Because, as we’re learning, many of them are incompetent thugs. Here’s a case of a woman who was executed for the crime of being arrested while mentally ill.
A mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.
Natasha McKenna initially cooperated with deputies, placed her hands through her cell door food slot and agreed to be handcuffed, the reports show. But McKenna, whose deteriorating mental state had caused Fairfax to seek help for her, then began trying to fight her way out of the cuffs, repeatedly screaming, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!” the reports show.
Then, six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair, the reports show.
So her hands are cuffed, her legs are shackled, they’ve got her muzzled, and six policemen are so damned bad at their job that they can’t cope, so they tase her to death.
You know, there’s nothing in that account of her behavior to actually suggest that she was mentally ill: she was abused, confined, and treated with such insensitivity that being terrified sounds like a perfectly reasonable, rational response. If we’re going to attach the stigma of mental illness to any behavior, it ought to be to the kind of mentality that allows six men to torture a woman to death…but even there, that seems to be a too human and too common kind of mentality to call an illness.
I’m at a loss for words. Damn this is… damn. What the FUCK were they thinking is an adequate response to someone shouting “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me”? Hurt her even more?
One thing I’ve noticed from opponents of police reform is that many of them don’t view incidents like this as part of an overall pattern of police behavior. Just like cases of civilian gun violence, they see these incidents as individual cases unconnected to one another. It’s frustrating trying to get them to pull back and see the bigger picture.
It is morbidly fascinating. Apparently either the police’s threshold for their own personal safety is much lower than the normal human being, such that it is considered reasonable for them to further subdue a woman who is already heavily restrained and essentially just refusing to sit down, or they are just straight up allowed to injure or kill people who make their job slightly more difficult.
At this point I don’t which standard is the one we are operating under.
When I was a suburban middle class white girl, I did not understand why in some neighborhoods it was considered the worst sort of behavior to be a “cop caller”.
I sure get it now.
I’m mentally ill. I know that if a cop shoots me, regardless of the circumstance that will be used to explain it and physical violence they decide to do to me away.
If I am raped or abused, it will be why I cannot be believed.
There’s always an excuse for why it’s OK to treat certain people as expendable. We really hate minorities in this country.
america…fuck yeah
My favorite website about Cops: http://killedbypolice.net/
Thousands dead, few prosecuted. “Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found. Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.”
“Distrust” is not a strong enough word.
I can hear the police apologia coming any minute now. Usually in the form of “they put their lives on their line, heat of the moment, split second decisions”, etc. etc. And victim blaming, of course.
OP:
Or maybe we should just try and get rid of that stigma. The officers’ actions were terrible and wrong, but the stigma only increases when labels such as mentally ill and crazy are attached to reprehensible behavior.
It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large – they’re the guards, we’re the prisoners. Good job, government. Not the direction I would’ve taken policing, but you do you.
Somehow, I think they got the wrong lessons from that experiment.
(Note: I’m Canadian, so I’m an outsider looking in. The above is just how I see it)
Six of them, full restraints, a restraint wheelchair, muzzles, and a damned electrocution device, and they couldn’t restrain the poor woman. I’ll bet one of them, alone, could have gotten her to sit in that chair if they had just fucking talked to her like a human being and shown a little bit of patience.
No guns for cops outside of response teams. No tasers either. They get a bobby stick and their mouths.
Sorry for the double post, but… jesus christ.
QFFT. Seriously, this wasn’t a dangerous prisoner; this was a cop who was too fucking impatient to talk to someone and so fucking privileged that he got angry when someone didn’t do what he told them as soon as he told them. And a large part of the problem that US police has is that it engenders that kind of attitude. “You are in charge; people must do what you say, when you say”.
Respect mah authorithah!
/Cartman
@10 savant
Our police & correctional services have the same problems, even if not to the same degree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Smith_inquest
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/police-shootings-often-involve-mental-illness-and-ill-prepared-officers-1.2850020
How much time to cops spend training how to shoot people, versus how much time they spend training in de-escalating tense situations? The ratio is irrelevant because generally the answer is “some positive number to zero” It doesn’t take advances in psychology to observe that in stressful situations you tend to fall back on your training.
To be fair: cops do walk into a lot of dangerous situations. Virtually ever situation gets more dangerous the instant a cop walks into it.
