Breonna Taylor wasn't firing a gun at anyone. So yes, absolutely, better training would have reduced the chance of her being shot. And better police procedures would have meant that her boyfriend would have known it was police he was firing at, as opposed to a home invasion. Brown was shot 160 feet from the location of the incident where he went after Wilson's gun. Ten shots were fired, six striking Brown, two in the head. I won't say that the shooting was unjustified, but it is possible for a better outcome to have happened given non-lethal methods and better training. Brown after all was unarmed when he was shot. No, it doesn't sound awful in the abstract. It IS objectively awful. And it was later revealed that Officer Loehman, the first shooter, was relieved from another LEO position for being emotionally unstable and unfit for duty. Loehman lied about this in his job application. A nationwide database on police for job references seems like a pretty important thing. And the person who reported the incident twice told the police that the gun was probably fake, and that it appeared the person with the gun was a juvenile. That was not relayed to the responding officers. Yes, clearly this could have been avoided. After that politifact post, an investigation showed that the number of police shootings are undercounted by as much as half. Many appear to be intentionally misrecorded by coroners. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1041989880/deaths-caused-by-police-misclassified The politifact link also quote a researcher saying 'only a multiplicity of reforms' will combat the level of police shootings. Certainly that includes better police training.
Re: Breonna Taylor, better training on literal shooting would have meant that no officer would have fired back wildly, as one seems to have done. Whether that would have meant that she would not have been hit is tough to say. I don't know how close she was to the shooter, and of course, no matter how well trained cops are at literal shooting, they are not going to be able to hit the target in the heat of the moment. Using different tactics could have of course had a different result. It seems there's evidence that the officers at least knocked. There is a neighbor who heard knocking and announcing, IIRC, although some may cast doubt on his story because he changed it. Breonna's boyfriend said he heard knocking over enough of a period to allow both him and Breonna to ask who it is, not have an answer, for him to put on clothes and get a gun. That's if you take him at his word that he thought it was an ex of Breonna's rather than the cops. Re Brown: The evidence suggested that he reached into Wilson's patrol vehicle for his gun originally is what I meant. The evidence was that Brown was moving toward Wilson when he was shot, and people's mileage may vary, but it seems like reasonable to fear that someone who already punched you and tried to take your gun and is coming toward you knowing that you have a gun is intending to take your gun or inflict other serious bodily harm. https://www.justice.gov/sites/defau...doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf Re: Brown, it would be a good thing if better background checks were in place, certainly. That doesn't change the likelihood that the best trained officer seeing Tamir Rice with that toy gun might have reacted the same way given that they did not have the additional information about the gun possibly being fake. Again, any situation could potentially have been avoided, especially with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of having additional time to think about various options. The question I'm raising is whether better training alone would likely have resulted in a better outcome in the exact same set of circumstances. I am certainly not arguing that better training for police would not prevent some deaths, or that better training would not be worth the time or money it takes. I am saying that better training will not prevent a lot of police deaths, because some percentage are going to be largely or entirely justified, while others are going to be accidents that no amount of training will prevent.
I have never said that I am against better police training. I am for it. Here is one example: https://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3257886/ I'm not sure where you are deriving the notion that I'm against more/better police training. Where exactly is my logic contorted in what you are quoting here? Are you claiming that Norway, Finland and Germany have the same population as the U.S.? That they have as much crime as the U.S., even on a per capita basis? That they have as many guns as the U.S.? That they have the same social safety nets or worse? That they have the same racial/poverty issues as the U.S. that both affect the level of crime and the police overreaction to the same? That these factors don't contribute to the increased numbers of cops shooting people in the U.S.
I think that eliminating some of the questionable deaths that happen at the margins and in the "gray areas" might have a greater effect on the feelings of minority communities toward police than you might think. I believe that reasonable people in every community will agree that there are times when a shooting is justifiable and unavoidable. Most people would also agree that there are shootings that are entirely unjustfied. The problem comes at the margins. Where police have no credibility and a reputation for being trigger happy they're not going to get the benefit of the doubt in those marginal situations.
It's easy to compare stats on a per capita basis, so I'm not sure why you keep coming back to this point, unless I missed where you established that a higher population increases per capita rates of violence?
It doesn’t. The reason crime is so high in the US has nothing to do with population. It has to do with the wealth gap and people who are forced to commit crime or starve.
Maybe that property owner should have had better sense to put his property between a starving person and the object of his wrath.
Maybe that property owner has his own bellies to feed. Who the fuck is anyone else to decide they need what's his more than he does?
If the property owner can’t see past his own needs to recognize someone else in pain, then it’s karma and not the starving person’s fault.
I think the thing is that at this point, the general public and the press tend to blend all shootings/killings together instead of looking at the individual circumstances of each. There is no easy objective way of knowing, but I suspect that only a small fraction of police killings fall into the clearly unjustified camp, maybe 10 percent. Some of those, like George Floyd, could have been prevented with better training. Some of them, like the Dallas off-duty cop who believed that she was shooting someone who had broken into her apartment when she was really in the wrong place, probably wouldn't. The thing about training is that even with perfect training, some people in the heat of the moment are going to blank out on it, and some people are going to be deliberately bad actors and ignore it. And in the specific area of deadly force, the underlying lesson is not that difficult to grasp: You are not to use deadly force unless it is reasonably necessary to defend one's self or others from the use of force that would cause great bodily harm or death. If someone can't comprehend that in six months, they probably aren't going to get that concept in two or three years either. Which again, is not to say that there shouldn't be more training. Just to say that I disagree with the implication of the meme that the reason why the other police forces shoot so rarely is because they are that much better trained. My point is that the meme is faulty in comparing the raw number of police shootings in the U.S. vs the raw number of police shootings in the other countries because they are not adjusted to a per capita basis, which as you point out is relatively easy to do. (I assume that once adjusted the U.S. would still have a higher rate of police shootings than the other countries per capita, but that would be a fair comparison.) Anyway, I brought the point up previously twice. Once to say that it was an example of problems with the meme, and the second to ask Demiurge who claimed that my logic was flawed if that was an example of my flawed logic. I think it is safe to say that the percentage of people who have few choices besides committing crime or starving is a sliver of the percentage of the people who commit crime. Yes, you have people who steal to put food on the table with relatively few options, people who have been limited or effectively blocked from the conventional job market because of a prior conviction or societal forces like racism/sexism, or who are too mentally ill/drug dependent to hold down a job. But most murderers, rapists, and even thieves could hold down conventional jobs but choose not to.
