Attention Where did the Mesa cop shooting thread go?

[MakeItTonite]

You remind me so, so much of another jubber who has the habit of deleting only to come back again, just to stir that pot a little.

I thought I just answering a post I came across. Why would you single me out as a someone who's stirring the pot?

I think if you're going to speak so passionately about this or any subject, you should make the minimal effort to get to know the facts. It only serves to advance the discussion in an honorable way and without any confusion.

I can only hope I remind you of one the A-listers.

 

[NotHardUp1]

This is probably where the non-American members are recoiling in horror that Americans know this kind of stuff.

Maybe a lot of Americans would like to know they don't have to worry as much about home break-ins and violent home intrusions. Too many dopers are out prowling the neighborhoods, breaking in, hoping to score easy loot and get gone. When they find the wife home, it can be awful. A shotgun may be a good field leveler as long as the woman isn't a nervous mess. If you know it's your home and you are willing to stand your ground, many a punk has been run off at the mere sound of a shotgun being cocked and readied.

Not everyone is a bloodthirsty killer> Most of them are just stupid punks who then get into worse trouble with violence when things get out of control.

If I had a wife, I'd much rather we just had a hunting shotgun for hunting, but have it there if she were alone. No one wants to think about the unthinkable, but I'd rather think about it than just plan on luck.

For all the talk from Canadians and others on here, and for all I have lived in the South, in New Mexico, and Alaska, I have known very few people who have pulled a weapon on someone or been forced to defend themselves with weapons, although MANY or even most people I know owned guns.

It just isn't true that many of them were violent or welcomed becoming violent. It's cultural. There are violent people in our society, and the rest of us don't intend on being walked over just because they do not recognize boundaries.

It's just like Texas. Everyone like to depict them as backward, redneck, and stupid. It's not true, and there are tons of people in Dallas and Austin and Houston that are from all over.

India isn't just one big gang rape crew, England isn't one big York-style tenement ghetto with crime, and America isn't one big shootout. It is violent in pockets, and painting it with a broad brush is off. Even Alabama rejected Moore, and even if it had not, the state was split down the middle, hardly a monolithic throwback.

 

[KaraBulut]

I think many non-Americans recoil in horror at the whole concept of American gun-culture.

Maybe a lot of Americans would like to know they don't have to worry as much about home break-ins and violent home intrusions. Too many dopers are out prowling the neighborhoods, breaking in, hoping to score easy loot and get gone.

There are plenty of places in the world where there is crime but the the connections between crime, fear of crime and guns isn't the same in every country.

Everyday on the freeway, there are drivers one encounters whose ability to drive seems to be less important than their right to drive.

When one looks at the people who are elected to public office, one questions whether the wisdom to vote should be considered in conjunction with the right to vote.

Unfortunately, America is a place where the right to drive, right to vote and the right to own a gun don't seem to require any ability, competence or intelligence. So, we spend a lot of time and effort avoiding unwanted interactions with bad drivers, bad politicians and bad people with guns.

I can only hope I remind you of one the A-listers.

Depends on what the "A" stands for.

 

[KaraBulut]

In a recurring theme with an unfortunate twist:

CNN: Police kill a man at his home while responding to a fake call

A prank call to police led to a man's death at a home in Wichita, Kansas -- and a man in California has been arrested in connection with the crime.
It's another example of swatting, or a prank in which people falsely report horrific crimes to draw large numbers of law enforcement.
In Wichita, a 28-year-old man was shot and killed Thursday after police responded to a call about a shooting involving hostages. Family members identified the man as Andrew Thomas Finch, CNN affiliate KAKE reported.

In the prank call, the caller said someone had an argument with their mother; that the dad was accidentally shot; and that a brother, a sister and the mother were held hostage, Wichita police Deputy Chief Troy Livingston said.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I resent the announcement by the police in the Kansas case, pinning the entirety of the blame on the prankster. Although the prankster indeed bears a heavy burden of the blame, the police forces cannot exempt themselves morally for how they execute deadly force. They are still charged with being trained professionals and de-escalating whenever possible. There must be protocols to legally enforce that require police to use least-harm means whenever possible.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I mean, what's the fucking point of the NSA and eavesdropping on every call and all the invasion of privacy if the police state can't simply talk to people in a standoff. This didn't even look like a standoff. They spotlighted a home and an occupant came out and was shot. Shit.

Likewise, realizing we have stupid practices that allow cops to presume malice means citizens should be wary and this one should have called 911 to talk his way through it too, but then again, he was a kid. Even an adult would not think clearly about alternatives when not expecting a SWAT.

 

[gsdx]

^ Indeed, especially since these 'swattings' have been going on for almost 2 decades. This shouldn't be new for them. And shooting the victim just because he was moving his hands toward his waistline. There was no hint of a weapon. And why don't the police shoot to incapacitate? A shot in the leg will put a man on the floor or a shot in the arm will surly slow him down if he's going for a weapon. You don't have to put a bullet in a person's chest to stop him from shooting you.

 

[Alistair]

^ it's not quite as easy as that Neil. Police and military are trained to fire at the mass of the body. You're more likely to hit it. I think less than lethal force should have been used in both of these situations if the cops truly felt in danger.

 

[gsdx]

^ I don't know how it works down there, nor do I know how it really works up here. I do know, however, that I've never, ever, seen a gun pulled in public either by the police or by a citizen. Never. But I know that, in cases where excessive force is used by police, it is investigated. There have been charges laid and convictions handed down. The most famous is probably the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim by Toronto officer James Forcillo who was later found guilty of attempted murder by a jury.

 

[Telstra]

In a recurring theme with an unfortunate twist:

CNN: Police kill a man at his home while responding to a fake call

This is horrible.
Better off the police not turning up.