It’s been stated and restated, but the rationale for giving the police tasers was to REDUCE violence. They were to be a less-lethal alternative to shooting people.
Now, instead of being used instead of a gun in situations when a gun would otherwise be needed, they are been used as tools of management, of coercion, ways of weakening resistance and forcing compliance when before a firm grasp on an arm would have been used.
Tasers have INCREASED violence.
Unless and until police can be trained and trusted to use them only in the way they were intended, in the way their use was sold to the public, tasers should be banned.
Ibis3 @ 14:
Thanks for posting that link. My first thought on reading this was “Ashley Smith all over again…”
Makes me so fucking angry.
Jafafa Hots @ 16;
I would go even further; we are seeing ever increasing numbers of incidents of the use of tasers to apply multiple shocks to restrained or otherwise already incapacitated people where there is simply no conceiveable public or police safety justification for their continued use, suggesting strongly that they are being used for the purposes of extrajudicial punishment, revenge, or even as a means of expressing the personal bigotry of the offcier in question. We have now reached the point where tasers have become the preferred legal torture implement of law enforcement. A more high tech version of turning off the tape recorder, working over a handcuffed prisoner, and later saying that they ‘fell down the stairs’. It is a heinous abuse of power and a gross violation of human rights.
Quoted for truth.
Reading these things, especially over the last few weeks, I have to wonder: Do US Police Academies not have courses in de-escalation and communication?
A friend of mine who trained with German (bavarian specifically) and Austrian police always me that no matter what specific topic was on the schedule, their instructors always emphasized that their umber one goal in any situation was to de-escalate the situation and to calm the person they’re dealing with. Not only because they had the obligation to use as little force as possible, but also because it made their job a lot easier.
Perhaps it would be smart for US police departments, to train their officers in these kinds of things, and less in the most effective use of violence.
We have now reached the point where tasers have become the preferred legal torture implement of law enforcement
When I read that, I had a little mini brain-fart and thought:
“We’ve reached peak cop”
Probably not. But the idea of “peak cop” sure sounds nice.
In my fantasy world cops would learn Aikido, not shooting and room entry techniques. It’d be better for everyone’s health, really. Also, there are techniques of calming onself and adjusting body language, listening, and negotiating that ought to be part of cop training.
But, instead you get things like the tiny town in New Hampshire that had a pumpkin festival with some rioting: they got a new Bearcat assault vehicle(*) Fuck, why not give them an AC-130 close support gunship to make those rowdies get the fear of god?
(* http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/03/14/10689730-nh-citys-new-military-muscle-raises-some-hackles )
It seems to me that there is a dangerous shift in the attitude police have regarding the taser. The taser was a great invention that could save many lives… provided it was only used in circumstances that would otherwise require a gun. Previous to that invention, an officer confronted by an aggressive person with a knife would likely have no option but to use the gun to end the situation fatally; the introduction of the taser in this particular scenario would thus be a net gain as there is now a non-fatal (usually) option. It works well to consider it as a less lethal gun – a better option than a gun where circumstances permit it, but still an object of injury and potential death.
The problem arises when it is no longer viewed purely as a gun substitute, when ‘less lethal’ is mistaken for ‘not lethal at all.’ Now, instead of being held in reserve as the penultimate weapon, it has come to be seen as a general purpose solution to any level of unruliness. It is now being deployed in more and more circumstances that never came close to warranting such a strong response, and so it is no longer a net positive.
Okay, it sure looks bad. An innocent person, dead.
But lets try looking at the overall situation.
If it’s the cops job to place a person into a wheelchair, and they’re having difficulty, what can they do? They’ve been ordered to safely transport this person, and having them flailing around is not an option. Yes, a sane person might also get riled up in that situation. There are no great alternatives. Some that might be suggested: have the cops withdraw a goodly distance until the person calms down, have a counsellor work with the person, trying to explain what is happening and why it’s okay, withdrawing completely for a day, etc, etc, etc. None of those mesh well with the order to transport this person, now. Perhaps if the situation has several levels of enlightened managers on the scene, something less drastic could have been worked out. But as prisons are usually understaffed and compartmentalized, that’s not generally possible. So you have a bunch of not terribly bright guards trying to get their job done. You can’t always hire Mr. Rogers types to work in dangerous wards. It’s just a difficult situation for everybody.
