Associated Press – November 18, 2007:
A candy bar, a wallet, even a pair of baggy pants can draw deadly police gunfire.
The killing of a hairbrush-brandishing teenager last week was the latest instance of police shootings in which officers reacted to what they erroneously feared was a weapon. It has revived debate over the use of force, perceptions of threats and police training.
“We have cases like that all over the country where it can be a wallet, a cell phone, a can of Coca-Cola and officers have fired the weapon,” said Scott Greenwood, a Cincinnati attorney who has worked on police use-of-force cases across the country and who is a general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
If I can give a bit of an outsiders advice, and I know its non of business really, but as y’all seem to like to offer your advice to the world over, I’d assume that you’ll appreciate advice from others: that whole idea of the ‘right to bare arms’ may have been a really good idea in a pre-industrial society where ‘citizens’ where only men who owned land, but in a post-industrial civilizations it just doesn’t work out very well. If you look a brief survey of civilizations past and present, pretty much everyone except the US has banned weapons from cities. It just makes sense.
Now don’t get me wrong, if you live out in the bush or in the middle of 50 acres of firearm is a useful tool…. but in cities it just doesn’t make sense.
1. “If I can give a bit of an outsiders advice…”
Considering none of the incidents above involved guns, other than those carried by the police, I’ll file your advice in the trash as irrelevant.
But if your point is that the police shouldn’t carry guns either, well, then maybe you’re on to something.
#1 UB – I firmly believe that in an urban environment is where you need the weapon the most. I carry my Glock every chance I get and carry a Taurus 9mm while I work around the farm.
Go ahead everyone label me once again as a gun nut neocon or whatever you wish.
If the police roll up on someone with baggy jeans (a trend I was told started in Chicago by young thugs indicating that they were armed) and the person has something in their hand the stress level of the cop is going up. Day or night if you turn and make a motion towards a stressed officer with something in your hand there is a chance you are going to look like Swiss cheese when they get you on the coroner’s table.
Who is to blame? Well, since no one likes to blame the person killed for anything it always goes against the officer. Anyone killed by an officer is out made out on the news to be a nice boy/girl well liked by everyone and he/she was a straight A student or a hard worker or, you get the idea.
How hard is it to listen to what an officer tells you to do if they stop you. If you watch Cops it must be pretty hard given that they are always wrestling some idiot to the ground who won’t do what he is told.
Signed
Don’t Tase Me Bro
The problem with cases such as this. . .well, let me give an example.
http://tinyurl.com/ys8jmn
If the first instinct of the police anymore is to cover up, lie and obfuscate, can we really believe any of these stories. How do we know if one of those punks just gave the cop lip and the cop decided to execute him for the humiliation? “His can of coke was scaring me!” And then they get off without even suffering leave, most of the time.
The problem with this scenario is that we’ve essentially given the police officers a license to kill with little or no accountability. If they can shoot someone for having a coke can, or shoot a man in bed when he jumps up at a loud noise at night, then can any of us really be said to be safe from summary execution at the hands of some renegade cop?
baggy jeans (a trend I was told started in Chicago by young thugs indicating that they were armed)
It may have come to mean that, but originally it signified that you had spent time in jail, (because the first thing they do when they bring you in is take away your belt and shoelaces.) That’s the same source as all that “fo shizzle” kind of pidgin talk, which is actually (originally) jailhouse talk (so the guards couldn’t understand what you were saying.) And just to finish off the Cliff Clavenish explanation, jailhouse pidgin originated with carny talk, also meant to baffle the rubes.
A cop know that the person that fires first usually wins a gun battle. A cop also knows that underneath a baggy coat could contain a superior weapon to his. It’s a war out there on some of these streets and sometimes a cop may loose their nerve and shoot first. There is no answer to this problem. How many of us would want to pull a car over on a darkened inner city street and walk up to it? Cops are just poor smucks like the rest of us that want to go home at the end of the day.
#6 UTH – Thanks for the additional info.
In WW II the military discovered that only about 20%of the troops were actually willing to try and kill the other guy with small arms fire. They’ve changed training procedures and upped the percentage to over 50% by teaching the troops to react and fire before thinking about the fact that they will be killing another person. And, you guessed it, the same training methods are now being used on our civilian police forces. Yes, I’m VERY afraid of cops, they can kill you by mistake, and only have to fill out a bunch of paperwork as a result.
Better to kill then be killed, I say.
#9 GS – “and only have to fill out a bunch of paperwork as a result”
Do you seriously believe that an officer could take someone’s life and not feel anything other than aggravation for the paperwork requirement?
Usually they are sued before the corpse is cold whether it is a justifiable shooting or not, so that alone would give them pause.
I’m not saying there are not some that could do it but I’ll bet there are not that many that can just pull the trigger without remorse for taking a life, bad guy or not.
10,
You’d better pray your family and friends never screw up in a situation with a cop.
Vat do you expect?!?!
De do not look like good Germanz!
Ve must shoot dem so zat zey vill learn dat everyvone must be good Germanz!
Kids are taught to be impolite jerks, “speak truth to power”, riots are called “peaceful demonstrations”… Who are the role models? Cynthia McKinney, Rosie O’D, Gangsta Rappahs, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, etc.
The cops turn around and act like storm troopers so they can deal with the SNERTs.
Lots of people end up dead.
Get rid of guns and it’ll be clubs, knives, rocks, and boots used to kill. How many guns did the Hutus and Tutsis use to kill each other?
Bad manners and a skin full of hate are lethal.
You’d better pray your family and friends never screw up in a situation with a cop.
