Summations Only

In other threads you rail against guns, going on and on about how unsafe and dangerous it is for people to even own the damn things. And now you want to claim that this kid's actions presented no 'clear and present danger' on the grounds that he wasn't shooting folks, but was just waving the gun around scaring the shit out of people and, as far as any reasonable person could tell, endangering the safety of anyone in that public space.Stop being ridiculous.This kid (who appeared to be a 20 year old man) was a threat, and police intervention was certainly necessary, and they definitely should have approached the situation with their guns drawn.The only mistake here was the unqualified officer's. And that was a mistake of being unfit for the job, not a mistake of being a racist. I suppose you'll have to find cases of some white kids waving around real-looking fake pistols and see what happened to them. We have covered a lot of this in some of the gun threads. African Americans (for whatever reason) commit proportionally more violent crimes than white people; so there is no surprise that the general public might associate black people with crimes more than whites.It's not the news reporters' jobs to sugarcoat reality. To be fair, I 'denigrated and declined to complete' it because it was stupid.I think that's a pretty good reason. She can think whatever the hell she wants. No one should be forced to feel shame for their thoughts, only guilt for their actions.Jon

Definitely a better and more relevant example than anything that's been in the news lately.

It's hard to tell who the victim is in a case like that, which is why special investigation is needed to determine what really happened. If the police were acting according to protocols and not out of line in any way according to the protocols and they can show that they had reason for their actions then the victim who got killed was in fact at fault. It happens. Again, the witnesses who said the cop was out of line in Ferguson were shown by the Grand Jury to have lied. The video and the investigation in the case of Garnerk, who was being arrested for illegal activity, showed that he resisted arrest and the cop acted according to his training in his attempt to restrain him. Unfortunately Garner had health problems that made it hard for him to tolerate it though the cop of course wouldn't have known that.The idea that white cops go into black neighborhoods with racist motives in this day and age is ridiculous.By your standards cops should never try to do anything about crime or trying to protect the public safety, though, oddly enough, that's their job.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Really? What if the protocols themselves are wrong? Besides that, choke holds are against protocol, yet killing someone with a choke hold does not seem to result in an indictment. How can the Grand Jury show that anyone has lied? All the grand jury can do is indict or not indict. Even a not guilty verdict after a trial does not mean that the prosecutions witnesses were liars. Generally speaking, that is not the law. If you harm someone with an eggshell skull, then you are liable regardless of the fact that such a thing was unknown to you. The choke hold applied had been outlawed in New York after someone else was killed. The city is probably going to lose a civil suit based on this case. True. However a much less odious set of motivations is required to produce bad outcomes. All that's required is a mindset under which the police department is under siege by a criminal element and a mutual distrust between the police and the policed. There is no question in my mind that having a police department that does not mirror the community racially plays a part in developing that situation. Pretty odious comment. Since it wasn't made to me I'll let it pass.

From the videos it looks like the officer is trying to apply the proper hold, where the bend of the elbow is in front of and away from the windpipe and the upper and lower arm are pressing on either side against the major arteries of the neck.The suspect was a pretty big guy, though. The officer has to practically jump just to reach his neck, and can hardly fit his arm around it. The safety of the hold attempted was thwarted by the suspect's size and his thrashing about in the commission of a crime (resisting arrest).It's unfortunate that this man died, but his death was precipitated by his physical resistance to an arrest for a crime he knew full-well he had committed and the cops' justifiable and legal attempts to restrain him.As in the case of Brown, this is another example proving that people have no right to an expectation of personal safety if they choose to become resistant and physical with police. These are not clearly examples of police racial prejudices.

Well, EvC has been down all day but it's back up again, so without further ado I'll answer this post:==============
If the protocols are wrong, nevertheless if they were being followed there is no error on the part of the police for following them. Changing the protocols is another subject and perhaps that should be the next project. But indicting an officer for what he was trained to do would be a miscarriage of justice. In order to indict or not indict a Grand Jury must examine the evidence, right? And apparently that can mean interviewing witnesses. Who then changed their story or confessed they hadn't actually seen the incident and other things like that.This guy tells it according to the facts I got in an email which I now can't find: Ben Shapiro on Lies About FergusonI read conflicting reports about whether the choke hold had been outlawed or not. Apparently the cop who tried to restrain Garner apparently didn't know it was outlawed and he was acquitted. And how could a person be held accountable for a guy's complex health issues when he was doing only what he was trained to do? You're the legal expert here but that makes no sense to me.You could be right about the general situation and the need for reforms but that doesn't justify criminalizing a cop who was doing what he thought was his duty. If reforms are needed, full speed ahead on them, but it sure sounds like there were people in Ferguson who intentionally promoted lies about how the cop Wilson dealt with Brown in an effort to make a racist case against him that he didn't deserve. Also whipped the people up to burn down the town. On the basis of lies.

