Is there any way to observe compassionately that these victims both have fantastic names, without sounding like a shallow jerk?
At this particular moment? I don't think so, no.
It is commonplace for my fellow guilty white liberals and me to respond to the hypothetical police supporter's "What would you have done?" with something like "Absent an affirmative, active threat (distinguished from noncompliance), issued a summons, disengaged and retreated," but I assume that police procedure, in both theory and practice, discourages that.
That being the case, what would the most competent, non-fatal police action in this situation have been (and, I guess, have looked like -- taking into account that even non-fatal violence can look very bad to laypeople, especially laypeople disposed to suspect and resent police power)?
It is easy for a layperson to answer that the police weapon shouldn't have been drawn and, having been drawn, shouldn't have had the finger inside the trigger guard and, having been drawn with the finger inside the trigger guard, shouldn't have been pointed. GSwift?
Every time something like this happens I come back to the same thing: Cops need better training and higher standards and the only way to attract the cream of the crop is to pay them far more than they currently get. Training should be continuous, with lots of emphasis on how to not shoot people. Also internal affairs should be handled by a completely separate department with no connection to the police force at all other than purely investigative. Ideally IA would be a federal matter so standards are uniform nationwide.
Ideally IA would be a federal matter so standards are uniform nationwide.
Yeah, whatever, libtard. Next you'll want Obama to set our children's reading proficiency standards from Washington, D.C.! Well, I'll be damned if my grandchildren are going to read from a socialist primer! You know what's in there? "Adam and Steve Visit Design Within Reach"! "Hillary Heals the World with Her Politics of Meaning"! No, thank you! I'll buy gold and vintage 1950s men's adventure magazines the way Jesus tells me to!
(Some people might find the DWR and "politics of meaning" references in 8 recondite or even unrealistic out of the fingers of a notional FoxNews commenter, but I think that referential texture, like tempo, is an important aspect of comedy.)
From what I've read (haven't been able to bear to watch the videos) these are both "reported perception of danger" cases, no? Again pointing out how horrible our law is that it accepts the perception, and therefore imports racism, regardless of objective facts.
Anyway, two Twitter threads taking things slightly new directions worth reading:
The problems in "emphasizing danger as the constant and universal metric of police work"
Garner and Sterling compared to Uber and AirBNB
Those are some truly sick, sick individuals captured in the Alton Sterling video. Sorry, I don't have any light repartee to offer on this one.
(Okay: yes, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are both fabulous names. Castile's girlfriend was Lavish Reynolds, also a fabulous name. Black names are often fabulous. There. That's my contribution to light repartee.)
The Philando Castile video is almost as bad and gratuitous, but at least there you can stretch to the possibility of... well, I can't quite say legitimate misunderstanding, but a commonplace form of American "misunderstanding" nevertheless, which is to say a stupid and vicious racist-conditioned literal jumping of the gun. You can see how it could be manslaughter that the killer doesn't get indicted for, is what I'm saying, rather than murder for which he'll get a slap on the wrist and an administrative suspension.
The Alton Sterling video, though. Those are fucking murderers who will probably not get indicted. Those are some seriously lowdown worthless lying* sacks of ratshit with a slap on the wrist and an administrative suspension in their future for holding a helpless man down and pumping bullets into him. Absolutely fuck those sick motherfucking wastes of planetary atmosphere.
(* I mean, I assume they're already trying to lie since that happens fucking always.)
Anyway, I'll just leave this here for gswift's inevitable apologetics.
Louisiana being an open carry state, of course- you have to wonder if part of the motivation for making more places open carry is it gives cops a more convenient excuse to execute a minority who's not obeying. He had a gun, after all!
Some possible context for shootings like this one from a while back, in re: large-scale white supremacist infiltration of U.S. law enforcement.
The DOJ is taking the Alton Sterling case, so good news, we'll see some official going-through-the-motions-of-giving-a-shit before nothing happens. The officers, of course? They "believe they were completely justified in using deadly force," because when don't they.
"Both officers say their body cameras fell off before Tuesday's shooting."
Oh, for fuck's sake.
I don't have anything meaningful to say. This is all so disgustingly tragic. I can't bring myself to watch the videos. Those poor men.
Part of me is worried that because Philandro Castile is an extremely sympathetic victim who did everything perfectly, other victims of police aggression in even slightly more questionable cases will be ignored. But the white supremacy machine has already been denigrating him so I guess that's not going to be a problem. Christ.
13.last: I know you didn't mean that literally, but Oscar Grant is the only exception I can think of. Oh, and that idiot deputized old guy in IIRC Oklahoma who actually got charged.