Sorry but they dont:
1. wear baggy, gangsta clothing
2. travel late at night in areas of high crime
3. Ignore police commands. When they are told to do something, they do it
So no, my friends and family don’t have to worry about this.
15,
Just as they say a conservative is a liberal that’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative whose rights have been trampled on by the authorities.
You say that your family and friends don’t go outside of the “norm”, but that’s just whistling in the dark. All it takes is one out-of-the-way traffic stop, one night out late after a party, or one of any number of unusual (but not improbable) situations to find yourselves at the wrong end of what passes for a justice system these days.
Keep whistling in the dark and thinking that you and yours are exempt. Yeah, that’s an intelligent policy.
#11 – Steve
Thanks for the interjection of good, balanced sense. You make two excellent and accurate points.
1, the dread – and the near inevitability – of being sued is, in the great majority of cases, the very reason for the “first instinct of the police anymore … to cover up, lie and obfuscate” that Li mentioned above. In the most righteous of officer-involved shootings, one incorrect word, one statement that can be misinterpreted, will be jumped on and ridden for all it’s worth by some totally amoral POS lawyer. So even when the cop is 100% in the right, he and his PD have no choice but to zip it and spin it.
2, there are, have always been and will always be sociopaths and psychopaths who manage to become police officers. (Notice, as an aside, how little attention is paid to refining the screening of new police hires to prevent this…) That there are and will be bad actors with badges is a given, but the truth remains that the overwhelming majority of cops never fire their gun in the line of duty, and very few want to actually kill anyone. The exceptionally high job-induced stress shows up in high rates of alcoholism and suicide, among other things.
Many cops who shoot and kill don’t remain cops that much longer, and are often psychologically scarred for life. This happens a lot more often than some bloodthirsty psycho with a badge gunning down some innocent.
Tha gangsta thugs and their chosen animalistic “lifestyle” and contempt for the sanctity of human life are the ones who set the stage for these confrontations the great majority of the time.
I wish some of you people who constantly barrage the police for anything and everything would spend some time as a cop yourself. It must be so easy for you to sit behind your computer safe in your home and call the police a bunch of trigger happy ramboo’s when you don’t have to go out every night and pull over vehicles and people who any one could try to kill you at any time, and if that person should pull a gun on you. Got forbid, you think that person is pulling a gun on you, and you try to defend yourself, and make a mistake.
You guys are the worst kind hypocrites.
Here is a lesson that should be thought in every school. When a police officer tells you do do something, you do it. If you don’t agree with it, their a time and place to fight those battles, that time and place is not in the middle of the night, in a darkened alley, swinging your arms around with objects in them. If you run from the cops you deserve whatever happens to you.
Now don’t get me wrong their are some bad cops out their, but they are very, very ,very small minority. I have never had problems with cops, when I get pulled over, I keep my hands in view. When asked questions, I respond honestly, and politely. May bee the people who are so scared of the cops should look into the mirror some time.
BTW, the pic of Lt. Harry Callahan is supposed to be amusing, I suppose – but he is, and has long been regarded as a hero by much of America, as, if you take the time to remember, he never killed anyone who didn’t richly deserve it… the very appeal of the character, as with Chuck Bronson’s role as Paul Kersey came from Americans’ frustration with the way scumbag lawyers, exploiting technicalities, manipulate the legal system to prevent actual justice being done.
but he is, and has long been regarded as a hero by much of America, as, if you take the time to remember, he never killed anyone who didn’t richly deserve it…
It’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys in movies… just listen to the soundtrack.
Real life ain’t got no soundtrack.
To a boy with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.
To a cop with a gun, everybody looks like a criminal. This is probably a natural tendency, and doesn’t mean that the average cop is (was?) a bad human being. But studies (blah blah blah) have shown that when you put ordinary people in positions of power, they will almost inevitably abuse that power. No police force that I am aware of makes ANY effort whatsoever to train out or attempt to control these tendencies. Cops become cynical. Perhaps it cannot be any other way. But it doesn’t mean that society should just PUT UP WITH IT.
And I have to say “EAT ME” to anyone who says “don’t criticize if you haven’t worn the badge”. That’s bullshit. Nobody forces anybody to be a cop. If you’re not cut out for it, QUIT.
#20 UTH – Little sensitive are we?
I wasn’t an officer but I was married to one. I have my opinions about them, some good, some bad.
My current wife says she couldn’t do it. Too many Cops like shows showing exactly why you must endure a lot of shit to be in law enforcement.
I wanted to be one when I was younger for all the wrong reasons so I would not have made a good one.
The possibility of violence does not justify violence; only actual violence does. The stress that comes with police work is well known, but this seems to me like justification for more vacation time, not justification for random acts of violence against the citizenry.
Let me put it another way; if I shot someone because I thought their coke can or hair brush was threatening, do you really think I would get off scott free? If not, then what good can come from having one standard for cops, and another for everyone else? That’s one of the later steps towards violent tyranny, actually, and not at all a healthy development for a representative democracy.
GetSmart’s point is a valid one; the migration of military tactics to police work, which should be as different as night and day, has contributed greatly to the violent jumpiness of our police.
#1 – “right to bare arms”… um you mean to bear arms?
Bare Arms sounds like a he-man-pumping-iron magazine or something
holy jebus go back to grade school and take some of those spelling tests again
Guys, for me it’s very easy. If anyone with a gun gives me a command, he’s not going to have to guess my intentions. I’m going to follow the command. He’s going to know that my intentions are, “I want to live.” When a cop stops me, and pulls me over, he’s not going to have to wonder where my hands are. he’s going to see two hands on the wheel, unless he directs, otherwise. If Amadu Diallo had stopped with both hands in the air, I imagine that he’d still be alive.