Let me tell you why the cops are actually right in this case. Just like every other case.

The police had no intention of arresting him.

These police officers do think that it's okay if someone gets killed as they go about enforcing the law, and they don't see a pattern of which people get killed.

Or they see the pattern and think it is also O.K. or even a positive good.

I'm sure everyone has seen this, but interview with the shooter before his death. Hope his family stays safe. My sense is that the far right prefers sustained psychological terror (no real consequences) over actually shooting people's families, but that's not any kind of law of nature.

4: Should be "no real consequences for them (vs. decent chance of criminal charges for killing someone)". I edited that parenthetical out of clumsy clarity into concise meaninglessness.

Because of course "reign in" has to show up in the Latest Outrages thread. Horses, damn it, not queens.

/Curmudgeon

NMM: Stars & Stripes!

Or so says the Defense secretary, anyway.

7,8: Now saved by the great saviour Trump. Glory be to he whose deep understanding of the troops and the spirit of America surpasses all. May he rule for a thousand years.

The Daniel Prude thing is horrifying on so many levels. It's obviously racist in the way that all these killings of black men are, but it's also enraging, because he was clearly dealing with a serious mental illness. That's a situation where I can't help but wonder whether it might have turned out just as badly for a white person.

10: The Daniel Shaver incident comes to mind.

We had the Ethan Saylor incident locally. Someone who doesn't comply because of mental illness or mental disability may get treated like someone who is being defiant. The mental process being attributed to the presumably sane person seems to be "I don't think you'd really have the guts to kill me just for refusing to leave a movie theater, copper".

To the OP: There's really something to that. When community/cop relations break down, it's rare (but not unheard of) to have the police leadership say "mea culpa, community trust is the most important requirement of successfully doing our job, we're going to do whatever we can to get it back," instead of getting defensive and, in extreme cases, slow-walking or just not doing their jobs. On a recent podcast local boy Ezra K. was saying that in the business world, that'd be totally unacceptable. A company doesn't blame its customers for lack of consumer trust.

So taking this to the next level, the conservatives and neoliberals are actually right in this case: a government monopoly and union capture leads to an unresponsive service provider that can't be replaced by competition. Market forces would create so many more problems than they would solve, but police unions need to be defanged. An armed group with the monopoly of legitimate violence over the populace cannot be treated like other workers.

The level of impunity is such that I would not be surprised to learn 1% or more of US police forces actively blackmail or threaten city elected officials, or that a greater percentage make elected officials fear this in some way.

The utterly fucked up felonies dumped on various government officials and community leaders in Portsmouth by apparently one extremely angry and connected cop suggests 13 manifests in all sorts of ways.

That's a situation where I can't help but wonder whether it might have turned out just as badly for a white person.

No doubt. Close to half of the unarmed people killed by cops are white. (Obviously I'm not making any sort of bullshit "all lives" point. Black and Latinx people are still disproportionately far more likely to be killed.)

15: Yeah, of course, I'm not at all meaning to minimize that. What I am trying to say is that people with disabilities, specifically serious mental illness and intellectual disabilities are marginalized people. I bet that their deaths at the hands of cops occur at a greater rate than among the population not suffering from a mental illness. So, black and having schizophrenia, doubly marginalized and at an even higher risk.

Reinoehl was reportedly killed because he pulled a gun. The surest way to get yourself killed in an encounter with police is to be holding a weapon. Sometimes it's enough to seem to have a weapon or seem to be going for a weapon. It's hard to shed any tears for this guy: thanks for giving the alt-right a martyr!

Reportedly.

If you're going to kill someone, always shout "He's going for a gun". It's free, quick, and plenty of people will believe it even if there's no other evidence to the report.

14: Yes, that's what prompted that thought (combining with closer memories).

I wonder how many jurisdictions can pursue the Georgian option simultaneously.

So there's some sort of Antifa Navy, or I guess Antifa Seals, disrupting Trump boat parades in Texas and other places? Whatever will they think of next?

Fluid dynamics have a well known liberal bias.

"a guy who showed up to a rally to kill protesters"

Did he actually say that?

