This insanity has to stop:
A Cleveland police officer shot and wounded a 12-year-old boy who was carrying what turned out to be a fake pistol outside a recreation center on Saturday after witnesses said the boy had brandished the gun on a playground, the authorities said.
Two police officers responded to the scene and ordered the boy to raise his hands, but he refused and reached for a gun in his waistband, the Cleveland Division of Police said in a statement.
An officer fired two shots, striking the boy once in the abdomen, police and emergency medical services officials said. He was taken to a hospital in serious condition and underwent surgery. His mother told a local news station that her son’s condition had deteriorated to critical on Saturday night.
At an evening press conference, Deputy Chief Ed Tomba of the Cleveland police said the boy did not threaten the officers or point the weapon at them. “There was no verbal or no confrontation,” he said.
The police learned that the gun was fake after the shooting, said Jennifer Ciaccia, a spokeswoman for the Division of Police. Investigators recovered a replica gun resembling a semiautomatic pistol, the police said. “It looks really, really real, and it’s huge,” Ms. Ciaccia said.
Since they were responding to a 911 call, I would really, really like to hear the audio and find out what the officers and dispatch were told prior to the response to the call. Did someone claim the kid was a threat? Was this another murder by 911 as was the case with John Crawford III, when scumbag Ronald Ritchie called 911 and knowingly lied to them about Crawford’s actions in the Walmart? And why is Ronald Ritchie still a free man?
Baud
Didn’t they pass a law that toy guns had to have some type of orange marking to prevent this type of tragedy?
Stella B.
From time to time the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of middle schoolers.
Poopyman
@Stella B.: Well, to be fair, they do have more blood than toddlers.
Howard Beale IV
@Baud: If it was an Airsoft gun, all bets are off.
Gin & Tonic
I know it’s another in a long line of police over-reaction, but given the number of these incidents, why, these days, would any parent allow a child to play with a toy gun? That just seems dangerous on its face.
MikeBoyScout
My gut response to a policeman shooting a 12 year old is “unbelievable”, but of course, reality forces me to accept this is as usual as water is wet.
Fk!
MattF
@MikeBoyScout: But… but… he was a really big 12 year old.
Trentrunner
Geez, you’d almost think that some white people want all black people dead, or something.
Except Bill Cosby, right? He’s one of the good ones.
Wag
@Gin & Tonic:
This. A thousand times over, this. I will not allow my twins to play with guns
Zam
@MattF: I bet he was flashing gang signs too, probably just another drugged up thug.
Mike in NC
When I was a kid we routinely played Cowboys & Indians with cap pistols. Today that might well end up meaning “Death by Cop”.
Linda Featheringill
The people who make toy guns have blood on their hands.
Since this happened in Cleveland, I assume they mean the actual city thereof. Any 12-year-old inner city child who tries to bluff the world with a nonfunctioning gun of any type is really stupid. If he had confronted someone other than the police, he would already be dead of a few shots to the head. Then what?
Darwin would say . . . .
As far as the police, I dunno. I assume that the toy looked quite real. If so, maybe they could have shot a leg or something like that to bring him down but not kill him.
I do hope the child survives. I realize he was probably operating under delusions of invincibility and it would be a shame to take that away from him. If he doesn’t get help to deal with premature exposure to mortality, he may be really screwed up.
Geez. Tragedy all around.
Steve from Antioch
@Baud:
Story I read said it was a “bb” gun – and they don’t have the orange markings because they are not toys – despite the fact that people treat them as toys too often.
Petorado
The key to this story is context. A child is playing with an object and none of the other people in the area are threatened, nor do they appear concerned. The 911 caller even mentioned the gun was probably a toy. There was no reason to believe anything criminal was going on, nor was the public in danger — until cops show up with real weapons and the intent to use them if they see fit.
What’s galling about the extraordinary pattern of police abuses we constantly witness is the alarming lack of judgement, reason, and discretion shown by officers and their superiors. That is, in part, fostered by the fact that their never seem to be any repercussions for the individual officers nor the force at large for any abuse of public trust or unnecessary violence directed at the public..
Petorado
@Linda Featheringill: The boy died this morning from his injuries.
Citizen_X
@Linda Featheringill:
Maybe he was thinking, “The cops aren’t gonna really shoot me. I’m a 12-year-old kid with a toy gun.”
I know, I know, crazy, unrealistic thinking. But some people might think it seems like a reasonable assumption. Go figure!
Linda Featheringill
@Petorado:
Ah, shit.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@Linda Featheringill: You have some very interesting assumptions which seemed designed for you to have to feel no empathy whatsoever.
“Tragedy all around” nice dismount.
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donnah
I have three sons and made a hard and fast rule that they were not to have toy guns of any kind, period.
So they either used sticks or built guns out of Legos.
Kids play with toy guns. Police officers need to be trained accordingly not to kill them.
Gex
I’m sorry, but in a country where gun laws are expanding and our policy is designed to encourage people to carry guns in public, cops are going to have to stop using “but he had a gun” as an excuse to shoot someone. Increasingly that is not an illegal act in and of itself. I realize it’s a lot harder and riskier for cops to have to wait until some subsequent action after possession of a weapon is ascertained to take action, but that’s how it needs to be with current gun laws. Blame that problem on the NRA.
Linda Featheringill
@Citizen_X:
That kind of thinking would likely be quite normal for a suburban child raised in peaceful circumstances. City kids should know better.
Trentrunner
The boy has died.
Most of white America: “Well, that’s one less. Or is it ‘fewer’? Oh well, he dead.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Linda Featheringill:
He didn’t.
Linda Featheringill
@Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™:
Empathy for whom?
Inner city parents of all colors NEED TO TEACH THEIR CHILDREN HOW TO DEAL WITH THE POLICE.
Inner city kids need to understand THERE ARE SOME REALLY STRONG AND TOUGH PEOPLE OUT THERE.
Of course the police were trigger happy. They are police. And they are Cleveland police. [I know what I’m talking about here.] That is what inner city people have to cope with.
But what are you going to do? Move to Boca Raton?
MattF
@Citizen_X: Or, maybe… he was an ordinary 12 year old kid.
Mnemosyne
This is not usually where my thinking goes, but the cop who killed the boy is going to wrecked by this. From what I’ve heard, the worst nightmare of even the most trigger-happy authoritarian cop is that you kill a kid. Hopefully s/he will get some real help psychologically and not just be told to get over it and get back on the street.
And, to repeat myself once again, this is yet another example of the problem created by training cops to demand obedience rather than training them to negotiate. Cop ordered kid to obey, kid didn’t obey the order, cop shot kid dead because that’s what s/he’s trained to do when someone doesn’t immediately obey an order. That is fucked up and is a huge part of what leads to these tragedies.
Trentrunner
@Mnemosyne: I’m glad someone is thinking of the real victim here.
Mnemosyne
@Linda Featheringill:
How do you know he was raised in the city? Maybe they had moved there recently and he didn’t know the new rules.
Also, it’s interesting that the deputy chief seems to be hanging the officers out to dry:
Usually there’s a lot of talk about how the cops “followed procedure.” That’s an interesting omission.
jibeaux
The NRA opposes proposals to require realistic looking toy guns to be clear or neon. Because, I’m sure, there is some legitimate hunting reason, perhaps so that you can frighten your prey into fainting or something.
Seems like a good case for lawsuits, against the police and the toy manufacturer.
Iowa Old Lady
A friend of mine is bed-ridden at home, and one of her caregivers showed up with a gun strapped to her hip. The caregiver said it was unloaded, and she had to get comfortable carrying it that way first before she carried it loaded because she might have to draw quickly.
When did we become a country in which people feel they have to be armed to walk out their front door?
Ripley
@Linda Featheringill: Wow, getting your racism AND your victim blaming on this fine Sunday morning. Have a great Thanksgiving in suburbia.
Mnemosyne
@Trentrunner:
You honestly think that cop went out on patrol yesterday and thought, Today, I’m going to kill me a 12-year-old kid!
