That cop can barely speak. His system is so flooded with adrenaline, his throat is locking up. He’s in full-on combat/ survival mode.
I just heard the story on NPR’s Here and Now about the lunch room worker getting shot while trying to comply with the cop’s request for a license. Goddamn. Unbelievable.
One of the great tragedies of the age is that it really isn’t really true. It only SEEMS true. Violent crimes have risen in the past couple years, but overall they are down significantly since the recent highs of the 80s or 90s. Even if your throw in things like Orlando, it’s statistically far more safe to be a cop (or a citizen!) now than in any time in living memory, yet it appears like the police are shooting a lot more people for a lot sketchier reasons.
However - and for much the same reasons - this too might not be true. The fact that we hear about things like Ferguson, Baton Rouge, and Minnesota is because of cellphone cameras and omnipresent surveillance cameras. As the WaPo article from above notes, we don’t have great statistics on police shootings… it’s very possible that they are down from previous decades. And maybe down just as radically as violent crimes.
Fucking horrifying.
I don’t know if this was posted elsewhere during the ‘lost era’ of vBulletin, but more apropo than ever. Jessie Williams is the closest thing I’ve heard to one of the 60’s civil rights leaders.
Police shootings may very well be lower than previous decades, but that just makes it more horrifying to think of how many murders have happened in the past by bad cops who were never held accountable.
Black folks don’t distrust the police without reason. They’ve been telling us about this shit since… well forever really. It’s only in the digital age where literally everyone is carrying a video camera that we’re even starting to see what they’ve been telling us about all this time.
Thing have probably gotten better, but it wasn’t that long ago that cops were openly Klan members in a lot of places, so I’m not sure that metric is all that comforting.
Yeah, it’s not like this is really new.
The new part is that now we get absolute proof.
Like that guy who the cop shot while he was running away in NC a while back? Without the camera, the cop’s story probably would have held up. But the video showed that he just flat out murdered that guy.
Oh, absolutely. But there is a BIG difference between “This shitty problem is slowly going away and these cellphone videos are accelerating that decline” and “Police are increasingly nervous, militarized, and willing to use deadly force against minorities.”
It sure would be nice if we knew which was a more accurate statement.
They can both be accurate.
The problem is that statistics o how many people are killed by cops are exceptionally shoddy. Investigations into the true number reveal that the official numbers are off by at least a factor of 3.
So the reality is that there is no good, trustworthy, source of data on this. The best databases we have are essentially compiled news stories, which are prone to all sorts of holes. Creating a set of data over a decades timeline? Probably not practical.
Scalzi’s blog on the Philando Castile tragedy is a great read.
The police officer who shot Philando Castile wouldn’t have known that Castile had no police record, worked in a school and was by all indications well-liked in his community but even that is placing the burden of exculpation on the man who got shot. In the same situation, pulled over with the same broken tail light, telling the cop the same things, with the cop knowing exactly about me as he did about Castile, I still don’t get shot. Of that I feel certain. Nor should I be. Why should I be? Even if you hate the idea of people being able to conceal carry weapons, if someone is following the law, they shouldn’t be shot for carrying that weapon.
Excellently written. No wonder I like that guy’s books.
Interview with Castile’s mother and uncle (CNN)
“That was something we always discussed. Comply. That’s the key thing in order to try to survive being stopped by the police is to comply. Whatever they ask you to do, do it. Don’t say nothing. Just do what they want you to do. So what’s the difference in complying, and they kill you anyway.”
Imagine having to repeatedly talk to your son about what he should do to (try to) preserve his life, when he gets pulled over by a cop, especially when your son has never gotten in legal trouble and, as per current accounts, is an upstanding citizen.
How many white parents have to think about that?
The overall problem is that over the years the general attitude of law enforcement has gone from preserve and protect (the public) to CYA and preserve and protect the police. Law officers need to be able to protect themselves, but just as a firefighter can’t refuse to go into a burning building (any building, leaving aside clear weird cases where it was suicidal) because it’s dangerous. Being a cop is dangerous. But in the past, officers would routinely disarm people, beat them with sticks, do all sorts of things besides just shoot them. Now, it seems the meta is, anything that preserves the officer’s life, even if the threat is only in his or her mind, is justified, and no risk should be taken at all. So, you see stuff like this all justified because the officer felt threatened. Well, being a cop sort of means you always are under threat, but until recently it didn’t seem the cops took a shoot first ask questions later position as default.
