quote:Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study that raises pointed questions about racial bias among medical examiners and highlights the lack of reliable national record keeping on what has become a major public health and civil rights issue. ... Researchers compared information from a federal database known as the National Vital Statistics System, which collects death certificates, with recent data from three organizations that track police killings through news reports and public records requests. When extrapolating and modeling that data back decades, they identified a startling discrepancy: About 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death.
However outraged you've been at the number of blacks killed by police, double it.
I'm not wanting to downplay the tragic police failures such as George Floyd and many others, but...
The police, especially in troubled areas of big cities, have a very difficult job. I think that one might need to be crazy to want to step into doing such a job, and/or the job might induce craziness. Not unlike being "the boots on the ground" in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and (?).
Moose
Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U Evolution - Changes in the environment, caused by the interactions of the components of the environment.
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"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
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It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn't know what he was talking about. - Paul Krugman (as stolen from Chiroptera's signature)
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"I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things, but I'm highly ignorant about everything." - Moose
The police, especially in troubled areas of big cities, have a very difficult job.
Yes, their job is difficult, but they're taking the difficulties of that job out on the public they're sworn to protect because of a problematic culture underpinned by and likely caused by qualified immunity. It's the age old "power corrupts" story, with the result that in too many jurisdictions police get away with all kinds of malfeasance and misbehavior including, sometimes, murder.
Arguably the job of police might be easier without qualified immunity. Without a feeling of impunity they might be less likely to walk into dangerous situations or escalate them in ways that make the chances they'll need their firearms more likely.
The cases where police have been successfully prosecuted are ludicrously extreme. Walking into a man's apartment and murdering him. Choking a suspect for seven minutes. Tossing a handcuffed man into the back of a police van without securing him with seat belts and then taking a series of violent turns that slam him into the van's sides.
The cases where police were not charged are also informative. Deaf Magdiel Sanchez murdered when he failed to follow police instructions yelled from behind him. 12-year-old Tamir rice murdered while playing with a toy gun in a park. Breonna Taylor shot to death in her own home during a no-knock raid based on an errant informant. Qualified immunity is very powerful.
I don't know what percentage of police discharge of weapons results in death, but I've always suspected it was pretty high. This might lead one to believe that police are crack shots who aim for the heart and hit it every time. The reality is that a cop discharging his weapon is usually in a panicked and highly volatile frame of mind that often causes them to completely discharge their weapons at the supposed suspect.
For years I've asked why cops can't shoot to wound and the answer is always the same: the chest is the biggest target, and since a cop would only be using lethal force when lethally threatened he must aim for the area that has the best chance of neutralizing the threat.
That's a good story, but it's a lie. The big problem isn't cops constantly being lethally threatened by citizens (which of course happens, but that's not the *big* problem) but cops being spooked into thinking there might possibly be a scintilla of a chance of the potential for being lethally threatened. Kid holding a (toy) gun? Shoot him. (Deaf) man with his back to you refusing to follow orders? Shoot him. With qualified immunity to remove almost all possibility of accountability there's rarely any downside to putting their own safety above the safety of the public they're pledged to serve and protect. And so we have the current situation of a citizenry preyed upon by cops who shoot first and are later almost invariably exonerated by their department.
The war-zone style training made available to contributes to the problem, turning good cops into paranoid zombies who see citizens as potential threats instead of as the people they serve.
So three cheers for this small step forward that, if adopted nationwide, would greatly reduce the number of unnecessary police homicides. Of course the ultimate goal is to get rid of the guns. Put all the guns in an armory and break them out only when needed.
