Suddenly, all these videos of the Philando Castile shooting are being released after the murder cop got acquitted. This latest one is heartbreaking: it’s video of Castile’s fiancé, handcuffed (WHY? What did she do wrong, besides sit next to an innocent man getting violently slaughtered by a cop?), while her daughter tries to deal with the situation.
Mom, please stop cussing and screaming ’cause I don’t want you to get shooted.
In the earlier video, I noticed how both adults in the car reflexively used “sir” in just about every sentence to the asshole cop — I don’t think they wanted to get shooted either. Our police departments are relying on fear to cow the population, and it shows.
The worst part of that video is when the little girl says something about how dangerous the city is, and you know she isn’t talking about criminals.
Bloody hell. Next holiday is France where even la Garde républicaine seems more friendly. Well once they get over the surprise of someone asking for directions.
What she did wrong was endanger the life of a minor. Or be a black woman in a violent incident. Or (and you know this one is the real reason, right?) stream the incident on her phone.
Every time I read stories like this, I’m so thankful my great grandfather ended up in the UK and not the USA. Life is so cheap over there.
I can kinda forgive the cuffing. When the shit hits the fan, rule number one is to get people under control. She just watched her husband get murdered, you have to assume she’s capable of almost any behavior. By cuffing anyone connected to the situation you at least ensure that no one else dies that night. And let’s face it, the officers involved proved that they were not in control of the situation to begin with.
So it’s kinda, sort of, perhaps, maybe I’d let that one slide.
What cannot be forgiven is the murder. What should be blatantly obvious to anyone is that the officer was completely inept in his handling of the situation, whether it be to prejudice or incompetence. How the hell did he come to be in such a situation? Who the fuck allowed him to be an officer?
And who the fuck let him off the hook? This guy should be in jail for a dozen of years the least.
I know. But with systemic failures it isn’t really productive to go after the individual cases. Guilty or not, jailing him won’t change much. If anything it will perpetuate the problem by providing a suitable scape goat.
The letting off the hook is a systemic flaw.
To Erlend Meyer
How very authoritative of you. You are the problem. You are one of those people who allow cops to live by different standards of use of force than the rest of us, which allow cops to shoot people for no good reason and not suffer consequences for it, which enables it to happen more in the future.
What you propose is god-awful, and it ought to be fundamentally unconstitutional – a violation of the basic civil right to be free from baseless arrest and detention.
It’s simple: If you jail cops who shoot people unjustly now, then less cops will shoot people unjustly in the future. It’s called “the deterrence effect”. You might want to learn about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/punishment/
Look in the mirror. You will have your answer.
To Erlend Meyer
How very authoritative of you. You are the problem. You are one of those people who allow cops to live by different standards of use of force than the rest of us, which allow cops to shoot people for no good reason and not suffer consequences for it, which enables it to happen more in the future.
What you propose is god-awful, and it ought to be fundamentally unconstitutional – a violation of the basic civil right to be free from baseless arrest and detention.
It’s simple: If you jail cops who shoot people unjustly now, then less cops will shoot people unjustly in the future. It’s called “the deterrence effect”. You might want to learn about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/punishment/
Look in the mirror, and you will have your answer.
Responding to Erlend Meyer
How very authoritative of you. You are the problem. You are one of those people who allow cops to live by different standards of use of force than the rest of us, which allow cops to shoot people for no good reason and not suffer consequences for it, which enables it to happen more in the future.
What you propose is god-awful, and it ought to be fundamentally unconstitutional – a violation of the basic civil right to be free from baseless arrest and detention.
It’s simple: If you jail cops who shoot people unjustly now, then less cops will shoot people unjustly in the future. It’s called “the deterrence effect”. You might want to learn about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/punishment/
Look in the mirror. You will have your answer.
I want to watch it, but I can’t make myself. It’s just so insane that that little girl understands the whole idea of how not to get shot. But in order to not get shot it should be so much simpler than that. It should be as simple as not being an actual dangerous person, rather than having to act so subservient because she is not white.
To methuseus
This is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. Race is definitely a huge element, and I do not mean to downplay it, but race is far from the only relevant factor in play. Cops across the US regularly abuse other people too, albeit certain races have it substantially worse. You have to act subservience to cops no matter your race, although this is even more important for blacks.