That cop did something stupid that not only ruined the life of that kid’s family, it’s going to ruin his own life. I think that’s something important to point out to the cop defenders who are going to show up — that cop did something that he is never, ever going to be able to get over, and he did it because cop defenders refuse to admit that there’s anything wrong with the way we train and deploy cops.
jibeaux
Personally, I think there’s a huge difference between toy guns and realistic looking toy guns. There may be a good argument along the lines of “culture of violence” for not having any toy guns, but my son’s had fun with some of them and he wouldn’t hurt a fly. If they’re bright blue and neon plastic and have little foam darts at the end, I am not too worried he’s going to be shot by the cops over it.
patrick II
@Petorado:
It is also fostered by the fact that other children have brought real guns to school and shot children. Also, by the fact that toy gun makers insist on making toy guns look like real guns. Also, by the fact that real gun manufacturers work to make laws so they can sell guns to every person not still in the womb, and sponsor stand your ground laws to be sure we use them. Also, fostered by media, and especially right wing media that spreads fear as both an attention getter and a political act.
JPL
The 911 caller
The caller twice said the gun was “probably fake” and told dispatchers the person pulling the gun from his waistband was “probably a juvenile,” according to audio released by police officials late Saturday.
href=”http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/12-year-old_boy_shot_by_clevel.html#incart_river” rel=”nofollow”>link
Mnemosyne
@jibeaux:
The problem here is that it sounds like the kid had a BB gun or airgun, which aren’t actually toys because they do shoot projectiles that could hurt someone or kill a small animal, so manufacturers get to treat them like they’re full-size guns. Between this case and the death of John Crawford, I agree that there needs to be some way to differentiate between BB guns and full-size guns.
rb
@Citizen_X: No, no better to think he is [now was] trying to “bluff the world” and is [now was] “really stupid.”
I mean 12 year olds really ought to act their age and “not stupidly” recognize that they’re targets for cops, amirite?
@Linda Featheringill:
Not sure why I’m even bothering to ask, but: what the fuck?
We’re talking about a 7th grader here.
JPL
@Mnemosyne: There are so many guns on the street, that you can’t tell whose an innocent person and who’s not. The police officer was a rookie but you are correct. He killed a boy and he has to live with it.
Eric U.
I saw an airsoft assault rifle that looked incredibly dangerous. I was a little shocked that the parents allowed that kid to run around in the woods shooting that thing, seemed like a really good way to get a visit from the cops. I am at a loss as far as how we are going to turn the cop culture around so that they stop seeing us all as bad guys. I feel that it only works for them as long as we don’t see them as bad guys, expecially if the NRA gets their way
Fair Economist
In my city the police state that they have had issues with real criminals painting the orange markings on real guns, and so they will treat somebody wielding a marked gun the same way as somebody with a real one. So yeah, if you let your child play with a toy gun in public here it’s basically child abuse (not legally, but morally).
Edit: I don’t know about the gun in this story, but I’ve seem some remarkably realistic toy guns that you have to examine up close and carefully to be sure they’re toy.
JPL
@rb: It might be time to start teaching children from a very young age that guns kill. It might be important to even mention that police officers with guns kill.
SatanicPanic
@jibeaux: that and they’re making pink guns for kids. Why the fuck would anyone oppose this? I don’t get how that benefits anyone, not even the most amoral gun seller, to blur the line between toy and real guns. Fucking stupid.
rb
@jibeaux: I am not too worried he’s going to be shot by the cops over it.
Sincerely, and without malice, I’m going to guess that this is because that, for you, the police have a baseline level of trustworthiness that many parents simply cannot assume.
People are gunned down while armed with cellphones and wallets on the regular.
It seems to me that where and by whom the object is being held has a hell of a lot to do with whether a plastic (or leather or electronic) object will be considered sufficiently dangerous to require a lethal response.
SatanicPanic
@Linda Featheringill: Darwin would say “I’m not touching your comment with a ten foot pole”
rb
@Mnemosyne: That cop did something stupid that not only ruined the life of that kid’s family, it’s going to ruin his own life
Grant you the former; latter assumes facts not in evidence. This is the kind of thing that is typically described by the powers that be as being regrettable but necessary.
Mnemosyne
@JPL:
I think cops could, if they had better training. Right now, they’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later, which is how you end up with car accident victims shot dead, diabetics shot dead, and 12-year-old boys with BB guns shot dead. All because cops can’t be trained to ask a question or two before they unload on someone.
rb
@JPL: Sure. But it’s ALWAYS BEEN time not to blame unarmed 12 year olds for being gunned down by cops.
Felonius Monk
Once again, an appropriate place for this.
Tree With Water
The same scenario played out in Santa Rosa, Ca. last year. A cop (while training a rookie) spotted a kid in a gang plagued area carrying what looked like a bona fide automatic rifle down a street in broad daylight. The cop ordered the boy to drop it, and then shot the boy to death before the kid could comply. The “rifle” in question looked real, the cop feared for his life, and in a terrible split second he reacted accordingly. The DA’s office refused to indict, and I can’t fault that decision.
A Humble Lurker
Yes, the officer who did this has to live with it. He should. It ain’t nothing compared to what the kid’s parents are going through, if they cared for him at all. Yes, we need to change how we train cops, but a twelve year old and a 9/11 call that said the gun was probably fake twice….Just no. No.
Mnemosyne
@rb:
“The powers that be” didn’t shoot a 12-year-old boy. That rookie cop did. He took his gun out of its holster, aimed it at a child, and pulled the trigger twice.
I know people like to think of all cops as being sociopaths who don’t care if they kill people but, like I said above, even the most trigger-happy cop says that their worst nightmare is that they would kill a child. Hell, even in prison they have to keep child killers separated from the other prisoners because the other rapists and murderers consider them to be the worst of the worst.
Add in the fact that his department seems to be hanging him out to dry when you read the quotes from the deputy chief, and I doubt he’s going to be a cop much longer.
JPL
@rb: I’m not one to blame the victim and I didn’t mean to infer that. I’m not blaming the police officer, either. I do blame the NRA for promoting guns for everyone.
rb
@Mnemosyne: You honestly think that cop went out on patrol yesterday and thought, Today, I’m going to kill me a 12-year-old kid!
Perhaps not, but I do think police are trained now to think “if it’s me or a twelve year old and there’s any chance he’s armed – even if the dispatcher says he’s most likely not – I’ve got to put him down.”
The results speak for themselves.
rb
@JPL: Then we agree.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
I get what you are saying, Mnemo.
The prevalence of guns has likely made cops much more fearful for their own lives, and more likely to shoot first, ask questions later. Thanks, NRA!
Bring back community policing. We don’t need MPs and the military. We need police. It’s a different function.
And what a tragedy re the 12 year old.
This is happening WAY too much. Time to get a handle on it.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@donnah: one would think that the cops themselves once played with toy guns as kids…
…
Chris
As others have said, the boy has since died. http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/12-year-old_boy_shot_by_clevel.html
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
I am not trying to minimize what the family of the murdered child is going through. At all. But if we’re going to change the way we train and deploy cops in this country, we need to point out that the “demand obedience or use deadly force” model is bad for everyone, not just the immediate victim(s).
Howard Beale IV
@Howard Beale IV: And it was indeed an Airsoft, and “supposively” the orange band was removed.
Did either cop have a Taser on them?
rb
@Mnemosyne: even the most trigger-happy cop says that their worst nightmare is that they would kill a child
People say this and it may even typically be true.
But in this case, police actions are not consistent with this “worst nightmare” framework.
Either training made this officer so trigger-happy that it overcame his reluctance to potentially bring about his worst nightmare, or he just hasn’t given the horror of gunning down an unarmed preteen as much consideration as we would like to believe.
For what it’s worth, I’m inclined toward the former interpretation. I assume that officers, being human beings, would be terrified of this, but that a military style approach to training and terminology like ‘force protection’ trains them out of it.
And that is far less comforting idea is the notion of a lone sociopathic cop for those of us with kids who sometimes are outside.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@Linda Featheringill: keep blaming the kid for his death with facts assumed, yet not in evidence.
