Minn. officer acquitted in shooting of Philando Castile

[brewster]

What's the criminal history? Was it flagged on the computer? Did he run a check? Was there an APB with a description matching the dead suspect out at the time? Could there have been any evidence at all the cop felt threatened for his life?

Notice every time you get pulled over where the cops hands are. Why do you think that is Brewster?

WTF are you on about? Did you read the post, or was it also tl;dr?

[TheReal_ND]

The post didn't answer a single question I asked you. Why are you @ me if you don't want to answer any questions? Just fuck off then or ignore it.

[Speaker to Animals]

duh

The point is they aren't being payed to be rocket scientists. They are being payed to police. Honest work for an honest pay until it's not but rather the point is that they are in no way overcompensated at least imho.

Edit: at least not legitimately overcompensated but if what Hollywood has told me to think along with all the several dozen cases hyped up in the media, is true they are all CROOKED COPS AMD PROBABLY FASCISTS WAHHH

I can tell you from experience most of the cops in Chicago are crooked as hell.

Here is another in the latest string of police abuses, this time in NYC:

[TheReal_ND]

I can assure you that after listening to the Chicago police scanner I am mystified why anyone would want that job. I'm not dismissing the problem but I would minimalize it slightly due to the fact that is some next level hard work.

[SuburbanFarmer]

As always, running from the police is now a capital crime. Fucking clown show.

[brewster]

The post didn't answer a single question I asked you. Why are you @ me if you don't want to answer any questions? Just fuck off then or ignore it.

Not one of your questions was relevant to that story I linked rather than the Castile case. I'm guessing you didn't read it before firing off laundry list.

[Okeefenokee]

I've found that the issue at hand is police protocol.

The people who call foul do so in opposition to what is in many places protocol.

One high profile case involved a man attacking a police officer, stripping his drawn taser from his hand, then running only to be shot in the back. Protocol in that case warranted deadly force against an aggressor who might be believed to be fleeing while possessing a weapon. In other places, it would be required of the officer not to shoot a fleeing armed suspect, but not there. The officer, having had his taser taken from him, followed protocol in shooting the fleeing suspect. He was acquitted.

The debate centered on whether the officer should have shot him, or let him go. The issue that I have found to be ignored is that his department's policy does not leave that for him to decide. People inject their own opinion into what the officer should have done, ignoring what his department had established as protocol.

In California, an armed suspect can be expected to be allowed to escape, while in Georgia, such an expectation is not likely. In each of these places, similar situations can end very differently simply because the established protocols are not universal.

There are places where public opinion has deemed that criminals be given much leeway. Others have not. Police in these places operate along different guidelines.

It makes me think of a night in Iraq. If under the protocol of certain places, the mortar crew, having fired their rounds, and attempting to slink into the darkness, would have been deemed off limits. Certainly they presented a threat not moments before, but at present, they had ceased their hostile actions. Any dangerous actions they had been engaged in were complete, and they no longer presented any further threat...tonight. With today's ROE, it would not have gone well for us, but that wasn't the protocol then.

[Martin Hash]

Very convincing.

Social Media has allowed everybody's opinion everywhere to have the same weight & volume, the flaw of democracy.

[DBTrek]

Very convincing.

Social Media has allowed everybody's opinion everywhere to have the same weight & volume, the flaw of democracy.

No, not everybody's opinions.

Consider the demographics of people who have all day to write post after post, comment after comment, on social media. These are people with lots of time. People who don't have active social or professional lives that take them away from their computers. Thus, social media over-represents the idle, the friendless, the manic, and the bored to an extreme degree. That is to say, it actually lends a disproportionate weight to the exact demographic of people we should probably *not* be listening to for advice.

A busy, wise, thoughtful individual might make one salient post on social media to address an event.

In the meantime, millions of brain-dead, shut-in, bottom-of-the-barrel misanthropes are typing away their 200th response to the same event.

Who is represented?

Whose message is heard?

That's social media.

[Speaker to Animals]

The problem in the video was communication. The officer was not being explicit. His warning should have been to stop reaching into his clothing and put his hands on the wheel. Instead, he warned the guy not to deploy his firearm, which they guy wasn't doing (it sounds like he was getting his CCW card). But because the two men were operating under completely different assumptions about what was happening, the more abstract the instructions the cop made, the more likely the situation would lead to violence. Police should always assume they are operating under different assumptions of what is happening and make extremely explicit and concrete instructions. Wrong: don't reach for your gun. Correct: put your hands on the steering wheel.

There are other cases where police make ambiguous demands and then kill somebody.

We can argue about culpability all day, but in my opinion, the bigger issue here is that we don't hire the best possible people for these jobs because we don't make policing a somewhat elite club with commensurate pay. There are lots and lots of people out there today who would make excellent police after nearly two decades of constant warfare overseas. But they have better things to do with their lives.

Men in particular seek status and earnings. When you make something less exclusive and less discriminatory, less of the exceptional men will pursue it. You see this with medicine between nations that pay doctors low salaries and nations where being a specialist is a high-earning and high-status career choice. If I need brain surgery, I'd rather get it done in a nation where such surgeons are elite and the best doctors are attracted by very high compensation than getting it done in a nation where being a surgeon is just another job that pays a middle class salary. I might not be able to afford the ideal, but that's a separate issue that does not apply to policing. We certainly can afford to pay for fewer but far more qualified police.