I haven’t watched the video and I’m not going to, but I’d heard that the kid was refusing to show his hands while shouting “I don’t want to live anymore.” Is that correct? It does seem harder to blame police for an obvious, intentional suicide-by-cop.
Thank’s for the invite :). I love Australia and hope to visit again some time. My understanding is that immigration is difficult unless you are wealthy though .
Or skilled. And if you’re skilled and prepared to work your arse off in the outback for a few years, it might not even cost you anything.
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You don’t know how one can compare the two? Two white dudes, each reaching for weapons they might have but never pulled or aimed towards police, each ignoring officers commands, and each shot dead? Gee, how could one compare the two, let me just ponder that one…
Things don’t have to be exactly the same to be comparable. And where there are differences, we can talk about them and how they might affect whether one was a justified shoot and the other not. You remember those “compare and contrast” essays assigned in high school? We can use the to situation to consider police training and procedures, and to consider whether we are consistent in our judgement of police, or whether we are inclined to give them a pass when someone who’s politics we disagree with is shot.
Right, which is why you are fixating on the narrowest possible comparison to prove your “point” while ignoring the drastically different overall picture of the two situations. You’re so hell bent on proving someone’s perception has to do with politics, that you reduce the situation to the one thing you see the same about both of them.
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I am so happy to take part in your political test, especially since we have fuck all idea about some randomly pulled over 19 year old’s politics. Or the politics of the cops for that matter. Go high five yourself for being so clever!
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I pointed out the commonalities, ones you have not rebutted, and suggested a compare and contrast. If there is fixation happening it is on your part, refusing to knowledge that there are actions in common in the two situation.
Oh fuck all. I said there were actions in common, but there was a bigger picture difference. That should mean something in an analysis of the two situations.
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Please, I apply this to me as well. I thought the shoot of Finicum was justified given what he had promised to do, which was to not be taken alive (a difference, as tropo would point out, between the two situation). This shoot might be justified as well. In this case the cops knew nothing about the state of mind of the person they pulled over or whether he was armed. So, they had to read the situation based entirely on his actions. But, I ask myself, would I consider the shooting someone I agreed with instead of Finicum justified? I think so, but we are all prone to unconscious bias. It’s why I bring up this very handy comparison so we can look at these shootings from different perspectives.
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Except that only one of them claimed to be armed and there wasn’t any evidence to suggest that the Fresno victim had a gun; one was part of an armed takeover of federal property, one was sitting in his truck.
Yeah, the two situations are completely comparable.
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Please quote where I said it was “completely comparable.”
I realize arguing against something I never said is easier than arguing against what I did say, however it is bad form and a logical fallacy.
Strikes me that there’s a few commentators in this thread who were apparently never teenagers.
I wasn’t so lucky to make the magical jump from 12 to 22. I unfortunately had to be a teenager. And I recognise that dance of frustration. The same dance of frustration you perform when you consider yourself a grown-ass adult, and your mother won’t let you out to party until your room’s tidy. The same dance you perform when just everything’s going wrong today, one thing after the other, and your emotions are still a little too tectonic to allow it to all just flow over you.
I’ve been that kid so many times. I was a bit of a dick as a teenager. Luckily for me, however, we don’t have the death penalty for that here.
No, he probably shouldn’t have been driving if he was so emotionally charged. And if they’d let him live a few years longer, he’d have learnt to recognise that. But they were ready to shoot before they stopped him - and it should be their job, their duty and their training to recognise when the hunt has left them hopped up on red mist.
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Agree all the way. Except the kid was pulled over because the cops were looking for a man on foot with a rifle. Not for a traffic violation or car chase or anything.
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Glad you’ve redefined the topic to your narrow focus. Since no one wants to play, how about moving on before it gets flagged as off topic?
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Too late.
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My intent was to provide a point of reference. I think principles are the things we stick to even when it’s hard to do - and which many conservatives abandon as soon as it’s convenient as we see in the case of all the evangelicals who are voting for Trump (for which I consider them unprincipled). So in these instances we have a chance to compare whether or not our instincts to protect people who *don’t pull guns on cops" and get shot are the same across multiple situations.
He did not cooperate with any of their orders. Once he got out of the car (against orders), he walked around in an agitated way, holding one arm partly behind his back as if he was holding something. Finally, he started advancing on the officers despite repeated orders to stop and being told repeatedly that they would shoot if he did not stop. They let him get dangerously close before one of them fired two shots. On the ground, he continued to ignore orders to keep his hands out where they could see them, and repeatedly tried to reach under his shirt at his waist, as if he was trying to reach a gun. He got shot once more with the pistol, then the guy with the shotgun - after literally pleading with him to stop reaching for whatever it was - fired one shotgun shot at him.
If I had to guess, I’d say he was on drugs and not in his right mind. They did not find a gun or any other weapon on him, just a pill bottle.
Yes, for a traffic violation. They may have been looking for a pedestrian with a gun, but they went after him because he “peeled out” from an intersection, right in front of them. That’s on the audio inside the squad car at the beginning of the video.