15.2: If he was so much as given a Time Out by the teacher back in kindergarten, we'll be hearing about it before long.
Nothing light to say about either of these. Agreed that better training would be great, but it seems kind of hollow while senior cops remain horrible so many places.
The cop who shot Walter Scott in SC was indicted; it looks like there's a chance that Tamir Rice's killers will be indicted.
Ferguson's police department has changed training after the DOJ forced them to do so, the police chief there has resigned, but the shitty mayor is still there.
18: Weird. I just tried it and it's still working for me.
It's a Sam Jones article at the Grio. As an alternate, the same material is referenced and expanded upon in a DailyKos piece here.
17.2: "it looks like there's a chance that Tamir Rice's killers will be indicted"
Where did you hear this? Last I heard, the grand jury declined to indict a long time ago. The most that happened in the Tamir Rice case was the city settling in a wrongful-death suit.
20. Wikipedia, where I made a mistake thinking that June 3 was June 3 of this year. You are right, grand jury returned no charges after a lot of care to present them with exculpatory documents. Jesus, so depressing.
Selah's been asking lately when the police are going to shoot her. I'm assuming she overheard some daycare teachers or something, because I've talked to the older girls but not a three-year-old. We got stuck watching someone being taken into custody a month or so ago and while it was done gently and humanely, it had a big impact on her in particular. We're talking through it a lot but it makes me feel so false and weird to reassure her. They all have relatives with drug/alcohol or mental health problems, the sort of people who might not comply quickly or easily when told what to do by an officer. It all just feels too close to home for me to really assure them they're safe.
Further to 7: Very specific policy recommendations from Campaign Zero.
I don't know how much my sister has talked about it with her daughter. I often think about how much more terrifying it would be if she had adopted a boy instead of a girl.
22: I don't mean to offend, but I keep being told that murders like this by the police are nothing new in the black community (probably actually decreasing, like other gun violence), and it's just the rest of us who are becoming aware due to viral videos. But in reality, people in the black community are more scared now than ever?
Heightened awareness also applies to black people. It's one thing to know that it happens constantly and another thing to be actually able to watch the process -- from guys getting gratuitously executed to their cold-blooded murderers getting treated with kid gloves by the justice system -- from end to end in something like real time.
14 alone should be enough for some sort of conviction in a just world. Or at the very least dismissal for incompetence.
25: I'm not sure I have a good answer. My oldest is 10, so to them "black community" only means what's happened in the time they've lived under a black president. From what I can see on Facebook, their relatives are angry and scared right now. One branch of one family had Panther-type political involvement in the past, but this seems to be something that feels like both a new threat and simultaneously "See, I've been TELLING you this is still a problem!" for my generation and younger. I'm not going to say more scared now than under more explicit segregation of slavery or whatever, but there's a clear belief I share that there is no excuse for hints not being better by now.
Eh, 7 is a mixed bag of very good and very terrible recommendations (the bad stuff mostly involves an end to street-level policing, which would be a disaster for poor communities). But whatever. These particular two shootings look like the rare instances where even under current (inadequate) law the police were straight up murdering dudes and can be sent to prison for it. You don't have the Tamir Rice problem of "extremely poor police tactics that created the possibility of a shooting don't go into the criminal law equation if the shooting seemed justified within the two-second window before the officer's shot was fired" when you're shooting dudes you have pinned to the floor or random people through a car window. No question that outrage is appropriate.
Also giving it to DOJ is exactly the right thing to do. No need for grand jury whatever, send it straight to the people whose job has been to look at civil rights violations by cops.
28's "hints" s/b "things"
Very soon after the incident we witnessed in the next community over, where the police were all white and the person resisting them black, I saw lights outside my bedroom at night and crept down to see what was going on. A (white) guy had sort of fallen over into the street and I could hear the police talking to him quietly and calmly about "You say nothing is wrong, sir, but you don't really have your pants on and that makes me think we should check that out" and they were able to talk him into an ambulance.
I mentioned how impressed I had been to the officer who attended our new neighborhood meeting, who's on medical leave from active work because he hurt himself in a pickup baseball game with kids on one of the blocks he covers, and he happily shared more details about how they're working on relationship-building in situations like that and have permission to take psych admits in a police car rather than ambulance if that's what the person prefers. I realize that's all sort of going to sound like spin and cliche, though not as much as the officer who really does show impressive skills at the skate park, but being part of a multiracial cross-class group agreeing with the police about treating people as people while still keeping our town safe felt encouraging.
29: I do think the bit about decriminalizing most quality-of-life offenses (under "broken-windows policing") is understandable given how they're used in practice, but advocating this not just for marijuana but also for disorderly conduct, trespassing, disturbing the peace, etc. seems inapposite.
