US police & murders of black men

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:28 pm

Good. Only took a few days of rioting this time.

Also, I hadn't realised that
Ms. Potter, 48, worked for the Police Department for 26 years and was training other officers on Sunday afternoon when they pulled Mr. Wright’s car over.
which does rather suggest quite severe problems with current training, if even the trainers can't tell the difference between a gun and a taser.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Gfamily » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:32 pm

monkey wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 4:22 pm
Duante Wright's killer has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter.

clicky
I think the inevitable question is, it 'coz she is female?
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:40 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:32 pm
monkey wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 4:22 pm
Duante Wright's killer has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter.

clicky
I think the inevitable question is, it 'coz she is female?
Huh?
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Gfamily » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:42 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:40 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:32 pm
monkey wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 4:22 pm
Duante Wright's killer has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter.

clicky
I think the inevitable question is, it 'coz she is female?
Huh?
Would a male police officer have been charged, or would the ranks have been closed: "punished enough", "living with the consequences of this terrible accident" etc?
My avatar was a scientific result that was later found to be 'mistaken' - I rarely claim to be 100% correct
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by monkey » Wed Apr 14, 2021 6:05 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:42 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:40 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:32 pm


I think the inevitable question is, it 'coz she is female?
Huh?
Would a male police officer have been charged, or would the ranks have been closed: "punished enough", "living with the consequences of this terrible accident" etc?
In the example I found and linked to a fair few posts ago, a male officer, close to retirement didn't get charged, despite not following the rules.

But caveats of different state, possibly different law, and these things are rare events, if we limit ourselves to mixing up tasers and guns.

Of course, it may be the case that this cop is only getting charged because of the ongoing protests.

ETA: I'm sure you will find sexism in the ranks of the USian police without looking too hard.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Apr 14, 2021 6:31 pm

Yes, I suspect it's more because it's in Minneapolis during the murder trial of George Floyd's killer - the eyes of the world are already on the city and its police, and the protests surely helped bring that home.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by monkey » Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:18 am

NYT did a look and found 15 other cases where an officer fired a gun instead of a taser in the past 20 years. So it happens a bit less than once a year, which is what I wanted to find out the other day.

Out of those 15 cases, only 5 of those were indicted. 3 of those resulted in prison sentences.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Fishnut » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:42 am

One aspect that doesn't appear to have been mentioned yet is the "killology" training that many police officers around the US receive from Dave Grossman.

From a Mother Jones article,
Over the past two decades, Grossman has achieved semi-celebrity status as an authority on aggression, close combat, and the psychology of violence. He literally wrote the book on killing, On Killing. His books have been translated into several languages and he says they are required reading at the FBI Academy and many law enforcement academies. He’s lectured at West Point and claims to have conducted trainings for every federal law enforcement agency, every branch of the armed forces, and cops in all 50 states. For more than 19 years, he’s been on the road, leading seminars and trainings nearly 300 days a year.
...
“Dave Grossman tell him that every single traffic stop could be, might be, the last stop you ever make in your life.”... says Seth Stoughton, a former cop and law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies the regulation of police. In Grossman’s worldview, Stoughton says, “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.”
A Slate article points out that,
Grossman wants cops to develop “autopilot responses” so that they will not be caught flat-footed when confronted by an armed suspect. “Is it possible to see a gun pointed at you, draw your own weapon, and shoot without conscious thought?” Grossman asks. “Not only is it possible, in this case it is highly desirable. Of course, his training must be state-of-the-art, so that he knows instantly that the threat is indeed a gun, and not a wallet or a cellphone.” In practice, many cops have had trouble clearing this threat-assessment barrier...

“As a cop, or a peacekeeper, your job is not to kill. It is to serve and protect. To do that, you may have to kill,” he says in Unit 4. “The most effective way to stop someone is to fire a bullet into his central nervous system. It is up to God and the paramedics as to whether the man dies. Your job is to stop the deadly threat, and the most effective way to do that is to make the threat die.” Throughout “On Combat,” Grossman is very, very clear that police officers must be ready to manifest the will to kill...
The Insider reports that,
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned warrior-style training in Minneapolis in April 2019, calling it "fear-based."... But Grossman's course is still continuing elsewhere.
I don't think it's overstating things to say that Dave Grossman has had a major impact on US policing over the last 20 years and has led forces all around the country to see themselves at perpetual risk from the public they purport to protect and serve. As Seth Stoughton notes,
"If officers look at the people that they interact with as enemy combatants, as potential threats instead of community members whom officers are supposed to be serving and protecting, it's really not a surprise when they disregard the value of someone's life"
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by jimbob » Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:45 pm

@Fishnut - yes the killology training and use of such trainers as "expert" witnesses if police do go to trial is bad.

