One of the side-effects of the recent focus on police shootings in the US, is that outside agencies are starting to track and publish statistics about the police. Those attempts uncover additional layers of horror; under the shit, there’s more shit.
The Washington Post is maintaining a database about police shootings [wapo] and it’s got a lot of depressing information:
Source: Washington Post
The police are a killing machine that chugs along at more or less the same rate, regardless of all the media focus that has been directed toward the topic. It’s not “as if they don’t care” it’s that they really, truly, genuinely do not care. Or worse. They’re outright malicious: [salon]
A police officer told a crowd gathered at the scene where a Black teenager, Ma’Khia Bryant, was killed by police in Columbus, Ohio just minutes before the verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial was announced on Tuesday that “blue lives matter.”
The crowd had, literally, just seen a cop gun down a 15 year-old child, and one of the cops on the scene felt it was necessary to flex his power. The cop knew that he was being recorded on camera, and he knew that it was going to wind up on the internet – but he was confident enough that he felt he could get away with it. The cop who shot the girl, Nicholas Reardon, [abc6] is a relatively new cop: 1 year on the force – but apparently apples rot pretty quickly in Ohio. At this time there is no indication that Reardon has been fired or will be prosecuted, and the name of the cop who yelled “blue lives matter!” has not been disclosed (and they have not been fired). It’s hard to imagine more incompetent “customer service” in any other industry.
Cops, in the line of duty, have to deal with disturbed, drunk, angry, and injured people and those can unquestionably be dangerous. But that’s not an excuse for causing more disturbed, angry, and injured people! The claim is that they have to make split-second decisions, which is true, and that they are in danger of being killed by a gun-toting citizen – which is… Less true? If we listen to the cops, it’s like OK Corral out there, and they’ve got to constantly be ready to kill or be killed. But if that were true, why this: [FBI]
According to statistics reported to the FBI, 89 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2019. Of these, 48 officers died as a result of felonious acts, and 41 officers died in accidents. Comprehensive data tables about these incidents and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are included in Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2019, released today.
Almost as many cops were hit by cars in the line of duty, as were killed in “felonious acts” [the FBI is not known for the beauty of its writing, for good reason]:
- 15 died as a result of investigative or law enforcement activities
- 6 were conducting traffic violation stops
- 4 were performing investigative activities
- 2 were drug-related matters
- 2 were interacting with wanted persons
- 1 was investigating suspicious person or circumstance
- 9 were involved in tactical situations
- 3 were barricaded/hostage situations
- 3 were serving, or attempting to serve, search warrants
- 2 were serving, or attempting to serve, arrest warrants
- 1 was reported in the category titled “other tactical situation”
- 5 were involved in unprovoked attacks
- 4 were responding to crimes in progress
- 2 were robberies
- 1 was larceny-theft
- 1 was reported in the category titled “other crime against property”
- 3 were involved in arrest situations and were attempting to restrain/control/handcuff the offender(s) during the arrest situations
- 3 were assisting other law enforcement officers
- 2 with vehicular pursuits
- 1 with foot pursuit
- 3 were responding to disorders or disturbances
- 2 were responding to disturbances (disorderly subjects, fights, etc.)
- 1 was responding to a domestic violence call
- 3 were involved in vehicular pursuits
- 2 were ambushed (entrapment/premeditation)
- 1 was serving, or attempting to serve, a court order (eviction notice, subpoena, etc.).
“Tactical situations” – such as dealing with someone barricaded in a building, or holding a hostage – those are not the OK Corral situation, there’s not an element of surprise going on. Call for backup and de-escalate from safely out of range. It appears to me that about 9 cops, last year, got killed because they were walking up on someone in a car, and were shot.
It’s probably more likely that too much sugary, creamy coffee and yummy donuts are going to kill any given cop, than a gun battle. Yet, cops continue to justify drawing weapons and shooting first, because they are afraid that the person in the car is going to produce a weapon and kill them – or that the 15 year-old girl is going to produce a knife and stab them through their body armor. It’s situational, but a full-grown cop who can’t kick a 15 year-old’s knee out does not belong on the force. But, more to the point, cops need to show some strategic sense: if you have a gun and your opponent (theoretically) has a knife, then you need to manage the range between them and you, and you win the engagement. The whole point of a firearm is that it allows you to manage the range in a tactical situation, which is why the cop who killed Duante Wright was wrong: they had no business assuming they were about to find themselves in a gun-fight, and no business taking the tactical advantage of surprise.
