Utah cop executes unarmed man who was listening to headphones, gets away with it

boing
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It’s an unfortunate aspect of reality, if you do something really dumb in any situation, particularly making yourself seem threatening when there’s armed men pointing guns at you, then you can end up dead.

I didn’t think the victim was brown in this case, which is ironic because I think it’s the first of these scenarios in which I think the cop acted appropriately.

And 1-6 are critical because they demonstrate it’s nothing to do with non-compliance, it’s about a suspect being openly defiant with guns pointed at him, then making a set of motions that look exactly like he was drawing a gun.

A question to both of you, how do you think the cop acted inappropriately in this case? What should he have done different? Keep in mind if the suspect did have a gun and was intending to fire then the cop was in a shoot or be shot scenario.

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Maybe he was brown maybe not, I don’t watch cop porn. But when the rate at which cops shoot brown people dead is 21 times as high as otherwise you can expect they’ll eventually start treating all persons that way.

Defiant is a direct synonym of noncompliant. They are completely interchangeable, your statement makes no sense.

Your question is predicated on a fantasy, the person was not armed, the officer saw no weapon. Your question is 100% pointless, but the officer probably had a spray of one kind or another, hand to hand training and grappling experience and far and away more experience at both, and backup available to assist in any measure.

As for some anonymous person claiming there was a gun present, so what, there are as many guns present as people in the US. If LEO’s didn’t learn from Tamir Rice that shooting first and asking questions later is wrong then they should be forced to keep order without weapons for a time.

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Who determines what “seems threatening”? It can be as little as doing anything the scared bully with gun does not expect, and there’s no way to know what he expects.

He should have delayed pulling the trigger until knowing reasonably well that there is an actual danger there.

Keep in mind the cop usually has a backup cop ready to unleash a swarm of lead wasps at the wannabe at-cop shooter (“cop shooter” has too many meanings here, “at-cop shooter” is a better qualifier). The cop usually also has body armor and other amenities, significantly increasing the chances of survival. Also keep in mind that actually hitting something without much aiming from even modest distance, without training, is quite a hit-or-miss affair, which further reduces the cop’s level of risk.

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Looked white to me.

Non-compliant is me not doing something because I don’t want to.

Defiant is me not doing something because I want to defy you.

I’m guessing you didn’t watch the video then because both spray and grappling would have been useless.

A person who’s been acting defiant turns around, says “No Fool”, then brings his hands out like he was pulling something from his belt. That’s threatening.

If I was walking around and saw someone acting like the guy from the video my first thought would probably be he has a gun.

Would you be willing to do so? If I thought I saw a guy drawing to shoot me I don’t think I’d want to risk giving him a first shot.

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If this is threatening for a scared little copper, he should not be in the streets and instead go home to his mom.

And what would you do? Shoot and take a life without chance to undo it? Or duck, cover, jump to the ground or do other defensive action of reversible nature?

Or not. In vast majority of such cases there is no gun. Many end up without shooting, too.

Besides, you should know the community you are patrolling. Then you’ll be better able to gauge the level of risk from a given person.

If you aren’t willing to do so, you have no business to be a cop.

To answer your question, I’d go for passive defensive countermeasures. Duck, cover, expose the parts covered with ballistic vest instead of the softer ones. You usually have a wide range of defensive actions.

Who shoots first is to blame.

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Synonymous, but not directly so. Defiance is active, while non-compliance is passive. Throwing rocks at riot police is defiant. Sitting in the road singing “We will not be moved” is non-compliant.

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What’s wrong with a taser?

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Or a spray, or a hold, or a punch, or a tackle, or god forbid, a de-escalation.

Or a hundred other responses besides deadly force to the head.

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How sad is it that we’re longing for racist police to just use somewhat lethal methods on the innocent people they’re harassing?

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Not quite. People are longing for racist cops to be held accountable, and not use deadly force for every little incident. There are other options first.

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I’d run but I’m not a cop. And there’s no action here that reliably leads to zero deaths. If the cop shoots the suspect probably dies, if the cop runs there’s a substantial (though smaller) chance the cop dies, or an innocent bystander who’s caught in the crossfire.

How do you know that the cop didn’t do exactly what you suggest, and anyone who knew the suspect and saw him acting like that would have assumed he was packing?

Tasers have two big problems. One they’re not very reliable so they’re not something you’d rely on in a gun fight. Second they tend to be used as a compliance tool against non-violent subjects.

In my opinion they only thing they’re good for is dealing with a violent suspect who don’t have a gun.

Using a taser while he was walking away is bordering on excessive force.

Using a taser when it looked like he was pulling a gun means a good chance it won’t work (and the suspect gets a free shot) or the suspect spasms and fires off a random shot.

