Reminder that these are the guys who will prosecute a war on guns.
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It really never plays out that way for a city of any size. Beyond a certain point the city probably turns to self insurance anyway. The largest pretrial settlement so far for police violence was the for the murder of George Floyd. A look at big settlements in US police killings | AP News To put that in municipal budget perspective that is roughly a fifth of the amount of the city’s share of the US Bank stadium. If it is a more standard size settlement for a national news murder by cops it will fall between 5 and 10 million. They treat it like another line item.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it as revenge for disrespecting the cop by running. The excuse that they thought it was someone who fled makes no sense for those actions, but if you assume the cop was motivated by malice it makes perfect sense.
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Fairfax County. Yup. Gotta love it.
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Pension funds? You’re being too generous. They should be paid directly out of the bank accounts (and/or garnished wages) of the guilty parties.
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It is awful this kid is in the hospital. What a homicidal maniac this cop is to justify shooting by anything we see in this video, or any backstory shared in this comment thread.
Unfortunately if you are following this kind of thing you know there are many times something like this happens where there isn’t video evidence. And there must be many other examples that the public will never hear about.
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Of course not. The profession attracts sketchy people. And many (most?) are trained and acculturated to abuse their power. That’s the problem.
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thank god then that we don’t need a war on guns anymore than we need a war on drugs.
some things we do need: a ban on the manufacture of certain types of guns, regulation of the sale of guns and ammunition, regulation of ownership including mandating insurance and safety training, and gun buybacks.
as long as we start now, america will be a safer place in five to ten years. good laws and time are all that is required.
more on topic: it would be extremely helpful to defund the police and spin up organizations and policies which don’t require an armed response to everyday situations like this one.
guns kill people. fewer guns means longer lives. it’s a nice and simple equation.
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This is extremely good advice. Lock your doors the first thing you do when you get in your car. This very unfortunate victim might have had a different outcome if he had done that.
Absolutely no way. Cops are appalled by what he did. This was a terrible shooting. He’s going to be facing charges, although it will take quite a few months before there’s any visible movement on that.
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See, this makes absolutely no sense to me.
I can’t see any reason to prosecute the teen; and I see every reason to prosecute the cop. That the DA should have to consider this for a long time is insane.
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An individual doesn’t have the ability to pay a $5 million dollar judgement, a pension fund does. And once ALL the cops in a city start getting notices about how the behavior of some cops is affecting them financially hopefully recruitment and training methods change. Also, when these cops are fired, hopefully they’ll stay fired because the union (made up of cops) and other police departments don’t want shitty cops draining their retirement funds.
PS: I don’t believe for one second that anything like this will happen in my lifetime. I’m just sick of seeing something like this and knowing that, while the cop might lose his job and may even (1% chance) end up in prison, the people who trained and supervised this cop and create and maintain the environment to leads to these shootings won’t be affected, and any judgements to the kid will be funded by the taxpayer (including the kid’s family).
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If you want to see the right-wing cop analysis of this shooting, one created a training video to deal with individuals armed with lethal hamburgers, went out to the actual location, and then analyzed the whole thing including going over Tennessee vs Garner. Actually several right-wing cop influencers (yes that’s a thing) collaborated in this video, so this isn’t just one guy’s opinion.
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oh good 
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How do you figure that? What about the door being unlocked made the cop more trigger-happy?
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The door opening startled the driver, who then did something that made the car move. That startled the cop, who started shooting. Can’t we just given them ink sprayers, like cephalopods have, to give the cops time to escape and mark the person for later retrieval?
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And yet we hear about cops shooting people in cars with doors in every state: locked, unlocked, open, closed - every week or so. The two things that all the incidents have in common are: one or more cops and a BIPOC person in a car.
If the door had been locked, the cop would have knocked loudly on the window, which would have startled the driver, the car would have moved and the cop would have shot the kid.
Saying this would have been prevented if the kid had locked his doors is victim blaming.
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So you’re assuming here that the driver would not have been started by someone aggressively attempting to open a locked car door? That certainly would have startled me.
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The current murder rate says it all: if the threat of decades in prison or capital punishment isn’t enough to convince thousands of (non-cop) people to not murder civilians every year, why do you think the threat of less retirement income will convince dirty cops not to do so?
I’m not saying every individual has the ability to pay $5 million. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on the hook for it. After all, if an individual does $5 million worth of property damage, don’t they usually end up owing the property owner $5 million, whether or not they have that kind of money in the bank? Likewise, if a murder is slapped with a civil suit and told to pay $5 million to the victim’s family, then they owe $5 million, end of story (appeals notwithstanding). The only difference here is that cops murdering civilians should not have to rely on civil suits to be punished.
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