About Police Shootings (in America, Duh)

There's also a big difference between having essentially a proactive injunction against using force and having damages actions for the occasions when law enforcement oversteps. I think that remedies have been gutted, and still are the best overall legislative framework for law enforcement to follow.

They're just enforcement officers. The root of the problem is in the Law they enforce.

Like not holding a gun to someone else's head in the video shown?

ZealotX wrote: I shouldn't have to live in fear because of what other people have done who look like me. I'm me. They are them. If an officer sees them when he sees me that's a problem.

I agree with this. You should be seen as you, not as the criminals the officer has dealt with in the past.

And that makes me and others more likely to see those guys in the white hoods when we see them. And that's a problem too. But I can't say the person reacting to the problem is wrong without first addressing the problem they're reacting to.

You think he has to not judge you based your skin but that you can judge him based on his skin and uniform? I know you like to think its not a double standard when you do it, but it is.

This idea that someone COULD be doing something threatening is being taken to an extreme. And its based on the idea that every criminal suspect is some kind of stupid wannabe action star who can, with hands already up, reach for, pull out, and shoot 2-4 officers before any of them, who already have weapons pointed center mass, can pull the trigger.

You seriously need to research VIDEO FOOTAGE of suspects pulling out guns in real life situations. Im sorry to be rude but you really dont know what youre talking about. A suspect doesnt have to shoot FOUR officers, just ONE. You want that one to be you? The worst part is that i fully believe the police are too militant and too aggressive at the policy level. Replying to you makes me seem like i think everything is hunky dory lol

And of course when they all tell the story about the kid they had to shoot, that's exactly what happened.

And you know the inner world of police officers who have shot children because....?
You dont really know at all. Your prejudice is leading you into making sweeping generalizations about a group that you see and conceptualize as a personal enemy. But again, i understand that you dont see it as a double standard when you do it.

And when the story is repeated on the news, other people hear it and think, "yup. Those *bleeps* are crazy." This is how the stereotype gets reinforced and then new police reacting to that reinforced stereotype.

You see racism everywhere. A broken clock is right often enough that it never has to doubt that its right.

And it goes both ways. Police get stereotyped too and so a suspect has to then think, what's the best way to survive the encounter. Is it to run? Is it to shoot? Or is it to cooperate when he or she might still get killed.

This was the comment that pissed me off the most, lol. Like honest average non criminal citizens are running around with guns and are going to shoot police over some traffic stop because they are otherwise good guys who are afraid of racism. Honestly, this is total utter BS.

This is how you deal with police, no matter what color you are. First of all, if youre breaking the law you need to realize that theyre doing the right thing when they arrest you. PERIOD. They are right and you are wrong. Everything that happens has to be understood from this context: if youre a criminal, they are right and you are wrong. If they find you, give yourself up. Dont argue. Dont run. Dont fight. Dont pull your arm back when they go to cuff you. Accept the fact that they have already won and obey all of their commands.

If youre not breaking the law then you still need to realize that they are doing their job and they are the ones in charge. I tend to take it personal when police bother me without a reason (which they have, many times) but really, dont take it personal. Dont tell yourself theyre picking on you because youre black or any other personal reason, theyre probably not. No matter what the reason is, theyre going to win. Dont argue. Dont run and dont fight. Be respectful and obey their commands. Get over this idea that they work for you or are your public servant. They work for the state and are allowed to kill you if you seem dangerous to them. This is true whatever color you are.

Their job is to arrest suspects to be tried by the judicial system. The fact they manage to do this more often if you don't look like me, says something.

https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf

OB1Shinobi wrote:
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf

But i also found this one, which supports the opposite conclusion.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141854

ZealotX wrote: .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEKd_7QL-q8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr8G7MtRNlk

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Implicit bias, micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation, and white privilege are all activist-generated thought-viruses deliberately intended to exacerbate existing resentment between racial groups. The flaw with these ideas is not that they are wholly inaccurate: its that they are partially accurate, intellectual weapons. They are PSYOP weapons in a culture war. Their purpose is not to edify, clarify, or reconcile: it is to incite further division and resentment among us. I can go through the list and explain all of them but since this post was on implicit bias....


First, lets do an article:
From The Chronicle of Higher Education.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308926636_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Change_in_Implicit_Bias

That link takes you to the abstract where you can request the full study if you want (i have, but i dont know of i will get it or how long it will take) and underneath the abstract is a roster of OTHER relevant studies which support and bolster the general conclusions.

