Cop Shooting Thread

I just can’t wrap my head around the number of civilians that die at the hand of US law enforcement. In a country of 80 million, German police shot a total of 11 people in 2016.

Hey, our country is 4 times that size, so it’s to be expected our death toll is 20… times… higher…

You know I hear Germany is lovely this time of year.

It’s probably the Sharia law we have throughout Europe that keeps people in check.

Don’t know how much to trust the accuracy of this, but Australian nightly news just reported that the officer that fired has been suspected of criminal activity in the past and that this is being investigated as a homicide.

There were reportedly fireworks going off in the area at the time. It may be that a loud noise startled the officer, so his reaction was to shoot the nearest civilian?

When your standard for shooting people is “fearing for your life”, yeah, fireworks startling you is as good a reason as any to shoot people. You should probably avoid fearing for your life in areas where non-poor white people live though…

If I had a gun on me and every time I felt some form of fear I just shot someone, I’d suspect there’d be at least a few dead people around, and I’d be in prison. I guess I just assumed cops had better training and, I am not sure if I am using the right word here… better personalities than to run around being afraid all the time.I’m thinking cautious is better way to go.

The training / fear management issue is one of the things that makes me think we are taking far too narrow a view on police shootings. Currently, the issue in these cases is whether the officers will face criminal charges. That’s good, for the cases where there is abuse of police power to commit an intentional murder (like the Walter Scott case). But so many of these cases make me think the problem is the training of the officers, or the department policies, or the attitudes of the officers (which reflects on the selection and hiring practices of the departments.)

Whatever happened to that idea from a couple decades back, which seems so quaint now, of civilian police boards, or systemic efforts to improve police training and procedures? Improved police assessment of risks, improved police training on use of force, etc., are not just ways to protect the public; they also protect the police. I hear very little about that when these shooting stories make the news? Is that b/c of the media’s selective attention span, or have we just gotten overly focused on individual officers instead of the bigger picture?

Yeah, CRBs have basically been replaced by grand juries.

That said, the nature of the job is likely as much at the core of the issue as the training is.

  1. you could get killed at any moment
  2. the lives and safety of others depends upon you
  3. the public views you with fear, hatred, and occasional admiration

Those three factors will instantly turn a lot of people away from the job. Assuming it doesn’t, you still often need particular schooling to be a qualified applicant (not everywhere - some places you just need a high school diploma). This often prevents people who are thinking about switching careers from entering law enforcement, which means many officers have only had one career job their whole lives: being a cop. I’d imagine that limits the perspectives of those involved.

Now, of course, you get to the training. If your workforce is filled up with people who have largely only ever done what they’re doing, I’d expect any training to reinforce existing patterns of behavior instead of incorporating criticism.

Mind, this is all opinion (I have a couple of extended family members in law enforcement, but we don’t talk about their job too often).

This will be an interesting case to see develop. The victim in this case, unlike most of these cases, was White. And the cop in this case was Black. And he’s Muslim.

Isn’t that standard operating procedure in some districts already?

“He’s running away → shoot him.”
“He’s reaching for something in his car → shoot him”
“It’s dark outside and someone is at our car window → shoot her”.

You kidding? That just seems “too good to be true” in that, its just too fucked up but gives reason to believe in a god with a twisted sense of humour. Should be interesting to see how the various organizations and media units handle that case onwards.

It might be bureaucratic incentive systems or something. I’ve often wondered why cities keep making multi-million dollar settlement payments but don’t try to fix the police force afterwards like a profit-seeking corporation would. They might not care since it’s taxpayer money or they don’t want the responsibility. Or the police resist. Just speculating.

It’s because the police don’t actually believe they have done anything wrong. The insurance companies pay out to families but no guilt is acknowledged, no police chief says his guy did wrong. They don’t think they need anymore training. They think they just need more cops.

I think it’s police resistance, and the relative political power and/or popularity of the police in many areas, that influence this. Despite the lack of a profit motive, cities do have to balance their budgets and trying to keep legal costs down is a significant incentive for many cities, so I don’t think it’s a money/profit motive issue.

Not a shooting, but wow.

In the January 2017 video, Baltimore Police Officer Richard Pinheiro appears to place a bag of pills under some garbage in an alley. He then walks back out to the street, at which point he activates the body camera. But because the cameras are programmed to capture the 30 seconds prior to activation, the officer’s actions before returning from the alley were recorded.

We need more training about the perils of using body cameras.

Those cops need to go to jail and be put into general population.

That’s an obviously dirty cop and should (at minimum) be fired.

This is very much the case.

They’re often trained to act like everyone in the world is actively trying to murder them. Which is funny because actual soldiers in war zones have better self control, but then again those soldiers are also trained not to be afraid of anything and everything. They’re often told to try to be friendly to the locals.

Fucking shitburgers. All three of the cops involved in that video should be in jail.