Summations Only

Well we've covered that and I've said a few times that the officer probably overreacted. But I was replying to your comment that: "In hindsight we know that police intervention was not needed."Which was a downright stupid thing to say.But you knew that already, didn't you? Nothing criminally negligent about the police shooting someone waving a gun around. Might be against their regulations; might be unnecessary. But it isn't 'criminally negligent'.But you knew that already, didn't you?

Did you watch the video?He's resisting through the whole interaction. He denies the charges. He refuses to let the police handcuff him.That's resisting arrest. And that's what prompted the hold.And as I said before, it looks clear to me that the officer is attempting the proper hold, but has difficulty keeping his arm properly placed because of the suspect's size. But that's not his fault. And he isn't required to just stand there and do nothing until a bigger police officer comes around to do the job. He has every right to attempt whatever is in his power and authority (and there is no evidence that he was attempting anything else) to take the suspect into custody.It's really very simple. And with so many actual instances of police being total assholes, I don't know why people are focusing so much on these horrible examples.Edited by Jon, : wordingEdited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

I agree with your assessment of the situation from the cops' point of view, but after watching a number of videos of it myself I think they way overdid it. The guy himself is no threat, there is no need to arrest him immediately, he IS protesting that he's done nothing wrong and the videos don't indicate that in fact he was selling the cigarettes at that time. Perhaps he was but at least one video says the cops acted right after he'd stopped a fight.And even if he'd been selling the cigarettes again, he's just a guy standing there on the sidewalk objecting to the cops coming after him and there is no reason anyone can see from the videos for them to come after him either, certainly with force. I can see a need for some other kind of police work in such a situation.I understand that resisting arrest is against the law but it's also the normal reaction of INNOCENT people to police action. There should be some wisdom applied that doesn't seem to be getting applied. The cops seem to know nothing but force. I know cops are threatened by criminals all the time, shot etc. They are rightly scared in many situations. I was once stopped by a cop years ago about one in the morning on New Year's Eve, as I was speeding through darkened streets to pick up my young teenage daughter from a party. I think I might even have run a stop sign. Well, you know, there weren't any other cars for blocks ...except that cop car unfortunately, that must have been parked out of sight.I was impressed by the fear the cop showed. After I'd pulled over, he stopped some distance behind me and kept crouching as he came up to ask for my ID. I guess the circumstances hit him as suspicious. I can sympathize. Perhaps I could have been shot, I'm glad he merely crouched and didn't pull his gun. He was visibly relieved to find a harried Mom behind the wheel.So again I sympathize. Police work is dangerous work. On the other hand Garner didn't look like a threat. The kid in the park could have looked like a threat, and it sounds like Michael Brown did too, but not Garner. The police may have done what they were authorized to do but still....

Not disagreeing so much as just responding. I'm not sure when else they would arrest him. A couple of days later? Next year? Whenever they get around to it?The crime they were accusing him of was admittedly ridiculous. But the fact remains that he was breaking the law and that the police had a duty to do something about it. In this case they chose to arrest him (probably based on the fact that he was a very repeat offenderof all sorts of crimes). He chose to resist. Understandable chaos ensued. And someone got hurt.That the whole thing was unnecessary and over-the-top in general is a different matter to discuss. My points to others have only been that it wasn't racism. I don't think resisting arrest should even be against the law. Nor should selling 'cigarettes'.But it's often the police's job to arrest people for committing crimes. And they understandably have a good deal of leeway regarding the lengths they can go to accomplish that end.That's how it goes. Crazy stuff, but not racism. Police often arrest people for crimes that aren't threatening (they probably shouldn't, but they do). Several years ago a young man was arrested in the Cities for not carrying proof of insurance in his car. He was put in jail where he was beaten to death by others in the cell.He was white.The reaction to that case was that he shouldn't have been arrested for something so ridiculous and then thrown into a jail cell with violent criminals.And I can see people having a similar reaction in the Eric Garner case. There are plenty of differences, of course (Garner had a criminal history and had committed the crime for which he was being arrested numerous other times), but there are definitely arguments to be made.Folks in New York can certainly call for revisions to the laws and different standards about what are and are not arrestable offenses. I guess it's not my job in northern Minnesota to decide things for them.Anyway, this has been a lengthy non-disagreement response. I think you and I are already on the same page with this: what happened was tragic and unfortunate, but it wasn't racism.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

To be negligent is to act without regard for the legal standard of care. Acting against regulations, and in particular, regulations intended to prevent exactly the kind of harm that occurred is all just about all that's required to established negligence.

