I don't want to get drinks with this character in Solnit's story, either. But I'm not sure we should applaud the tactic of summoning up and focusing outrage on people like this.
He certainly wasn't a murderer, not even close. But he was an unusually big asshole. I, for one, do not express any serious wish to shoot people very often.
I certainly wouldn't express it in writing over any electronic medium in today's world, but that's a different discussion.
I mean, you could write the title - Death by Snu Snu and you could paint his girlfriend as some shady character.
That lasted a couple minutes. But "poorly managed, barking dog jumps up on someone" happens millions of times a day, and those dogs owners are not complicit in murders.
As reported elsewhere, Solnit's story leaves out Nieto's mental illness, which is apparently severe: he appears to have been schizophrenic. We don't know what Nieto's reaction was to the dog. He could have terrified, or he could have been outraged.
A previous version of this comment suggested that Nieto had tased someone else at the park; he had not. I misread something; the taser incident I read about was unrelated to the park.
In fact 50% of the people killed by police are "mentally ill".
Also consider that having severe depression, autism, ADD, etc. are considered mental illnesses.
Alex's Nieto's "mental illness", even if existent, is not an excuse for his death.
I am going to gently push back on you, though, because you're making it sound as if Nieto had a completely unrelated historical diagnosis that is being used here as a smokescreen. Here are some details salient, I personally think, to this case:
* Nieto had been prescribed two antipsychotics. He had not been taking them at the time the police confronted him.
* Just three weeks prior to this shooting, Nieto had tased the ex-husband of a friend while they were putting their kid in a car. The victim removed the taser darts, and Nieto tased him again. The victim managed to get into the car and drive away as Nieto screamed and threatened him.
* The second of Nieto's two antipsychotics was prescribed two years prior, when he was placed on psychiatric lockdown after trying to set his parents house on fire.
There is mental illness of the kind that many of us suffer and manage, with varying kinds of assistance. And then there is uncontrolled, ongoing, and violent psychosis.
Nobody is arguing that Nieto's mental illness is a good reason for him to have been killed. But the notion that the police, dispatched to confront a subject reported in a 911 call to have been carrying a pistol, faced someone who did indeed refuse to show their hands and then did indeed draw a weapon is corroborated by Nieto's history.
Do you have a cite for that? Cursory googling doesn't seem to pull it up.
I don't think people should be allowed to arbitrarily carry tasers around, either, by the way. Certainly I don't think it's OK for bar bounces to have them. Dozens of people die every year when the police tase them. Tasers are not safe.
Snow deserves a big chunk of blame here.
It's simple folks: if you're not highly confident that your dog will behave itself
For those of you who still harbor sympathy for Snow, do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.
Now Snow's dog didn't end up biting, but that's beside the point. His dog clearly caused a major disturbance because he didn't control it. Snow's recklness is the root cause of this profound tragedy.
Also kids get killed being mauled by dogs.
Not sure why people don't get this. If you own an animal that can kill a human being, you don't own a pet, you own a very dangerous animal, responsibility of actions of whose should solely rely on you.
Pets are parrots, squirrels etc. Tender animals which can't cause meaningful harm to human life.
We can't know the state of mind of the victim, but there's every possibility that he believed he was pointing his tazer at a group of assailants. It's incumbent on police to properly identify themselves before making demands of someone they expect to comply.
The same eyewitness is the basis for claims Nieto's hands were in his pocket when he was shot. But Nieto's hands were wounded by the shooting, and his pockets were not damaged.
Then the DOJ report more or less refuted all of those eyewitness claims.
The police were called to the scene based on a report of a subject brandishing a firearm. They found the exact person the report referred to. The subject was indeed armed (though not with a firearm). They did not need to tamper with evidence. They didn't need to fire the taser. In fact, doing so would only put them at risk, if they somehow managed to screw up firing it themselves.
The police probably did not fire the taser.
Solnit would like us to believe Snow was complicit in Nieto's killing, because it supports her narrative.
Surely Solnit was made aware, before this article was published, of critically important details, like Nieto's diagnosed and medicated psychosis (he was off his meds), or his record of having violently confronted people in that same park. She chose to leave those details out of her story, entirely, because it would have muddied the point she hoped to make.
Meanwhile, Solnit is perfectly happy to write the story in such a way that a casual reader would have believe Snow was at fault. Some readers on this thread have apparently come away with the impression that it was him who called 911!
