Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/25/jacob-blake-has-8-holes-in.html
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Attempted murder.
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Well, clearly he was resistin’
/s
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A whole summer of protest and unrest and these cops still couldn’t help themselves. A lot of work still to be done.
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Well one article said that the officers immediately offered medical aid after they shot him…
There is a reason I try to limit my reading on these incidents. Over feeding my own rage is not good.
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I’m surprised as hell he’s alive.
Godspeed on recovery as much as is possible.
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Arguably even more disturbing than the police brutality is just how many Americans see no problem with it because they think noncompliance is justification for deadly force (at least when it’s a black guy).
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They couldn’t help but go out of their way to attack, maim, and generally go on destructive, even murderous rampages in response to protests against police violence, so it’s pretty clear what their intentions are, going forward…
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Yeah, I assumed he had died. He’s damned lucky to be alive, assuming he stays that way - I can’t imagine he’s out of danger yet. But best-case scenario, one doesn’t get shot 8 times in the back, at close range, and ever fully recover.
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Obviously the real victims here are those brave police officers; when the target aggressively turned around and walked away from them without a weapon, they must have feared for their lives. 
Thank goodness they can rely on Qualified Immunity to protect them.
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This will not change until cops are no longer trained that “shoot to kill” is the default.
And yes, I’ve heard the arguments why they’re trained this way, to which I say boolsheets.
ETA: Using the hiring process to filter out the sadistic macho white supremacists couldn’t hurt, either.
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It isn’t bullshit. But there should be a MUCH higher threshold for using lethal force. For example, actual presentation of a weapons. Non-compliance should not be cause for lethal force.
If you made shooting them in a leg SOP, all you will end up with is a lot more people (especially minorities) shot in the leg. And probably more deaths as all you need to do is nick the femoral artery and they will have a good chance of bleeding out.
We need the use of lethal force to have consequences. Our soldiers in Iraq had more restrictive ROE and consequences than our police do. Certainly some police shootings are justified. But for those that are not, it should be career ending and jail time.
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I don’t pretend to know how you meant this statement, but with police weapons, shooting is always shooting to kill. Severing major arteries leads to bleeding out in moments, whether in the torso or extremities. Shooting at a person is 100% always shooting to kill. Not that it is always successful, but it is always potentially lethal and thinking of it any other way is just delusional.
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My local paper ran this story with no photos of the victim or even the officer involved, but with 30+ images of the protests, fires and violence. It’s like they’ve become tone deaf all over again to the reason behind the protests. We learned nothing from George Floyd, who died [checks notes] 3 months ago, today.
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I didn’t express myself as clearly as I could have; the model seems to be that shooting to kill is appropriate in situations where it clearly is not, such as a retreating suspect, one that is unarmed, one who presents no threat, or any combination thereof.
Also, the habit of fully unloading a weapon into another human being at point-blank range seems a little over the top.
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“appears to” 
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They know, once they start shooting, they’ll be in more trouble if the target survives.
For one thing, juries tend to award more money to survivors than to dead victims’ families.
And, if the victim dies, there are lots of people in society eager to agree that he had to die to keep everybody safe and hold civilization together. Killing people is a holy rite for worshippers of the State. But if he doesn’t die, and then civilization fails to collapse, then it’s a lot harder to argue that there was some good reason for trying to kill him.
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Presentation of a weapon should not sufficient for using lethal force, that is much too low a bar. Police need to be able to deescalate a situation so that most of those situations can be resolved without violence. And there’s videos out there that demonstrate that even US police is able to pull this off when white people have a gun. So they just need to train how to do that with black people, it appears.
I’d say only if a weapon is actually being used, lethal force can be justified. If that’s not ok with someone, they can’t join the police. That would solve it pretty fast.
That is a pretty strange argument. You have plenty of ways to die from a wound in the torso, and you don’t necessarily die from a hit in the femoral artery, so we would not have more deaths.
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if there were a “shoot to wound” policy, cops would eventually start shooting-to-wound in cases where they currently use tasers and pepper spray—which are also tools they are not supposed to use except in dire circumstances—and some of those people would bleed out
leading to more deaths
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