I don’t condone the use of excessive force but one needs to consider the situation, from all sides, and the possible and feasible alternatives. We don’t have infinite resources to handle every situation.
Six men can’t pick up a trussed up woman and put her onto a portable bed safely? They had enough personnel. They should all be fired for incompetence. That is the problem.
Oh go fuck yourself george gonzalez. They don’t need infinite resources, they need to not taze people to fucking death just so they can get quick and easy cooperation. People paid just above minimum wages in behavioral residential programs deal with worse behavior with less resources every fucking day. The answer is be patient and talk them fucking down. Not taze them into submission because you are fucking on a deadline or some fucking bullshit.
@george gonzalez #22 – Yeah, “could you get into the chair please” sure needs an infinitely amount of resources.
george gonzalez
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
George Gonzalez, if they had no business shooting her with a gun, they had no business shooting her with a taser.
THAT is what they are for – a gun replacement – and that’s ALL they are for.
Tasers also, though, have a very big marketing department behind them with a lot of lobbyists.
Taser is a brand name… and that company pays a lot to politicians.
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.
Brendan Behan
And of course the alternative of six armed men electrocuting a restrained woman who won’t sit down is to hire Mr. Rogers and have prisons with infinite resources. Because of course. Police officers killing people isn’t a matter of entitlement and abuse of authority, it is all about not having enough equipment and money. I’m sure if they had a more gentle tazer, they would have used that instead, but they just didn’t have the budget so they had to use the full power one instead! And of course the only alternative to men killing a woman for not sitting down promptly enough for their busy schedules is to hire a saint-like pacifist. Because reasons.
I swear police apologists have a far worse view of police officers than the rest of us. The rest of us expect police to uphold a high moral standard and are outraged when they do not. We are outraged when they exploit their authority or behave worse than the general public. But police apologists EXPECT them to behave worse and think it is perfectly normal and understandable. They expect them to desperate, incompetent, or even immoral. They don’t expect police officers to have a higher moral standing to justify their possession of high authority. They just think of them as bullies who are allowed to use powerful gadgets and weaponry to bully people. Which seems about accurate, but while we push for them to be better, the apologists think this state of affairs is just fine and dandy and completely unchangeable. That’s fucked up.
george gonazalez @ 22
Are you suggesting that deadlines are a good reason to use potentially lethal force against people?
Sometimes things are delayed for the sake of health and safety. This is a basic fucking fact of any industry that isn’t actively violating human rights.
They totally do, because there is never a reason for “now” that trumps “possible fatality in getting it done now” unless the “now” is also going to be fatal within the next few seconds. The big problem is exactly what you are demonstrating here – an allegiance to following orders no matter what, coupled with lack of respect for training that prioritizes not hurting someone over expediency. It is not a “difficult situation” – it is an easily manageable one, and calling it “difficult” lends cover to how bad the systematic framework was.
george gonzales takes the word “deadline” a little too literally.
Also, apparently seems to think it is okay to use deadly force in order to get your job done on time. Somehow offices across the nation became a very different place.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #23:
Indeed. (Please ignore the really bloody annoying presenter.)
I once saw a police officer arrest a belligerent man twice his size, using nothing but a bare-handed arm lock combined with pressure between the shoulders, to force (not throw or trip, which could result in injury) him to the ground, face down. Took him maybe ten seconds, with another ten to put cuffs on.
If they aren’t given lethal toys to rely on, they learn how to do it properly.
george gonzalez, #22
If only they had seven guards instead of six..
If only they had the money to not be able to afford tasers.
@George Gonzales
Let’s say you have a toddler and you need to get to an appointment so you have to transport them now. Imagine for the sake of argument that you can’t just pick them up and carry them–you have a bad back or something. Do you pull out a taser and jolt them a few times? Do you beat them with a stick? Do you escalate the violence until they’re *dead*? No? Then why do you think it’s appropriate for police, no matter how short-staffed, to do that to a vulnerable mentally ill person? Whatever techniques you can use to get a toddler to comply, you can certainly use for a person in police custody. And more. Because you have the option of using non-lethal restraints and drugs.
Yes, yes you do.
anteprepro @ 33
I’ve got a big project that needs to get done by the end of the day. Maybe I should hook a car battery up to my office door to give a little jolt to anyone who interrupts me, eh? How else could I possibly get this done fast enough?