9 (or so) dead cops are the excuse for over 1,000 dead civilians.
If cops don’t like the tiny sliver of risk that comes with their job (getting hit by a truck while they swagger down the street to give someone a ticket) they should get a job working for FEDEX or UPS or Starbucks. Or, if they want to shoot people, they can join the army and commit war-crimes in faraway places. If they want to act like they’re at OK Corral, they need psychological counseling and drugs, and they need to stay off the steroids and learn to handle tactical situations using the zen approach: by not being in a tactical situation. I remember, when some of us were discussing the Musashi movie series (starring Toshiro Mifune) after Iaido class, our sensei sighed and said, “Musashi had mental problems. No rational warrior seeks such a high level of conflict. A good warrior wins duels by not being present at the duel.” At around the same time as I was studying iaido, I was also buffing my tactical pistol and rifle skills, and I started the process of seriously re-thinking what it means to get into a tactical situation. One of the key points you learn in iaido is that your opponent may draw a sword on you at any time, and you must be prepared to – as John Boyd would say – get inside their OODA loop: defeat their intent with a positive action of your own that breaks their initiative. If you were a crazed samurai like Musashi, then you would shoot the guy in the car because they moved funny,* but that’s not the actual situation that a cop is in. Or, if they think they are in that situation, they are mistaken and they should not be cops.
That was when I realized that, in order to be tactically prepared to respond to violence, you have to become a dangerous person. When you answer the door, you have to have your gun in the back of your waistband, locked and loaded, because it might not be the postman. You have to walk around your house at night in the dark so you’re not silhouetted against a window for a sniper. Your katana must be in your belt, properly, and your posture must be correct and your distance right, so you can draw it with blinding speed and get inside your opponent’s attack. In other words, you must live constantly in a fantasy-land of the most extreme violence. My sensei didn’t bother to say it, but you have to be a dangerous, crazy asshole. What else would you call someone who creeps around their own house in the dark because they’re afraid of snipers? Or who answers the door expecting a ninja assassin with a sword, instead of the UPS guy? Or, who shoots a 15 year-old girl because she might have attacked with a knife? A non-dangerous non-crazy non-asshole would get some tactical distance, perhaps prepare a weapon, but then ask the girl, “What’s up? How can I help you? Please let’s not have any trouble.”
Basically, cops are saying that they’re scaredy-cats who live in that fantasy world, in which their lives are constantly being threatened. In the US there are around 600,000 cops. And only 9 died in tactical situations. Assuming some fudge factors, we might expect to lose around 10,000 cops to COVID-19. I can’t come up with a good risk metric for donuts and coffee, but before it became a stereotype it was a fact that a lot of cops stopped by Dunkin’ several times a day for “free” donuts and coffee. That’s more life-threatening, to the non-dangerous, non-crazy, non-assholes in the force. If there are any of those.
Blue lives matter, but they don’t matter that much.
* Musashi: Normal people we shit-scared of Musashi. He lived in a cave in the middle of nowhere, an outcast. Sensei was right, he almost certainly had mental problems – at least PTSD and probably severely bipolar, from descriptions of him. It’s interesting that he is held up as an enlightened individual but I think he was probably a highly compensated sociopath. He’d have scared the shit out of Derek Chauvin. He’d have scared the shit out of most people; for crying out loud this was a guy who chopped people apart with a blade, and regularly faced being chopped apart himself. It’s saying a lot about shoho-era Japanese culture that he was considered to be anything like “normal.” And it says a lot about US culture that Derek Chauvin is considered qualified to be a cop.
I saw a statistic somewhere that blew my mind so hard I don’t believe it. Something like 25% of some police departments’ cops use anabolic steroids. What, excuse me? What percentage are also using meth, I’d like to know. What a fucking mess.
A good warrior wins duels by not being present at the duel.
Well hell – Musashi only won 61 duels – I’ve won all of them.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3745740&page=1
You can use that reasoning to justify anything, officer. Let’s make street life a tactical battle of “who is higher?”
I did a little search.
