Pretty much once you’re shot, the best you can hope for is they won’t put the cuffs on too tight, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll roll you into a position where you won’t drown on the blood coming from your mouth.
Because #BlueLivesMatter and absolutely fuck-all nothing else does.
I’m not a fucking driver, how can I pose a threat to other drivers? I’m just a civilian, getting hit with these gorram hazard lights, turn signals, and other flashing safetyweapons every time I try to walk anywhere.
Which gets back to my original question:
Who the fuck decided that it was okay to use hazardous lights in public places anyway? let alone okay to mandate hazardous lights?
I know you have to be immune to the hazardous lights to be allowed to drive, but those of us who aren’t immune still need to be able to walk down the street, cross the street, wait for the taxi after the eeg, etc.
I got hit with multiple strobe weapons while waiting outside the neurology clinic, because some county vehicles arrived and fired their strobe weapons in all directions.
This, I think is a big part of the whole narrative in addition to the very real issue of racism.
A little story, that happened this Saturday night.
My husband and I watched Hell or High Water a very good modern-day cowboy story with lots of gun, fear and tense nerves. For various reasons we went to a cinema in Picaddilly (middle of the craziest London night life).
We drove home (20 min drive across London, and just behind the British Museum on a dark road stood a young woman and a young man. This was in Bloomsbury, where there is no night life and also very few residents–mostly just University London buildings. They waved us down. When we stopped they said they couldn’t find their way back to the building they had been working in. They couldn’t remember the address and their phone was out of battery. Then I saw that the guy was wearing thin rubber gloves, the kind surgeons wear.
Just as he said (without prompting) they had been working in a student housing cleaning a new building to make it ready for Sunday, for the new students to move in. They had left to buy something but couldn’t find their way back.
All sounded reasonable. There is lots of student housing in the area, term really starts this week. But still coming from a film which was all about heightened fear and the possible fatal encounters with strangers I was feeling queasy and wondering if, for our kids sake, we should just drive off. On the other hand they were close to tears.
Anyways, we plugged in their phone in the car, battery perked up, found the address, a building I know and matched their description–made sense. It was on our way so we offered to drive there. In the car they said they were from Romania, and this was their first week in London.
My husband and I survived to tell the tale, but I did wonder if we were foolish–definitely not the circumstances I would have liked to leave this earth or be robbed or have the car stolen.
I did wonder whether in the Texas of Hell and High Waters I would have done the same–most likely not.
Which is a real shame, because when I lived in Utah in 1985-87 people were very friendly and helpful, not just to me as a teenage girl, but to everyone in my family. I remember how when we arrived at the airport in Salt Lake City as a dirt poor immigrant family with four kids from the Eastern Block, people’s friendliness hit us like a wave, we had to readjust, get used to it. Never, ever, for a moment was I worried in those years on the streets, of people with guns–and this was in the West, people hunted, had guns, I don’t remember a single shooting.
So it feels something happened and it is not good.
Well, in that particular case you did the right thing, even though you’d been psychologically primed to feel fear. You can’t actually control your feelings, not fully, but you can control how you react to them.
Americans used to be disdainful of cowardice, which is what we called it when you were controlled by your fears instead of your hopes and aspirations. We aspired to courage, which is what we called conquering fear, or to fearlessness.
Today people will actually criticize you for not being a coward! Yet, paradoxically we are far safer from criminal violence than you ever were in the 1980s.
I believe @MarjaE is referring not to hazard lights, which let other drivers know that you are a hazard, but rather to the flashing police lights, which are pretty hazardous to people with certain photo-sensitivity issues.
Hazard lights are basically your yellow blinkers–blinking. That’s it.
It’s a safety issue for 99.9999% of the population. You happen to be part of the tiny minority for whom emergency lighting causes more problems than it’s worth.
Blinking is hurting.
The weapons on police cars, ambulances, and those golf cart things are the worst, but the weapons on regular cars, regular trucks, schoolbuses, cell phone towers, construction lights, and crosswalks are still dangerous. Cumulatively, they’ve caused me to stumble into the street more often than the ones on the police cars and ambulances. The things get used everywhere, even on parked cars where people are supposed to be able to walk.
