There’s one problem with your argument: the dead twelve-year-old kid.
Suppose the police officer really thought it was either him or the kid - of course most people would value the kid’s life more, and those people who would value their own life more probably shouldn’t be trusted with police work.
Why would they value the kid’s life more? By all appearances this kid was armed and potentially a deadly threat. You tell me you’re going to just stand there and die, leaving your wife a widow and kids with out a daddy?
Like it or not, there are 12 year olds running around with guns in drug gangs. They start even younger as look outs, go-betweens, and holding on to product for the dealers. In even more fucked up areas (like Africa) they have child soldiers running around with AKs.
This is nothing new. When I was a kid there were stories about kids getting shot because of toy guns. I remember when Lazer Tag was a fad, it lead to one kid getting shot. This is one reason why toy guns now have orange tips, and most toy makers, like Nerf, make them in bright colors and clearly make them look like toys.
Of course you can paint a water gun, or in the case of Airsoft or BB/Airguns, they look very much like real guns, especially with the tips removed/painted. Where were the parents and parenting? Did he get this airsoft gun from them? If so, why was he allowed to use it unsupervised? Why didn’t they teach him to respect and obey armed police? Even as a 5 year old we knew never to point a toy gun at adults, period.
It was a tragic incident, but I find it very hard to fault a cop given that scenario.
Absolutely, it’s a shitty place to be.
And I completely acknowledge that a kid with a gun can kill someone just as quickly and just as dead as a grownup with a gun.
But we humans have it hardwired into us to recognize when we are facing a child. More generally, every mammal can recognize the juveniles of every other mammal.
When a cop’s training overrides their hesitation to kill a juvenile, I don’t think they need to be a cop anymore. More generally, if police training creates a pattern of reaction that can ignore protection of kids, something really awful is going on.
Serve and Protect has become Survive and Punish.
My further suspicion, entirely unverifiable, and at this point just another awful burden of sadness, is that a white kid would not be dead.
Even if he behaved in exactly the same way, he would still be alive, because the police officer would not have been quite so primed for violence.
Edit to add: Or the person who made the 911 call would have been more inclined to declare it a fake gun and stick to that story when the dispatcher asked about it. Or they wouldn’t have actually made the 911 call, but walked over to the kid and investigated themselves. Or… Or… Or…
A lot of people, including the kid, contributed to the horrible storm of mistakes that resulted in his death. Still, I can’t help but wonder if that perfect storm of awful wouldn’t have been broken up if he’d just had lighter skin.
You just fulfilled the first rule of law enforcement: Make sure when your shift is over, you go home alive.
I think the Police take this to heart. Keep themselves safe first and foremost. I don’t want to see police officers getting killed, obviously, but they’re given a tremendous amount of power and it behooves them to act in a way that means they are assuming the risk, not the members of the public they interact with. That’s their job, it’s what they signed up to do, it’s what they’re paid to do. Do not fire until fired upon.
Because kid. Whole life ahead. Which isn’t a perfect reason, because life expectance could also be abused to choose an abled kid over a disabled kid, a privileged kid over an oppressed kid, etc. but it is probably a good-enough reason for most people.
Because an adult choosing to take on risks is different from a kid choosing to take on risks without the same awareness.
I see your point if it’s an adult running into a burning building to try to rescue a child, or putting yourself in harms way for a child. I’m a father and would do that for my kid in a heart beat.
Letting a kid do violence to you because he is a kid isn’t acceptable in my book. Some people are irreparably broken by that age. It’s rare, but you read about young kids assaulting and killing other kids or even adults.
Or at the very least, it was his bad decisions that brought him to this point. Maybe he would have straightened out, or maybe he would have gone on to do even worse things. I’m not willing to gamble my life on that though. It is a fucked up scenario but one I have a hard time faulting someone for reacting that way to.
You may want to see this.
Warning: shows Tamir Rice getting shot.