I could assume a special needs kid and then we’re off to the races…
Also, too, more caps.
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debbie
That statement speaks volumes for the quality of police training.
wasabi gasp
Oh Linda, Linda. Would you please just blindly hate on some cop before I keel over into my all-bran?
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
None of the trigger-happy pullers this past year seem to have had any nightmares, let alone twinges of conscience.
A Humble Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
I know what your game is, that that’s the best way to put it for the disbelieving. But it’s not effective if it’s not true at all, and I’m sad and scared to admit that I think in many cases it’s not. It would not surprise me at all if many cops feel little to no guilt about things like this because they’re able to justify it to themselves in the oeuvre of hoocoodanode? And it’s not like they have to worry about things on a practical level, because it’s so hard to indict them or keep them from getting a job on another force once they’re fired. If THAT even happens.
And even if all that wasn’t true I still wouldn’t in a million years feel worse or as bad for the cop as I would for the parents.
Mnemosyne
@rb:
Obviously, I feel pretty strongly that it’s a failure of training. When they train cops that they should expect instant obedience to all commands and use deadly force if they don’t get it, it leads directly to tragedies like this, because training takes over and blots out any second thoughts. By training a rookie cop this way, the department basically ensured that he would react with deadly force to any perceived threat, and now they’re shocked, shocked, that he reacted exactly the way they trained him to react.
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
It’s not a fucking game. A child is dead.
I don’t feel worse for the cop than I do for the family, any more than I feel worse for the texting driver who causes an accident than I do for the victims. But I do think it’s worth it to point out that the department who trained this cop put him into this position and trained him to do exactly what he did, and now he’s the one who has to live with the results. The department is going to wash their hands of him even though he did what they told him to do.
Elizabelle
From Cleveland.com:
Also, poor communication from dispatch to the responding officers:
Follmer is president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association.
Mnemosyne
@debbie:
How many of them killed children? Not 18-year-olds, but pre-adolescents?
People can usually justify killing an adult to themselves (“it was him or me!”) It’s a lot harder psychologically to convince yourself you were in mortal danger from a 12-year-old so you were justified in shooting him dead.
Schlemazel
Given the crazy number of guns loose in society today I refuse to automatically presume the cops were not scared they might get shot at. This is part of the NRA success, make people so frightened of guns that they feel they simply must have a gun of their own – which naturally leads to more guns and more paranoia. Its a big win for the NRA and the manufacturers who fund them.
I wish the cops had not shot but I don’t feel confident I would react differently in that spot
The Other Chuck
@A Humble Lurker:
I tend to think that police departments are the criminal gang we pay to protect us from other criminals, but even I don’t think they’re individually that heartless. Soldiers are turned into monsters by war, but there’s damn few who aren’t haunted afterward by what they became.
Mnemosyne
@The Other Chuck:
That’s where my thinking is as well. Sure, there are always a few Allen Wests who can commit war crimes without a twinge, but they don’t seem to be the majority of war veterans.
Wally Ballou
On a semi-related note: Rudy Giuliani can, once more, go fuck himself.
Eric U.
@Mnemosyne: I agree with you about the effects on the cop. Except the occasional sociopath, I suspect that this deeply affects the shooter. Too bad they don’t get taught this ahead of time
Elizabelle
I’m wondering if we have a child with learning disabilities or mental impairment here. We will find out.
This happened at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was light out.
In suburban Maryland last year, a young white man with Down’s syndrome ended up dead, asphyxiated by police responders, over not wanting to leave the theatre after a showing of Zero Dark Thirty. He wanted to see it again. He gave the off-duty sheriff’s deputies a hard time, but did not deserve to end up suffocated, calling for his mother.
That one breaks my heart too. His parents are suing, but it won’t bring that soul back.
The Ancient Randonneur
Any chance the NRA and the 2nd Amendment absolutists are rallying to support the family kid? Go read the comment section in any of the related articles in the Cleveland newspaper and you will quickly learn that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t cover 12 year old “inner city” kids.
kc
The gun was a “realistic replica of a semi-automatic handgun” without the orange tab and the kid was pointing it at people at a rec center.
It’s a horrible thing, but this seems less egregious than some other police shootings.
A Humble Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think it’s a game, I thought you did. Hence ‘your game’.
Or he just wanted to shoot a black kid. That’s possible too. Doesn’t mean his department wasn’t shitty, but it doesn’t excuse him, or means he feels guilt when he might very well not.
Everybody was surprised by that crap Bundy said about black people and slavery. I wasn’t, because I’ve heard that shit my whole life. I was just surprised he said it out loud. There are monsters out there. Some of them wear police uniforms. You have to take their existence into consideration.
The Other Chuck
@Elizabelle:
Speculations from 911 callers are usually of the kind that get the suspected perp shot. “He looks suspicious, I think he’s planning to rob the place” and such. One of the ostensible reasons for having a trained police force is to let them assess the situation rationally. Not that that’s actually been the case for some time now…
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: I think you are right. It is a horrible, horrible loss that the child has died. These are the consequences of the fear-based society. Even the best police officer is human, and humans do stupid shit when they fear. Better training will help reduce but not entirely prevent these incidents, because we can’t re-program the lizard brain.
But maybe if we could stop being so pants-shittingly afraid all the time, we could interact with each other in compassionate, loving ways. But if the NRA has their way, it’ll be even worse, because every untrained racist dumbass will be armed. And maybe if we could stop glorifying violence as an inherent component of virility and masculinity, it wouldn’t be seen as cool or manly for toymakers to make realistic-looking weapons for children to covet.
Joel Hanes
@Tree With Water:
I can’t fault that decision.
I can.
Nicole
@Schlemazel:
Yeah, but you’re not a cop (as far as I know). They should be trained not to react the way a civilian would.
My uncle was mounted police for 30 years and he talked about how they would train the horses to not react to things that would terrify an average horse- to stand still during gunfire, etc. My uncle was on a police horse that was hit by a firecracker and didn’t immediately dump him and take off. If a fucking prey animal could be trained to stand still while guns are being fired, I don’t understand why cops can’t be trained to not react with blind panic when they see a kid with a gun.
A rookie cop shot a guy to death in a housing project in Brooklyn this weekend, too. The guy was unarmed; basically, he saw him in a darkened stairwell and likely freaked (of course, the official line is that the gun “accidentally discharged”). It’s ridiculous. I don’t want people that panicky in charge of my alleged safety.
Pogonip
@Wag: Yup. If I had a little boy who wanted to play guns, I’d tell him he’d have to use his finger (of course I’d explain why).
tesslibrarian
@Eric U.: Did anyone else hear this interview on Fresh Air? I get the idea there are going to be more police officers who also have this problem as more and more people think they need guns to keep themselves and their families “safe.”
Moral Injury is the ‘Signature Wound’ of Today’s Veterans
KG
i can’t believe I’m about to say this, but… Gun control will become hugely popular when a few incidents like this end with the cop in the hospital or morgue rather than a random (nonwhite) kid.
Ruckus
@Schlemazel:
I wish the cops had not shot but I don’t feel confident I would react differently in that spot
This is an important point.
We talk about the NRA and guns on the street but how many of us see guns, other than on cops hips, around us on a daily basis. I frequently eat lunch at a deli that a lot of plain clothes cops(and some uniformed) eat at, and they walk around with semi auto pistols on their belts. But that’s all the guns I ever see around in public. I’d bet most of us here have the same experience. And if we have that on a day to day basis, so do the cops. I am in no way excusing cops shooting the unarmed or even armed kids. They take a bigger risk of being shot than we do, that is part of their job. They should be trained to at least attempt to disarm someone. Hell we hear reports of that happening with whites on a regular basis. So is some of this training? Some racism(OK there’s no question of this)? Some that guns are not really that obvious on a day to day basis?
Is it changeable? In Europe it seems that many fewer people get shot by cops. Or even that cops in some/all countries fire fewer shots in total/yr than cops here fire in one incident. Wonder why that may be?
