ferguson, mo

[Harrison]

I call things as I see them.

Garner? Manslaughter
Rice? Murder
Brown? Nothing.

This is how it breaks down for me on these three cases.

I don't jump on the "omg fuck cops" bandwagon. It's a case by case basis because it's retarded to call an entire group of people anything based upon a handful of individuals. (Sound like racism much?)

[Drem]

Calling it as you see it...but...nothing about the improper grand jury proceedings?

Seems like you're calling it like fox news sees it

[Reynaldo]

so i guess there will be outrage about the Arizona guy now too even though he had a gun in his truck but wasn't "armed" when fleeing / resisting arrest.

where's the outrage about these folks just not doing what the cops request them to do? They'd all still be alive if so. Does the 10 billion years of oppression code state you can't follow basic requests when encountering a white police officer?

My frustration with the cops is that you're trained to use a handgun and probably have a pretty good ability to shoot at specific locations. Why are you popping dudes in the chest all the time when you could probably very easily blast someones knee or leg area. Then if they still pull out a gun while on the ground you could finish them off.

[Spazz]

so i guess there will be outrage about the Arizona guy now too even though he had a gun in his truck but wasn't "armed" when fleeing / resisting arrest.

Kind of he had a gun in his car and he was going for a gun are not the same shit.If your going to make it someones last day on earth you damn sure better be right. Were not talking about a dude who was robbing a store at gun point or up in a bell tower here we are talking about a guy who sold a lil dope. Dead. Forever. And why run cuz americas drug policy will lock you up for a real long time for some real petty shit. Why sell dope sometimes its the last option ya got. look at the suspected offenses and ask yourself should people really be getting smoked over this. Could just be the way I was taught about how the world works but its never ok to fire a weapon on ANYONE when nothing short of life and death is on the line. Forever is a very long time so you better be right.

Raynaldo its just not that easy to shoot with pinpoint accuracy when people are movin and adrenaline is flowing. The current school of thought on shooting is aim center mass as its the largest target and shoot til the threat stops. Its my understandings that cops dont really spend that much time on the range or doing other drills but I dont have the exact stats on that at the moment so I cant nail it down to an exact.

Would the world end tomorrow if some shit head sellin pillz evaded capture and didnt get gunned down? Would the world be a better place if those laws didnt exist at all ? Isnt much difference now days between a fuckhead selling pills and a DR now days anyway.If im wrong about that than please explain to me how they are everywhere.


Would it not be safer for cops crooks and the innocents around if they let this asshole run off then used evidence ( police work) to track him down and arrest him that way ? Im pretty sure they had his car and that more than likely would give them enough info to find the guy. Plus they still have a good chance of killing the guy in a no knock but at least the gunfire isnt outside in public.

I dont think the police are the problem. I think the laws we make make the police behave in this manner. Change the law and the police will more than likely change as well.The war on drugs is a very real war and it makes the police and us the combatants. There wills till be bad guys crime and scumbags but I really do think that ending the war might end the war if ya feel what im sayin.

[Zanchief]

A civilized society would make strides in non-lethal forms of protection for police officers. Things seem to be moving the other way though. Tanks for cops seems much more civilized.

[Gypsiyee]

it makes the police and us the combatants.

This is also the problem in the use of grand jury proceedings to indict a cop.

The prosecutor's job is to get an indictment. But a prosecutor doesn't want to indict a cop, because it puts the prosecutors at odds with the police department when they are typically on the same side working together to prosecute civilian criminals. It is a conflict of interest that will almost never serve justice to an at fault police officer.

the nonsense about how open and shut the Mike Brown case is and the typical response of "hurr, you're retarded and he was a thug" is just ignorance to the facts--and the significant amount of inconsistencies--in the case. You don't get to cherry pick what pieces of actual evidence you want to pay attention to because they validate your preconceptions and then ignore the rest and claim victory.

[Arlos]

I tend to at least somewhat believe the old axiom of "If there's smoke, there's probably a fire."

Well, in communities all over the country, SOMETHING is going on that has given the minority communities the feeling that they are being oppressed, unfairly harassed, etc. to the extent that they simply have no trust that they will be treated fairly or even humanely by the authorities. When there is that big a disconnect between a very large segment of the population and the one governmental agency we give the power to forcibly effect our personal liberty and lives as part of protecting the greater whole, that screams to me that there is SOMETHING going on that desperately needs to be fixed.

I personally am a big advocate of requiring police to wear body cams at all times, for the same reasons they have dash cams now: absolute proof of the actual course of events. If Wilson had been wearing a body cam, we would KNOW whether Brown went for his gun. We would KNOW the distances at which he was shot. I mean, look at the effect of the dash cam in that incident in South Carolina, where the cop asked the guy to get his license, then shot him repeatedly when he turned back into his car to get it. THAT cop was fired and is being tried. If we had actual video of Brown, I think the whole story would have played out very differently. Note that body cams also protect the police, too, from false accusations of misconduct or brutality.

[Gypsiyee]

You have to question the efficacy of body cams, though, when an actual recording of the entire ordeal did absolutely nothing for Garner.

[brinstar]

I call things as I see them.

Garner? Manslaughter
Rice? Murder
Brown? Nothing.

