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Author Topic: Cops burn and kill a 7-year-old girl while being filmed by a reality show  (Read 7139 times)

Dwarf

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That being said, incendiary grenade ≠ flashbang.

But goddamn you fascist Americans.
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Cthulhu

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That being said, incendiary grenade ≠ flashbang.

But goddamn you fascist Americans.

Didn't they just ban minarets in your country?
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Shoes...

Dwarf

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Not 'just', quite some time ago.

'Conservative', racist, whatever ≠ shooting girls

Well, I disapprove anyway.
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userpay

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What I'm curious of is that if the guy has seen footage of the shooting thats contradicting what the police are saying that happened why hasn't he posted the video? Presumably if he's seen it he has a copy.
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Duke 2.0

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 Reading these articles there appears to be a few pieces of inconsistent data, and nobody really has a good excuse for why the gun was fired. It was shot from outside, so that makes me doubt that it was fired intentionally at the child. Also, I didn't see your quote in the sources provided. Unless I somehow missed it I would like to see where it came form, as it is the only source I see stating officers stood on a dudes neck.
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nil

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What I'm curious of is that if the guy has seen footage of the shooting thats contradicting what the police are saying that happened why hasn't he posted the video? Presumably if he's seen it he has a copy.
He's the family's lawyer.  Not making it public at this time may be part of a legal strategy, a way to keep leverage over those who don't want the tape to be public, or just be a reflection of the family's personal wishes.  It's not impossible that he's lying, but unlikely--neither the family nor the attorney will get anything out of this if they can't produce real evidence in court.
Reading these articles there appears to be a few pieces of inconsistent data, and nobody really has a good excuse for why the gun was fired. It was shot from outside, so that makes me doubt that it was fired intentionally at the child. Also, I didn't see your quote in the sources provided. Unless I somehow missed it I would like to see where it came form, as it is the only source I see stating officers stood on a dudes neck.
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2010/05/attorney_geoffrey_fieger_alleg.html

I don't think the shooting was intentional per say, but firing blindly into a house you know contains a number of people is an insane, stupid, evil thing to do.  Whether it was heat-of-the-moment over-excitement by an over-armed officer or an intentional act of showing off for the fucking television cameras I don't know, but everyone involved deserves to be fired.  The shooter should go to prison under a manslaughter charge, at the least.  Note that this almost certainly won't happen; the family will be lucky to get a nice settlement and the shooter's badge.

G-Flex

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Interestingly enough, a google search seems to confirm that the quote in the OP used to be in the CNN article, but isn't anymore. I wonder if the police department is pressing people to withhold release of anything that could be remotely considered "evidence".
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Jackrabbit

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Brrr. Hope somebody gets their balls caved in for this fuck-up.
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G-Flex

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This kind of stuff really makes me sick to my stomach.

I mean, I don't have anything against cops on principle or anything like that. My girlfriend's dad is a cop, and it's a hell of a difficult job, deserving good compensation, recognition, training, and whatever measures are possible to prevent the job from completely wearing down and desensitizing those in the position (I know that I'd want a shrink available if I had to babysit dead bodies sometimes).

However, in turn, they need to be held to some pretty high standards. Yet, stuff like this happens all the time:
  • Some cops, particularly in small towns where not much is going on, don't seem to respect the position or treat it with any gravitas at all. We're not talking Andy Griffith style "helping out people around town and making sure things are in order" small-town cops, we're talking "crew of 27-year-old smug jerkasses with authority complexes who want to hold a gun and hassle kids on the street for no reason". This undermines the job and the respect it should deserve, not to mention these people make horrible candidates if something serious does happen. The cops in my town are like this (I swear every single one looks the exact same). My dad tried to break up a fight once (some 18-year-old punk was beating on a girl in a nearby yard), the cops showed up, my dad tried to get the cop's attention, and he was rewarded with eyes full of pepper spray (note: You're not really supposed to use it like that) and a couple punches from the violent dude. Oh, and then the officer lied about it on the report. Hell, I've been hassled two or three times just for walking down the street, and I'm as harmless as they come. Obviously, this isn't as serious a problem as the kind of thing discussed in the article, but it sure as hell doesn't help matters.
  • Crooked cops. I have no idea how common these are, but I can definitely see this happening in tougher cities and the like. Basically, I'm referring to police officers who are flat-out corrupt rather than simply incompetent or those who disrespect the position or get away with too much. I can see cops getting too desensitized to violence/crime/the suffering of others through their work in areas like this, and my relatively-uneducated opinion is that perhaps the departments need to treat their members a little better in the psychiatric sense, and that they need to be decently compensated.
  • Cops who get away with murder. I don't know if it's a lack of oversight of the police departments, or the fact that public opinion is too lenient (perhaps because police are glorified without exception made for the ones who are total dicks), the justice system being too lenient with them (being "inside men" of sorts), or what, but police officers can effectively get away with anything is they can pull a bogus justification out of their ass (I swear I had to tase that old woman!), or claim that the stresses of the job made them do it, or get the department to put them on paid leave or some-such instead of ever actually being tried for a crime. Hell, when things like this end up in court, it seems like it's usually civil court and that normally the result is a settlement. If a cop kills someone, and a reasonable person could have been expected to not have done so (as opposed to a more legitimate mistake, which we have to admit can happen, albeit more rarely), then he needs to be tried and convicted of a criminal offense. If anything, committing a crime as an on-duty police officer should carry greater penalty because he's abusing the public trust and his position.