Except… that’s not really the situation. Nobody’s suggesting he should have said “Oh, it’s a kid… okay man, shoot me.” He should have been willing to take more of a risk. Most shots fired by POLICE miss, much less kids (yes, they’ve got video game experience and generally better reflexes, but they also typically don’t train on real firearms). He should have been willing to, instead of firing right away, duck for cover and try to reason with the kid (in this case, from what I see on the video, the problem might have been averted by not driving right up to practically point blank range). At the very least, waiting more than a few seconds (it’s hard to determine the exact timeframe because the video’s runtime is compressed, but judging by the walking rate, I can’t imagine it’s much more than that). Yes, it may end in tragedy, the kid may be inherently broken, a total sociopath. That’s what the word risk means. He also might have just been a stupid kid who didn’t quite get how his actions would be interpreted. I have a feeling that’s far more likely than evil murderous kid.
So if a kid is in that burning building and freaking out and flailing everywhere because he doesn’t know how to react to a fire (or maybe has developmental problems), should you not grab him because he might hurt you? What if a kid is up a tree or something and got scared and stuck there, he’s not moving at all, but he MIGHT be so freaked out that if you try to help him, he’ll kick at you. Even walking into a building carries a risk that a kid might attack you (particularly if you’re using a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night in the wrong house)… if you’re a police officer, you should be willing to accept some risk, and a little more when a kid’s life is on the line. Even if the risk comes from the kid himself.
I’ll have to watch the video later. I can’t comment on this specific incident being reasonable or not, only that when presented with the scenario I find it understandable and that the age of the perpetrator isn’t a reason to not react. It happens at least a few times every year.
Your other examples of someone being less than cooperative during a rescue I don’t think works as an analogy. Indeed I know people who are trained to rescue drowning people learn how to avoid being drowned by the person they are trying to help. But the intent or perceived intent is totally different. These cops got a call about a guy pointing a gun at people, so they aren’t going in with a rescue mentality either.
That’s the crux of the issue in that case. The short range meant that there was too little time to make a sensible decision. In a country which doesn’t arm their police, the approach would have been more thoughtful and circumspect …
Maybe they should be. I’d certainly be happier with a police force that goes in with a mentality of “every incident is a potential rescue situation” rather than “we’re in a warzone” combined with “catch the criminals at all costs.” Again, especially where a kid’s involved.
And sure, there is a difference between somebody in a fire who’s being less than cooperative and a person with a gun. But perceived intent is a hell of a thing to base a death sentence on, particularly for a kid. Actual intent, at least as far as we can determine, was not for the kid to harm anybody (although we’ll never be able to know for sure, now, his side of what was happening). Approaching the situation more cautiously may well have helped resolved the situation. Nobody (as far as I’m aware) was reported actually being shot, and, at the moment the police arrived, the gun was in his waistband (because he had to reach for it… at least, according to the cops. He might have merely meant to point at it and say, “It’s just a pellet gun, officer.” He might have reached for his ID, knowing it would be asked for (like the guy who got shot going back into his car for his registration). Or he might have meant to grab it out of fear that, as a black youth, the police might well be trying to kill him. Perceived intent is a hell of a thing, and if we excuse it of cops, let’s excuse it of people that cops disproportionately harass and kill, too… and regardless of actual intent, if that was what was in his head… he was closer to the mark than the cops were).
I’m not saying I don’t understand the cop’s instinctive “he’s going for his gun!” freakout (particularly when the dispatcher did not pass along the information that it was believed to be a toy gun), I don’t think these are necessarily evil guys… I’m saying they should not go in with the mindset that their lives are more important than a kid who’s a POTENTIAL (but not confirmed) threat and might well not understand all that’s going on.
After all, ANY criminal is a potential threat. If the ‘kid caught in a fire’ is a poor analogy, how about a kid spray-painting a wall. He might well be a gang-banger and packing heat, so if he makes a move that looks like it’s reaching for something in his coat, do we excuse the cops under the theory that this was a criminal and he shouldn’t have been allowed to risk the cop’s life, even though the cop’s life wasn’t actually at risk. Or a kid who’s just been caught buying drugs, and his first (stupid) instinct is to toss the drugs in the bushes so it’s not on him, only the drugs are in his pocket, where a weapon might be. Or somebody who’s running for the cops and suddenly turns around… maybe he’s giving up and surrendering, maybe he’s going for a weapon. Should all these kids potentially forfeit their lives just because, in the murky world of perceived intent, the cop saw harm?
