No, Americans do not suck. Their attitude to acceptable levels of gun usage is an anomaly in the developed world though.
Cop in America doing a bad job, again
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No, Americans do not suck. Their attitude to acceptable levels of gun usage is an anomaly in the developed world though.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood you when you jumped directly to nationality and preconceived notions of it rather than actually discuss the situation that the police officer on the forum proposed.
The point was that she isn't a fecking terrorist. Is the difference so difficult to grasp?
Not really what I said, is it? Common sense would be in this case, being able to defend yourself without using lethal force. Which they should have training for, unlike you, if I remember it correctly, a teacher.
There's also nothing common about the amount of people that are being killed by the police per year or that teachers have to tell their students what to do, when a shooting happens. That's not a normal drill in any other country, as far as I know, yet completely normal and necessary in the US.
In your hypothetical example, I would obviously defend myself, even if that means killing the other person. I responded to the hypothetical assumption by that poster above, that the mentally ill woman actually was willing to kill or harm the officers, which isn't proven at this moment in time.
Here's an article from 2015 (graphic somewhere in the middle):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/american-cops-lethal_us_565cde59e4b079b2818b8870
It also adresses many of the questions discussed here today. I have only skimmed through it, but I guess one key sentence is:
The situation that Choiboy proposed obviously assumed that the woman was within a short enough distance to cause lethal harm to the officers with a deadly weapon.
Cheers for the article mate.
We would expect our officers to run to a safe distance. If no immediate threat was caused to another innocent party of course. You can turn three metres into ten metres very quickly. Nobody dies.
That simply doesn't happen if an American police officer is involved. Gun out. Shouting. More shouting. More shouting. Trigger pulled.
You see it time and time again. Escalate. Escalate. Escalate. I've witnessed it first hand. Thankfully there was no gun involved.
It's not an attack on American people. You train your officers differently. There's a lower value on life. There's less of a focus on agreeableness between civilians and officers.
You're privy to how officers are trained in America or in Europe?
Or you're just drawing conclusions you believe to be self evident from articles providing limited facts and lots of conjecture?
To a point, yes. Not on an absolute level obviously, but evidence of training methods are available for anyone to find.
I've witnessed UK Police training first hand. I've witnessed UK Police control disturbances countless times. I've seen New Zealand Police training up close. I've also seen those officers in their community.
My understanding of policing in America is principally digital.
I've experienced first hand the attitude of Police in the US. Many times casually. Acutely on two separate occasions and got the same response on both of those occasions. One of which was hands down the worst experience with authority of my life. Over something pathetic.
It's almost unarguable that the standards and methods of training are worlds apart. You don't have to be an expert to form an educated opinion.
On anything.
I agree and all that is totally reasonable. I do think people rely heavily on digital education, and to a certain degree when it's provided by what they view to be a reliable source it's accepted immediately as fact.
Funnily we have here people quoting articles and newspapers from all over the place and they seem to challenge very little within them. Conversely you have a guy who does the job attempting to provide insight, really valuable insight. I think he's being very fair, very little opinion and just matter of fact explanations of stuff.
Largely he's met with derision and written off as 'cops will protect cops'.
A generalisation not too dissimilar from the problems everyone is so angry or disappointed about.
I think we do need to credit some people with having a sensible grasp of things though.
I went into London at the weekend. Accidentally found myself on The Mall and the Queens birthday celebrations were on. I must have had 4 interactions with Police. Every single one of them was great. There is zero hierarchy when dealing with our Police on neutral terms. There is an absolute culture of serving the public.
The American model is overwhelmingly 'Protect and Serve'. Officers are entirely different. It's as though they have a constant part of them that's thinking 'Protect'. A pervading sense that danger is afoot. It's very fluffy to say, but you can feel it.
Europeans, and English specifically, will never reconcile the nature of American Police. That attitude of Comply.... COMPLY... It's a real thing. When we see that dynamic on film, routinely, we're not cherry picking. Plenty of us travel there and can instantly draw a line between our own soft experience, dialled up to 10, with a bad decision thrown in, all of a sudden there's a gun out and we're a twitch away from a gunshot.