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If saving time is really as valaluable to you as you claim, you could have just shortened your contribution to this conversation with simply #NotAllCops…

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So, if all DA’s apply this thinking to every single police shooting. There is absolutely nothing to stop a cop from getting out of his car, yelling at you from behind to comply with a command. And as soon as you fail to comply with said command within one second, the cop can just shoot you down because the cop “reasonably perceived a threat.” And my one friend at work wonders why have absolutely no trust for the police force at anymore. This video pushed me past the point where I am now going to get a concealed carry license and personal body armor. When push comes to shove, I’m going to be the one that ends up being alive and not being in the body bag.

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so clearly shooting him to death was the better choice.

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To a copologist who is actively pretending this was a gunfight? Yes.

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There was no weapon, the victim was a pathetic homeless young person moving away from the officer who had a drawn weapon and several backup officers and nothing but an anonymous tip.

Therefore, any form of non-lethal detention or de-escalation would have reliably led to zero deaths excluding death in custody due to strangulation or beating.

That’s putting aside the fact that police regularly take armed suspects into custody, even defiant or noncompliant ones. Especially when they have the drop on them and overwhelming tactical advantages.

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You can make a good decision and get a horrible result.

The question is whether the officer reasonably thought it was about to become a gunfight.

Which is not this case.

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it seems to me that there is no set of circumstances for which you couldn’t justify a police killing of an unarmed individual. i get it, you are convinced to a moral certainty that the poplice can do no wrong and therefore any police shooting of any civilian under any circumstances will be defended by you. i truly hope you never find yourself on the wrong end of a police officer’s gun and learn how wrong your convictions are. no one should suffer death at the hands of the police or anyone else when they are unarmed and represent no real threat.

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[quote=“navarro, post:141, topic:59088”]
it seems to me that there is no set of circumstances for which you couldn’t justify a police killing of an unarmed individual.[/quote]

Wrong. I think there’s some cases where the cop should be charged with murder. I think there’s cases where the cop did what they had to do. And I think there’s cases where the cop did the right thing but got a horrible result.

For most of the bad cases I think the cop should be charged with murder except that many policing cultures are so dysfunctional that you’d be charging them for doing their jobs as expected.

[quote=“navarro, post:141, topic:59088”]i get it, you are convinced to a moral certainty that the poplice can
do no wrong and therefore any police shooting of any civilian under any
circumstances will be defended by you.[/quote]

Hmm, lets see if there’s a way we can actually test this claim of yours by going back to the account in the original article and comparing it to the video.

“At 0:17, Officer Bron Cruz gets out of his vehicle. You will notice people confused by his presence.”

Possible but there’s no evidence of this in the video.

“At 0:22, Officer Cruz walks past two men who were friends with Dillon Taylor.”

They forget the somewhat critical fact the two men put their hands up

“At 0:24, Officer Cruz walks behind Taylor, who has on a white T-shirt and is listening to music.”

We have no evidence of music. Also is excluded is the fact that Taylor obviously saw the cops when they showed up, saw/heard whatever caused his friends to put their hands up and most likely knew they wanted him to stop as well.

“At 0:33, we see the officer has his gun drawn and is yelling at Taylor, who’s holding his sagging pants up and does not appear to hear Cruz.”

Unless Taylor was almost deaf or had the music extremely loud (in which case he wasn’t talking to his friends) he obviously heard and was purposefully ignoring the cops.

“At 0:36, the officer shoots Taylor. It would be fatal.”

Ignored is the fact that Taylor (possibly trying to obey instructions) lifted his shirt and extended his hands towards the cop, a motion looking a lot like drawing a gun, shortly after yelling “No Fool”

So every single one of their points leading up to the shooting contains either misleading statements or the exclusion of critical facts. Which leads to an obvious question.

So back to the point, if I’m the who will hold my position under any circumstance then why did the writer at DailyKos feel the need to completely change the circumstance?

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What they have to do is maintaining public safety. That’s what they are paid for. When they are the most dangerous element on the streets, they are doing it wrong.

If you get horrible results, you definitely did not do the “right thing”. You may have thought it is one, but the results prove it was not.

What seems to be the right thing at the moment, and what actually is one, can be quite different.

I’m not a hardliner, I’d go for a manslaughter, possibly negligent one - but certainly include at least two, maybe three, overlaying levels of management in the prosecution. The ones who decide about the training, who assign the money.

Investigate the events like industrial or aerospace accidents. Count the malfunctioning cop as a faulty piece of process equipment, his training as its maintenance. Count his management as the plant managers, find the root cause, the root responsibilities, the organization/workplace culture that led to the problem manifesting.

When a pilot screws up and crashes the bird, the airline procedures and training get investigated. When a plant blows, the corporate safety and training procedures get investigated. Why not do the same with cops? Are they so much different? Don’t they deserve better than what they got, don’t they deserve at least a similar attention as plant maintenance engineers?

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