I'm not sure how any of the other 9 planks in the Campaign Zero solutions would "end" street-level policing. Or even the other parts of the "end broken windows" plank (mental health response teams, end to stop-and-frisk and other profiling practices).
31: The more and more episodes like this I hear (Dylann Roof) make me suspect police do typically have the skills to defuse, de-escalate, etc., it's just that those skills mysteriously disappear when it comes to POC and they fall back on the legal minimum.
"Stop and frisk" is something that needs to happen, and is different than "stop and frisk based on no articulable suspicion other than racism" which is what the problem was. Decriminalizing things like disorderly conduct would be an epic disaster.
34: They have a lot of specifics on what should be required for police stops, rather than saying police shouldn't stop people period. For example, getting rid of "furtive movements", "matching generalized description", "being in a high-crime area" as justifications.
29: I didn't say I endorsed them all. I do find it useful to think about specific, achievable proposals and to consider what seems to work in some cities that may be transferable.
33: Exactly.
Do you think those are workable standards? Remember, you have to thread the needle between preventing unnecessary or racially motivated harrassment and incentivizing street cops to just say fuck it and do nothing. Anyone who tells you this is an easy problem to solve is bullshitting.
But mostly it seems wrong to deal with half-thought-out general police reform measures in a day when people are outraged about straight up murders.
37 to 34. I agree with 36 and for that matter with 33.
33: Right, and seeing it happen and work with someone black felt more fraught (and would have even without kids witnessing) than this straightwhitemale-looking guy. I think a lot of these are doable but will take work.
The thread has moved on slightly, but here are two powerful pieces about the shooting:
#AltonSterling is dead and there's nothing more to say
Whites rate the nation's police force among the three institutions in our country that inspire the most confidence, behind only the military and small business,according to a survey by Gallup. In fact, white Americans admire the police more than they do clergy. With that in mind, it should be no surprise then that70 percent of white Americans say they can imagine a situation in which they would approve of a police officer striking a citizen. Nearly the same share approve of police hitting suspects trying to escape from custody. . . .
Am I Going to Write About Murdered Black People Forever?
So many of these writers--black and otherwise--write beautiful, tragic and true prose in the aftermath of these offenses about the fallacy that is being both safe and black in America. Their articles are shared and lauded and discussed and responded to and built upon. Then we wait for another--another shooting, another lost life. And we write again, and wonder: is this just the way of things now? How much time will I spend finding the correct words to say that the color of a person's skin is not justification for ending their life? And how much time will elapse until those words mean anything to the people who actually kill us?
The shooting of black people by the police has been happening for as long as America has existed. But this cycle--the graphic videos, the celebrity social media posts, the GoFundMe campaigns, the essays, the thinkpieces, and then the wait to do it all again--it's fully visible. We ache and we yell and we hope that, eventually, the obvious weight of all this pain will be enough to move something to change. But at times hoping in public feels even more precarious. We cannot appeal to a national conscience when, as Stokely Carmichael reminded us, there is none.
I actually disagree with that. I think the level of attention and publicity that these killings are getting is important, that I'm impressed by how much Black Lives Matter has made an impact as a social and political force. But I also realize that doesn't offer much consolation. I have no idea how quickly things will change and I have the luxury of not being afraid that the police will attack me.
I'm on the road to MT. In brief, at this point the Castile shooting is looking very bad. The Sterling shooting is reminding me of the Brown shooting and I would advise a bit of caution regarding all the murder talk on a scene where a felon illegally in possession of a gun who was a suspect in threatening another party with that gun then gets in a tussle with the police.
I dunno, the pinned to the ground shooting him factor seems very different than Brown. I guess it's possible that there's some legit use of force based on something unseen but whether or not Sterling had a gun seems irrelevant since he's like, for real pinned and on the ground with two officers on tip of him.
Good thing the Baton Rogue PD has bodycams, which will allow people to dispassionately review what happened and determine whether the shooting was preventable.
I'm waiting with bated breath for the NRA's take on both shootings.
42: You'd think any reasonable person would be factoring in the whole "pumping rounds into a pinned and immobile guy" thing, right? But nope, that's crazy talk in gswift-land.
Truly his wackiest thug-with-a-badge apologetics yet. He should take this act on the road, he'd kill in Vegas.
(Due credit for his being able to acknowledge a potential bad shoot in at least one of the blue-on-black slayings of the moment, though.)
The Onion is pretty dark these days. I hadn't realised.
John Scalzi is great.