Meanwhile there are some good cops, except... they get fired for intervening.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/14/us/b ... index.html
The officer, Cariol Horne, was fired following a 2006 incident in which she tried to stop an officer from using a chokehold on a handcuffed suspect. Horne served on the Buffalo police force for 19 of the 20 years required to receive a pension.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by shpalman » Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:47 pm

Carbon monoxide poisoning f.cking really?
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by jimbob » Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:53 pm

https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/statu ... 16230?s=20
In my 25 years as a reporter I have NEVER heard police in America actually say “journalists will be arrested” during a protests. But that happened in #BrooklynCenter last night. We stayed. The citizens are why we stay. I took this moments aft the announcement #DaunteWright
First amendment anyone?
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Fishnut » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:41 pm

13-year old boy had his hands up when he was shot and killed by a police officer. Adam Toledo was shot and killed by police on 29th March this year.
Prosecutors initially said that the boy turned toward the officer and had a gun in his right hand. Immediately before the video was released, however, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office told WGN9 that that detail was inaccurate and that the attorney who provided the information “failed to fully inform himself before speaking in court.”
According to the Guardian,
Elizabeth Toledo, Adam’s mother, had not been notified about his death until two days after the shooting, leaving her to think her son was missing... [She] said in early April that that two days after the shooting, police reached out to the family asking for a photo of Adam. She thought it was for his missing persons report but about 30 minutes later the police knocked on her door asking her to go to the medical examiner’s office to identify his body.
...
Protests have taken place across the city, calling for transparency and accountability, as many are angered by a string of police-involved shootings that have killed young Chicagoans in recent weeks. In addition to Toledo’s death last month, Anthony Alverz, 22, and Travon Chadwell, 18, were killed by Chicago police in March.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Fishnut » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:04 pm

Vice has a story originally reported in the Baltimore Sun (which I would link to directly except it's blocked due to GDPR stuff).
Last week, the beginning of an explosive corruption trial involving eight members of Baltimore's elite Gun Trace Task Force revealed that a handful of Baltimore cops allegedly kept fake guns in their patrol cars to plant on innocent people—a failsafe they could use if they happened to shoot an unarmed suspect.

Detective Maurice Ward, who's already pleaded guilty to corruption charges, testified that he and his partners were told to carry the replicas and BB guns "in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them."
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Millennie Al » Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:14 am

Herainestold wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:18 am
So a racist goes through racist indoctrination at a racist training centre and then is hired by a systemically racist organization and given a fire arm. What could possibly go wrong?
Their training might fail to work and they fail to kill somone? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... es-lawsuit

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:03 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:14 am
Herainestold wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:18 am
So a racist goes through racist indoctrination at a racist training centre and then is hired by a systemically racist organization and given a fire arm. What could possibly go wrong?
Their training might fail to work and they fail to kill somone? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... es-lawsuit
From the link:
“He wasn’t angry,” Mader previously told the Guardian. “He wasn’t aggressive, he didn’t seem in position to want to use a gun against anybody. He never pointed it at me. I didn’t perceive him as an imminent threat.”

But amid Mader’s attempts to convince Williams to drop the weapon, two veteran officers arrived on the scene and, almost immediately, shot and killed Williams.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:55 am

