Certain communities have a lot of overt criminality. These same communities tend to be racially homogenous. Look at this cultural gem which is still sung by kids to this day, here in North Carolina (the song is about nearby Tennessee)
Once two strangers climbed on Rocky Top,
Lookin' for a moonshine still.
Strangers ain't come back from Rocky Top,
Guess they never will.
Dead DEA investigators, wooo.
What do you have against the Osbourne Brothers? This is a really strange non-sequitur.
The song supports my point that some communities are locked in a cycle of animosity with the police. This tends to happen with poor, culturally homogenous communities. Like mountain moonshiners who murder DEA agents, I thought that was obvious.
I was trying to dig up statistics to confirm or deny these constant (unsupported) accusations of racial bias, but I'm at my wit's end. The problem is covered well in this fine CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/02/politics/kristoff-oreilly-police-shooting-numbers-fact-check/
Basically, the departments are self-reporting if at all. That's crazy and should be fixed. I think this has already come up in the thread, but it bears reiterating.
Even if we use O'Reilly's bullshit data it's still clear that black people die to police disproportionately.
Yeah, in typical FOX news fashion O'Reilly only quoted part of the data (which is from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention). In doing so he encourage people to jump to an incorrect conclusion. Sure ~3x as many whites are shot, when there are about ~5x as many white people.
The ironic part is that the Propublica article did the same thing, to a lesser degree. Adjusting the numbers per capita was understandable. Focusing entirely on the young teen demographic was... misleading on their part. Which is what the FOX soundbite basically pointed out: The numbers are different outside of the young teen demographic.
At the end of the day, "Black teens are 21 times more likely to get shot dead by police" is just as true as "326 White-Americans and 123 African-Americans were shot dead by police". They're both technically true, and both lead the reader to make assumptions and jump to certain conclusions. And they're both based on woefully incomplete data.
I don't understand, what assumptions am I snidely doubling down on?
but it's convenient for you to assume it wasn't.
The implication of that statement on your own beliefs is what I mean.
People are assuming things about these cases which fit their position. I'm not assuming that, I'm watching people claim stuff when there's nothing to back it up. Sometimes it turns out to be possible, if remotely. I just think we should stick to the facts, or make it clear when we're hypothesizing.
This is the relevant section of the article. And it doesn't seem in temporal order in terms of events. But the officer in fact used his taser, in what I'd like to think but don't know is standard procedure: when a suspect and/or POI is trying to flee the scene.
“The other officers started yelling and screaming to get down, Tased him multiple times, and from what we understand (told the university officer) to Tase him again,” Solomon said.
This surprised me... I didn't read it that way. I don't think the officer used his taser, I think the other officers tased the suspect and then asked him to do it. That usage of "again" seems unclear to me.
So it's wildly premature to condemn the other officers, and just wrong to say he was fired for "Not instantly escalating the situation".
And it's not wildly premature to fire a 20 year veteran exercising police discretion, without the results of a full investigation?
Yeah, wouldn't it be weird if they fired him just for that? Again, they didn't. We know they didn't. You keep saying they did, but that is wrong.
Presumably he was fired for walking away from the active scene. To join the speculation train, the situation would make more sense if he got self-righteous and argumentative. But we don't know that! We know very little about the situation, but that isn't stopping anybody. In fact, I'll keep going! If I was concerned about fellow cops using excessive force, maybe I wouldn't... leave them alone in the room?? Unless I was so angry I was losing control.
Wow, I see why everyone enjoys making up stuff for their position! Everything makes sense when fill in the gaps yourself.
But this again goes back to my core complaint with police violence these days: they are more concerned with their own safety than the people they're interacting with, even, apparently, at the non-lethal level. Could they have cleared the weapons to secure the scene? Handcuffed the student for his safety and everyone else's? These are all things that an investigation could suss out. Oh, except the one dissenting officer has already been fired.
Case in point!
How these cops, which tend to be huge guys, can so completely fail to immobilize tiny people without shocking them and beating them, is beyond me. And shit, the vest is meant for bullets but I guarantee you it would take the edge off most body blows. I'm not a cop. I'm just some guy. But I guarantee you I could immobilize most people smaller than me without doing as much harm to them as these cops seem so intent on doing.
Somebody who actually has combat training should be able to do a lot better.
Those huge cops, huh? Wasn't everyone on Wilson's case for mentioning Brown's size? Not that Wilson was small, but since we're apparently expecting cops to defuse threats based on body weight.
And just for the record, I've seen a taser get used on someone. Twice. One of my friends did it with a buddy to see what it was like. My friend got back up, shook hands, and tased the buddy back. It was "like touching an electric fence", which is an experience we have in common. It's exceedingly unpleasant, but not exactly painful... Like getting hit with a giant foam hammer and all your muscles cramping. That was years ago, but my friend offered to do it to me recently... I should probably take him up on it.