Gvg
Most toy guns look toy at least in daylight but not all and I am not sure why. Maybe we should look into that because I thought it was the law for some 20 years. BB guns need there own required non removable “look” in between. NRA a needs to be told to take a hike on this. colorful real guns need to be removed. women’s pink guns etc are ment to make cops more paranoid IMO. there are hunting guns that are hunter orange and I suspect there may be real reasons for that but I don’t know what they are so laws on appearances need to be carefully crafted. If Orange is good for hunter safety then no toys can be orange. I wish the nra wasn’t run by nut balls.
It feels like blaming the victim but well my sister and I won’t let nephew play with toy guns. He really wants to too. I am afraid we aren’t the only parents to take this attitude. I feel for those parents and I don’t want to be in their place. In the long run police training has got to change and voters are going to have to force that. It will take decades just like it did to get here.
gocart mozart
It’s not lack of training, it’s too much training of the wrong kind. Cops are trained out of their humanity and trained into killing at the slightest threat or suspicion of a threat. This doesn’t happen nearly as much in other “civilized” countries and I don’t think it is because are cops are uniquely sociopathic.
Ruckus
@Nicole:
This.
“Accidentally discharged?” A fucking trained professional law enforcement officer and s/he accidentally discharged his weapon while aimed at a person? I carried a 45 auto pistol in the navy and my qualification consisted of firing the thing off the back of the ship while under way and all I had to do was hit the water and I was better trained than this.
KG
Not to change the subject, but why don’t teams go for 2 more often in football. I’m watching Bengals and Texans and Cincinatti just scores a TD to go up 15-3. An extra point makes it 16-3 and if Houston scores two touchdowns, they win. Whereas if the Bengals get 2, it’s 17-3 and two touchdowns ties the game. So really the difference between 15-3 and 16-3 is close to nil
Schlemazel
@Ruckus: @Nicole:
Thats easy to say from the comfort of your living room. If you were on the street every day and knew that there were a lot of crazies with guns & that not everyone of them is as easily identifiable as a Dick Tracy villain you might be a bit spooked by it. You want to face a kid with a gun? You want to see if you can sweetly talk him out of using it on you? I sure as hell don’t. Cops get a lot of things wrong, particularly with all this spiffy military hardware and ‘hard hit’ raids. They need to do a lot better but on a deal like this I’m not convinced this is not the logical and expected outcome of 40 years of foaming at the mouth gun paranoia and not much that training would fix.
Ruckus
@KG:
Two pointers are harder to accomplish than the kick. And if you’d already run up the score 15-3 you’d take the odds that the other team wouldn’t be able to score 2 touchdowns. And if they scored one that you’d probably be able to get in field goal range and get those extra needed points. It isn’t all a game of violence, it just looks like it.
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
Well, okay, let’s start from a premise that all cops are irredeemable monsters. That’s sure going to help us get to a place where this doesn’t happen anymore. Good answer.
Nicole
@Schlemazel: What you’ve just described is a mentally unbalanced person who shouldn’t be within fifteen feet of a weapon, let alone put in charge of law enforcement. No, a cop shouldn’t be spooked by the sight of the citizens they are hired to (allegedly) protect and serve.
Elizabelle
The Cleveland.com link at #68 has audio of the bystander calling in to police. Caller makes very clear it’s likely a toy. Says that several times. Does say that kid is “scaring people” with the gun. Child was sitting on the swings at one point.
I wonder how that caller feels. It was responsible of him/her to report the incident, just in case, but the police killed a child with a toy — but realistic looking — gun.
Too many guns on the street, and that is the NRA and cowardly (and campaign-money grubbing) legislators’ fault.
Maybe the cops assume the kid will bring out a semi-automatic. That’s tragic. But not hallucinatory.
Another Holocene Human
At this early date I’m gonna say death by realistic looking gun. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out this kid had learning disabilities, though.
There would be a lot less shootings by cops in this countries if our cops were more patient. But they’re not, they’re paranoid freakazoids.
If you watch foreign movies, it’s kind of funny the sort of stereotypes they have about cops … emasculated public servants, submissive, cowardly, taking bribes, selfish, useless*
and ours … trigger happy, macho, criminal, hypocrites
the trailer to “Let’s Be Cops” is the finger on the pulse of how Americans view their police forces today
*-don’t want to leave out the part where they do beat your ass at the station … US version, shoot, then sprinkle some crack on you
Ruckus
@Schlemazel:
I was agreeing with you. I have carried a gun, I did this in port, while on watch, in foreign countries we were tied to a public wharf, citizens could drive right up to the ship. We also gave tours where the public came on board while I carried a gun with orders that if someone tried to do anything other than take the tour, shoot if I thought that was necessary. At a time of huge anti war/anti American government protests.
But.
We hear way too many stories of cops making these snap judgements when the victim was not even armed, toy gun or not. That’s fear, that’s lack of training, that’s the wrong person with the gun and power of life and death. This is a management problem as well as an individual cop and society problem. Curing this will have to come from the upper end, society. Other countries do it, we can’t?
ETA Of course to fix this we as a country have to even recognize it as a problem. And many of our fine citizens not only think this is OK, they want more of it.
hilts
OT
Who could have predicted?
Lindsey Graham: House Benghazi Report ‘Full of Crap’
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/lindsey-graham-house-benghazi-report-full-of-crap
Giuliani Explodes over Black Crime: Wouldn’t Need White Cops ‘If You Weren’t Killing Each Other’
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/giuliani-explodes-over-black-crime-wouldnt-need-white-cops-if-you-werent-killing-each-other
Pen
@Schlemazel: if they can’t handle the job they, simply, shouldn’t have it. Police have a legal monopoly on violence, for the most part, and I simply refuse to cut them any slack when they fuck up. Their job is too important, and their right to violence to dangerous, to treat them as “just another person with a dangerous job”.
A Humble Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
I said possible, not incontestable. And I think it’s obvious how that helps this not happen anymore. If you get the opportunity to fix the system, you do it not just so that it doesn’t create monsters, but it keeps monsters that have already been made out of positions of authority as well. Duh.
Edit:
IOW, what Pen said.
Suzanne
@Pen: If you’re only willing to accept a failure rate of 0%, then what you’re effectively arguing is that we should have no police at all. Even the best police officer is a human, subject to human frailty.
Everyone fucks up at their jobs. We can reduce fuckups, but certainly not to nothing.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
We ended up watching a big chunk of Hot Fuzz last night. One of the big plot points is that Nicholas Angel is a supercop so efficient that he gets re-assigned to a small village because he’s making all of the other London cops look bad … and he hasn’t shot a gun in over two years. When armed villagers come after him at the end, the IMDb trivia points out that he only shoots two people out of about a dozen — for the most part, he shoots objects that fall on the baddies and immobilize them.
So there’s your super-efficient supercop from the British POV.
D58826
@hilts: (sigh) beat me to it
.
We have reached the point with Rudy’s comments that the GOP doesn’t even bother hiding their Klan membership cards. Of course the come back would be that since 83% of the white murder victims are killed by whites then we need many more black cops in white neighborhoods. Lets see how far that one flies.
R
Howard Beale IV
@Elizabelle:
The NRA constantly uses the argument that the Second Amendment is there so citizens can protection themseves primarily from criminals.
What the NRA needs to have rammed into their faces is that:
(1) If someones wants to kill you-they will succeed
(2) Their preferred weapon of choice-a firearm.
(3) Unless you are 100% of the grid and have a well stocked pantry-you can’t eat ammo.
scav
@Suzanne: There’s no personal incentive to reduce fuckups on the job if all your fellow cops, the higher-ups, and a solid majority of the public and media instantly rush to protect you from all consequences of the fatal (and other) whoops moments. I don’t see any is no serious motivating force pushing police departments or officers to be better than we are observing at this point.