That’s not a police shooting. That’s a fucking execution o_0
Presented without comment:
Holy smoking conflict of interest, Batman!
How can this not result in prosecution? This ought to get him disbarred, at the least.
I wonder if the double-jeopardy rules apply to grand jury proceedings?
So, there are others who work on a daily basis with people who are violent and deranged - people who are threatened, spat at, punched, scratched, kicked, charged, swung on, verbally abused, assaulted with weapons and bodily fluids, and violently resisted on the regular: Nurses, orderlies, counselors, doctors, therapists, gerontological assistants, home health care aides, and other professionals who work with severely mentally ill people, and elderly people with dementia, in residential, day treatment, and lockup settings.
Strangely, none of them carry guns. None of them, other than the doctors, get paid anything near to what cops get paid, or get the kind of perks and benefits available through the police union. Even though many of them get injured regularly on the job and wind up with bodies too broken and abused to do their work any more, none of them have retirement plans that start at 55. Many of the orderlies and GAs and other “line staff” don’t even have much in the way of sick days, or insurance, or access to “desk job” positions if they’re injured in the line of duty (or if they get PTSD so badly they can’t work directly with patients any more.) Most home aides work longer hours, with few or no breaks, than any reasonable person should have to work. Many of them, by the way, are women and men of color who get off work and then get to head home hoping they don’t “fit the profile.”
Sometimes severely mentally ill people, and elderly people, do get injured or even killed by the people who are supposed to be caring for them. But I’d bet dollars to donuts that the rate is nothing like the rate of police shootings of black men.
You’re probably right on a lot of counts. As noted elsewhere it is a big problem in many areas that people start in gangs very young, often still while they are in the single digits. There are a lot of tween and teen gang members who carry real firearms and commit heinous crimes. In many areas being a juvenile is not necessarily the best indicator of harmlessness.
I agree that melanin content probably has a lot to do with being shot in this situation or not. However, I would also have to wonder whether there is at least correlation that these shootings tend to happen in less affluent areas with gang issues, where there is juvenile involvement in gang activity. Also, I’d have to wonder what the racial makeup of the local gangs were…
To be honest, I fault the person who called, and especially the dispatcher in this case. The person clearly introduced some question about whether the gun was real or not, but wasn’t consistent in that information or doubt, and the dispatcher did not pass on this essential piece of information to the officer responding to the call. If the dispatcher had said something along the lines of “we’ve got a call about a kid with a realistic looking gun in the park, the caller isn’t sure if it’s real or a toy, please check”, I imagine that the outcome may have been a bit different.
The fact is, regardless of age, if you pull something that looks real on someone armed (cop or not), you’re likely to get shot. The instinct for self preservation will win out over protection of others almost every time. And while it’s nice to dream that every cop should put the lives of the public over their own, it simply isn’t going to happen, it’s not consistent with human nature.
Me, I’ll be happy if they just stop acting like power hungry, abusive, and egotistical dicks.
Wow, that seems to change things a bit doesn’t it. Without the audio, it’s hard to know if the story about ordering a “hands up” is true or not (if it was issued over the patrol car’s loudspeaker for instance). The super short amount of time sure makes it seem like they just rolled up on him and shot him.
The video seems to show a different story than the one the officer tells (which may not be entirely surprising…).
Except, you know, with people who value other people’s lives. One would hope that would be almost all people. Not no people.
I’d absolutely love to live in a world where you can depend on almost all people sacrificing themselves for an unknown other person. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world where everyone is so noble. That’s not to say that they don’t exist. They do seem few and far between though.
Not charged means they can charge him in the future as long as the statute of limitations. Which for a cop killing some random black dude, may be only a few months. I’m not an expert.
But TV tells me that if the grand jury doesn’t charge, the jeopardy doesn’t reach (1), and that makes sense. Of course there’s the virtual double jeopardy of the (drive-time-radio) people complaining that the police account being a fabrication shouldn’t count, the prosecutor already had their shot, so any other outcome is just a reflection of the way the country is changing due to immigration. Or something.