And heres one more study, this one you can read in full:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/publication/239732934_Predicting_Ethnic_and_Racial_Discrimination_A_Meta-Analysis_of_IAT_Criterion_Studies/links/0a85e53a9a75e2ec00000000.pdf

The gist of all of these studies is that IAT looks like junk science. It has no predictive power and whatever it might be measuring doesnt seem to be correlate-able with actual behavior.

Of course, here is where we have to exercise the old “nuance” muscles. The basic idea of implicit bias seems to me something that hits on some real phenomenon and i presume it we could something useful, if not with the IAT itself then at least with the general idea. Even the IAT may become useful if it is better developed. On that note, problem isnt really with the IAT - even at the time of its creation, at least one of the authors acknowledged that it wasnt developed enough to be applied in any real-life context. The PROBLEM is that activists took the IAT and ran with it before the research community could turn it into something with real substance. As it stands, its main functions are to provide a non-falsifiable rationale for claiming racism when no evidence of racism is present and to reinforce the victim/oppressor narrative into the minds of the general population.

OB1Shinobi wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/

On a whim, i went through the lists of unarmed people killed by police for the last three years and tallied up their races.

In 2019, 35 unarmed people have been shot by police up to this day. 14 were white, 8 were black, 5 were counted hispanic, 3 were Asian, and 5 were listed as unknown. The names of the unknown were: Melvin Watkins, Channara Tom Pheap (male), Chad Michael Breinholt, Riley Eugene Peay, and David Ingle.

47 unarmed people were shot in 2018
23 white, 18 black, 6 hispanic/latino/a

69 unarmed people were shot in 2017
31 white, 21 black, 13 hispanic/latino/a, 1 asian, 1 unknown, 1 native american, and 1 arab/middle eastern
I didnt look up the unknown for 2017 because there was only one.

Society has decided that we are so scared of guns that we need more guns and so anyone can get a gun; which includes criminals and mentally disturbed individuals. Some people came home from service with PTSD and in reality THEY shouldn't have guns either. So yes, guns don't kill people, people do. HOWEVER, if you fail to control guns from getting into the wrong hands then that's also a people problem. If I'm in car and someone shoots someone and jumps in my car I'm probably on the hook for that murder too. But if I sell you a gun and don't care what you do with it I have no legal responsibility. Imagine if selling a gun meant that you had to share legal responsibility for what the person you sold it to did with it... wouldn't there be fewer situations like this? If you sell a person drugs you can go to jail because we've decided that drugs are dangerous. And if that person overdoses and dies you can be charged, I believe, with their death. But you can sell a gun and simply wash your hands of it.

"you should have ate crayons and finger painted with doodoo, lol. I agree with his basic sentiment: if your mental health issue drives you to murdering people, eh, youre a murderer. Id rather see the murderer killed than his victims killed."

But what if you replace his crayons with a gun? And what if he's not a murderer when you kill him? We're basically killing him because he could be a murderer and we don't know. We're assuming he will because we're scared of him. Most animals, even large ones, will attack a human if they are sufficiently scared and concerned for their own safety or the safety of another animal they're protecting. So under the wrong circumstances crayons and doodoo can "present" as something very dangerous. It's just that they don't feel threatened while they're painting with doodoo.

Harambe was a classic case (even though yes I'm comparing an animal to a person). They shot him because they didn't know what he would do and they were afraid and assumed he would hurt the child who had fallen in his pen. It wasn't his fault the child fell. And it wasn't his choice to be a display for human children to see. Maybe he would have protected the child and tried to help. But people couldn't take that risk. I think that's how cops generally treat situations with people with mental health issues. If the person seems out of control, they get scared. But we're also, as a society, contributing to the position that person is in and by extension the situation that person creates.

"This last bit makes me wonder if you actually did watch the video. The guy screaming "thats my momma" was not the guy with the gun."

I did. It was actually an article that said that the voice was another unidentified man. Had I read that part my response would have been different. That's what made me think there was a mental health issue. Without that, then I would have to withdraw my previous reasoning. And I agree with you about how the officer handled the situation. If the guy was at least talking then it gives you more, psychologically, to work with. I know its asking a lot to want officers to know some psychology but since its a matter of life and death... I kind of want them to.