Top result was a 2004 DEA report with a reasonable summary of ‘roid effects and absolutely no statistics. But other hits included:
Dopers in Uniform The Hidden World of Police on Steroids …
https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/hoberman-dopers-in-uniform
By John Hoberman Breaking down the “Blue Wall of Silence,” this landmark book investigates the widespread, illegal use of anabolic steroids in major urban police departments and how it contributes to excessive violence in American policing. Series: Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports November 2017
and
The Hidden World of Police on Steroids – Pacific Standard
https://psmag.com/magazine/the-hidden-world-of-police-on-steroids
There is no way to know for sure how many cops use anabolic steroids to bulk up and project strength, but after sifting through mountains of anecdotal evidence and preliminary investigations, Hoberman conservatively estimates that there are thousands, “probably tens of thousands,” of officers who do.
– which leads to the inevitable conclusion that maybe 1/30 of friendly officers are deranged dope fiends.
The 80’s stereotypical cop stealing cocaine from dealers and running around snorting huge spoonfuls with their eyes bugging out – that was a thing.
‘Big Stamp’ is watching you.
Post service accused of monitoring American social media posts under controversial ‘iCOP’ surveillance project
Why would they? Serious question. Why would I care about the interest rate in Burkina Faso? Why would the average US cop give a monkey’s about the number of civilians shot by police? It’s about as relevant to them as the BF interest rate is to me – i.e. it has absolutely no practical effect whatsoever. Why waste the time or brain space caring?
Hanlon’s Razor. “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.
Cops get away with KILLING PEOPLE – he’d probably have got away with shooting the person who filmed him if they survived. That’s not an unreasonable degree of confidence.
So does my wife, armed with a nurse’s uniform. She also has to deal, every day, with people infected with deadly diseases. So far she’s never taken a gun to work.
OK, there follow stats about how many American COPS are killed every year. How many AMERICANS are killed every year, because in fairness that’s the environment they’re required to work in. And if you’re honest, you know that – by the standards of civilised countries – it absolutely IS the OK corral out there.
For instance: we haven’t had a “mass shooting” in the UK since… 2018? The last one before that was in 2010. There were four in the USA just last Sunday alone. If that’s not the fucking OK corral you’ve got to ask yourself just how desensitised to gun violence you’ve become.
And that’s JUST the “mass” shootings. How many individuals got shot in the US last Sunday? OK, maybe not all of them, many of them or even any of them might have been cops, but that’s the environment. Can you blame them for being jumpy?
The person who introduced me to this concept was Marc “Animal” MacYoung. It’s a profound lesson. He’s a wordy guy and has a lot of good stuff to say (and some problematic stuff) at http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/ . I recommend a look.
In amongst it all, he points out pretty much word for word what you say there, and goes on to say that it’s not worth it.
It does… but on the flipside – before he was convicted, what formally DISqualified him from being a cop? “Being an asshole” isn’t a reason, otherwise there wouldn’t be 600,000 police in the US, there’d be 600. Again, serious question: he wasn’t an actual Klan member or Proud Boy or whatever.
I’ve long felt that this saying was incomplete. Here are some suggestions for finishing it:
“… but if somebody ends up dead, it doesn’t much matter which it was.”
“… but consider who gets to decide what “adequately” means.”
“… but remember that malicious people will always pretend to be innocently mistaken so they can fuck you over some more.”
Have you seen the video from Reardon’s bodycam? It sure looked like Bryant was about to stab another girl pinned against a car.
two things:
According to google/wikipedia, the U.S. murder rate is about 5 per 100K
Agreeing with what Marcus said, at some point I realized that in order to be a True Badass (TM), you have to be ready to assault and kill pretty much anyone at a moments notice. I’m not up on the proper psych disorders, but that’s got to involve some sort of sociopathy, psychopathy, or just moral bankruptcy. And along the same lines, someone who carries a firearm, should be alert and “on” all the time. That’s a major reason I have no interest in carrying a firearm, I want to be able to zone out and get lost in thought, go out and get a couple drinks, or just watch some shorebirds without constantly trying to mentally sort every other person on the trail by presumed risk level. I’ve tried to explain that to a few people I’ve known who expressed a desire to carry a fire arm, but they seem to think it’s some sort of magical talisman that will work without any training, awareness, etc…
surely in a country like the US the police regularly shooting people would make police more likely to get shot? if they are trying to arrest someone who’s actually guilty, that person might assume that they will get shot anyway so decide to shoot first.
@lochaber
that is exactly my experience too. having to be aware of threats around you is exhausting. it’s why i don’t go a lot of places; the chance of being assaulted is high enough that i have to be aware and can’t relax, and it’s just not worth it.