Eddie F. Gonzalez, 51, a Long Beach school safety officer at Millikan High School, witnessed a fight between Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez and an unidentified 15-year-old girl. Manuela jumped into a vehicle which sped off. Gonzalez screamed at the vehicle to stop and fired two shots into it, one hitting Manuela in the head and leaving her brain dead. She was taken off life support a few weeks ago and her organs donated. Gonzalez has been arrested and charged with murder. (Source: Long Beach school safety officer Eddie F. Gonzalez charged with murder in the shooting death of Mona Rodriguez. )
Most school safety officers do not need guns, and most schools do not need school safety officers. As described in https://healthyschoolscampaign.org/...-belong-in-our-schools, they don't make schools safer, and they make it more likely that students will be introduced into the criminal justice system, especially minorities who are the frequent target of school safety officers:
quote:Research does not show that increased presence of law enforcement makes schools safer. Instead, school police officers reinforce the criminalization of young people of color, serving as a key component of the school-to-prison pipeline. Black and Latinx students are more likely to be disciplined, suspended and arrested in school when police are present. Police assigned to school buildings often don’t receive the necessary specialized training on adolescent development, racial equity, restorative justice or strategies for de-escalation, leaving many unequipped to do their jobs without causing harm to students.
As the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law stated in its 2017 report Handcuffs in Hallways: The State of Policing in Chicago Public Schools: “Research shows that the mere presence of police officers in school increases the likelihood that a student will be referred to law enforcement for adolescent behavior. School-based arrests, which fall more harshly on students of color, put students in direct contact with the justice system. Poor policing within schools therefore puts students on the fast track to the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Use of school safety officers increased as school shootings increased, but it has not reduced school shootings at all. School shootings have only increased. One could argue school safety officers are causing the increase, but the correlation is not causation. School shootings have gone up with the increased prevalence of guns in our society.
We all know that school shooters frequently pull out their weapons and begin firing in the presence of safety officers - not! School safety officers are useless in a crisis because shootings will only rarely happen where the safety officer is. My old high school was huge - it took at least a couple minutes to get from one end to the other at a run. School safety officers are not needed because they don't solve the problem they were intended to solve. And they definitely shouldn't have guns. There should never be guns in schools, even on the hip of a police officer. Especially on the hip of a possibly "drunk with power and full of qualified immunity" police officer, like Officer Gonzalez.
As a Non-American, who visited the US a few times, it was strange to me that some Police Officers in the US had second jobs as security guards in pubs. I encountered that in various cities; Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, New York.
Both countries I have citizenship of would not allow police officers to have second jobs, as they officially work 24 hours a day. Maybe the problem is that police officers in the US don't get paid enough for a decent living?
Cops are so obliging. If you want to get shot then just behave in a threatening way, or behave in a way that could be interpreted as threatening by cops conditioned to interpret the slightest hazard as a threat to their safety.
Christian Hall was depressed and suicidal on a December afternoon last year, standing on the ledge of a highway overpass and holding what police said they thought was a real gun but was actually a pellet gun. Christian wanted to die, and the cops were just so obliging. His hands in the air, the gun in one hand, the cops shot him dead. See https://www.nbcnews.com/...ia-police-shooting-video-rcna5626.
No charges were filed because the Monroe County district attorney ruled the murder justified because the lives of the troopers were in danger.
It is just so comforting to know that there are armed men and women walking among us who only have to say they felt threatened in order to justify anything they do, including murder. They don't actually have to be under any threat, they just have to say they felt they were.
But the police have demonstrated that, their brains awash in the freeing elixir of qualified immunity (which in reality is almost always total immunity), that they are not a discerning bunch. If a few neurons in their brain twitch and signal threat then bang, bang, bang, you're dead.
Facts are stubborn things, and one unchangeable fact is that Patrick Lyoya was shot in the back of the head. Lyoya was shot by a Grand Rapids police officer sitting on his back while he lay face down on the ground. There are no bonus points for guessing Lyoya was black - that goes without saying.
Patrick Lyoya and his family arrived from the Congo in 2014 as refugees fleeing violence. In the videos he appears confused and may not have understood the officer, but a struggle ensues when Lyoya runs away from the officer (we'll likely never know why since he's dead) toward the front of his vehicle. He was of course unarmed and not threatening the officer, was simply running away.