This is why, I suspect, when so many people who look like me, white and/or male, and visibly part of the mainstream of American culture, hear about a black person being gunned down by a cop, in their car or out of it, immediately go to "well, what did they do to deserve it?" Because, in the somewhat unlikely event of one of us being arrested by a cop, much less gunned down by one, we know damn well that dude did something stupid to warrant the cop taking that action. My own lived experience of 47 years, and the lived experience of nearly every other person who looks like me that I know, confirms that fact. I'm not going to get stick from a cop unless I did something to get that stick.
...
And the first comment [to my tweet], from a white, middle-aged, mainstream dude, is reaching for a rationalization for the cop for shooting Philando Castile.
...
I'm not saying the fellow who made the comment to my tweet is racist. He's probably not, any more than I am. But we live in a racist society, and some of that racism gets exhibited in how our police forces deal with us. I have a very different experience of the police than my friends and fellow citizens who don't look like me. It's an experience different enough that while I understand intellectually that there are people who are afraid of the police, just as a default setting, and it's something I see again and again as minority friends of mine vent and rage on social media, I still can't feel it. I am not afraid of the police. I never have been. I have never had to be. I probably will never have to be. That doesn't mean that my friends are wrong.
Both the cops were on top of him and had him pinned. Why the hell at that moment would that one cop unholster his sidearm and point it at the guy's back? Why wouldn't you just keep him pinned and help your partner slap the cuffs on?
And why at that point would someone shouting "gun" prompt you to shoot the immobilized guy you're sitting on top of a bunch of times? It's almost is if there is no plausible justification and the shooting was a murder or something.
Take a cop to dinner:
Racketeers take cops to dinner with payoffs.
Pimps take cops to dinner with free tricks.
Dealers take cops to dinner with free highs.
Business takes cops to dinner with graft.
Unions and Corporations take cops to dinner with post-retirement jobs.
Schools and Professional Clubs take cops to dinner with free tickets to athletic events and social affairs.
The Catholic Church takes cops to dinner by exempting them from religious duties.
The Justice Department takes cops to dinner with laws giving them the right to do almost anything.
The Defense Department takes cops to dinner by releasing them from all military obligations.
Establishment newspapers take cops to dinner by propagating the image of the friendly, uncorrupt, neighborhood policeman.
Places of entertainment take cops to dinner with free drinks, and admission to shows.
Merchants take cops to dinner with discounts and gifts.
Neighborhood Committees and Social Organizations take cops to dinner with free discussions offering discriminating insights into hipsterism, black militancy, and drug culture.
Cops take cops to dinner by granting them immunity to prosecution for misdemeanors and anything else they can get away with.
Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.
And so, if you own anything or you don't take a cop to dinner this week and feed his power to judge, prosecute and brutalize the streets of your city.
Note: Gourmet George Metesky would remind everyone not to make the mistake of Arnold Schuster, who served the right course at the wrong time.
Police chief is saying three are dead.
This is very bad. Whiff of the 60s about this.
Link to live coverage here in Dallas.
4 dead. Were protestors shot too?
Oh Christ. What the fuck is happening to this country?
Just gathered and marched down Broadway. Too cowardly to take to the freeway, but turns out police weren't blocking it and there are like 1000 people up there now.
A lot of the speakers before the march emphasized "what are you doing tomorrow morning?" presumably because they're correctly gleaning that a lot of (white) participants are there partly to assuage consciences
I read up a bit on the Sterling shoot and watched that video. At this point we're nowhere near a murder. Sterling was the suspect in a call of a threat with a gun. He's in an active tussle with the cops when they see he had a gun. They've got him down on his back but the stuggle is still going and it doesn't look like they have full control of his arms. They verbally warn him to stop and he disregards it.
Two of my coworkers had a similar situation about two years ago except that the gun fell out of the suspects pocket as they took him down and he managed to get his hand on it. One cop was shot through the bicep. The other was shot first in the leg, shattering his femur just below the hip. The second shot as he went down was at his face but he manged to swat the gun to the side where it went off and burst his eardrum. The cop shot through bicep manged to get his gun out and kill the shooter.
They're lucky to be alive and two years later the cop who took the femur shot still has a limp. That's why we don't wrestle guys with guns.
Sterling was the suspect in a call of a threat with a gun. He's in an active tussle with the cops when they see he had a gun.
Shouldn't they have suspected he had a gun from the call?
Well, 63 was predictable. Laughable, but predictable.
And the business in Dallas is fucking crazy and entirely counterproductive. But of course, ignore peaceful protest long enough and make enough mealy-mouthed excuses for brutality and here you are. Evil begetting evil, leading only to more evil. How do you find a way out of a bind like that? What do you tell the youth who you want to find a peaceful path? That the justice system will reform? That someone will listen to them? That cops will stop reflexively defending obvious murderers? That choosing the path of violence only feeds racist fantasies of race war? They're already living a race war.