I just used two extremes. The point is, the wealth gap causes anger and frustration which is then directed (unintentionally in most cases) downward to their spouse and children. Children living in a household with anger and frustration grow up angry and frustrated. It’s not a direct affect, it’s a ripple affect and it is a quantifiable, measurable affect.
I certainly would not fall into the trap of arguing that better training will solve all, or most, of the problems with American policing. What I would argue is that continuing resistance to better (more expensive) training undermines the credibility that has to exist if there's going to be an improvement in those relationships. Improved screening during the selection process is another thorny, but separate issue.
A black woman died accidentally in a huntsville AL police car? You don't fucking say. It is like if Jeffrey Dahmer had only eaten black people racist police would have probably blamed it on the black people trying really hard to feed that good little white boy. We do not know what happened, all those black people just accidentally killed themselves, and then forced themselves down that poor white guys throat. He was just walking down the street and all that black people meat just fell from the sky, chewed itself, and then went down his throat while he was trying to spit it out and save them. I am sure there is a promotion for whoever is responsible for this.
Shooting Not to Kill. This Utah Case Fuels a Debate That Frustrates Police. A good article. It raises a point (besides the usual comment about how it's far easier to aim for the center-of-mass than it is an extremity), in that some people will ask why a cop shot someone at all if they didn't perceive the threat to be lethal. In the incident described in the article, the suspect had already been tased (and unaffected by it), so the options left to the officers were either a non-lethal shot or a lethal one. The cop took a non-lethal shot and was able to capture the individual alive. He was fired for doing it. It's fairly obvious that the suspect could have severely injured, if not killed someone (not necessarily the cop) had they not been stopped. Shooting to wound isn't an ideal solution, but it is far preferable to a fatal shot (which probably would have gone unquestioned). Seems pretty stupid to fire the cop. The goal should be for the police to capture a suspect whenever possible (after all, all persons are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law), so technically, shooting a suspect is sentencing them to death for something that may not warrant the death penalty were they to actually be convicted of it. Police departments ought to be handing out awards to cops who capture alive a potentially dangerous suspect, not firing them.
If you are close range and have something as accurate as a pistol you could easily put a shot into the leg, even in a firefight. I could easily do it with something far less accurate while moving in a field of fire far more saturated than a police officer is going to face in their career. I used to do it all the time on the paintball field and you cannot tell me paintballs are less accurate than a bullet. The reason cops cannot do it is they are mostly poorly trained for high excitement contact and they are squids. I call them squids because they flail around like squids when they shoot in high stress situations. No one trains these idiots otherwise, but they hand them a gun. Most of these idiots do not de-escalate tension even for themselves. They amp themselves up with fear and anger. Some better training in how to keep your cool, and some supervision that tones down their toxic macho response would do wonders for their clear thinking under stress. That would help out for much more than using their firearms too. It would help in chases, being able to confront hostile people, and also not showing up at the capitol riots because you are having a pissbaby fit because your furor lost his election. Part of the problem is it is real easy to become a sherriff or city police officer. Your ordinary police officer is not the best or brightest fish in the barrel. He is often a twitchy guy who wants to shoot and beat people up. He often feels persecuted and like he has joined a team that is against the regular people of the town. This sort of person just simply cannot shoot to wound because they do not have the calm and sense of self to remain calm in a serious situation. You can't be a tightly wound screamer and take a controlled shot.
I can't agree with that if the cop fired in order to save someone from death or serious injury. Sentencing someone to death for capital murder doesn't bring their victim back to life (otherwise, I might be for the death penalty). Killing a would be murderer who is an imminent threat to an innocent's life before they can kill them is totally different. There is no requirement for due process for the latter. It's not to punish the criminal pro-actively. It's to stop a murder. That can be extended to "shooting to wound" verses shooting center mass. The former might (but probably won't) work...but the latter has a far greater chance of working.
Re-read what I wrote. I said “technically.” Note that in a situation where a cop has no choice in saving a life they have to kill someone in a state that doesn’t have the death penalty, they’re carrying out a sentence far harsher than what the law allows for someone convicted of murder. That doesn’t mean that the cop was wrong in their actions.
I read where you said "technically" the first time, and I disagreed. They aren't "technically" carrying out a sentence for a crime that never had a chance to be committed in the first place. If you had said "figuratively", then...maybe? Nah. Not then either.
Training and good sense usually dictate shoot to kill. I don't think cops should be fired for trying to take a non-lethal shot, but I don't think it's something that should necessarily be encouraged either. It's great if it works, if it doesn't, it can make a bad situation worse. Maybe if the cop had more hand to hand training they wouldn't have to pull the gun at all, but that's just speculation and may not have been option in any case.
I always though police were trained not to shoot someone in an arm or leg as then the live suspect would be able to then sue the police department. Pretty sure I'd heard of such law suits back in the 70s. Anyway, I'd rather have qualified immunity for cops who injure suspects rather than for cops that kill someone.