Insofar as your pathetic drivel of nonsense has any content beyond the fact that you're butthurt, I feel that it has been answered by post #53 and similar posts --- and by understanding the concept of time, and that not everything happens simultaneously, something that I hardly thought I should have to point out to you.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Denying the charges is not resisting arrest. Refusing to allow handcuffing would be. That's completely stupid Jon. The suspect is the size that he is. At best, the police officer chose or was directed to apply a tactic that the police office could not pull off because of the suspects size. Selecting the wrong tactic is the fault of the person or persons who selected the tactic.We aren't talking about a situation in which the perp was a threat to the police or the public which needed to be stopped. Instead the situation involved one where the police had a range of options and elected to use a discredited and disallowed tactic, and then refused to remove it despite the distress that the perp was placed in.No excuse for applying a choke hold in such a situation. Totally unacceptable by any reasonable standard. Everything is simple when simpleton's reasoning is used to gloss over what actually happened.

Did you say 'negligence' or 'criminal negligence'?

Denying the charges is part of the escalation. Obviously the resistance to arrest doesn't happen until he actually resists being arrested. The police don't have to wait around for big Steve to get off his doughnut break before they can do their job. They admittedly had to choose one of the options, and they are understandably not required to weigh the pros and cons of each option at length before taking action. Again, your opinion. It looks to me like the officer attempted the allowed hold. And besides, none of the mahem would have ensued had Garner not first committed a crime (for the umpteenth time) and then physically resisted being arrested for it just moments later.As I've said repeatedly, no one physically altercating with police has any reasonable expectation of safety.Anyway, none of this gets to the topic. Even if we all agree that the officer used unreasonable force, broke the law, and disrespected his mother that says nothing about whether he was acting out of racism or not.

You apparently have zero appreciation for your rights under the US Constitution. Protesting your innocence through speech is not an escalation in any legal sense. If the police took it as such, that's just goonish behavior. The police failed to chose a reasonable option. According to you, the man's size was the reason that the applied hold became a choke hold. Well the man did not change size during the altercation. On the other hand, they might just as well have started shooting as pick the option that they did pick. The police were in no danger whatsoever, and there was no danger to the public. So what was the urgency that limited the police from picking a reasonable option?Jumping on that huge dude's back with a choke hold was a pretty ridiculous looking move. Had the defendant not had health problems, the likely outcome was ensuring an escalation rather than preventing one. None of which is an excuse for justifying lethal force in a non-lethal, non urgent situation. The police are justified in being the aggressors to get an arrest, but they are not automatically entitled to use lethal force. Nobody should have been using a choke hold, or allowing their chosen hold, through negligence to become a choke hold.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

What do you call negligence that is the proximate cause of the death of a human being? You call it criminal negligence, Jon.Remember the Oscar Grant case when the policeman shot Grant with his revolver while thinking he had his taser in his hand. Do you see the analogy between that and failing to avoid a choke hold, and then not noticing that you are actual killing the arrestee? I certainly do.It may well be that struggles and confrontations with police are prone to be deadly, but that is partially because the police will operate unlawfully. Not every confrontation justifies lethal force.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Sure, we can't read minds, and no-one turns to the camera, in the one-in-a-hundred times when there's a camera present, and says "Hi, just to clear this up for you, this is racially motivated".But there is a pattern, isn't there? Maybe we should stop talking about anecdotes and start talking about statistics.

Like the statistics that show a black male is 21 times more likely to be shot by police than a white male in spite of blacks being 12% of the population?The statistics that show that people with lower income are more likely to commit violent crimes and the statistics that show black income is lower than white income?So once you normalize the data by race and income to compare apples to apples I expect that a large portion of the 21 fold kill rate will still be significant.Enjoy.

Except this is just you claiming it without providing substantiation for your position. These are the kinds of answers one gets from cognitive dissonance. Curious that nobody else has your problem with the tests ... they are just indicators of tendencies not results that label you for the rest of your life.Enjoy.

The statistics might tell you that there is a problem when white cops confront blacks in their community when they've committed a crime, but it wouldn't show racism on the part of the whites any more than it could show it on the part of the blacks. Resisting arrest, coming at the officer etc. And, again, all this is occurring in relation to having just committed a crime, Brown having robbed a convenience store, Garner selling cigarettes again. The circumstances do not suggest racism on the part of the cops.Now maybe you could argue that the cops were particularly scared of the kid in the park because the kid was black, I wondered about that myself, but I don't know how far that could go, either. Would they have been less trigger-happy if the boy had been white? How would we know?In any case the kid was waving around a toy gun that looked like a real gun. I think his parents should have some of the blame. They should have known that it looks real and it could get him in trouble. My father would have known that, any gun-savvy person would, and told his kids not to wave it around. Actually, he wouldn't have let us have such a toy anyway.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.