I don’t understand how some sighted people are immune to the things.
The things flash, which means they blind and they disorient.
I know that there a couple studies on how they cause helicopter crashes, and how they can cause seizures, but there’s very little on the inherent danger for those of us who don’t fly helicopters and don’t have photosensitive epilepsy.
Big bad dude. Very telling. Tulsa
I hope that this officer gets the appropriate sentence when she gets convicted. No. No. That never happens. I hope she gets convicted when she gets charged? No no no. That never happens, either. Well…I hope she gets charged…with something.
No accountability - no changes.
And @MarjaE said “hazardous”.
I think before we pass judgement here, we should wait until all the facts are in. This is not a situation like the the one where the behavioral therapist was shot for no reason at all. I am personally leaning towards negligent discharge, but there is some missing data and questions here.
The incident started with a 911 call made by a person who claimed that they encountered Crutcher’s car idling in the middle of the road, with the door open. The caller said Crutcher fled the car because he felt it was going to explode. The caller reported that it seemed like the driver might have been “smoking something”, and that he “He started freaking out and he took off running”.
Officer Shelby was first on the scene, and called in to say that she “was out with a suspect who would not show her his hands”, and requested backup. Nothing has yet been released about any exchange between Mr. Crutcher and Officer Shelby.
When the video starts, Mr. Crutcher is standing in front of the police vehicle with his hands up as the backup cars arrive. But he starts walking towards the driver’s side of his car, which now has the door closed, but the windows rolled down. We don’t yet know if his car was still running, or if Officer Shelby had searched it. It would be very unusual for an officer to allow a suspect to return to an unsearched car after acting erratically. I get from the officer’s body language that Mr. Crutcher was ignoring the officer’s commands when he decided to go back to his car.
Tulsa News is reporting that PCP was found in Mr. Crutcher’s car, and that he has a previous history of both drug abuse and resisting arrest. That does not excuse the shooting, but it does enter into any questions about Officer Shelby’s state of mind, as she did check his background and record during the interaction. Officers used force to take Mr. Crutcher into custody on at least four previous occasions. It is worth noting that police officers are shown the following video when trained about letting suspects return to an unsearched car- http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=969_1263249923
All that being what it is, It does appear that Officer Shelby fired her gun because she panicked when she heard the taser fire, which likely make it an unjustified shooting. But it is not a simple case.
FACT: An unarmed black man with his hands raised was just shot and killed by police. There is no scenario in which this is remotely OK.
Yes, the officer who killed him should get a trial, but that doesn’t mean the rest of society can’t call this out as another symptom of the ongoing violent racist shitshow it is.
And a day later…
Ah yes. Our “brave men and women” felt threatened, so they shot someone. Bravely. Oh so bravely.
From the article:
“Detectives recovered the firearm the subject was holding at the time of the shooting at the scene,” police said. “Detectives are currently interviewing witnesses who witnessed the **accident**.”
Police shootings aren’t accidents. Any accidental discharge of a weapon by a cop means the cop isn’t fit to posses a weapon. Or a job as an LEO. Accidents with deadly weapons are intolerable.
Thank you.
You sure? Your own reference says “Crutcher’s attorneys say his history is not relevant, and the Tulsa Police Department has acknowledged that officers weren’t aware of his background during the encounter.” The audio transcripts do not suggest any hint otherwise.
So this smells a lot like a rancid herring. But hey, nothing wrong with digging for any possible reasons we can’t simply condemn killing an unarmed man, right? It’s not like it goes without consequences all the time. 
Forgot to say. It was past midnight…and we were glad to manage the fear… you are right, that is what life, freedom is all about.
we are dirgressing here, but in British English hazard lights are your blinkers.
No idea what they describe in the US. We seem to be talking different things.
Point being, stopping in the middle of a highway / motorway, in the dark without some very visible lights is life threatening dangerous.
