Teen shot herself with gunshot through mouth while hands cuffed behind back
abcnews4.com
abcnews4.com
If they're not prosecuted because of an unhealthy relationship between police and prosecutors, why is that relationship not changed? Why are prosecutors and police departments not held accountable for this?
Why aren't state and federal governments calling for better laws to protect the people from crooked cops?
Why are these officers not fired, at least?
And why are US police officers not better trained and selected?
Surely there must we ways to address this. Why is that not happening? Is American society really fine with their police murdering people?
I think the only possible answer is "yes"?
It's not even a US-specific phenomenon; lots of people around the world want "something to be done" about crime, and are happy to assume that if the police are after someone "that person must have done something wrong" and therefore "deserved" whatever happened to them.
It's just that most of the first world has managed to build little non-authoritarian enclaves where the police are subject to the law too, and enough of the public accept the idea that all life is valuable.
This, to me, is one of the primary tenants of what is evil about naziism, or tyranny, or whatever you call it.
You can see it alive today. Lookup police cam, or "karma justice" kind videos on YT and see people in the comments cheering on the beutality or deaths of people whom they know next to nothing about.
A civil and just society would see the human in everybody, and try to afford everyone natural rights. Not a judge, jury and executioner in the form of a uniformed enforcer on streets.
One of the biggest disservice that has been made towards humanity is the fabrication of this notion that evil totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or Communist Russia are exceptional events created by exceptional individuals who are extraoedinarily evil up to a supernatural/cartoonish level. This fabricated sense of exceptionalisn leads people to believe that thesr massive levels of cruelty are impossible to reproduce, thus there is no likelihood that our little world could ever descend into that state of affairs, even when we repeatedly see cases where police forces assassinate citizens with complete impunity.
> This, to me, is one of the primary tenants of what is evil about naziism, or tyranny, or whatever you call it.
Indeed, this is what Arendt meant by "the banality of evil". It's what people are cautioning about when they tell us that by far the smallest, most vulnerable, most heavily-oppressed minority of them all is the individual.
That means the only way to prevent evil is to shape the circumstances in such a way that encourage people to do the right thing, and discourages evil.
So with police, you can't merely trust them that they will always do the right thing and not mistreat or murder suspects, you have to train them, hold them accountable, and create a culture where bad behaviour is simply not acceptable.
My impression of the US police (from reading these kind of stories, as a foreigner, not having any first-hand experience with it) is that US police frequently fails on some, and sometimes on all three of these issues.
I do too, but executing potentially innocent people on the spot is not "doing something about crime", it's crime. That innocent could be you (unless you're rich and/or white I guess?).
> most of the first world has managed to build little non-authoritarian enclaves where the police are subject to the law too, and enough of the public accept the idea that all life is valuable.
But why not the US? Surely when you see the ideas behind the US Constitution, Americans should be completely on board with this. They should be leading the charge.
When I visit Europe or South America the only places that I saw officers with guns were in international traffic hubs, important government offices, or Army troops making patrols. Police officers usually only had access to batons, tasers, or pepper spray.
However we live in a society that has been flooded by ubiquitous access to guns that inevitably spillover to criminals and people are fine with police brutality because it only happens to marginalized groups with little influence over their lives.
That is why the handful of people that control the media push a pro-police message so hard. They do not want the public to turn against their keepers.
They have a rich and powerful police union that lobbies to make sure the laws favor the police. They have the backing of the ultra-wealthy class to keep people in line. If you try to peacefully protest, they will just mace you and the media will say it is your fault.
The police themselves tend to be good chaps but they do not get nearly enough training, and any training they do get pushes then towards considering the line of duty a combat zone, even though police officer is not even in the top 10 moat dangerous jobs. Also they tend to be not brilliant. They want obedience not critical thinkers. You can fail a police IQ test if you score too high. [1]
Finally, while most cops are good people, if you are a sadist becoming a police officer is a good career because it lets you sate your lust for power and there is very little chance you will be punished for it.
- 0: check out "the new jim crow"
- 1: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-the-U-S-people-can-...
There used to be a saying "only in Russia..." but it's apparently not valid anymore.
Of course we say "doesn't happen here," then again groupthink also killed everyone aboard Challenger, we ended up riding Russian rockets to space while our generation's greatest rocket engineer was tinkering in his garage until Musk hired him.
People and history have an easy way of putting other people down, including exceptionally gifted and valuable people. That's a danger I think we take for granted.
All you need is one person signing /stopping any meaningful investigation and you get these results.