Traffic patrol officers should not carry guns. Or Tasers. If the driver is uncooperative, call for backup. If the driver is armed and dangerous, let him go. If they drive off, let them go. The police dash-cam already has all the necessary information. Sure, if there are drugs or crime evidence in the vehicle it gives the driver the opportunity to get rid of it, but the purpose of traffic stops is traffic safety, not to come across crime evidence by happenstance. It is long past time to stop murdering people during traffic stops. And of course it is racist. The statistics clearly bear this out.
Tyreek Hill is one of the best wide receivers in the NFL, but yesterday morning outside Hard Rock Stadium where the Miami Dolphins were scheduled to play the Jacksonville Jaguars that afternoon he was pulled over for a minor traffic violation and ended up face down on the ground in handcuffs. Because the incident occurred just outside the stadium, other Dolphin players arriving at the stadium who observed the incident stopped to lend support. Dolphins defensive tackle Calais Campbell was also put in handcuffs. He claimed he was trying to "deescalate" the situation, but police said he failed to follow a direct order.
While one of the officers was placed on administrative leave, any consequences he or other police face will not be because they broke any law because police don't have to follow the law - they have qualified immunity. Police only answer to department rules and regulations. This is, as I have argued many times, a travesty. It is fortunate no shots were fired. Tyreek Hill is black, after all, as is Clais Campbell and many of the other Dolphins who stopped, and in the eyes of the police, primed and pumped full of paranoia, that could easily constitute a dangerous mob.
quote:A representative for the police union said Hill was at fault for not being “immediately” cooperative with officers.
Well, that's chilling. I await with bated breath the explanation for what constitutes "immediate" cooperation during a routine traffic stop.
I neither confirm nor deny the malicious rumors that in my younger days I received many speeding tickets, but if it were true then I would confirm that I was never removed from the car in any traffic stop. But of course, I'm an entitled white person. Were I black perhaps I'd still be suffering from the injuries I received during my whuppin' for being an uppity black guy.
I'm not sure whether the video is a net good or bad for Tyreek. He lowers his window and instructs the policemen not to knock on his window several times, maybe five times altogether. The policeman asks why he's not wearing his seat belt several times, but Tyreek does not answer that question. He hands the policeman something that is probably his license and registration, then he rolls his window up again, telling the policeman to do what he has to do. He said later that he rolled his window up to avoid attracting attention so that people don't notice that it's him. He's also already on the phone to his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, and may have been trying to hear him above the traffic noise and the talking of the policeman.
The policeman, who already has Tyreek's license and registration, asks him to roll the window down again. Tyreek opens the window a couple inches while the policeman continues to tell him to lower the window all the way. When the window doesn't open further after a few seconds the policeman decides to remove him from car, after which he is dragged out, placed face down on the ground, handcuffed, then stood up.
A view of the vehicles behind Tyreek's reveals four police motorcycles. For one traffic stop? Why? If there is a recording of the police chatter before the stop I would love to hear it, because I don't think four police motorcycles would have shown up to pull over a white guy in an SUV.
Tyreek keeps asking why they were banging on his window like they're crazy, which sounds obnoxious to me. He is walked to the curb where he is told to sit. He tries to explain about his knee surgery (I'm guessing that he'd like to avoid bending the knee beyond a certain point or do it in an awkward way), and then the police become even more violent.
Tyreek aroused suspicion and fear in the police by rolling his tinted window up, hindering their ability to see. That's on him.
The antagonistic and very physical response of the police could be interpreted as police violence except that I don't blame them for paranoia when confronted with someone who appears to be trying to hide whatever he's doing in the car. On the other hand, they put two other Dolphins in handcuffs who they accused of interference and of failing to follow a direct order, which implies a police force out of control.
I've probably said this before, but police can quickly transform into people who are not your friend. Most are trained to view everyone around them not as citizens they're pledged to protect but as potential criminals. They have a lot of training and can do you a lot of damage in a very brief period of time, plus they have guns, plus they have qualified immunity and will be unlikely to face any legal consequences for anything they do. Avoid them if you can.
For the record, my wife walked by while I was watching the video and asked what I was watching, so I started it again from the beginning. When it completed she said that to her it looked like a clear case of "driving while black."
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