I don't know what I'm saying, but I'm so glad that we have the standard of policing that we do.
Couldn't agree more, cultures are complete chalk and cheese, fortunately we can look at the UK model and be very proud of it.
However, do you think if everyone in the U.K. could buy a gun with limited hassle we would enjoy the same convivial existence? If guns were so commonplace, that in some places you can conceal carry? If historically guns featured in so many more incidents due to their availability. Fatality rates so much higher. Checks seemingly so slack?
Over here you can have a shotgun, a handgun and a very few other things, you have to go to considerable effort and time to get one, anyone with a conviction equating to over 3 years sentence will never have one, anyone with less than a 3 year sentence won't be allowed one for 8 years from date of conviction, if they are eventually allowed one. Gun incidents are comparatively so rare.
Danger is literally, much more prevalent. Or at least the risk, and that has to form some part of an officers risk assessment. By no means will I defend murder or manslaughter when full facts have proven a limited risk or a poor decision, by the same token I will extend a certain amount of grace to the situations and not leap to conclusions.
Culturally Americans are just so different, to compare their policing to ours is largely useless I think. Fair enough ours could be aspirational but the environment that dictates how you police is totally different.
752 homocides in Chicago in 2016. 2 a day. In Chicago they reduced their stop and searches by 80% due to pressure over unlawful killings and racial profiling etc. I may be wrong but i think the homocide rate doubled in one year.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
None of its intended as an excuse but I think at the least until full facts are available it merits tempering the response.
Figures were from memory and may be off;
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/01/01/us/chicago-murders-2016/index.html
States attacks on police doubled too.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/01/01/us/chicago-murders-2016/index.html
States attacks on police doubled too.
Appreciate and understand much of that response, but It's a senseless suggestion. Why would we debate a world where we shot ourselves in the foot by having ridiculous gun laws?
American police shoot people often because they are programmed to believe (often correctly) that the person they are faced with may have a gun. The answer is not to say 'Oh it's understandable'. It's to make the police safer, which in turn makes the populace safer. We all know how you do that....
It is an easy solution. Americans hide behind an amendment that is not fit for purpose. They know it, the whole world knows it. They're electively stupid. Every bit as bad in doctrine as those who commit a crime in the name of religion.
They know that their guns kill more people every day than domestic terrorism does every year, but they fear 'those different folks over there' more than they do their own self-harm rates.
I have little or no sympathy for them on the issue. I ache for all those that lose someone that they care about; young, old, innocent and 'guilty', but America is getting the society that it deserves on that front and I stopped trying to reconcile it several years back.
10000% agree, but I'm British and it's their prerogative, nothing to be done.
By the same logic though you have to extend that idiocy/difficulty to police. Surely the fault lies with the culture, the law, and the availability of weapons... exactly as you've described.
Yet we constantly seek to demonise and immediately judge the officer.
Absolutely. The problems can never be simplified to one guy, 6 seconds with a gun, and a perceived bad guy.
Thats what the news does though, makes something a discussion point for a day. Personalises. Obfuscates the larger issue.
Is that so? My impression is that a lot of the reporting puts singular incidents in a larger context of gun violence, policing procedures, racism, police brutality etc. The larger issues are talked about plenty imo.
I don't believe it's taught in the academy. We never trained in it. The 21 ft rule is discussed a lot, but there's no standardized policy or training for it as far as I know.
In my opinion, the larger context is only loosely mentioned. We attach names to the incident. The officer in question, his record. The victim, his priors or lack thereof. Nothing genuine is done in terms of maintaining a single news story throughout*. You've just quoted 4 topics. Depending on the officer and individual involved a slant is given to make most money off the news story. Be that race, brutality, whatever. There's always an angle. A cursory nod is given within that narrative to gun control. Someone from the right speaks, someone from the left speaks. It's forgotten until the next time.
