Shoot first, fill out paperwork later.

metalman

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"Investigator" detects a “strong chemical odor” while downwind of the house

LA Sheriffs kill 80-year-old man in bed in meth raid gone bad

Eugene Mallory died of six gunshot wounds from Sgt. John Bones’ MP-5 9mm submachine gun. When a coroner arrived, he found the loaded .22 caliber pistol the two deputies claimed Mallory had pointed at them on the bedside table.
Mallory had not fired a single shot. The raid turned up no evidence of methamphetamine on the property.

Widow Sues LA Sheriff, Deputies In Husband’s Fatal Shooting
January 10, 2014
 

Speelgoedmannetje

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Don't answer the door with a wii controller.
I'm not sure whether you can blame the cops in this case, they have to deal with wacko's day in day out, and they have to react with the speed of light. Poor sight in the dark and a black wii mote does the rest.
IMHO it more or less justifies the equipment of tasers. That, and the use of camera's when they work, would make the life of a decent law abiding cop a lot better I think.
 

FluffyMcDeath

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I'm not sure whether you can blame the cops in this case,...
You can always blame the professional who messes up. Cops need to be smarter not jumpier. Cops need to know what they are doing and they have to have ways to deal with situations beyond just shooting and they don't seem to quite often. If you think someone has a gun you get out of the way. Generally you'll be armoured so you have that insurance and even if someone does come to the door with a gun it's probably not illegal to carry a gun in your own home in a lot of places and shouldn't be a problem when opening the door to people who don't identify themselves. I guess the kid shouldn't have opened the door. Fair enough, but he did and he may as well have been opening the door to a home invasion or a hit squad because he's just as dead.
And tasers don't really help. They just encourage cops to pull triggers and for even stupider reasons.
The solution is to take the guns away from cops and have them go in to situations as scouts - calling for backup if they verify a need. Sound crazy? People are a lot more careful and less cavalier when they understand what is on the line. Putting armour on and weapons in hand make cops more willing to walk into situations because they feel less vulnerable, but they shouldn't be getting into situations so carelessly. And then, because they have the weapon and they get scared and their training is more about using their weapons than using psych skills they shoot first and ask questions later. That's about projecting police power more than about protecting the public from the bad guys which is the only moral justification for the police. Otherwise they are just enforcers for the state in which justice is secondary.
In 2012 there were 47 officers killed in the US (meanwhile 45 died in accidents). In the same year the cops killed 587 people. I can hear red necks already saying "Hoo yeah! At least them statistics are leanin' the right way." LEOs are killing non-LEOs at more than a 10:1 ratio - and not all of those deadies were crooks.
 

metalman

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metalman

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FluffyMcDeath

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It's not often there's a thread I can join in with on agreeing with metalman. I hope I'm not taking the fun out of it by doing so. There are some cops who just like to see what they can get away with.
At least we can be grateful there are dashcams.
 

metalman

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FluffyMcDeath

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probably another case of mistaking his gun for a taser

That's one of the ways that tasers have made cops more dangerous. The way you use a taser, the way you target it and the way you deploy the darts are very much gun like. If you are on auto pilot and grab either your gun or your taser the basic motor memory is going to be pretty much the same. If tasers were very un-gun like it would help prevent this sort of thing, but then it would impede adoption and increase training time.

The other thing about tasers is that some cops just love to use them as a effort free and mostly safe and non-bruising way of beating someone up.
 

Speelgoedmannetje

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You can always blame the professional who messes up. Cops need to be smarter not jumpier. Cops need to know what they are doing and they have to have ways to deal with situations beyond just shooting and they don't seem to quite often.
The point I wanted to make is that well, we have a saying for that in Dutch; "The best sailors are on the shore". Cops need this and need to do that and why didn't they do that.
It's easy to judge the ones who have to do the actual dirty work. There's also another saying in Dutch: "where there's wood being chopped, slivers will fall down".
If you're day in day out confronted by depraved idiots, "gangsta's" and what's not, PTSS is around the corner close enough, and a wrong judgement even moreso. Being an unarmed cop in the land of the Crips and the Bloods is just not realistic. If they're going to arrest someone, then what are they gonna do unarmed? I mean, hell, even here in NL cops do have guns. With reason.
Equipping cops with cameras will seperate the chav from the corn, on both sides. THEN you can judge. And judge mercilessly in the case of what Metalman's posted.
 