A government not acknowledging failures in training, procedure and accountability doesn't seem that much better than one that outright fosters that state in their executive branch.
In the United States, decisions about whether deaths are listed as suicides on death certificates are usually made by a coroner or medical examiner.
Not just in America, in the UK the Health and Safety culture has resulted in drownings where rescue personnel refused to enter ponds to assist victims. And currently an enquiry into the London Bridge attack has heard of how paramedics, thinking of their own safety, refused to help patients for up to 90 minutes after the attackers had been killed.
The US police increasingly resemble a paramilitary type operation with swat teams and armoured vehicles, all predicated on the protection of officers.
It was probably inevitable in a country where even automatic assault weapons are freely available.
this is a mistruth, 3 men didn't receive care instantly as the area they were in was deemed "Hot"
"The inquest has heard that the scene of the attack was deemed a "hot zone" under London Ambulance Service (LAS) protocol, which prevents paramedics from entering for their own safety."
""For our own safety we couldn't go forward," he told the Old Bailey, which is hearing the inquests into the deaths of the eight people killed in the attack at London Bridge and Borough Market."
but, of course "ambulance services protocols put the safety of their staff over those of injured members of the public." doing the maths, if those paramedics were shot while doing work, now you just have even more people injured and require more medics.
police can be armed, with direct contact to support, medics aren't.
the ethics, and legal standing around paramedics refusing to treat wounded civi or other are buried deep within code.
the reason why the area was delegated hot was because of reports of gun fire/ramming.
sadly, your logic isn't correct, we still have firefighters burn to death while trying to rescue civis.
--https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/04/grenfell-tow...
"A firefighter at Grenfell Tower prepared to die when his oxygen almost ran out during the attempted rescue of a 12-year old girl because the fire lift failed, the public inquiry has heard."
many people died in this event, not because of firefighters on the ground, but because of leadership/command/govt.
@barking, your comment made something click. For police, the protection of police officers is by far their highest duty, and then much lower is the protection of the public. From this first principle, I can now see why it follows that the murder of a police officer is viewed as much more important, and why so many more police resources are used to solve that crime.
It is all this first responder hero worship in the US.
Cops are just public servants no better or worse than the folks at the local Dept of Motor Vehicles.
If I had a nickel for every time police bodycams just happened to be off or malfunctioning whenever somebody gets killed under highly dubious circumstances, I wouldn’t need to raise venture capital. The PD declining to release footage from after is the icing on the cake. This is just ridiculous.
Officer’s son shoots man in back of head, lies and tampers with evidence and isn't charged with murder: https://www.news4jax.com/news/fdle-arrests-baker-county-man-...
Corrections officers neglect prisoner who dies, one goes back to work: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/05/21/j...
It is insane how often body cameras are 'knocked' or 'dropped' in these cases. Is the tech seriously that poor? This is not even the most ridiculous case; there have been times when five body cameras were all said to have malfunctioned at once, or even seven dashboard cameras. [1] [2, for non-paywall version]
How these forces are allowed to get away with this is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/06/28/...
When GoPro is sitting over going "hey guys we had a guy free fall 12,500 feet with one of our cameras on and it was fine"
Murder is murder and any time something like this happens and the camera was 'turned off' the cops should be charged with murder.
But hey even if the cameras were on would it matter? In Vallejo 6 cops shot a man 25 times who had fallen asleep in his car at a taco bell drive through. Dude was asleep, was surrounded, and shot 25 times. Best part? One of the officers was already being investigated for what you ask? Why possible excessive force that resulted in a death.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/07/vallejo-poli...
But it seems unlikely. Even more suspicious when body cams got turned off.
It's inconvenient to put a gun in someone's mouth the way they'd hold it to kill themselves.
And generally it's men who shoot themselves, but I guess she was just looking inside that car for some way, anyway to kill herself quickly and found an unattended gun. And luckily for her, I guess, she had the energy to actually pull it off - what with all the contorting that was required .
It seems to me that the best course of action when being approached by law enforcement is to immediately go into SUPER compliant state and SUPER static state. Meaning, don't do any action unless told so by the law officer. Don't move around like you normally would, anything you assume to be benign might not be as far as they are concerned, be patient, let it unfold as fast and as slow as they so choose. If their actions were wrong then courts are the route, but LATER, once you are out of the predicament.
1, "inside the car where she was a passenger, "contorted" her body and shot herself through the mouth" So she was able to get her hand cuffed arms in front of herself which would allow for control of a weapon.
2, Where did the weapon come from? Maybe it was in the patrol car, maybe she had it on her person.
Anyway flagged as irrelevant to HN.