Bottom line: America needs less guns. They need guns taken out of the hands not fit to own them. The fit and proper person test should be difficult. The country could take 30% of guns out of the country if they only targeted guns in the hands that most citizens would not want owning guns. They could remove large calibre guns from all but the most justified owners. Those two things would probably take the country down somewhere near normal-world figures for gun related deaths.
BUT... You've built a multi million dollar industry (that exists under a multi billion dollar arms industry) on citizens owning guns. The populace is put at risk year on year because corporations will not allow the government to make their citizens safer as they'll make less money.
It's insane. The whole world knows the problem, as well as implementable solutions on offer. The country does nothing, perhaps because there's a tacit understanding that they couldn't affect their government even if they tried.
* EDIT - My point is, at no point does every shooting become another brick on the road to improvement. There never feels like anything approaching critical mass. The country had something like two dozen children gunned down and instead of drawing a line in the sand to say 'No more', it carried on regardless. You see headlines on the newsfeed "The worst shooting since yadda yadda in April". They only ever need go back MONTHS before they can cite the last tragedy. Nowhere else in the world does that happen. I guess that's what I mean smaller issues of personality being given greater reporting than the actual thing that matters.
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The dashcam video is out.
I agree with this.
Appreciate you making it through the whole post and finding some value/sense in there. I've been ranty on this topic.
Read this...man feck this asshole
Jesus wept
Fcuking hell
That is so fecking sad. The officer was jittery as feck, if I was the driver I would have asked the officer if I could exit the vehicle while he checked everything in the car by himself although that would probably go against protocol.
That video and that 'explanation' is why we have riots.
It's why there is a movement called Black Lives Matter - which of course was ridiculed by racists and closet racists with shit like All Lives Matter.
No fcukheads...all lives don't get shot up by the police with ZERO consequence.
It's why there is a movement called Black Lives Matter - which of course was ridiculed by racists and closet racists with shit like All Lives Matter.
No fcukheads...all lives don't get shot up by the police with ZERO consequence.
If a white guy acts like that, he gets shot more than 50% of the time. Maybe a black guy gets shot more often, but this instance isn't a racial absolute.
The issue here is the officer not retreating. Yes the victim should have stayed motionless. He opened a dialogue. But acted stupidly after that. But the officer just needs to retreat. Give himself room to make the right decision.
It's murder. Avoidable murder.
What a cowardly fecking cnut. How the feck did he not get put away for that. I hope he is looking behind his back for the rest of his life. fecking coward, I wonder was he drug tested after this murder.
What really stands out to me here is how calm the other officer is... he doesn't look like he sees a threat at all.
I just... I don't understand
Mate, I feel so bad, watching the video (yet again) and with the audio is just sickening. His wife and kid were in the car, his fecking KID! I feel sick that i'm powerless to help, and even sicker that the jury acquitted. Does anyone know the number of jurors that wanted to acquit? It's inconceivable to me that the officer is not now sat in an orange jumpsuit contemplating his mistake and what he has done to that poor woman and her child. I honestly cannot fathom this one, racist jurors is the only answer I can come up with. I don't know how they can live with themselves and I certainly do not know how that officer can. Man, I sure hope Karma really is a bitch in his case.
So much wrong with that long before anyone has to consider lethal force.
The officer is poorly positioned and is not in control at all, he also goes from 0 to 90 in milliseconds.
Panicked, swearing, totally all over the place, I'll never understand why he had to fire 6 (?) rounds. The other officer is getting on like it's a routine stop proceeding as normal, barely reacts.
Reaching down when instructed not to is very silly and I don't know why on earth he did that either but it's still at the absolute least manslaughter.
To me it's clearly fear, that man is in fear of his life and completely loses control. The problem is the fear is not rational in the circumstance and the officer should be much, much better than that.
Very sad.
