Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/25/tacoma-terror-cop-plows-through-crowd-in-police-suv.html
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In more civilised societies, attempted murder 'cos you’re afraid for your safety is attempted murder.
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This is in my area. The police in Tacoma have a history of hurting BIPOC and shooting them. It’s shocking to see, but not shocking to realize they will use whatever weapon they have.
The Tacoma based subreddit has been underseige from folks stating the false dichotomy that the cop could either sit amongst the throng of angry people, or drive through them. The folks parroting this don’t seem to think a third option to call for backup so he could, you know, have people removed safely from around his car, and then he could leave.
I don’t know what horrifies me more. That this happened, or that people really do think the cops were right in freaking out and slamming the gas pedal, sending pedestrians tot he hospital “because he felt unsafe.”
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So cops are not brave? Or maybe these are those rare “bad apples”.
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What horrifies me the most is that after so many violent acts from police, people still believe it when the cops say the motivation was “safety” rather than the much more likely conclusion that he wanted to hurt people and knew he could get away with it
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Is it just me, or is there nothing stopping him from backing out? They say he tried to back up, implying he couldn’t, but it really looks like backing up was always an option.
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Tacoma is calibrated to a different scale of police misconduct than what most people expect…
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See, he heard there were donuts and got excited.
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Yeah, there certainly seems to be a lot fewer people, at the very least, behind the vehicle. And all that’s a separate issue from driving into a crowd at high speed, making it impossible for people to move away.
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Yeah, he didn’t run anyone over when he backed up so that plan had to be abandoned.
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I see they’ve decided to revise their initial description of the event as “people falling to the ground as the SUV speeds up through the crowd.”
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Or prevent the entire situation by waiting for backup before confronting a group of possibly irate people. He was using his car for intimidation. He shouldn’t have done that. Maybe stop a bit further out, write down some license plate numbers, record with the dash cam, and just wait for backup.
**caveat: I didn’t watch the video. It would be a bad idea for me tonight.
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I responded to the people saying that the cop feared for his life by posting a story where a cop who had every right to fear for their life DIDN’T drive through the people, pull out a gun, or injure anyone at all!
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Cop culture in the US is all about fear. They train to feel tough while they are scared to death, and the training often increases their fear as they talk about “the most important thing is that that you come home safe” instead of, you know, the most important this is that you protect people’s lives.
They need guns, because their job is the most dangerous thing ever. (Text in italics has been proven false through multiple studies and publicly available data.)
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The fear is not really what they are actually feeling. The fear is what they are trained to say when “testilying” about their use of deadly force. They must use exactly those words in order to defeat the constitutional protections of their victims.
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He wanted to be able to visually confirm his kill count. That would have been impossible if he was trying to drive at his victims backwards.
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Fucker should have just jumped off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It’s the decent thing for someone like him to do. If we’re lucky we don’t even have to clean up his nasty pig corpse.
It’s true that they generally are using the “I feared for my life” defense as a lame cop-out. But it’s also true that the killology training and lectures the departments and unions are sending them to constantly teach cops to be fearful and ready to panic in every situation they’re in.
It’s a fact that “warrior” training and killology are all about keying pigs up, making them feel like they’re an occupying force in a hostile environment (essentially that’s what they are anymore anyway) and to not respect anyone or be understanding. They are trained to treat everyone they interact with outside their little police force tribe as either an enemy combatant, or if you happen to be some rich fuckwit they’re trained to act like knights pledging fealty to their lords.
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This was a good option as well.
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Good for you! I can’t imagine being anxious about your safety as an excuse. My first career was in nursing with people that were often dangerous. We had patients you literally could not turn your back on. I have been jumped by patients double my size. Yet, my entire staff dealt with it professionally, with care for the patient. If we hadn’t, we’d have been fired and had to defend our actions to keep our licenses.
I don’t get why, if a staff of nurses and NAC’s dealing with quite literally the same people the cops routinely run into, just in an in patient psych setting, can do this, why the cops can’t as well.
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