KG
@Ruckus: I get that 2 point conversions are harder, but you only have to convert 51% to be ahead of the kick results. And I’m not saying go for it every time, I just wonder why logic that would apply in the last five minutes of the game wouldn’t apply in the second quarter when you have more time to overcome a failure. For example, you’re down 14-9 and score a touchdown to make it 15-14, in the last five minutes you go for two hoping to make it 17-14, but earlier in the game you’re willing to lead just 16-14, that makes little sense to me beyond coaches being risk adverse
By the way, Houston got a pick six and then a FG on their next possession, so it’s 16-13.
henqiguai
@Mnemosyne (#93):
Damned straight! At least, when & where I grew up, that was a survival trait. Must be nice to have actually grown up where “the police are your friends” actually meant something positive.
Suzanne
@Howard Beale IV: They also need to have it rammed into their faces that when you make guns an object of fantasy (usually male fantasy), people who have varying levels of mental stability will fantasize about them.
hoodie
@Mnemosyne: The perspective that reflects is one where criminality is not as sensationalized as it is in the US. Even though violent crime has been decreasing in the US, even cops are imbued with the notion of a seething mass of criminals constantly seeking to kill them and other innocents. More cops die in accidents or from illness than in shootings, the number of cops killed on duty has been steadily decreasing, and being a cop is safer than a lot of other professions. The statistics suggest that cops will likely not be shot in answering the vast majority of calls, even when weapons are present, and that they can take measures other than lethal force to address most situations in which a person has a weapon.
The American answer is that malfunctioning robot from Robocop. We need to ensure that kids with toy guns are properly gunned down so we don’t waste so much taxpayer money on healthcare and psychiatric counseling for cops that shoot kids.
Suzanne
@scav: For many people, cops and military included, killing someone is a thing that eats at you forever. I wouldn’t say that there is no incentive. Most people, cops included, want to do their jobs, then go home.
If you want to look at it from an incentives POV, what’s the incentive to become a cop if one fuckup lands you fired and in prison?
A Humble Lurker
@Suzanne:
That’s a false choice. We either settle for crappy cops, or no cops at all? There aren’t any non-crappy cops?
And I was accused of thinking all cops are irredeemable monsters.
Howard Beale IV
@Suzanne: Quite frankly, I’d rather have a situation where if you have a case like this, the cop should be taken off the beat permanently and be re-trained into another line of LE work. I don’t want them fired, but I also don’t want their own damage they may have suffered putting their partner and themselves at risk a second time.
Ruckus
@KG:
Never said it was a foolproof plan.
But it’s about protecting leads as well as creating them.
Getting it wrong and still winning is part of what makes it interesting to some and also sells antacids.
scav
@Suzanne: You’re looking at it only from an individual level — not from the system or group level. You’re also immediately isolating the trend to a single instance, this particular instance, this individual cop. Oh! and it’s instantly the first time it’s ever happened too in the mental example (in this exact case, yes, but what about most of St Louis’ finest). It’s easier to let things slide if every little pebble gets its freedom to roll downhill card individually as a one-off occurence. But, this is a dangerous trend and has to be dealt with. Sucks to be the first cop to suffer consequences for endemic issues of lax internal enforcement, but there’s no way to fixing the entire framework without going through the people. Lots of occupations get you fired after you make major mistakes.
Suzanne
@A Humble Lurker: No, we train prospective and current cops with the best methods known at the time, and we promise the citizenry and the officers a fair and impartial investigation, and a just punishment, in the event that an officer fucks up. But the fuckup rate will never be zero. And if you will only accept a fuckup rate of zero, then you should expect only really horrible people to apply to work on your police force.
A Humble Lurker
@scav:
And lot’s of those major mistakes don’t result with people dead.
Suzanne
@scav: No, I’m looking at it systemically. Only I’m looking at an even bigger system than a corrupt, shitty police department. Fear-based reactions are the natural and expected result of decades of fearmongering. No one, police included, live outside of this shitty culture we’ve created for ourselves. But on this blog, where people are always talking about how your life and career shouldn’t be destroyed for one honest mistake, I find it a bit disingenuous to then expect police to be perfect. Even in the most egalitarian, least racist PD, fuckups will occur.
Suzanne
@Howard Beale IV: That’s probably the best outcome. I can get behind that.
Aimai
@Linda Featheringill: what the fucking fuck?
A Humble Lurker
@Suzanne: If a surgeon fucks up a surgery and kills a patient, should that surgeon be held accountable? Would it be unreasonable for a hospital to decide to fire them for it? Honest question.
@Linda Featheringill:
…..no. Just no. To all of that.
sm*t cl*de
Gun controlDemands for vastly increased police firepower and pre-emptive strikes will become hugely popular when a few incidents like this end with the cop in the hospital or morgueFTFY.
Suzanne
@A Humble Lurker: Doctors fuck up ALL the time, and they have people die even more often, even when they don’t fuck up. They typically do not get fired or lose their licenses except for the most egregious occurrences of malpractice. Death is not proof of malpractice on its face.
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
Yes, let’s assume that a rookie with less than one year on the job isn’t a guy who fucked up thanks to the disastrous training that we put all of our cops through. Better to assume that he’s an irredeemable monster who went out hoping he was going to get to shoot a 12-year-old kid that day. That’s definitely going to help us figure out how to re-train everyone.
KG
@Ruckus: fair enough. I think I just tend to be more aggressive when it comes to strategies in sports
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Pen: Your argument falls apart here:
The problem is that in the United States, or at least in parts of it, the police don’t have any sort of monopoly on violence. With Stand Your Ground, they don’t even have a legal monopoly. We send them out there to enforce the law at the same time we sanction almost anyone else to have the power of applying lethal force. And there are enough guns sloshing around that even those who aren’t sanctioned can often do so, too.
Yes, it would be great if we could train cops to sit and wait for something else to happen besides having a gun, or something that looks exactly like a gun, being waved around in a dangerous fashion. But that’s a pipe dream. You simply aren’t ever going to be able to train a full police force to be willing to take that risk. If you have an environment where people are waving realistic gun-looking things at cops, you’re going to have cops shooting at the people who are doing it. End of story.
I’m not trying to defend overall cop training, which leads to a lot of really bad circumstances. And most of the cop shootings we’ve been talking about lately are not justifiable. Cops are out of control and they are getting away with murder.
But from what I can see, THIS incident isn’t one of them. The cops received information from a 911 dispatcher that someone was brandishing a gun in a threatening way. They responded to that threat. There are many times that police need to negotiate but this isn’t one of them. If someone is actively threatening people with a gun, the right thing for them to do is to demand that that person drop it and if they don’t, and continue to threaten with it, then they shoot.
The breakdown here, at least as the story appears so far (and if this changes, my opinion may well change) came when the 911 dispatcher failed to mention the caveats in the call. With those caveats, that the gun was likely fake, the cops should have approached the kid in a completely different manner. But if they didn’t get those, the situation that they reasonably thought that they were responding to was completely different than the one they really were responding to.
scav
@Suzanne: So our society and culture can’t expect better policing then we are observing, because out “best methods known at the time” are already perfectly in place and perfectly operating and things are just hunky dory because that idealized cop wants to go home and sleep and needs no other system in place to keep actual flesh-and-blood cops in check. This sounds like idealized market theory applied to cop on cop policing. they sure as hell don’t seem to apply in a blanket fashion such idealized assumptions of behavior to those on the other side of the badge.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Exactly.
We all are human, we all fuck up. I do, I did on my job last week. But all it cost was figuring out how to fix the issue, not bury someone. Some, have looked for excuses for one side or the other, the kid may be handicapped in some way, the cop is a rookie, the gun looked real. I’ve been accused (accurately) of being an armchair annalist. And we don’t know the official outcome of this shooting, the police dept looks to be going in the right direction. And yes if this rookie cop is a rational human being s/he will have to live with this for a long, long time. Mistakes will be made, and yet there are supposed to be prices paid for the severity of the mistake. We don’t know yet if this officer will pay that price. We do see many, many instances where no one ever does. Yes we can understand why these situations happen, fear mainly, in some cases justified in many more not at all. It’s a mess, it starts at the top and as usual shit rolls downhill. The people making the political choice to encourage this behavior never pay any price.
Mnemosyne
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
How many cops are shot by pre-adolescent kids every year? Just in round numbers.