Well, I've been watching a bunch of the different videos of the Eric Garner incident at You Tube and my overall impression after all that is that the cops acted with undue force and I have no idea why they felt that necessary. Racism probably not, but overreaction for sure. The crime if he was even involved in it at the time was petty crime after all, how does that call for the degree of force you might use to take down a really dangerous criminal? Too many of them, too much force, no attempt to talk to the guy in a reasonable way. I don't get it. They probably didn't act outside their guidelines but those are indeed strange guidelines. Good grief. One of the videos said that what had happened before was that Garner had broken up a fight and then the cops moved in. Something is wrong with this picture. I don't think racism says it but something is wrong.And what ABOUT the idea that those who police a neighborhood should look like they belong in the community? I was wondering that early on but got caught up in the Ferguson horror where they are screaming racism and trying to burn the place down. Then it turned out the witnesses against the cop lied and there was a whole gang promoting lies and violence. Why? But also why don't they put black cops in the black neighborhoods? I'm sure they've thought about it, so why did they decide against it?Garner at first looked like a similar situation to Ferguson but it's not.ABE: The more I think about it the more I think what you need to do is TALK to a guy like that. You don't just close in on him expecting to have to throw him down and restrain him, you TALK TO HIM. Don't you? Hey Eric, you selling the cigarettes again? Come on man you know you've been busted for that. Or maybe that isn't what he's doing at the moment, how would you know unless you talked to him?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All NY officers have been instructed not to used choke holds. Teaching officers to apply choke holds to stop the selling of untaxed cigarettes is a miscarriage of justice.

I believe that you are making up stuff to reflect what you want to believe. The grand jury can accept or reject any witnesses statement. Such rejection is not proof of lying. Most likely the grand jury accepted the policeman's version of events as true. Or they might have concluded that even if the eye witnesses accounts were accurate that Brown was still a threat. Did he say that? Has anyone said any such thing? Most of the commentary I've seen has been careful to say that despite being outlawed, choke holds are not actually illegal.As for not knowing police regulations. Yes a policeman should be held responsible for that. Would not knowing the law be an excuse for you? We are going to have to disagree about that. Perhaps such conduct does not rise to the level of murder, but there is the option to indict a policeman for criminal negligence. See Oscar Grant's death at the hands of the BART police.

Thrashing about, Jon? The dude was dying because some dude tried a maneuver he was not physically able to pull off. And then he was irresponsible enough not to verify that the suspect was actually having trouble breathing. Is it really that unlikely that the suspect was suffocating when a choke hold was being applied.Yes, he was thrashing around.

He looks like the proto-typical pre-teen to me. That's what he looked like to the citizen who called 911.In hindsight we know that police intervention was not needed. Pointing a toy gun at someone does not even rise to the level of assault.

You've said nothing.A person has no right to an expectation of safety, including preservation of their life, if they choose to physically resist arrest or otherwise altercate with police.If people don't want the cops to hurt/kill them, then they shouldn't start fighting with the cops.Stop pretending that the police have a duty to get the shit beat out of them and allow people to resist arrest.

But not to the officer that shot him. Police shouldn't show up when someone is waving a gun around ("probably fake"which wasn't true, see belowbut potentially real, and in either case that information was not related to the police)?Police shouldn't show up when someone calls them for help?Get your head out of your ass.Police intervention was definitely needed. If you were in a park where someone was waving around a gun, I'm sure you'd be more than a little impatient for the police to show up and 'disarm' the situation. Even that is nonsense. It wasn't a toy. It shot pellets, which though less severe than bullets, still have the potential of causing pretty serious bodily injury.The cop reacted in nervous haste and was apparently so bad at his job that he shouldn't have even been employed as a police officer.But that doesn't mean Tamir Rice was a good kid. Good kids don't go to the park pointing BB guns at people.

Perhaps the police ought to gun down everyone who's open-carrying a gun, or something that looks like one. I'll leave that up to you to decide. But as in fact they don't, one has to wonder why they did so in this particular case. I mean, no-one shot these guys.

And yet I don't think that RAZD, or anyone else, has ever said on other thread or anyone else that people practicing open-carry should be shot just for that.Meanwhile, in other threads, the pro-gun people have said that gun ownership is a right, and even that it's positively desirable. And yet when a black kid is shot for nearly owning a gun, well, now it's his fault he got shot and anyone who doesn't think so is some kind of hypocrite ...So, how does this work in your head? Is gun ownership a constitutional right for white people but a legitimate reason to execute black people without a trial? Golly, white people get all the luck, don't they?