Erlend Meyer wrote:
Yeah, I don’t think they deserve the benefit of a doubt here. I posted this on the last thread about this, but they spent effort in investigating Castile’s fiancé by demanding her phone records and all the data from her Facebook accounts and wanted to keep that fact from her. The only reason you’d seek that data and impose an indefinite gag order on the companies you’re requesting the data from is for rather nefarious purposes like seeking to discredit her and/or pin a crime on her via a fishing expedition. At some point, you just have to admit that malice is more likely than anything else.
@5, Erlend Meyer:
An entire paragraph about police procedure that conspicuously ignores the fact that the cop is the criminal.
So “cuffing anyone connected to the situation to ensure no one else dies that night” means cuffing the victim‘s fiancé, but not the murderer or any of his accomplices.
@11, Enlightenment Liberal
Cops abuse anyone they can, but race is a far bigger element than you seem to be implying.
I’ve personally stood up to the cops on a great many occasions. They’ve demanded subservience and I’ve flipped them off (without getting shot, arrested, etc). And I was able to do that while young, poor, and looking somewhat unusual— all those social indicators of other-ness didn’t matter as long as I was white. Don’t think for a second that any black person could have done the same, even if they were 50 years old and wearing a $1000 suit.
I saw the dashcam video on The Daily Show of all places. Fucking horrifying. He just, kept shooting. And then the little girl staggers out of the car. And I just lost my shit. I was sobbing when I saw that little girl. But people get offended when you say “Fuck The Police,” as if shooting and murdering people wholesale is ok but bad language is intolerable.
This is not a nice thing to say. I fully expect it to get flamed or even deleted. But here it is: I hope people track this cop down and make his life a living Hell. I don’t want him to be shot in return; I want his life made so miserable that he wishes to shoot himself, but never does, because he is a coward.
The goons are so out-of-control they are now shooting each other, Black St Louis police officer shot by white colleague :
The Grauniad’s summary (above) can be construed as the officer was shot whilst on the ground. I must emphasize that did not happen, as the article itself makes clear:
More like shot for being black.
Shot for being black.
It sounds like the initial two officers behaved appropriately when spotting an armed person approaching them, but the third seems more typical of USArseholian
policegoons: (1) Black, shoot with no or inadequate warning. (2) Armed black, shoot dozens of rounds more (maybe did not happen in this case). (3) No gun found by the body, plant one (did not happen in this case). And (4) Confiscate and erase any videos of the incident (unknown if happened in this case).One might forgive the cop for thinking his life as in danger (No, I don’t), but after the first shot, even a panicking cop should realise that the danger is over. What the hell was he thinking as he fired the 4th and 5th shots?
This is a common misunderstanding by people who are not versed in self defense ethics and law, as it relates to firearms, and also not versed in how firearms work and how body injuries work.
Any shot to the body can kill. A shot to the leg, if ti hits the femoral artery, can cause you to bleed out and die in like 5 minutes IIRC. Thus, legally, you are only allowed to shoot if lethal force is justifiable. Before that point, any shooting is unlawful. However, after that point, you are genuinely fearing immediately for your life or the life of others, and the only way to avoid that outcome is to disable the other person (which often means kill or mortally wound). Most people are bad shots, even trained cops. The accuracy rate, even at 5 ft, in situations like this, is abysmally low. Thus, they are trained to shoot repeatedly. Also, a single shot is unlikely to immediately incapacitate, and the goal is to immediately incapacitate, this is another reason why they’re trained to shoot repeatedly. After the first shot, they’re not going to stop for a few seconds in order to determine if the target is successfully disabled, because that takes time which could give the other person an opportunity to attack back.
Again, it’s a simple calculus: Either you’re not justified to shoot at all, or you are justified to shoot because you really really need to stop that person right now, and stopping a person right now requires lots of bullets in rapid succession. Just shooting once is either unlawful self defense because the situation doesn’t warrant lethal force, or it’s monumentally suicidal because your life (or the life of someone else) is in immediate danger.
PS:
If you think I’m an apologist for
copspigs, you are sorely mistaken.In a valid incident shooting lots and cuffing to control the situation is reasonable and it’s reasonable for people to bring that up as they try to work through their thoughts.
In this situation both those things are horrific because the out of control element is the police officer and not the people the officers were dealing with.