Ex-Cop who refused to shoot young black man sues city over his firing

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/st ... bdca61b335
"No good deed goes unpunished."

[AllanO]

Note this story is from last year (June or October?). As of February the lawsuit has been settled. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 334a960b1c

This whole thing was deeply disturbing in terms of punishing someone for doing the right thing.

[GloatingSwine]

This whole thing was deeply disturbing in terms of punishing someone for doing the right thing.

It's because he exposed the lie on which much of US police behaviour is founded. That police responders are in constant immediate danger and have to shoot first every time to save their lives.

Police responder is not even in the top 100 most dangerous jobs in the US. The only police role that is is highway patrol, and it's for the same reason that all the other most dangerous jobs are (time spent driving) not because of public interactions.

Fundamentally I suspect that the lack of any kind of national standards for policing are as much at fault as anything. US policing is fragmented into a hundred petty fiefdoms each with their own idea of behavioural standards and none of them with any form of independent oversight bodies.

That said, until proven otherwise on an individual basis members of the public in the US should treat police officers as volatile and hostile actors so as to avoid becoming a statistic.

[AllanO]

This whole thing was deeply disturbing in terms of punishing someone for doing the right thing.

It's because he exposed the lie on which much of US police behaviour is founded. That police responders are in constant immediate danger and have to shoot first every time to save their lives.

The thing is that is probably easily illustrated by comparing interactions where somebody gets shot by the police to all the occasions that start out the same but end without the police shooting anyone. The police interact with and even arrest far far more people than they shoot.

Anyway, this is precisely the sort of thing that makes it disturbing the reason they did it, both how screwed up that reason is (that cops should have basically unlimited discretion in deciding who to shoot) and how screwed up the reasoning is (the fact that the one cop did not shoot, does not on its own prove the other cops should not, treating it like it does actually draws attention to that evidence rather than refuting it).

Police responder is not even in the top 100 most dangerous jobs in the US. The only police role that is is highway patrol, and it's for the same reason that all the other most dangerous jobs are (time spent driving) not because of public interactions.

The thing is police (and other first responders) know there jobs are dangerous and take appropriate precautions or get appropriate equipment for the dangers they face (except I guess the highway patrol). Since the job description of garbage men or taxi drivers is not "run into burning building" or the like they do not get issued proper safety equipment or otherwise proceed with caution for their jobs which appear safe but actually have lots of risks associated. So it seems to me the issue may be more our underestimate of the dangers of quotidian professions rather than necessarily overestimating the risks to police (or fire fighters etc.).

That said, until proven otherwise on an individual basis members of the public in the US should treat police officers as volatile and hostile actors so as to avoid becoming a statistic.

Be careful not to make things sound too dire, the police interact millions of times with the public without shooting anyone. Based on the sort of statistical argument that police are not in that risky a profession, people in the US should put worries about being shot by the police far lower than worries about traffic accident or suicide or being shot by civilians or many of the most common fatal diseases considered separately (heart attacks, the two or three most common types of cancer, stroke and so on). They should rate being shot by police well above lightning strikes, dog attacks and other really rare events though. Of course there are considerations about what sort of situation you are in (being pulled over by a cop increases your probability of having a bad interaction) and the preventability of the problem (I would still guess there are more easily preventable traffic deaths than police shootings in the US though).

[Admiral X]

Note this story is from last year (June or October?). As of February the lawsuit has been settled. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 334a960b1c

This whole thing was deeply disturbing in terms of punishing someone for doing the right thing.

Yeah, and the really sad thing is that it isn't an isolated case. Another case I can think of off the top of my head was a female officer who responded to a welfare check call to find a mentally disabled man in a highly agitated state, and she actually managed to de-escalate the situation (like police always claim to be all for yet hardly ever actually do) and got the guy to calm down, when another officer from another department showed up and just tackled the guy, and then proceeded to start beating the crap out of him. The female officer physically intervened. Not long after, she was fired.

Police seem to have a very "us vs. them" mentality, and react very strongly when someone goes against the party line, so to speak (rather like the regressive left ). And yet there are those who insist that the police should be the only ones who are armed.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

AllanO, I'm with GloatingSwine on this one.

Be careful not to make things sound too dire, the police interact millions of times with the public without shooting anyone.

That's like saying "baristas interact millions of times with the public without poisoning anyone." It's not exactly reassuring, and it overlooks that police get special kudos for NOT murdering people on the job. I'd also wager most of those interactions involve people who are white, and who aren't deaf or neurodivergent. A lot of these end peacefully because so many people have learned, as a matter of survival, to treat police as dangerous animals who will kill with the slightest provocation.

You mention suicide, but the person in this example was trying to commit "suicide by police." The fact that our police are so bloodthirsty and bigoted that they can reliably be used as a method of suicide is itself cause for alarm.

I've seen posts from online companions who live in Australia or other nations, warning their compatriots about police in the USA. Warning them that you should NOT get out of your car if pulled over, because where they live, it is polite to do so, but where we live, if you dare to walk the twenty feet towards the officer these feral creatures will pull their guns on you.

[AllanO]

That's like saying "baristas interact millions of times with the public without poisoning anyone." It's not exactly reassuring, and it overlooks that police get special kudos for NOT murdering people on the job. I'd also wager most of those interactions involve people who are white, and who aren't deaf or neurodivergent. A lot of these end peacefully because so many people have learned, as a matter of survival, to treat police as dangerous animals who will kill with the slightest provocation.