This is how it breaks down for me on these three cases.

though i passively disagree with you on brown, those are (surprisingly) agreeable views on garner and rice and i would be remiss if i did not commend them

it is important to point out that those two cases have clear video evidence, so i am left to wonder whether clear video evidence of the ferguson incident would change your mind (or mine, or the grand jury's, or anyone's at all)

[Spazz]

i would need to see full video of the Brown incident to even consider changing my mind. Eye witness test sucks balls , people lie , I need to see video footage of it or my default setting is police brutality. My mother used to tell me that your reputation proceeds you and i think those wise words.


Be nice if video evidence amounted to a little bit more than public outrage though. Its not just the police though im of the opinion that any time someone unarmed gets killed by someone who is some kinda bullshit took place. I really just have a hard time believing that unarmed people be attacking the police on a rego.

[Drem]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014 ... -black-man

there is a problem with police in this country. and Cleveland is the only department that the attorney general has looked at, so far

[Harrison]

Never, ever, ever aim for limbs.

Your typical officer shoots maybe once a month at most, some less. Most everyday concealed carry people hit the range far more than cops do. There's always exceptions but, they're not hitting shit they want to outside of center mass. They just don't have the practice.

Hitting something the width of limbs with a handgun is a good shot, extremely difficult with your heart beating, chest heaving, and/or other shit going on.

Plus, if you're faced with a threat you deem enough to fire upon, you don't play games with your own life or of those around you by taking poor shots such as legs and arms.

[Drem]

yeah, no doubt, but why does this keep happening? i have a tough time believing that, in all of these cases, the guy that gets shot was "reaching for my service weapon"

a lie isn't a side of a story. it's just a lie

[Harrison]

Most assuredly there's people lying out there to cover their asses.

It's probably somewhere in the middle as most lies are extreme opposites.

"Reached for my gun" can simply be there, or the cop got punched. The lie is still a lie but, the truth is rarely the exact opposite of the lie.

[10sun]

Why didn't he just drive away?

[brinstar]

technique

idk about the rest of it, but the limb thing is totally true. if it's on, fuckin always aim for center mass. this is a digression though, the issue IMO is whether you/cops should shoot in the first place.

[Harrison]

That's a point of contention that's a hot button for a lot of people, and most don't understand what it's like to be in situations such as that.

How many people out of 10 would you say have wondered if they were going to live through an attack of any sort?(including wild animals, dog, what have you...) There's people out there that wholeheartedly believe that no police officer should be armed, or anyone else for that matter.

Everyone's line is in a different place.

[Jay]

Cops shoot when threatened. Cops just need to learn that black doesn't = threatening. Poor doesn't = threatening. They need to be properly trained to detect other signs of threat rather than letting their fear do the qualifying for them.

[Zanchief]

I think part of it is the dehumanization that is happening. I think a lot of it is cultural, but I don't know if training is going to make it go away. Even the training they already have would teach them not to choke someone who isn't resisting, and whatever resistance he was giving them was probably because he couldn't breathe. I think training would teach them to check vital signs of a man who's unconscious.

They didn't do those things because they didn't value the person, at all. That is a much deeper issue, and one that won't be solved by throwing a garbage can into a plate glass window. It only makes it worse. As much as everyone hates Al Sharpton, he turned what could have been a much more volatile situation and got people to protest, for the most part, peacefully in a way that could actually be beneficial.

[Spazz]

i dont think you can train someone not to be a pussy or a racist jay you either are or arent . Could prolly figure out who is and who isnt before handing out badges though.

[brinstar]

hot damn, some good fuckin posts on this page, esp re: threat and dehumanization

[Harrison]

It would be less of a problem if there was some sort of uniformity to the selection process for police officers across the country.

I know "state rights" blah blah blah. It's an issue, and I think one of the biggest. The qualifications for some police departments are woefully lacking in comparison to others.

Up here we require criminal justice degrees, down there? I doubt they even need a degree in anything.

[Spazz]

Yea i think every department is diff but I am in agreement with you at least on that last post harrison.

[Gypsiyee]

Up here we require criminal justice degrees, down there? I doubt they even need a degree in anything.

In many places I've seen or lived, this is often the case. Kind of like how it worked in Norfolk when I was 18.. it was like a third went off college, half went off to the Navy, and the rest of us just worked to stay afloat biding our time until we found a path because neither of those was an option for us at the time. I was talking to my best friend about this last night. He's from NYC so he knows a lot of people from school who went into law enforcement.. said it's very similar to how it was for us in Norfolk with the Navy, that a lot of people with average or subpar grades who couldn't get into a more prestigious school or people who simply couldn't afford the debt and didn't have the scholarship money would go the PD or FD route instead, because a bunch of debt for an undergrad with uncertainty vs a solid career path with benefits just seemed obvious. That's not to knock officers (or enlisted Navy) in general and say they're all a bunch of dolts because of course that's not true, but I think anyone who grew up in a heavily military town or something like that would've seen similar cases.

definitely a whole lot of variance, though. Jacksonville's police department hiring requirements are pretty different from Orlando's, and they're only 2 hours apart.

[Harrison]

In my honest opinion I believe police officers should be required to have former military service.

Their training is just so dismally sub-par as it is and I don't foresee it changing without a drastic influx of money that we don't have.

If police academy were closer to the military's strict behavioral and ethical standards I would feel better about it. Ask any former military what they think about these chumps in military gear running around like idiots in the streets and they will almost unanimously agree, they're doing it wrong. Pointing guns around willy-nilly, raising force where it isn't necessary, etc.

That's just me, though.