It’s reasonable to fire 55 times into a sleeping African American!

[W2L]

There was a gun present, they said he reached towards it, no witnesses to contradict since the camera fails to capture what took place.

Thanks for the re

 

[Ana the Ist]

The time between issuing commands and firing was a couple of seconds. For several minutes prior, McCoy was obviously out of it, and they knew that.

Ok.

It's reasonable to conclude they saw him move. They don't know why he moved. They didn't verify that he was moving in a threatening way. That he intended to shoot them is one plausible interpretation of his move, but there are many other plausible interpretations in which he posed no threat at all.

It's plausible there are other explanations....sure.

He scratched his arm and then slumped over. What is there to disagree about?

That's a different statement from the one I disagreed with lol. Are we talking about what he did? Or are we making guesses about "what the police were thinking"?

One of those is a reasonable conversation. The other one involves mind reading and time travel.

First, I wouldn't trust anything Rep. BorderWall OutOnBail says.

Why?

Second, as an artillery officer, he would've had to have received clearance to engage targets. He wouldn't have been allowed to fire willy-nilly. Virtually every Army & Marine vet I've talked to has said that the ROI in combat are typically stricter than what our local PD's operate under.

Well I work in law enforcement...and I also have colleagues who were former military (including special forces) and they would disagree.

You're comparing collateral damage with police not verifying a target is a threat in the first place. I'm not excusing the collateral damage, but they're apples and oranges.

Not at all....

You're imagining collateral damage as something unavoidable....not a choice someone was making.

There's a decent article that's super old, and I might be able to find if you aren't willing to take my word for it. It's just an account from an American journalist a couple of weeks into the second Iraqi war.

In it, he describes how a car holding 2 mothers and like 4 children are gunned down approaching a checkpoint. He watches the whole thing. The official military report describes the car as driving at high speed or erratically....and warning shots being fired. The journalist says nothing of the sort happened....the car simply didn't stop quite as soon as the soldiers wanted it to. It was driving erratically nor were any warning shots fired.

My point is....there are often certain realities of situations that aren't always clear to those outside them. I'd like to say I wouldn't haphazardly gun down any innocent people ii it were me....but I don't know. Perhaps the best chance I've got of surviving that scenario and going home in one piece is to take that risk as few times as possible....and gun down each and every person I think might be a threat, evidence or not.

To a lesser degree, I can see how a cop....in some places....might decide that there are only so many times he can possibly wait for someone to point a gun at him before he reacts and still live to go home to his family. I can understand why people don't want it to be that way....but I don't see any real solutions beyond disarming the public.

 

[iluvatar5150]

You're imagining collateral damage as something unavoidable....not a choice someone was making.

There's a decent article that's super old, and I might be able to find if you aren't willing to take my word for it. It's just an account from an American journalist a couple of weeks into the second Iraqi war.

In it, he describes how are car holding 2 mothers and like 4 children are gunned down approaching a checkpoint. He watches the whole thing. The official military report describes the car as driving at high speed or erratically....and warning shots being fired. The journalist says nothing of the sort happened....the car simply didn't stop quite as soon as the soldiers wanted it to. It was driving erratically nor were any warning shots fired.

What you described is not soldiers being held to a low standard, but rather, soldiers lying about their conduct such that it portrays them as having complied with a standard that, in reality, they did not meet.

My point is....there are often certain realities of situations that aren't always clear to those outside them. I'd like to say I wouldn't haphazardly gun down any innocent people ii it were me....but I don't know. Perhaps the best chance I've got of surviving that scenario and going home in one piece is to take that risk as few times as possible....and gun down each and every person I think might be a threat, evidence or not.

To a lesser degree, I can see how a cop....in some places....might decide that there are only so many times he can possibly wait for someone to point a gun at him before he reacts and still live to go home to his family. I can understand why people don't want it to be that way....

Oh sure. To be clear, I don't think there's anything puzzling whatsoever about the logic and the incentives on the cops' end of things. If Officer A's primary goal is to get home at night, of course he's going to shoot first and ask questions later.

My issue is that - as crappy as it sounds - that shouldn't be an officer's primary goal. Cops don't exist to serve themselves; they exist to serve the rest of us. Their primary goal should be the rest of us getting home safely. If that means that they assume some elevated risk by being more patient in assessing threats, so be it. That's the job (or ought to be, IMO).