I could see cops assuming that an adult is carrying a real weapon, but to automatically assume that a 12-year-old (a) has a real gun and (b) is willing to shoot two adults with it is a really major stretch — unless, of course, you’ve been trained to assume that every non-cop you encounter, of any age, is always a threat that can’t be reasoned with, so you need to shoot on sight. Which, frankly, seems to be the training that cops are getting right now.
ETA: And I’ll come out and say it — I would rather have a dead cop, accidentally shot by a 12-year-old who didn’t know it was a real gun, than a dead 12-year-old. YMMV.
jibeaux
Not really related, but in the morning we got a neighborhood alert that a woman heard her front door open, and went downstairs to find a black male, she thought in his mid 20s, standing in the foyer. She asked him to leave several times, and after several requests he did, never saying anything or doing much. She called the police. (This works out fine, but is a cautionary tale.) Police were soon combing the area, they had figured out this person was most likely an autistic teenager prone to wandering who had left church. He actually wears a tracking cuff because of it, but it apparently doesn’t really pinpoint location. They went door to door and found him riding a tricycle in someone’s driveway, he had taken a motorcycle from the garage but couldn’t start it, so he rode the trike. No one was hurt and the teen was returned to his family. I just saw about 15 ways that whole thing could’ve ended very tragically, and I’m thankful for neighbors who have the sense to do things like ask a person to leave before shooting, for communication between police officers and dispatch, etc.
Suzanne
@scav: No, we can and should do better here and now. Maybe in this specific incident, better training may have helped this cop make a better judgment. Maybe not. Honestly, just as in medicine, or law, or engineering, some cops are going to be better and some are going to be worse, by intellect or temperament. But as JMN points out, at this time, with what we know right now, it does not appear that this cop is some monster who wanted to kill a black kid today. The cop deserves an impartial investigation and a proportional consequence based on whatever the investigation finds.
Suzanne
@Ruckus: Concur with everything you just said.
I hope that the cop is disciplined to an appropriate degree. Appropriate meaning proportional to his level of poor judgment and what knowledge he had at the time.
In a society in which we are just waiting for the shootout at the OK Corral to start, though, we can expect everyone to have itchy trigger fingers. Cops included. Everyone wants to go home alive at the end of the day.
scav
@Suzanne: But again, I’m not worried about this particular cop, I’m worried about the trend. This one possibly good or simply unripe apple does in no way mitigate the barrel rolling past. This example doesn’t excuse the system. Based on a fair bit of evidence I’ve seen, I am less and less trusting of all cops and their cries of being universally well-meaning and unjustly maligned seems less and less persuasive.
A Humble Lurker
@Suzanne:
But do you think that should be the case? Do you think if a surgeon is proven to have fucked up to the point of killing someone, they should lose their job?
@Mnemosyne:
Well, you can do that if you want to. I don’t think that would be very helpful, which is why I’m not doing it.
What I’m doing is not pretending there aren’t just shitty cops out there and that sometimes it’s no one’s fault but the officer’s that someone is dead. And actually taking that possibility into consideration will help, because if it is the case that the department has lax hiring policies and you acknowledge that, you can fix it. As I’ve said previously in this thread.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Mnemosyne:
This is flawed thinking. You are correct that, statistically, it is extremely unlikely that a 12-year old is going to shoot a cop. But in the heat of the moment, the cops aren’t dealing with a statistical distribution; they have a sample size of one to work with. Would it be an outlier for the kid to shoot one of them? Sure. But they’re already in an outlier situation in that someone called 911 to report that (so far as the cops have been told) a person, whose age they can only estimate, is threatening people with a gun.
At that point, they have to work from the information they have, which is that this is a dangerous and potentially lethal situation even before they draw their guns.
The thing is, whether my mileage varies isn’t really at issue. The relevant question is whether or not you can train entire departments of cops that it’s better to be dead than risk shooting an innocent 12-year old when they’ve been told that the 12-year old is threatening people with a gun. That’s not going to be possible. Sure, we can sit here and say that taking that risk should be a part of the job but your living in a completely different universe from this one if you think that achieving that is possible.
If we have environments in which there is a persistent problem with people shooting real guns at and killing each other and where there are people, kids or otherwise, who run around with things that look just like real guns and openly use them in ways that would constitute a deadly threat to those around them, then there will be innocent people with toy guns who get killed. That’s an inevitable consequence of the two premises. Unless you alter one or both of those premises, that’s the conclusion.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@A Humble Lurker:
It depends upon the situation. There are circumstances in which they should but there are other circumstances in which they absolutely should not be. If you expect every person to be perfect at there job you’re going to end up with a 100% unemployment rate. And there are some people for whom being less than perfect will result in someone’s death. The outcome does not dictate the proper course of action. The process does, and sometimes the worst consequences can result from a process that was flawed but not necessitating firing someone.
Suzanne
@A Humble Lurker: No, I don’t think that every doctor that loses a patient should lose his/her job. Every situation has a hundred extenuating circumstances. That’s not the standard for any profession. There are cases where only one of a hundred doctors could get a patient through a procedure alive. I don’t think that means that the other 99 are unfit to practice.
@scav: I’m worried about the trend, too. My fear about the trend doesn’t mean this dude should be thrown under the bus to make an example of him. Fear-based decisions are almost universally shitty.
Renie
@Nicole: That’s not how it happened. The guy shot was not near the cop. The rookie was poorly trained in trying to open a stairwell door with the same hand he was holding his gun and the gun accidentally discharged. The victim was down lower in the stairwell. The cop did not see him.
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
I’m saying that those two things don’t necessarily go together. IMO, It is no one’s fault but this officer’s that this child is dead. That is not de facto proof that he’s a shitty, racist cop who killed the kid on purpose. He could be a shitty, incompetent cop who panicked and fired but wasn’t actually looking forward to killing anyone that day, much less a child. That’s why I’m saying that it was probably his training (“shoot first, ask questions later”) that was probably to blame rather than something specific to that one cop.
And as I’ve said several times previously in this thread, I think the problem is much, much bigger than lax hiring. I think that the way that cops are being trained to assume that anyone who doesn’t immediately obey their orders is a deadly threat to them is the base of the problem. Even if you have the best hiring in the world, if you train your officers to shoot first and ask questions later, you will have innocent civilians ending up dead.
chopper
@Suzanne:
In that situation I don’t think that failing would fall under the definition of ‘fucking up’ tho.
Mnemosyne
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
I disagree. I think it’s entirely possible to train cops that a 12-year-old is probably going to be able to be talked down from using a deadly weapon, and they should try that tactic before shooting anyone.
Again, look at my links above at #46. Cops aren’t just shooting people with what look like weapons. They’re shooting people who have head injuries from car accidents. They’re shooting people who are in diabetic shock. And they’re doing it because they have no training in what to do when someone doesn’t immediately obey an order, except to shoot them dead.
scav
@Suzanne: There are any number of far better choices for individual cops to start with. But there’s going to have to be some. And it will undoubtedly suck to be them — because being the first to get called on for practices winked at long time is no fun.
Elizabelle
Update from the NYTimes. The Cleveland 12-year old has been identified as Tamir E. Rice.
Suzanne
@scav: I think you need to differentiate between officers and departments who are purposefully trying to get away with shit, and those who make honest mistakes within a crappy system. I’m not comfortable going after this cop to make an example of him. I’m far more comfortable going after the cops who killed Oscar Grant, for instance.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Mnemosyne:
That’s very true and also completely irrelevant to this case, in which a cop shot someone who he reasonably thought did have a weapon.\
And I think you’re completely delusional about human nature. You are not going to be able to fill every police department in the country with people who are willing to stand there while someone points a gun at them and just talk their way out.
I’m also not as convinced as you are that it’s even a good idea to always try to talk down someone who is actively threatening people with a gun. I also think that you are using a lot of ex post facto reasoning. The cop can only make his decision based upon the information he has at that moment and the information that this cop had is that you had someone who was brandishing a gun and actively pointing it at people. Aside from the risk that the cop is going to get killed, there’s also a strong possibility that some other innocent is going to get killed by what the cop really has no reason not to think is someone very dangerous.