Excellent analysis, mate. He is definitely reacting through fear, as soon as he heard the word gun he started panicking, but as you say, REALLY panicking. He lost control completely and again, as you say, he's clearly not in control at any point after he heard the word gun. The swearing got me too as it showed he had lost the plot, and I think the report I saw said he fired 7 shots, which for lack of a better word is complete overkill. 2 hit him in the heart but he didn't die instantly, so he suffered for some time.
Quite how his lady and kid get over that i'm not sure. The verdict is disgraceful and I bet it's destroyed the poor woman all over again.
I know double jeopardy means that the case can't be tried again, but is this the end? Is there any chance a judge or the Supreme Court could overturn the ruling? And I hate to say this, I really do, but what are the chances of civil litigation?
An article mentioned that the acquittal all stemmed around the definition of culpable negligence. In this case, reaching for something when you are known to have a gun on your person.
My estimate is the victim did not consider having a gun to be out of the ordinary, and took a far more relaxed stance to the situation than the shooter. The shooter severely tensed up the moment he learned of the gun, and the movement of the victim triggered him into premature escalation.
I don't think the shooter should have ever been in a job that involved carrying a firearm, nor should he going forward.
My estimate is the victim did not consider having a gun to be out of the ordinary, and took a far more relaxed stance to the situation than the shooter. The shooter severely tensed up the moment he learned of the gun, and the movement of the victim triggered him into premature escalation.
I don't think the shooter should have ever been in a job that involved carrying a firearm, nor should he going forward.
The swearing reallly struck me.
I know it's not a situation most of us will find ourselves in but it almost sounds like an admission of guilt, at the least blind panic.
You shoot to stop if you have to, not 7 times, you should be justified in doing so and as soon as you do you should be clearing the threat/weapon and administering first aid, tasking ambulances etc. It's professional and procedure.
Not continuing to point a gun at a man shot 7 times, his partner and child, whilst saying feck in a blind panic.
I couldn't agree more. I don't think there's much to add really, you have said it all. Feck, it's just so needless and I honestly can't get the thoughts of the poor woman and kid out my head. Another thing that struck me was how his wife/gf was after he was shot. She remained so calm and polite, still calling the officer Sir for goodness sake. I know she would have been petrified, mortified and devastated and definitely in fear of not only her own, but her kids life too, but still. For her to act and remain so calm after what just happened is unbelievable. SHE is the kind of person you would want as a Police Officer and in charge of firearms. She is definitely the kind of person you would want around in a dangerous or stressful situation. I wouldn't want that cop serving me hot coffee let alone in possession of any kind of firearm ever again.
Counting the gunshots in a US police involved shooting is the wrong argument to make, akin to questioning shot placement. They're trained to shoot "until the threat is eliminated". It's going to be almost impossible to argue against an officer's judgment of when the threat was eliminated in a court room.
The big questions I have center around 1) what happened in the car that we cannot see and 2) why is the officer jumping to such a threatened stance when the driver is following proper concealed carry weapons training when informing the officer that he is armed.
The big questions I have center around 1) what happened in the car that we cannot see and 2) why is the officer jumping to such a threatened stance when the driver is following proper concealed carry weapons training when informing the officer that he is armed.
To be honest I think considering every incident in terms of what is required in a court room is indicative of a very poor mindset. The thing shouldn't be happening, full stop.
I know what you mean though how many shots it takes to stop someone is like asking how long is a piece of string. But case by case it totally relevant.
The number of shots have to be proportional to the risk and that's an ongoing assessment.
He's maybe less than 2 foot away, and pointing his gun down at a (presumably relatively) stationary seated male. He shouldn't miss. 7 shots indicates panic and lack of plan/control. As does his words, as does his body language. When we're given such clear footage you have to begin to consider these things and make judgements.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but it's undeniably such poor work and he should have been thoroughly questioned on every minute detail of that shit show, because none of his rationale would stand up.
We can't really answer your questions, if we are to go by his own words then the males drug habit as viewed in a matter seconds played into part of the reason for the shooting....
Mind bogglingly stupid.