I throw my hands up. All I can tell you at this point is that I'm glad I live in Canada and best of luck. We have our own race issues with policing to deal with, anyway, and they're just as deep-seated.
64: Sure, but they hadn't seen it yet so they tried a taser and then physical force until they saw and confirmed there was a gun. I have another coworker who about 16 years ago tackled a burglary suspect and was trying to get him restrained when the guy pulled out a pistol and shot him in the face. Continuing an wrestling match with a guy you know has a gun is nuts.
I mean, if tackling a guy who might have a gun is that dangerous, and I don't doubt that it is, surely that's not the standard and recommended way of dealing with that situation if you know or suspect in advance that it's what you're dealing with.
67 before seeing 66, but seriously, if continuing a wrestling match under those circumstances is nuts surely starting one is even crazier.
And it strikes me as bizarre that any cop anywhere (at least in the US) would err on the side of assuming that a suspect doesn't have a gun, especially if that was specifically mentioned in the initial call.
But I haven't watched either of the videos that have been released so far of the Sterling situation, so I'm not going to claim any detailed knowledge of this specific case.
68: So what are the options? Not being snarky, I genuinely wonder what people want at that point. We don't see the beginning of the encounter so maybe the approach could have been better bet we don't know that. If you're the cop and Sterling refuses to cooperate and the taser fails, now what? You can't let him walk away.
You're the cop, not me. I just find it hard to believe that there are no options for dealing with a report of a guy with a gun threatening people than tasering him and if that doesn't work tackling him. Surely this sort of call happens all the time, and most of them don't seem to end in officer-involved shootings.
Cops of course are, most of the time, perfectly capable of de-escalating violent situations when they involve white suspects. They're even capable of watching video of an altercation and telling when there's an "ongoing struggle" instead of a bunch of guys sitting atop a guy who happens to still be twitching. And they're capable of determining that shooting said guy for twitching would probably be wrong and that the pre-existence of an altercation is no excuse. That's exactly why white Americans have high levels of trust and confidence in police.
It's largely when black (mostly male) suspects are involved that this all mysteriously fails and we all walk the Sacred Stations of the Excuses every single time (here with gswift as our guide), and it's entirely transparent as to why.
I mean, if they really thought he had a gun, which didn't they draw their own guns? That would at least have put them in a position to respond immediately if he drew the gun that (from their perspective) he may or may not have had. The fact that they tackled him instead suggests that they didn't actually think he had a gun, which may have been a reasonable conclusion in the moment, but, in light of the fact that they had actually been told earlier that he might have had one, seems weird at a minimum. So while they may have had reason to think he didn't have a gun when they tackled him, when they learned he did have one they didn't have any reason to be surprised (because, again, they had in fact been told this before).
But as with all these cases, I'm not actually interested in arguing the details point-for-point, and I think the bigger picture is more important.
I don't think it's appropriate to convict the Baton Rouge cops based on the video alone and you can come up with a (somewhat far-fetched) hypothetical scenario consistent with the video under which the shooting would be "justified" under the very narrow focus of current law (though for reasons Teo says even if that's true there's no way it's not terribly negligent policing).
But at the end of the day come on, how would you bet. Dude is on the ground and twitching mildly with cops literally right at a place where they can hold the guys arms. They unload and shoot him in the chest. I'm more willing to wait for evidence to come in on these things than just about anyone here, and am obviously not a cop, but there's gonna need to be something exonerating much stronger than an officer's say-so to justify not prosecuting here with that video out there. We're not even close to Brown (or Tamir Rice -- as awful as that shooting was the legal "justification" for it was quite clear on the video, whereas here it isn't).
Feels stupid to be microlitigating these things again and probably is, though I'm a professional microlitigator. Obviously something at a much larger scale than an individu indictment in a particular case under existing law needs to be done because we are in the middle if a full blown crisis of lack of confidence in police, which hurts everyone but especially police and
people in communities in the most need of policing.
Also worth noting that one of the better and more hopeful and forward-thinking PDs was ... Dallas. Just shit upon shit.
Good Twitter thread about that here:
https://twitter.com/albertsamaha/status/751271814853070850
The shooters are telling the cops they've planted bombs around Dallas. I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Dude is on the ground and twitching mildly with cops literally right at a place where they can hold the guys arms
Pinning a strong guys arms can be hell. Both the suspects in the above stories were smaller than Sterling.