Police seem to think of tazers as cattle prods, to be used on the unruly masses to keep them in line. Utterly disgusting behaviour by athoritan thugs. Of course, they will always have their authoritan apologists to support them, like George here.
It was such a matter of life and death that they transport her immediately? They had DEADLINES? What the fuck is wrong with some people? So acquiescent to authority….
This is exactly it
There is something people have been missing.
This is also about the militarization of the police and the wish to use the ‘toys’ they’d received. There is no fucking way that that was needed to protect against someone who at best could spit at them.
@Who Cares #41 – Talking about “no infinite resources”!
Oh, gods, I have a presentation due Friday morning, should I be scared for my life? george gonzalez, there is no deadline or order from above that is worth someone’s life. You have argued otherwise: therefore you do indeed condone excessive force. For particular situations, of course, but since anyone can justify a situation after the fact, that’s pretty much carte blanche for these sorts of incidents. Whether you called the victim innocent or no, you consider her death justifiable, and that makes you an asshole.
anteprepro (#8) –
If they want to prove they are laying their lives on the line for us, they should fall on their swords. Those who commit crimes should plead guilty and take their lumps, not fight the charges. If Stager really cared about the public, he would willingly accept the death penalty.
Jafafa Hots (#16) –
The propaganda behind tasers was to make the public believe they “reduce violence”. But the selling point to cops is, “You can use it without leaving evidence” (vis-a-vis abusers who learn to beat people without leaving bruises). It was the same with rubber bullets: the manufacturers and users lied and claimed they they were “non-lethal”, but knew they could be used to kill and intentionally sold them for that purpose.
Governments and agencies know these weapons are made to kill. They buy tasers, rubber bullets and others because the public believe the manufacturers’ fictions. It’s all about lies and liability.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/11/mod-rubber-bullets-lethal-records
rietplum
Duh, they spent it all on full-body biohazard suits and gas masks. How the hell are they going to afford sensitivity training now??? Can’t fit in the budget!
Police seem to think of tazers as cattle prods, to be used on the unruly masses to keep them in line.
Cattle prods are insanely unpleasant. I zapped myself accidentally with one, once – it’s unforgettable (memo to Tractor Supply Company store managers: do not shelve stock cattle prods with batteries in them) (memo to the curious: cattle prods on store shelves may be “batteries included”) If someone deliberately shocked me with a cattle prod I would think seriously about hunting them down at a later date. I know someone who’s been tazed and she says it’s insanely unpleasant, BTW, and that if someone ever points one at her again she’ll try to kill them) Cattle prods and Tazers can fuck up your heart, depending on where the current runs. Also: you fall down. That’s a serious issue (says the guy who slipped and fell 2 years ago and broke his jaw and spent 2 months with it wired shut) Sure, it’s better than being shot, but that’s because being shot really sucks a whole lotta lot.
Perhaps one option would be to make getting tazed part of the training for cops. If they don’t want to get tazed, the alternative is being shot with a 9mm. It might give them some useful perspective.
Another point that needs to be addressed wrt bad copping: those motherfuckers need to learn that they’re not Machine Gun Jack McGurn doing the St Valentines’ Day Massacre. When you hear about these cop shootings, where the cops fired 50,100 shots that means – literally – “a hail of bullets.” Which means that they are not qualified to be shooting anything, anywhere. It means they’re firing and reloading and firing and reloading. That’s what you might do in a free-fire zone in wartime, but not in an area where there are civilians you’re supposedly “serving and protecting”
george gonzalez:
So, basically, to summarise this, they subjected this woman to death by taser because they weren’t competent enough to come up with an alternative that involved not killing her in the time they had.
How, precisely, does this excuse what they did?
I know a cop.
They were tazed and pepper-sprayed as part of the training.
This is in Alberta.
They were tazed and pepper-sprayed as part of the training.