All of this leads to a situation where the common man no longer feels protected, served, or looked after by his local police force. Instead, the police are seen as brutes, or incompetents, or some sort of abusive parental figure you have to hide from. Obviously, this situation is very fucking far from ideal, and is getting rather unsustainable, especially when things like the reckless death of a seven-year-old girl are involved. Hell, a cop can commit an entirely unnecessary violent act, be surrounded by evidence, and still get off with virtually no punishment simply because he's a cop, and that's awful. When shit like this is going down, I can't help but feel the gap between the populace and the law (law enforcement especially) growing wider.

Hell, incompetence alone can be just as bad sometimes: I remember a story where a mentally-unstable individual had a knife, was in some room by himself not posing an immediate threat to anyone, and another person in the house called the police out of fear of the guy's safety. Now, what's the appropriate solution to this? Maybe negotiators? Try to calm the guy down somehow? Engage in nonlethal restraint/violence if necessary? Nope. The officer who arrived on scene shot him dead. I forget the exact details of what happened, but they totally botched the job and just wound up shooting him.

What's the lesson we learn from all this? When you can't trust the police to actually serve the interests of the community, what do you do? Who do you trust? This situation is not going to stay like this forever. The way I see it, things will probably reach some breaking point where enough public outcry accumulates to get the courts/legislature to do something, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later.


Apologies for the wall of text. I just hope that, at some point in my life, I don't live in a world where people feel the need to treat on-duty police officers as people you have to avoid rather than trust, and for that matter, where people have no reason to feel that way. This is to say nothing of the gang-ridden cities, where expecting people in certain areas to follow the law doesn't even make sense, leading to a situation with no real clear or simple solution.
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RedKing

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As I've alluded to in a couple of other places, I work with Federal law enforcement for a living. I stress *with*, not *as*. I'm not an officer or Special Agent myself.

Things get really hairy really fast when you're trying to serve a warrant against a known armed felon. Law enforcement officers are seriously wounded and/or killed on a disturbingly regular basis in those sort of situations. So there tends to be a sort of 'hair-trigger' environment created. Most of them time, that's allayed to some extent by using SRT (Special Response Teams) to do the actual door-kicking and warrant-serving in those situations. These guys have a lot of additional training in fire control and just better psychological conditioning altogether. They're less likely to shoot someone the moment they walk around a corner unexpectedly. And when something goes wrong, there's lots of internal logging and evidence for Internal Affairs to go over to determine if someone maliciously fucked up, or if it was just a tragic mistake.

That said, this is Detroit PD, not the Feds. Detroit's a rough place to begin with, and its police force has a reputation for being...shall we say "rattled". It's not clear if this was an SRT or just a couple of regular cops. If it was regular cops, and they were being asked to go into a bad neighborhood to serve a warrant against someone who may well be better armed than they are, I can understand how they might just have lost it and gone in expecting the worst. That doesn't clear them of responsibility, and if they royally screwed up as it looks they did, then hopefully their IA section will come down on them like a ton of bricks. But again....it *is* Detroit.  :-\


EDIT: I just reread the OP, and noticed that it was in fact an SRT. So I find it hard to believe that they'd show such poor judgement.
« Last Edit: May 19, 2010, 08:21:15 am by RedKing »
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Dwarf

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As far as I can see, there was no psychological trigger at all.
They throwed in that grenade for the sake of it, or, one might even say, for fun.
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Jackrabbit

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Intel and reaction fuck-up aside, they believe that they could be facing an armed enemy in a suburban home. Throwing a flash-bang in is a logical action, they don't do it for 'fun', whatever the hell that means. Do you assume that law enforcement in America just throws grenades around randomly for shits and giggles?

What the hell?

EDIT: So wait, was it an incendiary or a flash-bang? Because if it was an incendiary, I apologize. Otherwise, my point stands.
« Last Edit: May 19, 2010, 07:03:28 am by Jackrabbit »
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Aqizzar

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Not that I want to inject myself into this mess, but I think I can answer that.  A flashbang works by firing off a magnesium charge (usually), creating a fast explosion.  They are quite capable of setting things on fire accidentally.  Of course, I haven't closely read any of the relevant articles, but as astounding as it to me that anyone in America outside of the military would have an actual flashbang ready to use, the idea that police officer would be carrying a dedicated incendiary device to a public disturbance call is just plain ridiculous.
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Jackrabbit

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Nevertheless, I contest the opinion that they threw one in there for fun.
« Last Edit: May 19, 2010, 07:11:54 am by Jackrabbit »
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RedKing

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Intel and reaction fuck-up aside, they believe that they could be facing an armed enemy in a suburban home. Throwing a flash-bang in is a logical action, they don't do it for 'fun', whatever the hell that means. Do you assume that law enforcement in America just throws grenades around randomly for shits and giggles?

What the hell?

EDIT: So wait, was it an incendiary or a flash-bang? Because if it was an incendiary, I apologize. Otherwise, my point stands.

I've seen conflicting accounts, and I think Aqizzar is right. News reporters aren't exactly sticklers when it comes to hardware terminology. They see "grenade that flares using magnesium" and equate it with "phosphorus grendade", which is a whole 'nother animal. As rough as Detroit is, I can't fathom a reason why any law enforcement would be issued an incendiary device, especially for a residential call.


EDIT: Also, just reread the OP and noticed that it was the lawyer, not reporters who characterized it as an incendiary grenade. Not only are lawyers even less concerned with being right, but in this case he has an logical self-interest in inflaming public opinion.  :-\
« Last Edit: May 19, 2010, 08:23:13 am by RedKing »
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