule again. We went from seeing an obvious gun, to seeing anything. Then it was the idea that the baddie might have something in his waist, or pocket, or somewhere hidden from view. The baddie might be the fastest draw alive. Now, we can’t wait to see something in the hand, that is too late, you’re already dead. So the exception of someone drawing a weapon became the rule that they might draw.
In movies, the good guys who aren’t cops, hold up their hands, and lay their weapons down and the cops don’t shoot them. In books, the same thing happens. In real life, if you live or die, is just up to how anxious the cop is to shoot someone. If the cop get the wild idea that this is one of those rules, the draw first, draw fast, and shoot first or die scenarios, you’re going to die. Holding your hands up won’t stop it. There is no action that is reasonably certain that you will probably not get shot.
Now, we’re on to other exceptions. The cop swears that the guy made an offensive gesture towards his waist. The video shows nothing of the sort. Well, we’re told that the cop expected that motion, and when he saw anything he honestly believed it was the motion he expected. So now, we have cops who are expected to be delusional, to see things that didn’t actually happen, and this is not only acceptable, but absolutely normal. The cops can’t wait, if the baddie gets the gun out first, the cop is going to die.
The primary victim of all of these exceptions, which have become rules, is the black community. It was black kids in Los Angeles who I heard about in High School who were shot and killed for playing cops and robbers. It’s the black men who are shot holding their wallets, or cell phones.
Now, imagine this is happening, and when the people don’t get shot, they are arrested for some bullshit charge. Or beaten to a pulp and charged with assaulting a cop. In Ferguson, they charged one guy for destruction of public property. After they beat him to a pulp, they charged him for bleeding on their uniforms. And people honestly wonder why the community of Ferguson had no love, and no respect, and no trust in the police.
One of my friends, who is black, told me that with my attitude, if I was black, the cops would have killed me long ago. Others both black and white agreed with the statement. I was one of those who agreed with the statement.
After decades of abuses, which you admit are happening, is it any wonder why the community is short tempered now? Every once in a while things get heated, and a new chief of police comes in, and promises to change things. Nothing changes. The same cops are doing the same shit, and nothing happens. If a cop beats a man half to death, and the video shows that the man was handcuffed at the time, and it’s happened more than once, the cops might be suspended, busted down a rank, or at worst fired and forced to get a job with another department. If you lay so much as a finger on the cop, you are going to jail, and prison, for years. Even if the video shows you never touched the cop, it doesn’t matter, because the cop thought you had assaulted him.
We have created a monster, or at least stood by and let the monster grow right in front of us. It would take decades to reign it back in and get things back to where they were thirty years ago. People aren’t going to wait for decades, not now. Any changes that would satisfy the community, would be opposed by the cops, and the politicians who are terrified of looking soft on crime. Again, the wrong lesson led us to that scenario, but that is another long thread.
...most of these are obviously justified
....most of the blacks shot are obviously justified
Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.https://nypost.com/2017/09/26/all-that-kneeling-ignores-the-real-cause-of-soaring-black-homicides/In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous,
Half of the shootings by police in Georgia were either people shot in the back, or unarmed. Half. Every single one of them was ruled a justified use of force. Every single person shot by police who was unarmed, or shot in the back, was a perfectly justified use of force. Half.
OVER THE LINE: Police shootings in Georgia
So that leaves the question, is Georgia unusually brutal, or is Georgia just one example of what is going on through the nation? If it was unusually brutal, wouldn’t the FBI under Obama have ripped it a new hole?
Half.