I may be imputing motives.

"Impute" makes an imp of you and te.

I wandered over here to see if there was a post about Linden Cameren's shooting by the SLC police: https://gephardtdaily.com/local/gofundme-account-set-up-for-13-year-old-boy-shot-by-salt-lake-city-police-officer/

and to see if gswift had any comment about it.

1 presumably also to 27.

27: Don't know much about the shooting itself, been off for a few days and it's an outside agency doing the investigation.

So far no article has even remotely talked about the total failure of the mental health system not putting this kid in a secure residential treatment facility. Autistic doesn't really describe him well. He's maybe a bit Asperger but is very articulate and willing to engage. His real problem is a propensity for violent outbursts. He's obsessed with guns and violence. He would talk my ear off about guns and then also brag to other school staff that he was on probation for assaulting a cop. Not sure if that's actually true, he was always friendly with me.

He's been spiraling out of control for at least a month. Multiple police calls at the house, Mobile Crisis Outreach responses to the house, trips to the hospital, and...nothing. He's been threatening violence towards his family and openly talking and fantasizing about a shootout with the cops for weeks and he kept getting sent home. The system was literally just waiting around until this kid or someone around him was seriously hurt or killed.

I absolutely love how 29 makes the argument for the utter uselessness of the police, at least vis a vis this situation, without perhaps even realizing it.

This is good: https://twitter.com/EliseSchmelzer/status/1303354576750346241

Fund mental health crisis intervention teams. Abolish the police.

29: So the fuck what? We all know the systems are broken. Shooting kids isn't the answer.

Looks like everyone is in agreement. Every other government department being defunded so that the police have to show up in these situations is extremely suboptimal and the police would rather not be the ones with this responsibility either.

I agree, police are useless.

29: So a 13 year old kid in a mental health crisis talked a lot about being violent. What did the family think about his propensity to act on those threats? What did you and other officers in contact with the kid think? What did any of you do to find out whether he add access to guns, and to get them away from him if he did? A family dealing with a mentally ill kid shouldn't have the additional burden of playing roulette with the kids life if they need to call for help, and even if the rest of the system is failing, police officers ought to be trying pretty hard to figure out ways of dealing with mentally ill kids without shooting them.

This is clearly a waste of time. I'm out.

Fund mental health crisis intervention teams. Abolish the police.

But the mental health crisis intervention teams apparently existed in this context, intervened multiple times, and proved utterly useless.

At least they didn't shoot the kid.

Perhaps they lack the resources to have intervened effectively? Perhaps they lack the regulatory authority to enforce compliance? I don't know what the answer is except that it doesn't involve more cops.

37: "Utterly useless" based on what expectations for what "useful" should look like? The kid isn't the one who shot someone, and our only indication that he was in desperate need of institutionalization is from someone who doesn't see appropriate treatment of mentally ill people as part of his job. In my limited but painful experience, mental illness isn't a problem that gets solved once and for all.

38: At least they didn't shoot the kid.

ummm...they DID shoot the kid, they just didn't kill him.

I'm still frustrated. I know gswift is out, but his response still rankles. He is essentially saying "If only they had institutionalized this kid like they should have, then we wouldn't have been forced to shoot him!" which makes the (obviously wrong) assumptions that a) the kid should have been institutionalized, and b) they were forced to shoot him.

A) Institutionalization should be a last resort option. I have a hard time believing that it was called for in this case.
B) A pair of big strong brave cops should be able to restrain a small 13 YO boy without having to resort to firearms. Non-athlete teacher's aides and nurses restrain kids like this on a daily basis without major injury to themselves or the child (mild injuries a plenty, especially for the adult involved, bit still). I feel like the cops are not as brave or as strong as they claim to be--if they are "forced" to use guns on a 13-year-old child, then it seems to me they are weak and cowardly.

40: I think in 38 (gensym) is saying that at least the mental health crisis intervention teams, which ajay in 37 deemed "utterly useless," didn't shoot the kid.

The reaction of gswift throughout the thread was anticipated by 1.

I am open to hearing what the crisis teams actually achieved on their multiple visits in this case.