To illustrate the point that things might be skewed too far towards impatience, comparing WaPo's police shooting database to the stats on the Officer Down Memorial Page shows that there are roughly the same number of (if not more) unarmed people killed by police every year as there are police killed by some flavor of intentional homicide (I'm excluding car accidents, heart attacks, and other causes not resulting from someone attacking them). The numbers fluctuate year-to-year, but the number of police killed typically sits around 50-70.

WaPo's data only goes back to 2015, so it's hard to compare older numbers or determine trends, though the data the have puts the number of unarmed killed by police in that same range. 2015, though, had 94, and this year is on track to see about 40, so I wonder if there's a downward trend emerging.

Either way, the fact remains that, among all police-citizen interactions, an unarmed citizen is just as likely to be killed by a cop as a cop is to be killed by that citizen. That suggests to me that the cops are posing more of a threat to the citizens than they ought to be.

but I don't see any real solutions beyond disarming the public.

You're not going to get any argument from me on additional gun control measures, but I have to imagine that there's *something* else that can be done to mitigate the risk for everybody.

 

[Ana the Ist]

What you described is not soldiers being held to a low standard, but rather, soldiers lying about their conduct such that it portrays them as having complied with a standard that, in reality, they did not meet.

Oh....ok. You and I are talking about different things then.

If we're talking about the standard on paper...it's a far lower standard. If we were to compare similar situations where soldiers came across someone they believed to be an enemy combatant asleep next to his weapon....they don't need to wait until he awakes or reaches for his weapon (as I understand it). The fact that they have some reason to believe him a combatant and in proximity of a weapon would be enough to kill him in his sleep.

If we're talking about the standard they're actually held to....it's lower than that.

Oh sure. To be clear, I don't think there's anything puzzling whatsoever about the logic and the incentives on the cops' end of things. If Officer A's primary goal is to get home at night, of course he's going to shoot first and ask questions later.

My issue is that - as crappy as it sounds - that shouldn't be an officer's primary goal. Cops don't exist to serve themselves; they exist to serve the rest of us. Their primary goal should be the rest of us getting home safely. If that means that they assume some elevated risk by being more patient in assessing threats, so be it. That's the job (or ought to be, IMO).

I understand that....I honestly do. I don't understand the impulse to bang one's head against what is for what one believes should be.

Even if I were to assume that most cops start off at the ideal you're describing....if they are in a particularly crime ridden or heavily armed population, over a long enough time, they will tend to lean towards what we have now.

To illustrate the point that things might be skewed too far towards impatience, comparing WaPo's police shooting database to the stats on the Officer Down Memorial Page shows that there are roughly the same number of (if not more) unarmed people killed by police every year as there are police killed by some flavor of intentional homicide (I'm excluding car accidents, heart attacks, and other causes not resulting from someone attacking them). The numbers fluctuate year-to-year, but the number of police killed typically sits around 50-70.

Sure. I just don't know that unarmed = wrongful shooting. If someone reaches for a gun or knife while police are training their weapons on him and telling him to put his hands up...and gets shot and killed...is that an "unarmed" assailant? If a cop tries to arrest someone who begins to fight them and tries to take their gun....I don't expect the cop to wait to lose his gun or hope the other guy tires first.

Last time I checked....I'd say on any given year, there's between a dozen and two dozen incidents I'm not sure I'd call "lawful shootings". That's not ideal....1 unlawful shooting is bad...but when I consider the actual number of armed assailants the police encounter in a year....

It strikes me as actually pretty good.

WaPo's data only goes back to 2015, so it's hard to compare older numbers or determine trends, though the data the have puts the number of unarmed killed by police in that same range. 2015, though, had 94, and this year is on track to see about 40, so I wonder if there's a downward trend emerging.

Either way, the fact remains that, among all police-citizen interactions, an unarmed citizen is just as likely to be killed by a cop as a cop is to be killed by that citizen. That suggests to me that the cops are posing more of a threat to the citizens than they ought to be.

I think your math is off a bit there. If we're talking about just regular police....we're talking about 500k people. If we're talking about people in the US (citizens or not ) we're talking about 320+ million people.

The dangers posed to police by the people are hundreds of times greater than the opposite.

You're not going to get any argument from me on additional gun control measures, but I have to imagine that there's *something* else that can be done to mitigate the risk for everybody.

Compliance? Common sense?

Or perhaps they will invent a pill which removes one's instinct to survive and we can require police to take it.