@lochaber: It doesn’t have to be a psych disorder; it could merely be complete amorality, ( unless that’s considered a psych disorder ).
“2 were drug-related matters”
That war on drugs must go swimmingly. Whatever happened to those gangs Trump kept going on about? They sounded not so much like organised crime than an actual military force operating with impunity in the US. Were they wiped out in some great big battle? Are they standing puzzled at the Great Partially Completed Border Wall unsure on how to get in?
I also note that the quoted bit could mean anything, from “shot by Don Rambo in a daring raid” to “fell off a balcony after overdosing on the evidence”, to loosely paraphrase Marcus. On second though, it can’t be the former because that sounds rather tactical. Hmmm.
—
Re: Lochaber (#9):
Apparently there are plenty people who like that way of thinking but can’t be bothered or at least manage to pay the necessary attention. At least that’s how I’d explain the guns some folks loosing in public places. Luckily in the US you can always buy another. No harm done, eh?
Reports I’m reading, including from bystanders, and camera footage seem to indicate that a female of significant bulk and strength was swinging a knife, big enough to classified as a deadly weapon, with violent intent as the officer rolled up.
Independent of the girl’s age it is clear this was not a small-framed child casually waving around a pen-knife. Kind of looks to like a ‘credible threat of death or serious injury’ to me. I don’t see not intervening as a significantly better option.
As I understand it up to that point the people had pretty much stayed out of the girl’s reach. He is said to have yelled for her to get down several times. She then, according to witnesses, lunged or ran at a female while swinging the knife. Her intention appeared to be to do serious harm. He then shot her.
From what I’m hearing it looks like he stopped an attack that very well might have maimed or killed the other girl. While this might seem to be a job for a Taser they are not considered suitable to stop an attack in mid-stride. A bean-bag round from a 12 gauge would have been a fairly reliable alternative but those are not routinely carried. Likely, if that was available at all, he would have had to go back to his car to get it.
I’ve made some effort to find information and it looks to me that of the option the cop had he made the right call. As with most of these situation it will take time for facts and timelines to be established. As with all things if more evidence comes to light I will, of course, reevaluate my conclusions.
sonofrojblake,
Chauvin is being investigated by the Feds for a 2017 incident now. Maybe if that incident had been taken seriously at the time…
Pesky lorn@13, doing research, looking at available evidence, letting facts get in the way of the narrative.
I just watched some video. The “child” in question – old enough, if she lived in the UK, to have get married, have sex, drive a motorbike, join the army, so, y’know, “child” – while she wasn’t taller than me (I think) was definitely heavier. And armed. And had just knocked down someone. And was in the process of physically attacking, with a knife, another person who was pinned against a car. As the guy in the video said – if that was YOUR daughter pinned against the car, what would you want a cop to do?
Let there be no disingenuous talk of de-escalation. I don’t know how good US cops are at it, but they often don’t seem to try it. This, however, was NOT a situation calling for de-escalation, this was a situation calling for an instant response to protect a civilian. I’m a little baffled by the “blue lives matter” comment, because the video clearly shows an officer acting in protection of a person of colour. Write that dude making the comment off as an ignorant insensitive asshole.
He must have done it damn quick ‘cos per the video the shooter got out of the car and started shooting thirteen seconds later.
I’m not cop-lover. But looking at the actual evidence here, that cop was in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Imagine if he’d stood by and tried to de-escalate while the girl in pink was stabbed, possibly to death, by her attacker. Would there have been a protest for HER life? And if you think not – why not?
Two angles here, from across the road and from the cop’s bodycam. Weight is a decisive factor in physical confrontations (that’s why combat sports have weight divisions), and I wouldn’t fancy my chances hand-to-hand against that “child”, let alone with a knife in play. Any martial artist claiming to be able to reliably defend against a knife attack barehanded is a fraud.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/04/23/makhia-bryant-columbus-ohio-deadly-police-shooting-jones-dnt-ebof-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/top-news-videos/
I make a point of trying to avoid videos of people being killed.
Let there be no disingenuous talk of de-escalation. I don’t know how good US cops are at it, but they often don’t seem to try it.
I don’t think it’s necessarily disengenuous. Asking why de-escalation was not attempted seems pretty reasonable, to me. I don’t know what was going on with the knife-wielding attacker, but would a loud authoritarian “FREEZE, DROP IT!” have maybe saved someone’s life? Obviously, we’ll never get to know. But, allow me to point out that the premise that “shooting that girl saved the other one” is equally hypothetical. The way things worked out is someone called for help and someone got killed – it sounds like a bad situation, and I don’t generally accept the “it was our only choice” response from cops.