FluffyMcDeath

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The point I wanted to make is that well, we have a saying for that in Dutch; "The best sailors are on the shore". Cops need this and need to do that and why didn't they do that.
Yes, it's easy to criticize when you aren't doing it - just like criticizing a violinist when one has no musical ability themselves. However, one would hope that a competent orchestra would only hire violinists that are good at playing the violin. Not everyone can be expected to play the violin but only those who have shown that they can do it well should be doing it for a living. We hope the same of doctors and surgeons. We should hope the same of our cops but perhaps there are shortages, or perhaps many of the candidates are criminals and bullies or perhaps there are institutional pressures that push out the good guys or there are all of those things.

I mean, hell, even here in NL cops do have guns. With reason.
There's been a move to arm the UK police and maybe they carry side arms since I left the UK many years ago but they weren't armed on a routine basis in the early 80s.
Arming the beat cop just escalates the arms race and makes everyone more jumpy. In the US there are some seriously bad policies driving ever increasing militarization, including the drug war, war on terror, the need for defence contractors to sell their wares, the ability of police forces to seize and sell assets or "criminals" to fund their departments and the need for private jails to be kept full to meet contract obligations that the governments signed.

Then there is the deep seated racism and wealth disparity. It's hard to keep the good cops when the system is pushing them to do bad things to meet quotas.
 

Speelgoedmannetje

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Quotas are exactly that what I'm against. It's thought up by people who have zero experience on the working floor but loud-mouthed about what the working people have to do.
As well as privatized prisons, which themselves are down right criminal. All made up by either talking heads or people with a hidden agenda.
IMNSHO this criticism is pointed 'upwards', not 'downwards'.
 

metalman

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If you're day in day out confronted by depraved idiots, "gangsta's" and what's not, PTSS is around the corner close enough, and a wrong judgement even moreso. Being an unarmed cop in the land of the Crips and the Bloods is just not realistic. If they're going to arrest someone, then what are they gonna do unarmed? I mean, hell, even here in NL cops do have guns. With reason.
Equipping cops with cameras will seperate the chav from the corn, on both sides. THEN you can judge. And judge mercilessly in the case of what Metalman's posted.

Austin, Texas, this video, taken downtown near the University of Texas campus Thursday.


the police had camped on a street corner and were issuing jaywalking citations. The woman jogger came along, wearing earbuds listening to music. The Police ordered her to stop, she did not hear them and continued jogging. Police then chased her down and tried to grab her from behind and she reacted as just about anyone would, and tried to brush them off before realizing that they were police officers. A witness, saw the incident and said that it was clear that the woman could not hear the police officers when they first approached her, and reacted to being touched from behind.

Jaywalking is a class c misdemeanor, not typically an offense that leads to arrest.

Woman arrested after allegedly jaywalking

revenue enhancement continues to deteriorate the relationship between the citizenry and the police
 

metalman

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Jaywalking is a class c misdemeanor, not typically an offense that leads to arrest.

It seems she was arrested for jogging without an ID, because she was not carrying an ID to identify herself, they then had to arrest her

she should look at the bright side:

When asked about the video Friday, Police Chief Art Acevedo said, "Cops are actually committing sexual assaults on duty so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas. ... And I'm glad that I'm here having to address mediocrity."
 

FluffyMcDeath

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It seems she was arrested for jogging without an ID, because she was not carrying an ID to identify herself, they then had to arrest her

Because in a free country you must always carry your papers.
 
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