The fact that the person in question is a 12-year old really is not relevant at that point. They busted up the statistical distribution the moment they started pointing a realistic gun at people. The reason that it’s really unlikely that a 12-year old is going to shoot and kill someone rests entirely upon the fact that it’s unlikely that a 12-year old is going to start threatening people with a gun, not because it’s unlikely that a 12-year old that is threatening people with a gun isn’t going to shoot. Frankly, I think a 12-year old in that position is much more likely to actually go ahead and shoot than an adult is.
Elizabelle
My comment was marked as spam. Could you please release? Maybe type of toy rifle is what did it. Thank you.
Suzanne
@chopper: Knowing the right course of action before the outcome and the odds are obvious is really, REALLY hard. And like it or not, we need to have some cops to do that. Sometimes, they’ll make the wrong decision. We can screen prospective applicants better, we can train them better, we can minimize situations in which life-or-death choices occur, but mistakes will always be made. Always. If the punishment for a wrong choice is always firing or jail, we’ll have no police, or at least, no police that we would want.
Ruckus
@scav:
This is such a multifaceted issue that many of the comments that appear to be contradictory, really aren’t.
1. Cops are being trained that they are right and everyone else is suspect. Drugs, violence, being black while breathing, all of these are suspects in some crime. Guilty until we say otherwise is the operating principle.
2. Guns. They are everywhere and may look like an assault weapon or they may not. They may look like or be a toy, or they may not. Toddlers have killed with guns, most likely accidentally but given our gun culture who knows in every case.
3. Racism. Is it different than 50 yrs ago? On the surface maybe, but in reality I’d say not that much. Yes we elected a black president but if you go by FB at all, he is the absolute worst president we’ve ever had, all of his policies are unconstitutional, every action and breath he takes is wrong and my conclusion is that no, racism has not changed in my lifetime, other than superficially, just language usage.
4. Wealth inequality. Wages, being in the bottom half of the economy sucks donkey balls. Not really a stunner there but it’s more about what it gives people, and that is despair that there really is no opportunity, no possibility of having anything. That working will gain you a foothold in life. It really doesn’t any more for most people. Mittens 47% comment that they don’t pay taxes because they don’t work hard enough is wrong in that they don’t pay taxes because they don’t earn enough to have a reasonable life. The rich are killing people in numbers that make the cops look like pikers. It’s just not as instantaneous.
All of these are part of the problem and they are related to the cops and the cops with trigger fingers in that cops are in some cases better paid than average but in many not at all. Hard to demand better policing when they are facing the same crappy life(with the possibility of getting shot first) that most of us are.
A Humble Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
We’re sort of getting into milgram experiment territory here. I don’t think it’s right to take all responsibility out of the hands of the cops. And I don’t think that lessons the guilt or responsibility of the department in question if we let the cops have some of the blame either.
But it’s not either or. A department that trains their rookies to be attack dogs are more likely to hire people who are already attack dogs. Cuts out the middle man. It’s a package deal. I’m not saying hiring policies are the only problem, or the real problem. I’m saying they’re a problem, and cops are a problem, and training is a problem, and that we have to take them all into account. If you have mice and roaches and you get rid of the mice, you still have roaches.
@Suzanne:
We’re not talking about every surgeon who loses a patient. We’re talking about a surgeon who loses a patient because of incompetence and or negligence. We’re talking about doctors who lose patients who didn’t have to be lost.
Mnemosyne
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Except, of course, that in this case, no one — not even the police — is saying that the kid was actively threatening people when the cops showed up. Even the 911 caller said the kid wasn’t threatening, but was just being kind of a jerk. He had the gun stuck in his waistband when the police showed up.
The cops on the scene claim that he reached for the gun but, frankly, I’ve heard that way too many times recently to automatically believe the cops without some kind of video backup.
scav
@Ruckus: And they aren’t facing the same social or media stigma either, especially as they often no longer live where they police (although judged by the behavior of same small town forces, that is in no way at all a panacea). They seem to have gotten very bubbled-off.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Mnemosyne:
But the problem here is that the qualifying information from the 911 caller didn’t reach the cops. It doesn’t matter what he told the dispatcher in evaluating the actions of the cops; the only relevant information is what the dispatcher told the cops.
Now, it does look like I misread and thought the kid was brandishing the gun when they arrived. That does change things. And one of the problems here is that, while I don’t trust the cops when they say that he reached for the gun, sometimes a suspect really does reach for his gun. It makes it really hard to evaluate from the outside and I’d be leery of drawing solid conclusions from the information we have. And I’m moving myself back into the category of not being sure.
Fred
Years ago (1970s-80s?) a friend who was a cop told me about some crazy stoned lady standing in the street randomly shooting a pistol up in the air and at row houses. His response? He walked up to her, grabbed the gun saying,”Gimme that thing.” Note he didn’t pull his gun and drop her. He didn’t call in back up and a SWAT team.
Then again, if the boy pulled the gun…A twelve year old can kill you as fast as a twenty year old. So did the kid try to pull out the gun?
Fer f**k sake!
Suzanne
@A Humble Lurker: Perhaps you should look up the definition of professional negligence. It’ sharper to define that you might think. There are plenty of situations in which a doctor, or a cop, for that matter, might do X while another might do Y. Maybe X has more immediate risk, but Y has long-term side effects or reduces quality of life. So the doctor does X, and the patient dies. The doctor isn’t negligent in that case. Maybe foolhardy, and probably not who I want to have as my doctor, but not negligent. In hospitals, they talk about risk management. Not risk elimination.
Police officers find themselves in these sort of situations with regularity. Shooting has risk, but not shooting also has risk, or so it appears at the time. To an extent, if we want to have police, we have to accept the fact that sometimes they will make the wrong call.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
When I was a kid, my mom woud never let me have toy guns. I made them of cheese, or sticks.
My son had an airsoft for a very short period of time. He used it in the woods with friends for a time or two, and has never picked it up since.
We need to stop making guns a fetish item for kids, and for adults. It’s sick.
Suzanne
@Suzanne: “harder to define than you might think”.
DYAC.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@A Humble Lurker:
You’re arguing with a strawman here. No one is saying that all responsibility should be removed from cops in general.
And in the real world, that’s going to happen. As I said, no one is perfect every time out. Sometimes people are going to make a mistake and if they have a job in which their decisions can result in the death of someone, you are going to have people that die unnecessarily. That’s life and those mistakes don’t always justify firing someone.
AxelFoley
@Linda Featheringill:
Ah, so blame the victim, huh?
What the FUCK makes you think “inner city” parents don’t teach their kids how to interact with police? How about these dumbass cops–who are supposed to be TRAINED–learn how to interact with citizens?
Mnemosyne
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Right, and IMO this is the spot where better training for the cops would have paid off, because I still don’t think that a 12-year-old would coolly pull a gun out of his waistband and shoot two adult cops without hesitation. I think there was at least some negotiating room in there, but that the rookie cop panicked and shot before he stopped to think about it.
AxelFoley
@debbie:
Thank you. I don’t want to hear shit about cops having nightmares or feeling remorse about killing kids when shit like this keeps happening. And what’s up with so many cops “fearing for their lives”? The fuck did they become cops for if they’re so chickenshit?
Nicole
@Renie: “Poorly trained” or a fucking idiot? Who tries to open a door with the same hand that’s holding a gun? Jesus Christ, that does not make me feel one bit better about what happened in that stairwell or how the NYPD goes about selecting the members of their force.
Suzanne
@AxelFoley: They probably became cops because it’s one of the few relatively well-paying, unionized jobs left that doesn’t require a college degree. You know, the kind we say we want to make more of and respect.
Mnemosyne
@Nicole:
We had a pretty infamous case here in Los Angeles about 10 years ago where a cop shot a mentally ill homeless woman (Margaret Mitchell) who he claimed was lunging at him with a screwdriver. It was judged to be “in policy” by the LAPD, but most of the evidence pointed to the probability that the cop was running down the street after her with his gun in his hand, tripped, and shot her accidentally.
