| Jim_Gunn |
02-26-2014 03:20 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
(Post 19996928)
While I think what happened here is a tragedy, one thing you need to understand is that most of the time the dispatch calls to the police are pretty vague. The call can simply say domestic dispute. My cop buddy has responded to that generic call many times and found everything from a guy holding his wife at gunpoint to a woman who was pissed at her teenage daughter for not cleaning her room and she wanted the police to make her clean her room.
So they show up at the scene most of the time with no idea who is involved and exactly what is going on. They are also lied to every day. Most domestics involve a woman and a man so it is fair for them to assume that it is he and the woman involved in this and that he might not be telling them the truth.
This doesn't mean that they have the right to kill him, but the police are in a situation where they often don't know what they are getting into when they roll up onto the scene so they have to expect the worst. If this guy resisted them they don't know if he is going to pull out a knife or a gun or if he just pissed off that they don't believe him.
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I agree that the police have a tough job and that they are dealing with the worst aspects of humanity in the form of ignorant losers and criminals, people with an incentive to lie to get out of trouble, drunks, people high on drugs and the like.
But I can't ignore the daily videos I see and reports I read online of woeful misconduct that are practiced every day by law enforcement officers around the country. The whole police culture now in every agency is polluted with an "us against them" mentality that leads them to hyper aggressive over reaction to nearly every situation. They violate people's rights with impunity even for minor infractions, shoot and kill animals, shoot and kill people- sometimes people even sleeping in their owns beds- at the drop of a hat and there is no accountability or punishment for the criminal behavior except in the most egregious of cases.
The United Sates has become a Gulag nation with literally millions of people behind bars, many for things that shouldn't even be crimes, all for the sake of making money for the for-profit prison industrial complex. An American citizen in 2014 is far more likely to be killed by a police officer than he or she is by a terrorist.
I would be in favor of what some police agencies already do of mandating police officers wear those lightweight cameras to record their entire shift. Not only does it protect them from bullshit accusations by citizens, but more importantly it protects citizens from the police violating their rights or hurting people. Accountability is a good thing that would serve both sides. |