Psychosis: not important for us to know about. Later unrelated racist text message between friends: very important for us to know about. You don't feel manipulated?
SoInit is not presenting all the facts because that is not a journalist's job. She has only a limited amount of space (yes even on the web) to work with.
But why are you talking about the messenger rather than the message?
The message does indicate the state of mind of the responding officers.
Considering you live in Chicago and that Rebecca and I actually live in Bernal Heights I think we have a much better perspective on the situation.
Where I come from you don't call the cops because you think you saw "a Mexican crazy man waving a gun around". If you see something, you leave, and you don't say anything to anyone. If you don't be a snitch then people don't get shot.
If you move from fucking Iowa and you think San Francisco is like adult Disneyland and you parade around town with your white ear buds and you're totally oblivious to reality, you might think that the SFPD is like the security guards at the mall and think you need to call them when you see some "Mexican kids hanging on the street in a pack".
The cops have fucking handguns and are very familiar with using them throughout years of gang violence in the Mission and Bernal. People who live in these neighborhoods don't look forward to having the police roll up searching for a Mexican with a handgun. Bullets fly in all directions. Completely innocent people get gunned down. Someone acting scary and just having a bad day but not hurting anyone gets gunned down. This shit happens all the time. I've been watching people get shot for no god damned reason for years and years and years.
STOP SNITCHIN'
Then, reread Solnit's story. The "snitch" we're talking about didn't call Nieto in. Someone else did.
There are two very different worlds here. The world Eric Snow lives in and the world Alex Nieto was taken from.
Eric Snow and Justin Fritz don't know the rules and never bothered to find out the rules yet decided to live in this world. Their actions got people shot.
Is this ideal? Hell no! It shouldn't be like this. No one fucking wants this. But pretending like it doesn't exist is irresponsible.
That said, this isn't directly related to the story at hand as it is not clear that Mr. Nieto was in fact waving a gun around, but appears to be a convenient story from the police to justify having shot him.
From the perspective of someone who's used to the benefits of calling the cops outweighing the costs. The parent poster gives valuable insight into the thought process learned from the very real places where the cost of calling the cops outweighs the benefits.
I heard a man gunned down by the cops just six months ago on a construction site on my block. Four years ago someone got shot execution style on the sidewalk 10 doors down from my apartment. That same apartment still had three bullets lodged in the walls and ceiling. Two years before that three people got blown away in a pizza restaurant underneath another apartment I was living in. That's five murders within 200 ft of where I was sitting in just 6 years. All of these happened in the Mission and Bernal neighborhoods where I've been living and where Alex Nieto grew up. That's just reality.
The point I'm making is that if you're in a neighborhood where there happens to be a history of gang violence you should know that calling the cops more often than not just escalates the tension and creates more opportunities for unneeded violence.
If different cultures are going to learn to live together peacefully we need to learn how to do so without getting the cops involved. How different would this have been if these people had just talked to Alex instead of making assumptions? That's the whole fucking point of the article. Eric Snow isn't in San Francisco to get to know people like Alex. He's here to make money and he doesn't know about nor care about what was going on in the Mission or Bernal before he moved to town.
And for fuck's sake, these are real murders I'm talking about and they rattle me to the bone. I'm a sensitive dude.
Seriously, follow these simple instructions for a much better life:
https://punchdrunktwolves.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/stop_s...
What I have a problem with are stories with "good guys" and "bad guys". Very few stories are really like that, despite what Solnit so obviously wants you to believe. There's just tragedy layered on top of tragedy. There are injustices to be found, but they're probably not the ones you want --- the injustice isn't "white dude didn't follow the sacred white dude code", but rather "we give all the police firearms and put them in situations where they'd need to be superhuman to forestall tragedy", or "our care for the mentally ill is fucking appalling".
I don't care why Eric Snow is in San Francisco. He's a racist gun enthusiast. I'm never going to be his friend. But I also don't feel like I have any right to tell him where to live, and I don't feel like you do either.
And he sure as shit didn't kill anyone that day.
I'm "Thomas", by the way. :)
† We can both name cities that are really like that.
Everyone else I would try to ignore, because I don't want them shot. Anyone remember 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot by cops because he had a toy gun?
I would never live in Texas where I would be surrounded by white males with guns. At this point, I am more worried by crazy white dudes with a gun than I am by non-whites.
Update: I love the fact that I am talking exclusively about my own reactions and getting downvoted; love ya all.
Do not discuss your own downvotes. Don't mention them.
Do not interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.