It would be interesting to see if there are any metrics regarding whether that affects their use of weapons. It seems to me that the American tendency to conceal any summary data about police use of violence protects them from criticism but also removes their ability to justify their actions. How many times are guns pointed at cops? How many shots are fired at cops? How many shots do cops fire? Are their bulletproof vests helping or not? Is there a reduction in violence if the cops are trained in conflict de-escalation? This is all meat and potatoes stuff to a metrics wonk like me, and I always find it hugely suspicious (in terms of an indicator of cluelessness) when key metrics aren’t kept or analyzed. There are lots of practices such as hot pursuit that might turn out not to be cost effective (after all, if you’re chasing someone X percent of the time you may know who it is, in which case is it more safety/cost effective to drop pursuit and pick them up at a tollbooth later?)
george gonzalez, you are an unspeakable piece of shit. There really isn’t much else I can say to someone who thinks there’s a shred, a single fucking shred of mitigation to be found anywhere for torturing a restrained prisoner to death. Understaffed? Deadlines? Six officers and one prisoner already in cuffs. Jesus fucking wept.
Have US cops always been this vicious, this callous? Or when did it start creeping in?
Some years ago I was stopped by the police in the UK as a dangerous madman. I was using a dibber – a T-shaped piece of wood with a blunt metal sheath, used to make shallow holes in the ground to insert cuttings or bulbs – along a towpath. An off-duty policeman persuaded himself that I was “brandishing” (his term) a knife. He phoned his colleagues who came along the towpath to meet us. The interesting thing is that he persuaded himself of what he thought so well that he followed me for over an hour and remained convinced I was using a knife, which reveals a lot about fixed ideas. Two of his colleagues came across me later when I had put the dibber away in a shoulder bag and my first response to their approach – to demand evidence that they were policemen and not madmen or practical jokers who’d stolen police uniforms and to check that they were sane and genuine by phoning their station – didn’t go down very well with them, but they acquiesced and allowed me to sit on a bench before they handcuffed and searched me.
At the time, I responded with a mixture of outrage and amusement, but it was only afterwards that I wondered just how fortunate I was. People who were convinced I was a dangerous criminal and carried guns would be much more likely to be concerned about their own safety.
I didn’t see a mention of race in the article. What are the odds of this woman being black? Pretty high, it seems:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fairfax-jail-inmate-who-died-was-fully-restrained-when-tasered-four-times/2015/04/11/ede0957c-decd-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html
@ george gonzalez;
‘Just following orders’ is not considered a defence against warcrimes, neither are budgetary constraints or (in this case distressingly literal) deadlines. Why do you think that they should be viable defences for law enforcement officers dealing with an unarmed, already restrained prisoner that they outnumber six to one? Why should police officers in peace time be held to such a dangerously lower standard of behaviour with regard to lethal force or mistreatment of people than soldiers are in wartime?
What you are suggesting would amount to granting law enforcement officers a blank cheque to abuse or kill any prisoner in the name of mere expediency and banal cost-cutting. Can’t you see how dangerous (not to mention offensive to the very notion of the basic dignity and value of human life) that is?
It’s beginning to start in Canada as well. Though there was no violence in this encounter, but for a moment, I certainly thought there would be. I was coming home from dinner with my wife on a Friday night when the normally abandoned call centre building parking lot (which is two blocks from my house) was suddenly full of cars and trucks, and people going in and out of the place. I thought, wow, maybe someone’s bought the place and there will be some hiring, because my town desperately needs jobs. So I went and got my camera to snap some shots, post them to facebook, and ask my local friends if they knew who was taking the place over.
As a photographer who’s seen many encounters posted online with security and the public go bad for legal photographers working from public property, it’s been a habit for years for me to run the audio recorder on my iPod Touch anytime I’m out shooting.
This is what happened. I was on public property the entire time, and not shooting faces or into windows.
Ibis@10, chigau@48, Robert@54 et. al.:
Canada’s certainly getting a lot worse – I’m in Alberta as well (hi chigau!) – but it’s not as bad. Certainly going in that direction though. I’m biased towards them because I’ve got a Mountie in the family and I’ve never met a more friendly, professional, and respectful fellow. My heart’ll break if I find out he’s behaved poorly on the line, because I just can’t imagine it. An individual doesn’t redeem a culture, though, and the RCMP and municipal police forces up here certainly have to answer to some pointed questions, though; no doubt about it.
Don’t want to distract too much from the main thread though. The problems to the south seem to be an entire order of magnitude worse by comparison. Hopefully we can all work through it together!