Except GloatingSwine made the point that police were not justified in feeling threatened even if a couple of dozen are killed in the line of duty every year (since that does not make policing even in the top 100 most dangerous professions). If we apply your analogy/measure then if barristas were killing a couple of dozen a year (first result on google suggests 143 officers killed in the line of duty, of which 66 shot in a recent year in the US, so lets say barristas poisoned 66 people) I think you are saying we would be justified in being worried about them, treating them as hostile and volatile actors. In which case the police are justified in treating everyone else as hostile and volatile actors on the job given the rate of officers killed on duty. Therefore the police are justified in being so high strung given your barrista-poison level of threat, so they are behaving exactly as they should. Likewise US residents should be terrified of dogs and lightning storms. Therefore US residents should all live in a cocoon of fear and do nothing. I don't think that is what you meant, so you need to come up with a more consistent account of what you mean and how risk should be assessed.

My point is not that things are fine, I was actually saying they were dire, but less dire than GloatingSwine seemed to me to suggest. I was saying you should treat all police at all times as dangerous and hostile actors would be overdoing it, in the same way as the police treating the public as dangerous and hostile actors is overdoing it. You should try to treat situations as exactly as dire as they are not more or less dire (given our limited knowledge and mastery of statistics we are clearly going to fail to do that but we should be clear on the goal) and there are other contextual issues that determine how dire you take a situation to be (if a dog is friendly be less worried about a fatal dog attack then if it is barking and bearing its teeth and growling, if you are the dog catcher you should be more willing and able to deal with growling dogs and so on).

I can't say for sure because I can't find statistics or even anecdotes, but I am pretty sure the police in the US successful capture (or deescalate situations involving) armed and/or agitated individuals all the time without shooting or otherwise killing them, but when they do we rarely hear about it as it is a "plane safely lands" sort of story. I do know that after a police shooting of a guy with a knife here in Toronto, a paper published an opinion piece pointing out that just the week before the police managed to capture another knife wielding suspect without firing a shot etc. and suggested there were lots of such success stories for every such failure. Policing is certainly different in Canada and the US, but problems with over use of force and lack of accountability by police certainly come up here with sad frequency. So I am pretty sure the same kind of contrast could be made in the US (for every fatal take down we could find non-fatal take downs of similar suspects). Otherwise I expect the number of suspects fatally shot by police in the US would be not hundreds but tens of thousands. Also note that one unnecessary death would be too many and a reason for action, but how dire we should feel about the situation depends on its scope and particulars. There are not just two possible reactions (worried or not), there is a spectrum, I am saying we should calibrate our reaction to the severity (and other particulars) of the problem.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Let me reconsider my approach then.

The difference between the policeman who fears dying in the line of duty and the ordinary citizen who fears being riddled with police bullets is that, when a policeman is murdered, generally there is a concerted attempt at punishment of the guilty party. Policemen, on the other hand, can get away with murder quite easily even without bothering to hide it.

My problem is that the factor in deciding who gets out of a police encounter alive seems more predicated on the type of person you are than the risk you pose. I compare the incidents of well-armed, actively hostile white men neurotypical hearing brought in alive, vs. deaf, black, and/or autistic people killed for "resisting arrest" or "failing to respond", or because they are simply suspected of having a weapon in accordance with their second amendment rights.

My premise, supported at least anecdotally by the situation, is that police kill suspects not because they have to, but because they prefer to, and the machinery of the policing institution encourages this. Rather than weeding out bad apples before they spoil the barrel, as we see here, policemen who are good and non-violent are removed to stop the rest of the squad from looking bad.

[AllanO]

I came on a bit strong.

To attempt another explanation, to me there are two questions largely (but not completely) independent:
How morally outraged should we be about X?
How personally worried should we be about X?

We can be (abstractly) morally outraged (write letters to our politicians, go on marches, donate money to charity etc.) about something that is really rare or really common: for example if something is rare, but really easy to prevent it can be a grave injustice that we don't take that minimal action to prevent it as much if not more than something that is common but difficult to prevent/change.

I think I agree with you about how morally outraged we should be about the excessive incidence of police shootings, it is clearly unacceptable, the bad faith is pretty clear and it is clearly a matter where simple changes would at least greatly reduce the problem and the right changes might all but eliminate it (given it is more and less a problem in different countries or indeed at different jurisdictions in the US etc.). So we have every right and reason to be outraged about this and work to change it.

We should (ideally) only be personally worried about things in proportion to how common they are and that we can actually control. Where worry means taking actual action like locking your doors, wearing a safety belt, helmet. etc.

In terms of personal fear and worry, I agree the tendency of the US (and other places) police towards being trigger happy (excessive use of force etc.) is certainly a cause for some worry and increased awareness, an awareness of the potential for police officers to be hostile and volatile actors sometimes and taking some actions (mostly how we interact with police during stops etc.). Perhaps it is a fine distinction but I don't think that means treating every police officer as an actually hostile and volatile actor, so I thought GloatingSwine was advising excessive worry/caution.

The position of the police with respect to cop killing and the like, is illustrative of the sort of give and take I am suggesting. So police are and should be morally outraged by cop killings, advocate for strict sentencing of cop killers etc. However, police should view the danger of being killed on the job in perspective, take appropriate precautions, follow best practice to react to potential threats with calm professionalism, not react to the potential danger by assuming everyone is a threat etc. as that is one way we end up with trigger happy cops.

Or at least that is how I think people should react to danger. To my mind excessive worry at best causes unnecessary stress, and at worse can actually make situations more dangerous, we all have to try and find a balance (although not as much is a stake for all people at all times).

There are more dimensions to this, the fact that minorities, marginalized groups and the like are at greater risk, should charge all our outrage, and for those affected it should illicit increased worry, but that worry should again be in proportion to the increased risk, not in excess of it (our outraged need not be in simple proportion to the increased risk).