Same! The irony is they also think they are "harder" because they do something stupidly extreme lol not fully understanding the only reason theyre jumping the gun is because theyre afraid theyll get their a$$ beat.

yeah, exactly. That's why I, even though guns are fun to shoot, I don't like the idea of them really. Because its too easy to kill someone. And I wish it wasn't that easy to kill someone. I think its kind of like money. If money is harder to get people tend to appreciate it more and hold on to it better and make wiser decisions with it. If its easy to get they get reckless and take it for granted. It's cheap and they treat it like they themselves are just as cheap. But yes, one of my favorite quotes is one from Dune, "fear is the mind killer".

You dont actually know a person is unarmed until theyve been restrained and searched.

I agree. That's true. Hindsight is 20/20 but I think its good to look at these things and think about what you might have done differently. In the case of the man on the bus, I think they should check people for weapons while they're unconscious. In both cases, I BELIEVE, that if they weren't questioned about weapons they would not have fired. If you disagree that's okay. But I think this is what's happening. People usually carry guns because they're afraid of guns being used on them. I think it helps to add to a certain paranoia and when you combine drugs into the mix then that paranoia is multiplied x3.

I had an old friend that I took care of for awhile because he was homeless and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after spending time in jail where he most likely was introduced to drugs. He was not the same when he got out and seeing how he acted around people, he could go off at any minute and get upset. People on drugs are not your normal average criminals and they, imo, have to be handled differently. And part of it, honestly, a lot of people get it into their heads that they're "not going back." You know what that means, right? If they believe they're going to get arrested it triggers that fight or flight response because for some, that arrest feels like a death sentence or worse. So they know, that once this officer pats them down, they're going to then find out that the gun isn't legal.

While officers should check for weapons for safety you also have the issue of officers looking for reasons to bust people. And when an officer goes from talking to you to trying to find out if you're carrying, that could trigger suspicions that the officer is looking for evidence to use against you. You and I might look at the video and say, no, the officer was acting properly although I don't know why he picked that moment to check for weapons. He was fine before and no one seemed threatened. But if the guy had priors, he knew all that was going to come up if the officers ran his id and they would definitely do that if they found a gun on him. So then for him it was a life or death struggle before the officer understood that's what he was triggering.

So even though it may sound like I'm defending the person in the wrong, I think SOP needs work. Standard procedure should, if a person is incapacitated, check for weapons so that EMTs and whoever else is there is safe. If you're questioning a guy you need to let him know early on that he's not a suspect and not in trouble. If he is a suspect or is in trouble then your gun needs to be drawn but aimed at a 30-60 degree angle and the suspect need to get their hands in the air.

The problem is that he was asked a question which had a triggering potential and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Because what people often hear is more than what the officer thinks he's saying. What they hear is "I'm about to arrest you and ruin your life over this. Feel free to cooperate while I bend you over and spread your legs." Officers often use terms like buddy and in an instant they're very much not your friend. And because it can turn on a dime I think you have to be careful not to trigger people if you can avoid it. And you do that by giving them the information they need to feel safe. Neither of those guys felt safe. And the guy who shot himself afterwards is just evidence of how he made a rash instinctive move because he probably knew he was in trouble. I think even temporary insanity could apply in some of these cases.

Part of the problem is the relationship between the police and the community. Some of these people are repeat offenders so they know the system. They may have been screwed over by the system several times before. We don't know their history; neither does the officer at the scene. I think the reality is that everyone wants to go home alive. And if the officer's job sometimes involves detaining people and keeping them from going home for a long time then that prospect is worth risking their lives (or perhaps even suicide by cop) to escape from. So I think we need gun reform, criminal justice reform, legalization of marijuana, etc. so that people stop thinking its the end of the world if an officer detains them. I would maybe even consider not arresting people at the scene anymore unless there's physical violence and let them report to their hearing on their own or report to jail before issuing an arrest warrant. The system goes way overboard on jail. I can tell you that for sure. Most crimes should honestly just be a predetermined fine and a hearing only if you choose to fight it. Jail does little but harden criminals and make them more likely to re-offend. If the officers in these concealed weapon videos said "hey I'm sorry but I gotta write you a ticket. If you pass a drug test you can easily get out of it though." there's a good chance no one would have died. It may be a stretch but I can feel their fear.

Not in the mood to comment on this atm but i want to submit it into the discussion while i have it on hand.
https://www.youtube.comf/watch?v=a2r5zMQEhbI

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