Imagine the confidence you must have that law does not apply to you to: 1. Get drunk 2. Be armed 3. Get in a fight 4. Use your weapon 5. Sue your employer for thinking that because 1-4, you need to take some unpaid time off
If, by “confidence” you mean gigantic, brass, church bell sized balls (of unmitigated schmaltz) then yeah...
Who in here is saying anyone deserves to be shot to death for doing any of those things? I think we are all in agreement about the last 6 lines from the tweet VD posted, but the fact that he felt the need to post it suggests that maybe he thinks we aren’t. But I don’t know why he thinks that.
We actually had an incident in the town where I live a year or so ago where a guy was walking down one of our busiest streets (actually a 4 lane state highway that runs through town) with a gun in his hand. Police showed up, guy points the gun at a cop, but the cop realized that the guy was trying to do the “suicide by cop” thing and de-escalated the situation. The guy was taken into custody and wound up getting the help he obviously needed. I don’t know for sure if the guy ended up going to jail or if he was sent to a mental facility but as far as I know he’s still drawing breath. Before anyone asks... yes, the cop was white, and the guy with the gun was black. It shouldn’t matter, but apparently it does. The cop kept his wits about him and a situation that could have gone very wrong ended peacefully. I hate it with everything that is in me that the encounter here is the exception, and not the rule... the city tried to make a big deal of it but the cop wasn’t having it. I don’t know him personally, but we have mutual friends and they have told me that this guy honestly doesn’t feel like a “hero” just so much as a cop that fell back on his training and did his job.
Reminds me of the scene in The Wire where Bunny Colvin made the cops walk the beat again in Baltimore in order to get to know the people of the community.
I really see all of these sorts of things as connected, even though the focus is and should be on the black community. This grew out of normalizing how they are treated. But anyway, this case of a septuagenarian with dementia being slammed to the ground and getting her shoulder broken by officers who approached her while she was walking home and picking wildflowers (she had been involved with a perceived attempted shoplifting incident down the road, likely due to her dementia) is pretty indefensible. And the casualness of the brutality is just awful.
He accidentally is demonstrating that the officer recognized he did wrong, with the whole "he only fired once, normally we'd fire twice." And they don't have to be shot at or see a gun to kill someone. Only need a "reasonable belief." Imagine trying to use that as a defense for killing a police officer.
The "he only had .8s of a second to make a decision" is a crock, too. No, that simply means the officer had already decided to shoot prior to the kid dropping the gun. The guy, as you said, gives a very wide latitude on cops being able to shoot and, specifically, shoot to kill which is pretty disturbing. I'm also irked as his insistence on this kid as a "gangbanger". He was 13. Yeah, he might have been in a gang, but, one, I'm not sure if the police knew this at the time and, two, he was still a kid. He could have chosen any number of ways to present this situation, specifically as a tragedy on all sides. Instead, he shits on a 13 year kid as if his life path were already decided. He demonstrated the epitome of the type of cop people have are having issues with these days.
Ya, acting like a gang affiliation means something only gives a gang more credibility as an organization that matters. It shouldn't mean shit in terms of the individual.
Let the merits of the case stand on their own. We don't need people intimidating witnesses or threatening riots and other trouble if the verdict those people want isn't reached by the jury. We should not be convicting people of crimes because we are scared of what will happen if we don't. No one wants to live in that sort of society. This sort of stuff is one of the many problems that come along with claiming that entire "systems" are racist. Chauvin can't be acquitted (or even just charged with manslaughter) because the details of the case are questionable or uncertain. It automatically has to be because the system is racist, which means the system has to be torn down. Just not a good situation.
We'd have to see a conviction before we could weight whether it was due to some intimidation or not. And right now, we don't see many convictions. Ever. This has very little to do with a racist system. This has to do with a system that protects law enforcement officers at a rate much higher than average citizens: qualified immunity, paid leave, internal investigations, and conviction rates that are well below national averages. I'm not sure how you arrived at racism being this issue. Racism exists as an issue. But this one is that law enforcement has little accountability, even when filmed doing something they shouldn't be doing, that leads to someone dying.
