Black therapist was shot by Florida police while helping a person with autism
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
"The therapist said police then rushed him, patted him down and put him in handcuffs. Kinsey said what police did after the shooting is what upsets him the most. “They flipped me over, and I’m faced down in the ground, with cuffs on, waiting on the rescue squad to come. I’d say about 20, about 20 minutes it took the rescue squad to get there. And I was like, bleeding — I mean bleeding, and I was like, ‘Wow.'”" http://wsvn.com/news/local/video-shows-moments-before-north-...
Doesn't sound like the officers had an ounce of common sense. Shouldn't they have applied some pressure to the wound or elevated the leg? I really hope that they didn't just roll him over, cuff him and just watch him bleed.
What really bothers me most about it is that police and their defenders tend to fixate on the fact that their 'lives are on the line every day' - but they don't mention that their training and behavior goes to great lengths to mitigate the inherent risk of their job, to the point of putting suspects and civilians at significantly higher risk of injury or death when interacting with police.
Wtf is going on America!?
Police have effectively insulated themselves from the public so well that we are no longer even human to them. Just "suspects".
the safety and threat response reads as spin to me
this is a video of an officer interacting with a person tased unconscious
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3629599/Shocking-das...
you are able to render safety and abate threat and provide care
the person in the video is unconscious lowering threat to zero and increasing officer safety and yet the officer causes harm
another situation where the officers rendered safety and abated threat but ended in the death of Freddie Gray
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5ac_1429472111
i think it's offensive both to and of officers to argue safety broadly
as if to say any scenario of providing care creates danger to an officer's safety
I hope the therapist guy gets a big settlement out of this.
“He's autistic” becomes not an explanation, but a warning.
Note, I’m not saying there weren’t three shots, just that often the first reports get things wrong. If he was indeed shot 3 times, then this goes way beyond negligent and into criminal.
- The officer involved
Same for the Baton Rouge "he lifted his head!" case from last week, where people try to argue that lifting one's head meets the statutory requirements for resisting arrest, as if merely checking an item off a list makes it okay to kill him, even if he is not physically able to pose a real threat of death or injury.
A lot of us were open to the idea that it was a media invention. Then cell phones began to have cameras in them. As a side effect, we found that UFOs aren't real, and there's no Big Foot. (No, this is not original with me.)
I think what we've really found out is that for a lot of people, if they have a gun and they get just a little bit nervous, the slightest thing will have them pulling the trigger. For example, there was a video a few years back of some arrest in Nevada. Cop standing over the cuffed and restrained accused with gun drawn, and the gun suddenly goes off (not hitting the accused, fortunately). I watched the video several times trying to figure out what set her off. I have no idea. All I could conclude was that she had her finger on the trigger and...I don't know, tripped? Accused ripped a fart? She looked as surprised as anyone, so "it just went off"? (For the uninitiated, handguns don't just "go off"; either you intentionally pulled the trigger, or you fucked up.)
When questioned in this case by the victim as to why the cop shot him, cop allegedly said, "I don't know". That might be true. So maybe we need to teach cops to keep that finger out of the trigger guard until ready to shoot, like the rest of us were taught.
And this is why there are organisations popping up whose sole purpose is to record cops. Alton Stirling would not be in the headlines save for the witnesses recording it. BRPD tried to hide their actions by illegally confiscating the shop owner's video recording. Someone was on the police scanner tracking their activity.
Once you get something, shut up.
In most cases they shoot when they detect unexpected motion.
My first guess on this from what I've read is that the officer fired because of answering a call of a man with a gun, seeing the toy truck as a gun, not hearing or ignoring the other man explaining the situation, man with toy truck makes sudden movement with toy, and finally officer fires missing toy guy and hitting the man on ground. All within the span of a few moments.
But that's a guess because I have no information on angles or distances of officer, toy guy, and shot guy. I would not be surprised that the officer didn't intend to shoot the guy on the ground but that's the way it turned out.
I would expect it to be ruled a bad shoot but who knows these days.
Apparently police officers spend 58 hours learning how to shoot, but only 8 hours are spent on de-escalation tactics.
I'm British .. we have pretty much the exact opposite of what you describe - we arm our officers with their mouths, and have firearms teams that can be called in if required. I guess this makes me biased, but I do see asking an autistic patient (especially someone severe enough to need to be homed) "what's wrong?" to be more intuitive than firing at them.
Missing and hitting someone else just has to be the icing on the cake.
What you describe for your British officers is training, which we apparently don't have. But I have to ask, if these officers encounter a situation they believe is a violent escalation do they just starting talking right away and handle the whole thing themselves? Or do they engage until a specialist is present, such as a hostage negotiator? If they do, then that's identifying and containing the situation until it can be resolved. That was missing from this situation.
This is whats happened in the US.
It also seems that the training they receive only amplifies these tendencies rather than screening out these pathological behaviors. The cop with the most abuse complaints (68 complaints) in Chicago was actually given a service award.
See here: https://cpdb.co/data/bmEM6b/citizens-police-data-project
and compare here: http://guardianlv.com/2013/05/chicago-annual-award-ceremony-...
Unfortunately, it also seems like this has been going on for a long time, perhaps decades. Movies like Training Day (with Denzel Washington) appeared as pure fiction when they appeared in 2001; now you can watch them as watered-down documentary of the real thing.
Both. Why would someone even have their weapon pointed at a non-hostile person instead of in a safe direction in case of a negligent discharge? That shows a staggering lack of training and forethought.
I've seen videos some of these training exercises. The "dangerous" situation exercises seem to favor escalation to deadly force as soon as viable and encourage the trainee to look for a reason to escalate. One was a domestic violence situation, where, when the trainee is told, the appropriate response to a person reaching into the sink is to use deadly force, since there may be a gun in there.
Which is why, I think, any situation results in a successful lawsuit or settlement should automatically be considered a violation of training policy.
And in regards to it being a criminal matter, the officer does have the right of being innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. You and I can make our judgements but he does have the right to defend himself.
Police safety will not be affected, as any person in true danger will risk a manslaughter charge to save their own life. Clear cut cases of necessary force will be open and shut without much issue, but the cowardly murderers with their fingers on the trigger around the country will think long and hard before they make that decision to trivially end someone's life.
Prosecution is not punishment. If you kill someone, there is probable cause to charge with murder and let the court establish permissibility of the killing.
You speak as if there's no fact-finding at all. A police officer can face up to three such things; local, state, and federal. If not more.
The feds picked the case up and tried the murderers in federal court under federal hate crime laws, they were sentenced to 9 years. The police chief and some of his deputies were convicted and their minimum sentences ranged from 5-7 years (although they of course served much less than that) for essentially a badly biased police report and some terrible local ties - truly, the only thing that saved them from a very long prison sentence was the compassion of a judge.
There's still a lot of xenophobia in the town, of course - but I'm betting the institutional memory of a DOJ civil rights investigation will last quite a while.