A lot of this has to do with training and overall cop culture; for individual police officers, it’s got to be scary world, and I have a lot of sympathy in general for their position. But as a society, if we send them out there, armed, scared, and conditioned to view their own safety as the only thing that matters–and add to that institutional and cultural racism and other flaws–we have a bad mix.
And yeah, race is a big part of it, because for a lot of cops (black and white it seems), to quote Jello Biafra and DOA from Full Metal Jackoff, “you see a black face, you see Willie Horton with a knife.”
I think that it is pretty safe to “blame” cell phones and social media for the proliferation of white awareness of a phenomenon that has been happening for quite some time. Cops have always been given the benefit of the doubt in these cases.
“Just do what the cop says” is reasonable for someone who rarely encounters aggressive cops, but what is reasonable if aggressive cops are a regular occurrence in your life?
Just wanted to say thanks for posting that. I’d vaguely heard the story, but that video was quite compelling.
Almost none. At the same time though, there are parents who have lost their children, but since they weren’t black they didn’t get much coverage. I absolutely think a lot of cops out there that approach the situation in a more aggressive shoot first think later mentality when they find out the color of skin of the person they’re dealing with… at the same time I think there a mentality problem with a lot of cops out there. They seem to think having a gun means a automatic lethal encounter, except… we live in a country where you have a right to have a gun. So someone calling to say someone has a gun shouldn’t auto mean there is danger.
How can we have the same group demand rights to carry and then condemn those people to death if they ever wind up talking to an officer while having a gun on their person.
No doubt; in the South where I grew up it was simply a fact of life that black folks were treated far, far differently than white folks, by the cops. But still, the level of violence and the type of encounters were, I think, different, in a lot of ways. Partly it was because of the culture of fear that a century of Jim Crow had instilled in the black population, which made people damn careful to not do anything to piss off the (white) cops, but also, in general, cops tended to use a lot more non-lethal force.
And maybe that’s part of it, too. In the 1960s, we had something of a revolution in the way we perceived the police and there was a lot of crackdown thereafter on the informal ways of keeping order law enforcement used to use, that is, beat downs and the like that never quite got reported or written up. As internal affairs and oversight boards and commissions cracked down on the old ways, maybe nothing really emerged to fill that gap between non-hostile encounters with the police and full-on shootouts. Pretty much every time a cop laid a hand on someone there was a lawsuit or a scandal, and the folks in charge hated that. So the departments were left to figure it out on their own, and without adequate guidance, training, and oversight, they simply made their practices sort of binary–no force/lethal force. The key was the realization, perhaps, that marginalized populations could be dealt with in whatever way they wanted, and with no pushback, the threshold for lethal force seems to have been lowered and lowered again.
I don’t know, of course, but it really does feel that something is very different now, and not just social media, though that has had a huge impact on awareness. Maybe once cops lost the sort of informal power they had–informal, extralegal, and usually arbitrary, and accepted only because it was usually applied to “them”–they just got jaded.
White parents don’t, but white people that carry guns should think about it. I did.
I remember there was always a big debate on gun forums about whether to inform a traffic cop that you were carrying. The general opinion was that if it’s near your wallet or registration you obviously have to say something, but otherwise don’t mention it. I believe the best way to proceed was to keep your hands on the wheel, mention that you’d like to comply and you’re lawfully carrying a firearm, and then ask the officer how he’d like to proceed.
It never happened to me, but most of the anecdotes involve the gun owner exiting the vehicle before the officer retrieves the weapon and unloads it. That seems weird but I guess it was common at the time.
This is some random Wikipedia quote so it could be inaccurate. Two things jump out at me though: potentially conflicting orders from the police officer (though that usually happens when more than one is yelling) or maybe an inherent reaction to put hands up instead of freezing in place.
I agree a culture change on the part of police and their view of self-preservation may be required to solve this issue. I don’t think an “us vs. them” attitude will encourage that, but I could be wrong.
One simple policy change should at least be checking on the victim as soon as possible rather than leaving them there to die. Just sad.