It's almost like sending armed police - racist or otherwise - isn't necessarily the best response to somebody having a mental health crisis.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by mediocrity511 » Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:37 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:55 am
It's almost like sending armed police - racist or otherwise - isn't necessarily the best response to somebody having a mental health crisis.
Worth pointing out given our track record of people dying following or during police contact when in a mental health crisis in the UK, that even unarmed police aren't necessarily the best response.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:43 pm

mediocrity511 wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:37 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:55 am
It's almost like sending armed police - racist or otherwise - isn't necessarily the best response to somebody having a mental health crisis.
Worth pointing out given our track record of people dying following or during police contact when in a mental health crisis in the UK, that even unarmed police aren't necessarily the best response.
Yes, good point. The police in a lot of places seem to be massively overused, often for completely inappropriate jobs.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:45 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:43 pm
mediocrity511 wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:37 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:55 am
It's almost like sending armed police - racist or otherwise - isn't necessarily the best response to somebody having a mental health crisis.
Worth pointing out given our track record of people dying following or during police contact when in a mental health crisis in the UK, that even unarmed police aren't necessarily the best response.
Yes, good point. The police in a lot of places seem to be massively overused, often for completely inappropriate jobs.
The police represent a government workforce who have a lot of downtime between the urgent jobs they definitely should be doing.

On a related note, I was given my CoVID vaccine by a firefighter yesterday.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the police are trained to do what they are asked to do, but you can see why they end up doing those jobs.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:51 pm

I mean, sort of. The UK does actually have public mental health services, though. It seems like false economy to cut all those services and give extra work to untrained law enforcement when the outcomes are so poor.
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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:02 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:51 pm
I mean, sort of. The UK does actually have public mental health services, though. It seems like false economy to cut all those services and give extra work to untrained law enforcement when the outcomes are so poor.
Yeah, it's definitely not the case that police are the right choice for the job, but they are conveniently available on call, and probably more likely to be local to the place where someone is needed. Even with strong funding for public mental health services, the chances are that a police officer would be first to respond to a call where there's reasonable fear of a risk to others, and the call goes out to get people to the location ASAP.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by mediocrity511 » Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:14 pm

dyqik wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:02 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:51 pm
I mean, sort of. The UK does actually have public mental health services, though. It seems like false economy to cut all those services and give extra work to untrained law enforcement when the outcomes are so poor.
Yeah, it's definitely not the case that police are the right choice for the job, but they are conveniently available on call, and probably more likely to be local to the place where someone is needed. Even with strong funding for public mental health services, the chances are that a police officer would be first to respond to a call where there's reasonable fear of a risk to others, and the call goes out to get people to the location ASAP.
And I think that would be reasonable still, in a perfect world. But what happens next is where it tends to go wrong, in the US people end up shot, in the UK face down restraint is a more common cause of death. There needs to be mental health emergency services available to take over ASAP. Worth pointing out that in the UK there seems to be a racial element to this too, look at lists of those who die following police restraint during a mental health crisis and they are overwhelmingly black.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:21 pm

mediocrity511 wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:14 pm
dyqik wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:02 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:51 pm
I mean, sort of. The UK does actually have public mental health services, though. It seems like false economy to cut all those services and give extra work to untrained law enforcement when the outcomes are so poor.
Yeah, it's definitely not the case that police are the right choice for the job, but they are conveniently available on call, and probably more likely to be local to the place where someone is needed. Even with strong funding for public mental health services, the chances are that a police officer would be first to respond to a call where there's reasonable fear of a risk to others, and the call goes out to get people to the location ASAP.
And I think that would be reasonable still, in a perfect world. But what happens next is where it tends to go wrong, in the US people end up shot, in the UK face down restraint is a more common cause of death. There needs to be mental health emergency services available to take over ASAP. Worth pointing out that in the UK there seems to be a racial element to this too, look at lists of those who die following police restraint during a mental health crisis and they are overwhelmingly black.
Yes. The job the frontline police really need to be trained for is "first responder" rather than "police office", with the first duty to arrive somewhere and figure out what is happening, and risk assess intervention to stop/control the incident reported, vs intervention to keep other people out of the way and monitor things while someone more trained for the job arrives. The UK police is probably better trained for that (possibly as a result of not being armed) than the US police, but I do wonder how much of US police culture ends up in the UK.

And obviously racism/lack of diversity of experience affects that judgement I mention.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by monkey » Tue Apr 20, 2021 9:09 pm

Chauvin has been found guilty.

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Re: US police & murders of black men

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue Apr 20, 2021 9:11 pm

monkey wrote:
Tue Apr 20, 2021 9:09 pm
Chauvin has been found guilty.
OF ALL THREE CHARGES
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