And shocking, it's not even his first time resisting while illegally carrying a gun.
I don't even care at this point. I probably won't even have cell service for the next week. You all enjoy this clusterfuck of a news cycle. I'm taking a break from it.
Everything in seeing seems to assume the Dallas shooter* was somehow affiliated with or acting "in support of" the protestors or BLM more broadly. But that does not seem obvious to me in any way based on any facts I have seen reported. Am I missing something? Because my gut guess would have been the opposite--this was some maniac who was trying to disrupt the protest, turn it to violence and chaos, and threaten its legitimacy. But I admit the motives seem murky at best.
*was it one shooter or more than one? I've seen reports both ways.
1 dead male suspect, 1 arrested female suspect (she had been shooting at cops) So far. No id yet. Portion of downtown Dallas in shutdown, still looking. Mercedes cleared. No bombs.
The only picture I've seen yet is of the guy who turned out to not be involved.
Well, did Chester Himes call it or did he call it?
Long, hot summer, here we come.
82: If I were guessing, I'd guess you were right, but of course I don't know yet, and of course I'm influenced by what I want to be true.
84: They're not telling, I said no id yet, I meant for us, it is not likely they will hold a press conference to solely reveal skin color, we will get names and faces of suspects when the DPD thinks it is safe to do so, as in no longer looking for others. I don't think the speculation is particularly flattering.
From NPR:
"The (suspects now in custody) were picked up in a traffic stop, after someone saw them flee the scene in a Mercedes."
I'm thinking white.
The Guardian is liveblogging the press conference. The female suspect (under arrest) was apparently African-American; they're not revealing race of the male suspect, who apparently shot himself after being wounded by an explosive delivered by a police drone. (Which also WTF?)
One of the things I hate most at work is when people play dumb -- guys who've been in the business 30 years pretend they don't know some obvious fact that we all operate under. And I gather, from TV and conversation and first hand observation, that cops generally feel about the same. And yet, now we're going to enjoy the spectacle of a big chunk of the white population and at least one black man playing dumb for weeks on end. Everybody with a brain understands why this happened, why it was inevitable. So, it's like the guy who sits down in a field and gets his ass bit by a rattlesnake: now is when we find out who are friends are.
Police chief David Brown: "The suspect said he was upset at white people the suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers."
From 84. I said "Mercedes cleared."
Shortly before midnight, a Dallas police officer saw an individual carrying a camouflaged bag, walking quickly down Lamar Street. The person threw the bag in the back of a black Mercedes which then sped off, police said.Officers followed the vehicle south on Interstate 35E and performed a traffic stop at I-35E and Kiest Boulevard, police said.
Police questioned both occupants of the vehicle and they were released, KXAS-TV (NBC5) reported.
92: yeah, I heard that. I guess it was (probably) not a white person, but--crazy--so who really knows.
Also, David Brown's speech made me very unsympathetic. Just a complete and total lack of self-awareness.
93 is probably wrong: according to the press conference they have three people in custody.
At this point I assume Trump is going to win in November, not because of a "blue lives matter" backlash or anything, but just because why would any news this year turn out to be good?
96: Oh, come on, Scalia's death was good news.
97: Optimist. We still don't know who Scalia's replacement will be.
If the snipers in Dallas were acting as a result of the recent police shootings I have to say they've got good hustle given that they also planted at least one bomb and had a fairly well worked out plan. My guess would have been extreme right wing opportunists taking advantage of the situation - not necessarily to smear BLM or anything but just out of the characteristic general crazy about tyranny! and watering the tree of liberty and so on. Who knows, though. We'll certainly hear plenty about how they show the true colors of the Black Lives Matter movement no matter what the explanation is.
No, Scalia's death was unambiguous good news. The optimist would be the person who claims that Trump winning the Republican nomination was good news. That one: I really need to see how things play out before deciding.
Of course prominent conservatives are reacting to the Dallas shooting with their usual sobriety:
This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.
If the snipers in Dallas were acting as a result of the recent police shootings I have to say they've got good hustle given that they also planted at least one bomb and had a fairly well worked out plan.
Sure, but that's true whatever you think their motives were - whether they were upset at the police shootings and wanted to kill some policemen, or they were extreme right wing types trying to provoke a race war, they still had to get this set up pretty fast, between the announcement of the protest and the protest itself.
Every now and then it's instructive to tune in to Fox News, but I probably should have given it a miss this morning.
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I just found out about the Hillary email scandal, and now I'm angry about "Murphy Brown"!
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Reading a little more about the Dallas police force makes me want to retract 94.2. They seem to be overall one of the bright spots, and i assume Brown deserves some significant portion of the credit for that. I still parts of his statement this morning were pretty tone deaf, but I'll write that off as mostly a result of shock and grief and stress and mourning.
