Opening fire in a train station puts many people at risk. Bullets go fast.
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I think the standard response in a country where ‘shoot first, shoot often’ isn’t the police motto, would be “contain the situation and wait for backup”.
Or they could have just forgone the handcuffs, grabbed an arm each, and just walked him to their car/van/etc.
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Have you considered looking at the example of, just perhaps, pretty much every other developed country in the world, in which the cops don’t routinely shoot people for petty offences?
This was not a hard call. It was not an unusually difficult situation. There was not the slightest hint of justification for the use of any violence whatsoever, let alone deadly force. Even an arrest would be an over-the-top reaction; this was an “offence” that calls for a warning, or at most a small fine.
If you are anywhere close to arguing that the police actions here might be justified, then you’re either completely brainwashed or a dedicated authoritarian bootlicker.
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Honestly, this is what CPD does best: putting ‘civilians’ at risk in their quest to kill as many black men as possible.
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I don’t know, they seem about average for cops these days. Shoot first, do your job later, if at all. The guy’s lucky he wasn’t killed, as are the other people at the station where these two dumbasses decided to play Dirty Harry.
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Did you read the rest of my comment?
Nice job cropping the quote to fit your narrative.
Likewise, the Taser was already out of line. (Make no mistake, a Taser is deadly force: it’s a ‘less lethal’ weapon, not a ‘nonlethal’ one.)
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The law could be justified on the grounds that a suicidal violator, or even a careless scofflaw, could easilyconceivably derail the train with his corpse, injuring or killing innocent passengers, and making ‘suicide by train’ into ‘combined suicide and manslaughter.’ However you feel about a person’s right to choose their own exit, they do not have the right to take strangers with them.
It’s still a remote enough scenario that there’s absolutely no damn way that it justifies deadly force against violators, unless there’s an imminent threat. Someone standing between cars crying, “I’m going to jump and you can’t stop me, copper!” But the correct response is still to get the person some sort of psych intervention - a jury that isn’t composed of brainwashed authoritarians will return “not guilty by reason of insanity,” and the threat of punishment offers no deterrent to a would-be suicide.
(Edited to remove an inappropriate ‘easily’.)
“Easily??” Even if the train had been moving I have never heard of a train being derailed by hitting a human being.
There have been many cases of suicidal people who put themselves in the paths of trains, but the only ones I’ve heard of that resulted in derailments involved people stopping their cars on the tracks.
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Change accepted, thank you.
Including this part of your post:
Shooting him was obviously out of line
Doesn’t change the context that the entirety of the police interaction with this guy beyond writing him a ticket, maybe, is way beyond “out-of-line.” Asking, “what are they going to do, let him go?” isn’t a good look.
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What we don’t see are the events leading up to this incident. If they tried to issue a civil citation and he got combative, they have reason to detain him. Not shoot him, but detain him. What you have to think about is police write tickets for jumping between cars on a regular basis. Most of the time it doesn’t lead to an arrest or anything like this. So… something else happened here.
That’s the whole point. If you’re a police officer and you try to write someone a ticket and they resist, let it go. Letting the situation escalate to the point where you’re putting a nonviolent person in lethal jeopardy, not to mention anyone else in the surrounding area, you’ve fucked up.
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Shooting him was fucked up. We don’t know if he was nonviolent before this video.
You don’t think it would have been mentioned in the reporting that the guy reacted violently to being stopped? You think Chicago PD would be investigating the officers if the guy had attacked them for writing him a ticket?
Edited: Come on. Please stay in the realm of reality. The police escalated the situation, as they do 99% of the time when the encounter leads to violence, instead of deescalating it.
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Who’s not in the realm of reality? If the police escalated the situation 99% of the time, 99% of encounters with police would end in arrests or shootings. They don’t.
There’s this show in the UK called Fare Dodgers which is all about people dodging fares in the London Underground. I only watched a few episodes, but it appeared that Underground employees could hand out fines, but if someone actually ran, and no police were on hand to apprehend them, they just took an attitude of, “we can track them via Oyster card and cctv, so we’ll just get them some other day.”
There are definitely ways to catch people without violent means. Wish we could take that attitude (if not methodology) here.
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I edited my post to include the part that was implied, which is that the 99% referred to the times the encounter ends in violence. Evidence: US police have almost 100x the violent encounters with the public compared to other similar nations.
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They do if you’re not white.
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No, they don’t. Yes there is bias but the statistics (which are ALSO biased) show that is not the case.