 

[Telstra]

sort of off topic
the prank caller sounds gay"ish" tho

 

[KaraBulut]

^ it's not quite as easy as that Neil. Police and military are trained to fire at the mass of the body. You're more likely to hit it. I think less than lethal force should have been used in both of these situations if the cops truly felt in danger.

He's correct. When a weapon is fired by US law enforcement, they are trained to make the shot count. There's no option of disabling or incapacitating.

Law enforcement knows that they are outgunned- in both the types of weapons, the capacity of the weapons and the lethality of the bullets that are fired. If a suspect gets a single shot at law enforcement at close range, there's a good chance it will be lethal. So, from their viewpoint they are always meeting lethal force with lethal force.

 

[NotHardUp1]

The problem remains that the systemic shooting of civilians is a direct result of policies by law enforcement that inappropriately assumes every call-out is the worst-case-scenario and really provide no practical accountability of the officers for using intelligence in place of fear.

This NPR article uses police data to report that officer shooting deaths numbered 64 in 2016 in the U.S. Just under 1/3 were actual ambushes in which the officer was killed in a targeted act of murder.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/30/507536360/number-of-police-officers-killed-by-firearms-rose-in-2016-study-finds

However, NPR points out that there is not a reliable statistic for the number of persons shot and killed by police annually. That is a very telling fact in and of itself. We have politicians and activists all over it, but an obvious refusal by the federal government to even track the problem to understand its dimensions. According to the article, The Washington Post attempts to keep tally, and its count was 955. To be sure, most were criminals in the act of some deadly crime, but without data, how many?

And to put things in perspective by proportion, in 2016 there were 421,459. That means 0.0152% of officers in uniform were killed by gunfire on the job. That's less than 1%, less than 1/10th of one percent, less than 2/100ths of one percent.

The Census Bureau estimated U.S. population at 322,762,018 in 2016, making 955 fatal shootings by police occur at 0.0003% in the total population.

So, obviously the deaths of officers occurs at a much higher rate than the deaths of citizens per capita, but that is without consideration of how many deaths in proportion to how many encounters, etc.

Meaningful data should not depend upon law enforcement to report nor opponents of law enforcement. There should be third party data available for analysis, but there seems to be a deliberate purpose in refusing to keep and publish such data by the government.

And, for comparison, the numbers of deaths of officers by shooting is way down from the 70's and 80's, perhaps as a result of the adoption of paramilitary mentality and training in response to those high deaths. Conjecture.

 

[Alistair]

And, for comparison, the numbers of deaths of officers by shooting is way down from the 70's and 80's, perhaps as a result of the adoption of paramilitary mentality and training in response to those high deaths. Conjecture.

Police now have bulletproof vests, and better weapons. I think mainly due to the 80's Los Angeles bank robbery where the suspects were wearing full body armor, carrying full assault rifles and semi-auto hand guns, while the police were hiding behind their cars for protection, carrying pea shooter 6 shot revolvers.

 

[Benvolio]

^ it's not quite as easy as that Neil. Police and military are trained to fire at the mass of the body. You're more likely to hit it. I think less than lethal force should have been used in both of these situations if the cops truly felt in danger.

It appears that in each case the cops incorrectly though the guy was going for a gun and fired without seeing a gun. Of course the cops should wait into the see a gun, but if they wait until they are certain, it may be too late. We are talking about split seconds.

 

[KaraBulut]

And on another related note...

Deputy killed, 6 injured after shots fired in Denver suburb

Five sheriff's deputies were shot and one of them killed following a domestic disturbance call in a Denver suburb, according to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office.
Two civilians also were shot and the suspect is "shot and believed to be dead," the sheriff's office said on Twitter.
Residents in the area were ordered to shelter in place.

 

[Alistair]

And on another related note...

Deputy killed, 6 injured after shots fired in Denver suburb

Scary. They are saying the cops were set up in an ambush attack, and the shooter killed himself

https://www.google.com/amp/www.chic...uglas-county-shooting-20171231-story,amp.html

 

[NotHardUp1]

It appears that in each case the cops incorrectly though the guy was going for a gun and fired without seeing a gun. Of course the cops should wait into the see a gun, but if they wait until they are certain, it may be too late. We are talking about split seconds.

We are also talking about a SWAT response. They arrived, set up, flooded the house, and the victim came out into a blinding flood of spotlights. If they were not behind shelter at that point in the operation, shame on them. If he pulled a weapon, which he did not, they had the advantage and should have been able to at least see a weapon from their secured positions. Remember, this was not a county sheriff and some tiny village, but a city police force, warned of an alleged SWAT situation.

Their response amounts to little more than being trigger happy. It is ridiculous how he was killed with no chance to even appear with hands raised.

Their protocols are wrong, prejudiced toward deadly force unnecessarily, and as long as these slaughters keep hitting the internet, we are going to see an increased number of ambushes in retribution. The perception is growing that cops are above both ethics and the law, so guerilla tactics are likely to increase until these injustices end.

Accidental shootings are just that, but systemic slaughter like this is not accidental when it is the result of bias in the judiciary system and in the training used to "prepare" police.

 

[NotHardUp1]

In reading the link, it doesn't sound necessarily like it was media inspired. It also raises the question of why a noise complaint drew five officers. Second-guessing is poor work, but I ask that because I repeatedly have seen overkill (pardon the pun) in police force responses. Simple arrests or even stops take on a gang-up tone when multiple cars stop with no hostility or escalation. I remember this happening to me more than once in traffic stops, and it always seems like cops cruising begin to "back up" their buddy even when no situation merits it.

Not suggesting that happened here. No idea.

And, cop deaths are every bit as tragic as civilian.

 

[Alistair]

^ history and knowledge of the suspect? The report I read was they'd been there once for a noise complaint, the second time was a domestic dispute.