102: Planting the bombs somewhere, picking locations and so on, sure. But while I have no idea given the way America is I suspect that having a bomb, and the equipment required, and having thought through the kinds of places to set up and so on would take long enough that doing it within a day or two would be impressive. I doubt they bought the guns within that time period (though, again, America).
I don't think they've actually found any bombs...
I'm having trouble posting. I've got light-hearted links and newsy links, but mostly I'm feeling news-glum.
What about a personal check-in thread (lot of ppl seem to be using this site feature lately) that explicitly invites lurkers also to vent and ask for advice?
Of course, because I kind of share Cyrus' pessimism in 96, it would end up dominated by a stupid logorrheic lurker with unsavory views of some stripe. #notalllurkers #butoneisallyouneed
What is this about them killing a/the sniper with a robot-carried bomb? Were they not able to at least isolate / wait out? Seems excessive once more.
So it's ok for the police to straight up bomb someone when they don't feel like trying to take them into custody anymore? I have no doubt it was an extremely dangerous situation but I've never heard of the police using a bomb robot to actually set a bomb, which seems to be the current story. I hope they had something recording the standoff negotiations.
No idea about the robot, but on the face of it they deserve props for even trying to to talk the guy out under those circumstances.
Yeah, when a dozen cops have just been shot I think it's understandable for them to prioritize neutralizing the sniper any way they can.
Yes, they used a drone bomb detonating robot. They claimed that any other option would have put police lives in jeopardy. Presumably they would not have used the bomb robot if there has been hostiges, etc., but my understanding is that they were already in a "shoot-on-first-sight" standoff situation. If they were ready to kill the guy at first sight anyway, I'm not sure a bomb-drone is really a worse way to do that then wither sending police inside or waiting in standoff for him to finally show himself.
115: Again, not to microlitigate (from reports there may be literally no data other than the DPD statement anyway), but emotionally, using a robot rather than a gun feels even more like an execution, and "they would have shot to kill anyway" is itself something they'd better have a damn good justification for.
My first thought about 82/87 is that I agree with you that it would be nice but it seems pretty unlikely. Dylan Roof, for example, didn't try to frame black people for murder, he just started killing a whole bunch of black people. I found it hard to believe that they could or would only kill police when protesters would have been both easier and more inviting targets.
But it turns out that at least one protester was shot. You just have to read way, way down in the article to find out about it. So who knows.
117 It sounds like they did have a damn good justification. The guy was holed up and expressing a desire to kill white cops. Which desire he'd manifestly and tragically expressed. What was the alternative? Ask for the black cops to go charging in on the chance he wouldn't shoot them? This isn't MOVE and I don't have a problem with the bomb for taking him out.
The guy exchanged fire with cops for at least an hour while loudly proclaiming every intention of killing as many more as possible. I'm not losing any sleep over the robot.
You know, microlitigating the death of an armed mass murderer before you have *any* of the facts would, in most circles, be an objectively horrendously shitty thing to do, but hey if it helps you reconcile yourself to a complex tragedy by framing it in the most police-antagonistic way, go for it, I guess. But you're not exactly covering yourself in glory. Nor am I for being mad about it, I guess. Bye, assholes.
On last night's protests: heavy police presence but no clashes I've heard of, no overreaction to symbolic throwing red paint on OPD HQ front door, both OPD and CHP let protesters up onto the freeway and CHP moved them off peacefully after several hours when they'd thinned out. At least one arrest (someone who broke a grocery store window). If this is what OPD behaves like under a civilian's management, I'm for it.
That should have been "asshole[]" singular, just meant to cover Minivet, or I guess me too. Anyhow this is like the worst possible place to discuss something like this. Later.
It's weird how robot-with-a-bomb feels more offensive and inhuman than shooting someone to death. Is it just the novelty factor?
They didn't bomb the Boston marathon bomber, but hey now, why not?
I submit to 123 that any newspaper comments section would be worse.
122: includes me too, but point taken and I'll stop.
Yes, technically my saying it "seems excessive" was not particularly backed up, given lack of data. Not sure why "shitty", but whatever. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I suppose is all I'm trying to say; I want use of force routinely justified regardless of the heinousness of the person it's used against.
Seconding 128. I think any useful conversation about this subject is about rules of engagement, not microlitigating the case.
What the fucking fuck is this cartoon? Protesters giving cops the finger and shooting them? Way to take the side of the white supremacists asshole.
