FWIW, Braves didn't make up the most dangerous jobs thing: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf I get that it's not the same worrying about getting shot as getting into a workplace accident. Braves was being a bit obtuse, but so is ignoring the scarcity of police deaths and adopting the mindset that cops are soldiers going into a war zone every day.
I think a problem is that almost anything can be justified...I don't think those guys are automatically terrible people, but it's frustrating that they can basically get away with a colossal fuckup that left a kid dead by saying 'well he was about to point a weapon at us', shifting the blame essentially.
Oh, and 14 cops have been killed by gun fire this year. Not counting vehicular assault and other deaths caused by the criminal.
The problem comes when you start view more and more civilians as "potential bad people" instead of just people.
I get what you are saying. 99% of the public are good law abiding citizens that might make a mistake sometimes. These aren't bad people and these aren't the people cops deal with on a regular basis. Cops differentiate between the 2, my hope is that the rest of the public can as well.
I don't know how many people are killed by cops a year, justified or otherwise. I think it was mentioned in another thread, but there is no real tracking of it. However, I'd assume most are justified. My point was that people are actively trying to kill police. It's not some made up narrative.
The vast majority of cops do everything they can to do their job the right way and to uphold their duty. The few that don't need to be held accountable for what they do. Too often they're not. If there's proof a cop lied to make a stop or lied to give a charge he should see some sort of penalty for his actions. Often that does not happen.
I don't think it's fair to say - under no circumstances should an 11 year old get shot by the police. First of all, "small child" to me sounds like an infant. I would agree that an infant should never, under any circumstances, be shot by the police. But an 11 year old is capable of doing something, like taking a real gun and shooting it at people. If an 11 year old is shooting at people, the only recourse might be to shoot him. That should be a very last, no other choice option, but it's not impossible to imagine that scenario. Improbable, but not impossible. Like I said before, in this case, the cops were very dumb to roll up on him like they did. They should have treated it like an active shooter situation; kept their distance, disarm the guy, and secure him and the gun. But even in that scenario, if the cops see the guy raise the gun at them, what are they supposed to do? "let the kid shoot us, Johnson, he's only 11!" If this person, 11 years old or 30 years old, is putting the cops, and other people's lives at risk by potentially shooting at them, there are not many options. The cops should at least be held responsible for poor decisions. I'm just not sure how far that goes. Not following procedure that leads to someone being killed sounds like negligence. I don't think it's murder. But I'm not sure about the letter of the law and what the exact charges should be.
It's nice to know that after the fact. If some random kid at a bus stop was pointing that "toy" at one of your kids, I'm sure you'd just assume it was a toy and not think twice about it, right? To clarify - I'm not saying they should have killed him. But they should most definitely have treated the situation as if it were a real gun. By the way, some replica BB guns are VERY real looking. I remember a show a while back, it might have been Cops, where cops stopped a guy and found he was carrying a BB gun. The gun was such an accurate replica that it fit in the cops holster. The holster was specifically designed for the cops (real) Glock. The specs on the BB gun were so close to the real thing that it fit in a locking Glock holster. Asking a cop, or anyone, to somehow know the difference between a fake Glock and a real Glock is a lot to ask.
I don't think any reasonable person would label that murder, but extremely negligent...just doesn't seem right that that can happen and the cops can make it justifiable...the driver isn't even being investigated, which is unbelievable to me.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, 1 cop being killed is too many. That said, there's 1.1 million police officers in the UA. In 2013, the FBI's official count was 27 killed, the lowest since 1980. 2014 was 51. That's .00004% in 2014 and .00002% in 2013. I'm not saying that cops shouldn't be cautious and protect themselves. I'm not saying there aren't people out there wanting to harm police. I'm just saying that if a cop can't accept the risks and still conduct his job responsibly, he/she doesn't need to be a cop. Cops having a "shoot now and ask questions later" mentality bc they are petrified by the risk of the job is not acceptable. They are not in a war zone where every single non-cop should be viewed as a combatant. Too many cops view it that way and that's the root of the issue we have today.
Agreed with everything, but also wanted to add that one cop getting killed is not any worse than one innocent person being killed by a cop. One is too many in either circumstance.
Not really. More of an attempt to show that throwing out percentages to support vast generalizations is dumb.
Let me rephrase that...Most of the time I feel like Police are glorified revenue collectors. Asset seizure is fucked up...It's crazy how they can take all your shit for having a few joints in a bag but they never seize shit from rapist and murderers, you know, ACTUAL criminals.
I was referring to dbl's numbers. No idea what you're talking about. The "Only X% of cops get killed in the line of duty, and that's not near enough for any one of them to be worried about being shot" argument was a dumb one.
Of course there's some risk involved, but the point he was making is that they're not strapping up to storm the beach at Normandy every morning.
That came on the heels of someone claiming that people are out there looking to murder cops which is just as sensationalist as people claiming that cops everywhere are looking to murder civilians. Truthfully, the police didn't start the shit policies in the first place that disproportionately criminalized a certain population that compounded the issue to begin with, but they can still aim to do better.
You do know this actually happens, right? How many times does it need to happen for it to be believable or not sensationalist?
No shit it happens...but I imagine a cop is far more likely to get murdered off duty in a car jacking than they are to get murdered by someone that is hellbent on nothing besides murdering a cop.
I blame to war on drugs for the rift between civilians and police. It used to be people viewed the police as part of the community, now everyone is worried about getting jacked by the police for some petty shit. Protect and serve vs. Harass and seize. Prison industrial complex yada yada yada....
This is incorrect. Though a couple of years ago, 2 citizens tried to rob a cop in Illinois as he was pumping gas. The cop put one down and the other dude took off running. The 2 citizens just picked the wrong person to try to take advantage of that day.
We also pay quite a lot to settle these police brutality cases. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/police-misconduct-settlements_n_7423386.html
I guess what I am saying is not clear. I am not talking about what the cop thought back then. In his mind it was a real gun so he shot the kid. I think it is mind numbingly stupid that the driver pulled up so close to the kid. I've said over and over again that if that was a real gun and someone up to no good, those cops could be dead. What I was saying is now when discussing the situation I know it wasn't a gun. I know it was a toy. So why would I call it a gun and what it actually was; a toy. I understand saying "the cops thought he was waving a real gun around " I don't understand saying "he was waving a gun around". IMO that is as disengenious as saying that Michael Brown was an innocent victim even though I know that is not the case.
ah gotcha. I think most, if not all of the discussion of a real gun is done with the mindset of the cops at the time. The question was whether or not a child idly playing in the park by themselves should be handled more cautiously, and the clarification was that the report was of a guy pointing a gun at passersby, not idly playing in the park, which was why they had to handle it (or SHOULD have) as if it were a real gun.
"Of the 464 people counted by the Guardian, an overwhelming majority – 95% – were male, with just 5% female." I think it's time men unite against this statistically obvious gender bias. #Ihaveapenisdontshoot
Of the nearly 400 people killed by police already in 2015, nearly 16% were carrying a toy gun or no weapon at all. Great article worth the read. http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...22256a-058e-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html
Probably because they pulled up going 30 mph and stopped right in front of the kid. Any movement he made was seen as threatening as the cop in the passenger side was like 2 feet away from him. That was just shitty police work and a kid died because of it. I don't really blame the passenger cop for doing it, I blame the driver who got right up to him while going that fast.
Washington Post must be pissed A national debate is raging about police use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.
This is probably not an area that should be divided by "teams". It's too important to be likened to a game.