By the way – that’s exactly the situation tasers are for. Too bad the cop didn’t have a taser. Or, did they? Unfortunately, I just searched for answers on that question and was treated to a photo of the encounter right before the fatal shot(s) were fired. Definitely a tight situation and if that was a cop body-cam image, it was not a safe angle to fire from.
The fact that the police are publishing video of the incident, quickly, and copiously, does argue that they believe it’ll be exculpatory.
I think that it’s a sign of how low policing has sunk, that “call for help and someone gets killed” is considered a good policing outcome.
robertbaden@#14:
Chauvin is being investigated by the Feds for a 2017 incident now. Maybe if that incident had been taken seriously at the time…
And the fact that he wasn’t, at that time, says something pretty bad about his chain of command.
lochaber@#9:
I’m not up on the proper psych disorders, but that’s got to involve some sort of sociopathy, psychopathy, or just moral bankruptcy
Actually, it’s normal behavior for an American.
That’s one of the “issues” I have with psychological terminology and diagnosis. It’s really imprecise – in a violentized society, the sociopath is the peaceful person who hides in a cabin in the woods and meditates.
That doesn’t seem reasonable to me at all. Asking IF de-escalation was attempted would seem a bit less like you were predisposed to blame the cops and had already prejudged what happened without bothering to look at the evidence.
Reports suggest the cop was shouting from the moment he got out the car. I don’t know as the video I’ve seen didn’t have sound. If he did, it didn’t seem to have any effect. Also, what a lovely world it would be if that worked.
Also, consider this: the dead woman called the police. She should therefore not have been surprised that the police turned up, and it is reasonable to expect, if you’re wielding a knife, that the police will tell you to drop it. You shouldn’t need to be told. You’re reaching to make this the police’s fault here.
You state upfront that you haven’t seen the video. Take it from someone who HAS watched it – shooting the dead woman DEFINITELY saved another person from being stabbed. She was IN THE ACT when shots were fired. It’s not really something you can argue about, IF you bother to look at the evidence.
I don’t generally, because a cop who’s shot someone is highly motivated to say that and construct a story to back it up.
But this is a specific case with very clear video evidence. There are two different angles of video that show pretty clearly to anyone not predisposed to blame the cop that he really acted extremely quickly in a situation that really did offer him no choice other than to let a civilian get stabbed. As I say – watch the video, then tell me if the girl in pink was your daughter you’d want something different to have happened in the 12 seconds the cop had between opening the door of his car and pulling the trigger.
Everyone’s an expert on tasers, suddenly. This was NOT the situation for a taser.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53222031
No it really isn’t a sign of that at all. If the police are called to a report of armed attack, turning up and killing the armed person they find mid-attack is actually a pretty good outcome, to me. It’s not optimal, because it’s always better to bring ’em back alive, but you have to stress it’s the armed person the police find when they arrive that leads to the situation, not the police.
It’s a sign of how low policing has sunk that without (and in this case, incredibly, even WITH) immediate release of obviously exculpatory video footage, otherwise intelligent people will assume it was all the cops fault, EVEN IF the “victim” (MASSIVE air quotes) turns out to actually have been armed. If US police didn’t go round pretty frequently shooting UNarmed people, particularly people of colour, they’d probably find that when they shoot and kill an armed one they’d get a pat on the back and a “thank you”, instead of an immediate pile-on.
There are so many examples of police intimidating, shooting, killing unarmed, inoffensive people of colour for doing nothing or almost nothing. The list just goes on and on. This is NOT one of those cases, and it’s unfortunate that the timing has brought it to the public’s attention and made people jerk their knees against the police. It’s absolutely not of a piece with those other cases.
Marcus @17:
You’ll never get to know if you don’t watch the video, sure. Let me summarize. Cop gets out of car, sees Bryant push one girl down. Cop asks “what’s going on?” twice. Bryant turns to attack girl in pink track suit. Cop yells “GET DOWN!” four times. Bryant’s knife arm is raised in the universally understood “I’m about to stab you now!” position. Cop shoots. From cop getting out of car to cop shooting was about 10 seconds. Dunno about your de-escalation chops, but mine wouldn’t have been up to it.
sonofrojblake@#20:
Everyone’s an expert on tasers, suddenly.