How many tries do they get before shooting somebody is the next option?

Three.

Can't we at least say the police system is broken for shooting 13-year-olds?

There aren't mobile crisis units where I live but I have friends who've used them with their kids. What they do varies a lot by region but it's mostly triage, deciding whether a child can go inpatient if there's a bed available somewhere, which there often isn't. Short-term inpatient is mostly for testing and medication adjustment, though near us at least the autism units tend to keep kids longer and assess them more thoroughly than IQ/basic psych/speech evaluations that the regular psych inpatient hospital does. How long "short-term" is depends on insurance. One daughter's insurer didn't like to pay for more than three days including any time spent elsewhere waiting for a bed to open, so the time after the one where I had a concussion her doctor there deliberately tapered her medicine slowly so they could get more time from insurance because they needed 48 hours to track side effects. I think that got us to about five days, which did get her back to stabilized and out of acute crisis but didn't do anything about longer-term or deeper challenges.

The more severe alternative is a residential treatment center or a group home, though it's often really hard to find the latter for younger teens who are violent AND have other diagnoses. Again, you'll need to get insurance to agree to pay or else be able to pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. Sometimes parents are forced to sign over custody to the state if a child is in RTC too long because that way Medicaid will cover more, but whether this counts as neglect/abandonment depends on the state.

I hear about a lot of crisis teams who release children as soon as they deem a crisis to be over, so if the child says they're no longer a danger to themselves or others, that's the end of the intervention. (This is often the case here, where triage gets done in the ER. And that's even when I think we may well get treated better than the norm because of the visible race/adoption dynamic at play.)

I won't call the police and haven't had to do so since Nia was eight and it was part of her case plan because I was still a foster parent. That was terrifying even though the police were fine and got her onto a stretcher and to the ER without upsetting her too much because I talked her through the whole thing. If we had done what we usually do and waited for her to be safe enough for me to drive her (and sometimes siblings, which is not ideal) to the ER, the outcome would have been similar. Better, really, because I always drive to the children's hospital that feeds into the good psych unit, whereas our local hospital sends kids to a depressing and inadequate mental health center and once you call for an ambulance here it's up to the drivers whether they let you choose which hospital you want or just drive to the nearest.

There are support groups too, for parents and young people. There are wraparound services where case managers will come to your home and to school to try to get everyone on the same page to support the child and family and come up with a safety plan. (Safety plans that rely on kids being able to self-regulate are a joke. Every time we're given one, I ask the provider to note that my child has never before adhered to a safety plan and I don't have any expectation that that will change. I can do my part, surveillance of various things and locking up knives and medicine, notifying providers when I see problems. But I can't make her go take deep breaths or make better choices when upset. If I could or she could, we wouldn't be in the ER. But that's all we get a lot of the time.)

So anyway, I don't know what went on. I don't know what Utah crisis response teams are like. I've heard a lot of bad stuff about SLC mental healthcare for teens. There aren't a lot of good options out there. Having the police shoot 13-year-olds isn't an acceptable one either.

"Social services must do better before the police have a reason to shoot more children" seems like the kind of argument that reflects more poorly on the police than social services, but what do I know?

You can't do "the thin blue line protecting society" and "behave or you'll get shot and have to listen to why it's your fault" at the same time.

I don't think gswift's comment on this boy is as bad in isolation, without the past few months of arguments coming along with it. I hear his words as saying "Our system is horrendously ill-equipped to deal with a boy who is slamming his foot down on the accelerator, determined to drive off the cliff."

I don't want a system where this boy gets shot, full stop. I also don't want a conversation where we pretend that the detail of being violent and obsessed with guns is irrelevant.

I should really really just leave here but I also don't want a conversation where we pretend that the detail of being violent and obsessed with guns is irrelevant needs to be in the mix as a critique of the police, who are adults and do this for a living.

The mother in this case called (according to her press interview) and asked for a crisis team rather than police.

Linden's mother, Golda Barton, has said in an interview with KUTV that she is the person who called police and asked for a crisis intervention team, also known as CIT, because her son was having a mental breakdown and needed to go to the hospital. She said she told the officers on the phone that her son was not armed, but was yelling and screaming because he's a kid and wants attention but doesn't know how to regulate.