@52 Vidar
It wouldn’t surprise me if she weren’t. As was mentioned it’s all about entitlement and demanding complete submission so the mentally ill stand to become targets and be viciously mistreated once they are unable to comply in the same way as black people who disrespect authority by existing. The Forgotten Floor demonstrates the stratification of our glorious justice system and how even minor charges that would normally result in a slap on the wrist for the common citizen become lengthy imprisonment under inhumane conditions for the mentally ill (and that’s saying nothing of the entirely separate justice system that a cop would go through).
It’s much easier to justify abuse against the mentally disturbed, too; “he was crazy” makes better PR than explaining that a black man shot himself while handcuffed or was such an immediate threat that he needed to have his backside punched with holes.
For Canada, the better comparison is how our cops treat First Nations people – and guess what, we’re no better than our neighbours when you look at the most ill-treated group. We have no grounds for complacency.
You’re exactly right, CaitieCat.
Police brutality may be less about racism, and more about what happens when you give insecure white people a gun.
I think it’s a matter of both convenience and training. It takes a fair bit of mental effort to figure out a solution that minimizes the use of force and using force is just easier. Eventually, they get in the habit and start to feel like since they are supposed to be obeyed as law enforcement officers, anyone who gets hurt deserves it. I think it goes well beyond victim blaming though. Humanity in general tends towards devaluing those who pose obstacles to our aims. It’s hard not to devalue the police themselves as humans and individuals for what they do since that’s the easiest response to something causing suffering or difficulty in our world, (and I’m not able to speak from authority here because I am outraged by police brutality and have had some extremely bad experiences with police myself). I think the tendency to use demeaning and devaluing language (the police have a word, “scumbag” which they use indiscriminately to refer to poor people who have encounters with the law) connected to the ability to feel justified in hurting those people and no matter how hard it is, I feel that responding in kind just fuels the fire. I’d rather point out their actions and condemn the actions as wrong, both morally and as productive social policy, and work towards change in the system.
I am encouraged by the national dialog that is beginning to take shape and the institutional changes we are beginning to see in some places. Giving police officers ongoing and above average social training in alternatives to force seems at a minimum to be required. Of course there will always be abuses but seeing them prosecuted and extra training for the cops who haven’t been caught yet as well as the threat of prosecution would be a giant step forward in my opinion.
We expect to live in a relatively safe society where we don’t have to physically defend ourselves from violence exactly because we have police and criminals are prosecuted. That’s a justice system. But when the police themselves are the threat, it only makes sense to arm yourself against them and shoot to kill if you happen to live where the abuses are prevalent enough to make you fear them as a clear and present danger. That, of course, just gives them an excuse to justify their behavior though.
It’s a tangled web and de-escalation has to start at the policy level. If you want to de-escalate, you first have to stop pointing a gun at the head of those who are angry. The legacy of Darrel Gates and the disastrous “war on drugs” casts a long shadow on the american justice system. I want to be able to trust police. But without systemic change, I don’t see how that’s possible.
I also am encouraged that I see some signs that institutional change may indeed be beginning.
There are also other problems with law enforcement besides violence against citizens:
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ny-cops-used-stingray-spy-tool-46-times-without-warrant/
Autistic 11-year old charged with disorderly conduct and felony assault on a police officer in Virginia.
All bolding mine.
Kayleb is also a person of colour. And it sounds like neither the “School Resource Officer” nor the justice system ever gave him a chance, nor made the slightest effort to take his learning difficulties into account.
As CaitieCat said, it’s very bad in Canada for First Nations people. One of the worst examples is Saskatoon’s infamous “starlight tours”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths
But, in fact, she is.
Yeah, but the “s/he was crazy” defense also goes over better when the person you shoot is black. Just like black people are especially good at developing terrifying superpowers when they take PCP.
No argument that mentally ill and mentally disturbed people of all colors are often treated like shit by authorities, but from what my friends in health care tell me, the black and brown ones get that treatment a lot more.
(And I always say this, but tiny female nurses and minimum-wage hospital techs deal with angry, terrified, delirious patients all the time. Almost never with a 6:1 numerical advantage. And yet somehow they manage to hold these patients down or talk them down without shooting or electrocuting them! Health care workers must be sorcerers or something.)
In a freelancers’ job exchange site, I saw this job posting today:
So this person considers “planting of evidence, swearing at occupants of car, assault of driver, shooting, etc.” as antics, and knows that there is a market for a game based on that belief.
Shameful.