Nicole
@Mnemosyne:
I can’t find ages of perpetrators, but out of 900,000 cops in 2013, 31 died as a result of homicide (out of 100 who died on the job). Being a cop is not even in the top ten of most dangerous jobs in America. It’s more dangerous to be a truck driver.
http://fee.org/blog/detail/by-the-numbers-how-dangerous-is-it-to-be-a-cop
A Humble Lurker
@Suzanne:
Let’s say on the patient’s chart it correctly says the patient is allergic to a certain medicine and the doctor gave the patient a prescription for that medicine and the patient died.
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Then I don’t understand why when I brought up the fault could’ve laid with the cop I get accused of thinking all cops are irredeemable monsters and blame get’s shuffled off to the training and the department.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t, either, but once you pull a gun out, all bets are off as to what is going to happen. That 12-year old (and, again, the cops are only estimating his age, so don’t just argue that they had any sort of precision on that) might be the exception rather than the rule. The gun might go off without the kid intending for it to. And the cops don’t know the answers to any of those questions when it is happening.
I actually don’t think that it’s at all unreasonable to train cops that if they are in a confrontational setting and someone starts to draw a gun, the proper response is to shoot them. Do not draw a gun on cops. End of story.
The problem is all of the times that cops go ahead and shoot when the other person was not, in fact, drawing a gun. In this case, though, they had been told that someone was waving a gun around. They found the person in question, in broad daylight, and ascertained that he did, indeed, have an object that looked exactly like a gun. If the kid started to draw it (and that is a big if), then I think the shooting was perfectly justified. If the kid did not start to draw the gun, then it is almost certainly not justified.
Don’t draw a gun on a cop.
Mnemosyne
@A Humble Lurker:
Because this is what you said when you replied to me:
To me, that sounds like you’re saying that many cops don’t give a shit if they kill children. I disagreed because, as I said, even criminals doing hard time in maximum security prisons think it’s morally worse to kill children than it is to kill adults.
If you were saying that you think many cops don’t feel a lot of guilt about killing adults (or at least refuse to admit they feel guilty about it), I would probably have to agree with you.
Suzanne
@A Humble Lurker: It is funny that you mention a medication error. I am an architect, and I specialize in the design of healthcare facilities. Over the last 10-15 years or so, there’s been a great deal of evidence-based research looking at the design of the physical environment of healthcare facilities, because, while we’re sitting here talking about people being shot by the police, exponentially more people die from medical errors, medication errors, and hospital-acquired infections. We are talking orders of magnitude here. So there is a body of research that shows pretty definitively that the architecture and engineering of the facility can contribute significantly to better processes and better healthcare outcomes.
Medication errors happen A LOT—take a look at what happened to Dennis Quaid’s kids. To prevent them, hospitals and pharmacies have procedures, double- and triple-checks. Is the patient always asked about their medication allergies? Are the responses accurately recorded (and here’s a frequent cause—are they written legibly?)? Is the chart always posted near the door, and does EVERY healthcare provided check it every single time? When the doctor prescribes a drug, who double-checks them, and who protects the nurse’s job if they have the temerity to question a doctor’s order?
To answer your question: no, I don’t think a doctor should be fired if they prescribe a drug but failed, AS MANY DO EVERY SINGLE DAY, to check the chart and it resulted in a bad outcome. It’s also on the hospital to have a more global procedure in place to prevent those errors. If the doctor fucks up repeatedly or willfully, that’s a different story. But even highly trained, highly paid people fuck up. It is up to all of us to create a better environment within which we all work.
On a related note, read about HAIs if you want to terrify yourself. It is likely that almost every healthcare provider has or will transmit one, and we know a lot about how to stop them, and we don’t.
Gvg
this time it appears it was the dispatch system that screwed up. maybe someone there needs to be fired. A proper investigation would find out. problem is we are seeing too many whitewashes.
and that is the problem with zero tolerance ideas. they cause cover ups and lying not improvement as the soviets and others have found. the only solution to work I have heard of is real investigations. maybe citizen boards with real power would help.
Stella B.
I agree with Mnemnosyne and Suzanne. The cops that I have known have not been sociopaths. They are regular people who do a relatively tough job, requiring a thick skin and at some personal risk. It’s hard to avoid becoming cynical when you spend a lot of time everyday interacting with many of society’s more difficult elements (and yes, I understand that they also interact with regular, dececnt people, but they spend more time with the difficult crowd than non-cops do).
Why did the parents allow the child to remove the orange safety band from the toy gun? That was just stupid. My mom was so traumatized by the accidental shooting death of her 11 year old brother, that we were never allowed to have toy guns. In the city, especially, it seems like my mother’s idea is the right one.
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
Incompetent is the key word in this and most of the shootings, I think. And it’s been that way for many, many years (I’m thinking of Amadou Diallou who, surrounded by 8 undercover cops was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet).
Why is this country tolerating such incompetence? They’re making Congress look like whiz kids.
AxelFoley
@Suzanne: Well, if they’re scared, they need to find another line of work. There are other jobs that can provide for them.
Ruckus
@scav:
Cops have formed their own social clicks for ever. They work with cops and “assholes.” That is there are two classes of people to many cops(most assuredly not all) them and every one else. And everyone else is an asshole until proven different, which is pretty hard to do if you only see things in a binary fashion. It was this way 50-60 yrs ago and I believe it has been this way for a very, very long time. Many state highway patrols are a bit different in that a lot of the time they deal only in giving traffic tickets and don’t see as much violence. But even there, clicks are formed and binary thinking can take over. Have a good friend of decades who spent 30 yrs as a CHP as I’ve written here before. He told me that he was glad to retire as what I stated above is becoming the norm even there. Cops are changing and in my opinion not for the better.
burnspbesq
Cole:
Show me probable cause, dumbfuck.
Renie
@Nicole: his other hand had his maglite cuz the stairwell was dark since he was a rookie I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt he was not trained properly but he never just shot at the victim as you stated
chopper
@burnspbesq:
You heard the tax lawyer, cole.
Howard Beale IV
@chopper: Ohio ORC 2917.32, perhaps? Sure, it isn’t manslaughter, but it’s a start of making his life miserable.
Suzanne
@AxelFoley: Yes, there is a wide array of other well-paying, unionized career choices for those without a college degree.
You know, if we want good cops, maybe we need to make it an attractive career choice.
The Sailor
“But the problem here is that the qualifying information from the 911 caller didn’t reach the cops. ”
So the cops say, but we have no proof, and cops are liars.
Howard Beale IV
@The Sailor: Nowadays they also don’t like to talk about how they get the info on perps, either, citing ‘confidentiality agreements’. Some judges don’t like that:
Gian
@jibeaux:
when I was in high school in the dark days of the 80s, and freshly moved to southern California 2 news stories caught my eyes.
1) kid killed by cop who fired twice with a shotgun. Kid was a teenager in a park in Anaheim with a laser tag gun
2) people writing in to a paper to bitch about the noise that a helicopter doing a medical evacuation made.
cops are people, with all the plusses and minuses that come with that fact. they get emotional, they get scared (notice in the story it’s the rookie cop who pulls out the real gun and shoots)
They are trained post columbine and Newtown and Virginia tech, and fort hood, and the religious center in the northern Midwest, and the movie theater in auroa and UCSB (and I know I’ve left some out) I think there was a guy in the mall of America, in what they call “active shooter: scenarios. call of bad guy with gun, go and engage bad guy with gun before he kills anyone else. and by engage they mean kill.
this is a societal problem not just a cop problem, but the country feels the need to train cops to respond to “active shooters” because we have a ton of “active shooters” more than any other civilized country.
Arclite
@donnah:
Just make sure they don’t make them out of Legos too realistically. From the article:
NCSteve
@Linda Featheringill: Yes, clearly, 12 year old children must be expected to make perfect, well-considered opinions on pain of death and being posthumously derided as “Darwin Award Winners” by insensitive jerks on the Internet. Especially if they’re black.
Paul in KY
@Howard Beale IV: You don’t take a taser to a gun fight.
Paul in KY
@Nicole: The horses don’t have a union.