Well, not suddenly. I did a system design review for the Axon implementation, including the software interlinks between the gun, body camera, and evidence.com cloud service. That was 2009, so – not sudden. One of my favorite bits of design I ever did was the use of a shared secret to pre-compute ciphertext that could be transmitted by XORing, while the unit was plugged into its cradle and had plenty of power, to save battery power on the Axon; I don’t think they used it, though.
Anyhow, that design review entailed me spending a month inside of Taser and their systems, including the “conducted energy device” and all the data it records. Fascinating stuff, but still under NDA.
Maybe “I read the source code” isn’t sudden expert enough for you, though?
(Edit: never was shot or shot anyone with one. I do know someone who has been on the receiving end and they said, “if anyone points one of those at me, I will shoot them with my service pistol” apparently it’s really unpleasant.)
Rob Grigjanis@#21:
Dunno about your de-escalation chops, but mine wouldn’t have been up to it.
Your or my de-escalation chops aren’t what matters – it’s the cop’s.
I get the sense that most of you think the shooting was justified. Well, that’s how it goes, I suppose. I think there’s a pretty low bar in effect here but maybe we’ll find out more about the situation. Perhaps my attitude is colored by the fact that I used to know someone who is severely bi-polar who cannot control their anger and probably would also get shot in a similar situation if they were facing a cop with a gun. I “de-escalated” them with a fist when they reached for a knife when they were mad at me and – like the cop – I had no idea what was going to happen. That’s the big problem with all this stuff – it’s so damned irreversible and unpredictable.
It’s a bit REMF, if I’m honest. In fact, it’s several echelons behind the people I’d regards as REMFs, really about as far removed from the sharp end of actually using one in anger as I think it’s possible to be. It’s a cool story though. I note you don’t refer to the BBC news report of a taser entirely failing to stopped a stabbing. Didn’t bother to read that either?
Also: the graph that forms the backbone of this post is interesting, but lacks context. We’re told it shows, and I quote:
What I’d really like to see, for context and , on the same axes, is how many armed individuals are confronted by police in the US. Specifically, I’d really like to see if, when there’s a lot of “media focus” going on, whether criminals considerately stop going out armed threatening and shooting/stabbing people, and the police killing machine just chugs on at the same rate, or whether the rate of people getting shot by the police is related, statistically, in any way to the number of bad people packing heat or blades and using them (or threatening to) in front of armed cops.
Because without information on how many people are volunteering to get shot, that graph at the top is meaningless.
We are rightly appalled when unarmed people – white or Black – are gunned down apparently in cold blood by the police. But I’m not appalled by the news that in a nation where anyone can own and be carrying a gun, and there are an estimate seventy MILLION gun owners that about 0.001% of that number get shot by police every year. That doesn’t seem surprising at all. If anything, it seems quite a small number – but as I say, I have no context as we’re not shown how many armed confrontations the police are expected to deal with every year, only the ones that end with someone dead. I suspect if you totted up all the armed confrontations cops are expected to deal with and put them on the same axis, that graph would look quite different.
I whole heartedly agree that deescalation would have been the preferred option. Unfortunately deescalation was something that needed to happen some time before she was actually in the act of commiting, on the face of it, murder.
Why was she so mad? And why at the girl she tried to attack? There was mention of somebody ‘messing’ with someone I took to be her grandmother. What was that all about? There were clearly several adults present. Why were they letting this situation get out of hand?
Short of an actual breakdown or psychotic episode people don’t normally go from concerned but calm to homicidal very quickly. Most people need to warm up to it. Immaturity does imply some volatility and lack of control but still where were the people trying to calm things down? Foster care implies, at least in my way of thinking, care and supervision. Intervention before things get out of hand, and it turns into a stabbing, is much preferred.
It is a tragedy. There seems to be a story there that includes someone, likely in a position of some authority, failing to cover their responsibilities.
One thing this case does demonstrate: when it suits them, i.e. when the evidence clearly demonstrates that the cop was not just not a racist sonofabitch killing an unarmed Black person, but in fact a fast-acting hero saving an unarmed Black person from an aggressive armed attack, the cops can produce and distribute that evidence DAMN fast.
The obvious corollary of which is: if there’s a case where they don’t pony up such evidence immediately, there’s something shifty going on and they know it.