For some reason, the police arrived instead. (Or, possibly, the police would have arrived anyway because you always get police along with a CIT as part of the package?) In any case they didn't get a CIT, they got police, who apparently thought the kid was armed and had been threatening people.

Horrocks told reporters near the scene of the shooting that officers had been told the juvenile, whose age he did not disclose, had made threats to someone with a weapon. "Our officers came into the area and, given the threats with a weapon, they arrived and made contact with the male," Horrocks said. "He fled on foot away from the address and, during a short foot pursuit, an officer discharged his firearm, striking that subject."

If everyone's telling the truth here, there are two culpable failures: first, the police arrived with completely the wrong picture of the situation; second, one of them shot an unarmed fleeing person in the back. (And shoulder and legs.)

I think it's reasonable to suspend judgement until we know what actually happened. But as I can't even get at newspaper reports (the SLC paper is GDPR-walled from here) I'd just say that I don't think we have the evidence to suggest that gswift or anyone else is actually in favour of shooting mentally disturbed teenage boys. Whatever happened was both horribly wrong in itself and probably the result of many other things going horribly wrong.

I think it's reasonable to say absolutely and with certainty that shooting an unarmed child is not justifiable.

1 to 52, yet again.

I think shooting fleeing, unarmed suspects is also clearly wrong. These are really low bars to chear. "Had made threats to someone with a weapon" as a justification without any information about when and how is bullshit. Basically every boy I ever knew growing up threatened other kids like that.

It's weird just how obsessed all cops are with victim blaming constantly. Someone smash-and-grabbed my bag from my car while I was in the Bay Area on sabbatical while I did a literally 5-minute errand at the grocery store at like 6pm. I called the police, who don't care since they happen too often for anything to be done about it, so you leave a message and many hours later a cop called to take the report. And of course the cop just has to lecture me about how this is my fault. And like, sure, I already felt dumb about this, what good is it doing for you to be obnoxious about it? And he honestly seemed like a nice friendly guy, it's just that the culture is victim blame all the time. Same thing when I got mugged, the cops wanted to lecture me about how it was my fault. And maybe they both were my fault, but it's still just such an inappropriate response.

I basically don't agree with 50. I think that police reform is essential and they are the agents of a massive amount of destruction. But in societies brimming with guns, police reform has to look different than in societies which have not developed a massive firearm problem. Gun proliferation and police reform are enmeshed issues.

If visibly not having a gun isn't protection against being shot because you have a gun, then gun proliferation is going to increase wildly.

You think that people are armed to the gills because they think police will shoot them? I don't think white Trump voters are using that logic.

No, I think people who might otherwise carry guns aren't doing so because they think it will give the police an excuse to shoot them.

I truly have no idea. Concealed carry is terrifying to me. (So is open carry, fwiw.)

The thing that scares me is how if the police shoot you, they have a PR person publicize everything bad you ever did or that they thought you ever did and that this is reported as factual.

A witness claims the OP death was a murder: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/10/reinoehl-portland-antifa-killing-police/

I have no interest in defending Michael Reinoehl's morality or judgment, but it does look like he was treated as if he had killed a cop. Basically a comprehensive manhunt ending with shooting him on sight, asking questions later. What he actually did was kill an extremist of the opposite political persuasion he thought was threatening to kill him or his friends. So compare that to how Rittenhouse was treated.

Yes. That's how I see it too. It's a revealing, but not surprising, confirmation of who is identifying with who.

Anyone in a similar situation (which I'm not endorsing - don't shoot people kids) really needs to go to another state or the border with Canada and surrender there.

It very much seems like this witness would be well-advised to do that as well, given how we know the cops have treated such witnesses in the past (harassment, jail, murder).

58-61: One of the things that the police said explicitly was "There was no indication that [the 13 YO] had a weapon, but there was no way to be sure." So they had to shoot him you see, because of Schrödinger's Gun.

To the cops, everyone--including kids--are treated as armed and dangerous until they can prove otherwise.