"useful conversation"? My first thought is, that's very rare in general and even more so here. On the other hand, I shouldn't be so negative. On the other hand, this thread is explicitly for a negative topic. On the other hand, my caustic whining negativity seems different from the sorrowful-yet-outraged negativity more appropriate to the topic.
Seriously though, microlitigating the case is a bad idea because it's so fresh and raw, and we're missing a bunch of key facts. But even if it was a week old and we had all those facts and we were actually discussing the rules of engagement, it wouldn't be useful. Nothing's going to change as a result of this. The Second Amendment isn't going away for at least a generation, and nothing else would make a noticeable impact in this stuff.
300 million guns, 30 million people with little to lose -- somehow I doubt more legislation will make a big difference.
134: Well, if every one of them started killing cops...
I'm sorry, that was too flip. But honestly, that's what it would take. No number of civilian deaths, at anyone's hands, will cause change to gun laws.
Ol' Newt is full of helpful tips.
Corey Robin ...is good and has good commenters. "It Has Begun: is a little over the top for a title, but mentions Locke, an important Michael Walzer essay from 1970, Keith Ellison.
On this issue, liberal and democratic theorists have had very little to say, but what they have said is clear enough and, it must be admitted, very radical. They have argued, in effect, that oppressed minorities have no obligation at all within the political system.Walzer takes that--"when justice is not done, there is no legitimate state and no obligation to obey"--as the premise of his essay.
Civil war is war, and war doesn't distinguish between good enemies and bad.
"No obligation to the state or majority" obviously does not cover all the moral examination necessary to an oppressed minority contemplating a response.
134, 135 is what I might say, I have seen little or nothing that would change police incentives before last night. However, I expect this incident to be too isolated and exceptional to have much useful effect.
Finally, Sebastian Junger's latest book Tribe about combat veterans not adjusting to homecoming, is getting rave reviews.
The DPD looks like a very good dep't, and not an acceptable target.
But one theory of change is that change happens not because you motivate the bad ones to change, that doesn't happen, but when you incentivize the good ones to get fucking radical.
I've been wondering for a while when the first quadcopter-based assassination is going to take place. I guess this was the most justified possible situation for the use of this type of thing, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it means. 1) Quadcopter assassination tech is already developed and widespread enough that a local police department has access to it, and B) Now that its happened once, we can probably expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
The DPD looks like a very good dep't, and not an acceptable target.
How bad would a department have to be before that *wasn't* the case?
Didn't think Corey Robin could get any worse but he never fails to sink beneath the low bar he's set for himself.
140.1: Very likely surplus military equipment that was passed on to the police.
July 8
One Killed in Tennessee by Man Firing at Highway Because He Was Angry About Police Violence
37-year-old Lakeem Keon Scott
"A 44-year-old mother of two driving to pick up newspapers for a delivery job died when she was struck with a bullet and crashed her car."
Not an acceptable target.
My prediction: Within 5 years, police use of assassination drones will be completely mainstream. Within 10 years, there'll be an incident where an assassination drone takes out several innocent people, and Halford and gswift will pop in here to tell us how it was completely justified and we shouldn't make up our minds before we have all the facts.
"several innocent people in the US"
135: What did you think I was talking about at 86?
https://www.amazon.com/Plan-B-Chester-Himes/dp/2867050138
So you're predicting unfogged will still exist in 10 years? Optimistic!
Bob's right in 139. DPD really is very good. Worth noting is they had other suspects in custody and released them after determining that they had nothing to do with the shooting. I'm pretty unconvinced that if this had happened in another city there'd have been multiple dead innocents at the hands of the police.
They have a policy of not showing up to protests in riot gear and they make it clear that they're there to protect the protesters from awful reactionaries as much as they are to protect the city from the protester.
The shooter had shot ten people and was screaming from the parking garage that he had every intention to kill as many police as he could as they tried to negotiate with him for over an hour. If there's any situation in which use of lethal force is justified, it's this one.
Lots of news stories up now that manage to talk about police use of robots without microlitigating anything. I recommend looking at them over this thread.
I guess it was a bomb disposal robot not a quadcopter rigged to blow up, as per my first impression. I think explosive quadcopters are just around the corner, though.
I'm pretty unconvinced that if this had happened in another city there'd have been multiple dead innocents at the hands of the police.
See the Christopher Dorner manhunt.
151: the thing about strapping an experimental improvised munition to a remote control aircraft flown via an unencrypted radio link (which you're also using to detonate the explosive) and flying it around in the middle of a city full of RF emitters, helicopter downdraughts and wires, is that you shouldn't do it.
Either encrypt the radio link or only fly it in a city without RF emitters, helicopters, downdrafts, and wires.