I’ve read a number of these sort of opinions (typically on whatever news site is hosting the article) but I have never seen anyone argue the second from top left:
“If we didn’t kill black men indiscriminately, “criminals” would take over.”
Not even a Stormfront member would make this rebuttal. The statement tacitly admits guilt on the part of the speaker and society.
You missed a few spaces.
“Shouldn’t have resisted”:
“If he wasn’t guilty, then why did he run?”:
“He had a history of misdemeanors”:
“Being a police officer is dangerous”:
Updated it with @nimelennar’s points and two that I spotted:
“This was an isolated incident”
And
“Let’s wait for the investigation”
Maybe replace that one with something implying that the victim was on drugs and acting erratically?
Hell, let’s just fill in all the spaces. It’s bullshit talking points all strung together. Given enough time, anyone who says one of these things will say all of them.
Nice chart. But do you really believe that we should make conclusions about this and other cases without understanding as many details as possible? Do you think resisting arrest is generally a good idea?
I have never implied that this was a justified shooting. I don’t believe it was.
Doesn’t even have to be intoxication. Someone with diabetes in hypoglycemic shock will exhibit disorientation, impaired thinking, and even aggression. Glucose, not bullets, will remedy this situation. But police officers confronting such a person without awareness of the cause of these signs may mistake them as psychotic and/or potentially violent.
This isn’t conjecture. This is a real problem.
As someone in another thread noted, it would seem that the ideal police officer today should be licensed, with a diverse background of rigorous training and education in law, social work, emergency medicine, and law enforcement.
The reason I preclude that statement with ‘it would seem’ is that we have to first determine if this solution addresses the core problem and to what extent. David Brown (the now-former Dallas PD chief) publicly stated, very soon after the Dallas shootings, that today’s police are overburdened:
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
It sounds like the officers who killed Crutcher were poorly trained (at best) or (more likely) should never have been officers in the first place. From that, I’d conclude that it makes some sense to license the practice of law enforcement. I’m not sure if ‘practice’ is the right word, but given that the term describes every other licensed profession mentioned above, I’m going to go with it.
So licensing is one step. The other, as Brown suggests, is acknowledging that keeping society safe and civil is really a collaborative effort between several professions, of which only one is law enforcement.
In short, the vetting and rigor of training in becoming a law enforcement officer needs to be raised. The breadth of that training, however, must overlap with other related professions only to the extent that those in these other professions can take up the slack.
A person’s history is possibly not relevant in a trial, but it is a pretty good predictor of future behavior. If an officer knows that a suspect has a long history of resisting arrest, it would be sensible to treat that person with more caution than is normal.
And the statement from the Crutcher family attorney is an important part of the case, but should not be viewed as an objective source of facts.
On the 18th, the police spokesperson said “Officers did not know anything in reference to the individual prior to their contact”
(prior to the incident, or prior to the shot fired?)
On the 20th, police released the detail that Officer Shelby called in during the encounter for details about the suspect and his car. We do not yet have a transcript of what dispatch told her about Mr. Crutcher. There were warrants out for his arrest.
But once again, I never said that I think it was a justified shooting.
We understand as many details as we have. If you have good, verifiable information we don’t, by all means present it. Waiting for all possible details to come out is to wait forever. So we strike a balance. What’s wrong with the information we have? In what ways is it insufficient to reach certain conclusions? Is it possible to reach any conclusions? Please break this down for us. A blanket, “we need more info” is applicable to a lot of things. Why do we need more info here to draw preliminary conclusions?
Do you really believe additional details might justify “unarmed black man with hands in the air shot dead by police”?
If not, then why should we have to wait before discussing this as the latest incident in a long, long pattern of unjustified lethal police violence against black people?
The relevant details are these:
A man is dead when he doesn’t have to be.
The person who killed him is a member of a group that has a distinct and noted pattern of killing people like that man for zero cause.
Investigations into those killings have never resulted in justice to the victims and their bereaved.
Everything else, including the points that you said, are simply obfuscation of those points in attempting to deflect blame and excuse the behavior of a group of people whose official motto is “Protect And Serve”.
At the end of the day, a man is dead when he did not have to be, and your statements are attempting to excuse that, and, furthermore, the reason for the existence of that chart that you are attempting to deride is because of repeated patterns of such excuses and deflections on the part of individuals that view such killings as not only justified, but reasonable, or even celebratory. So, by following those patterns, you have already used rhetoric from groups that demand silence from the oppressed and are unwilling to see justice done in these cases.
That being said, I will happily start dissecting your statements again if you want to get into another argument with me.
Yes, because the relevant details are this:
A non-resisting black man is dead, shot by a police officer who panicked while three other officers were also on the scene.
Further details and minutia will only serve to exonerate the officer by obfuscating that fact. They will not resurrect her victim. He is dead, and that is inexcusable. Resisting arrest (which he wasn’t) is not a capital offense. Being stalled on the side of the road is not a capital offense. Having a police record is not a capital offense. Being a black man is not a capital offense.
We, as a society, grant police the widespread powers that they have on the theory that they will “protect and serve”; they gain those powers with the understanding that they will be held to a higher standard of behavior and restraint. By acting as she, this police officer, who violated the primary rules of gun safety–i.e. keep your finger off the trigger and don’t point a gun at something or someone you are not willing to kill–has shown that she is not capable of attaining those higher standards of behavior and restraint, and should therefore not be eligible to be a police officer.
This is a loaded question, because it is black-and-white yes-no question in an incredibly gray context. Ergo, I will dodge the rhetorical trap by breaking this down into points.
First, in this context, he was not resisting arrest. He had his hands up. So, at the very least, you are attempting to justify the shooting by painting the dead man as having provoked the police by “resisting arrest”. Strike one.
Secondly, the question has to be asked, “is the arrest legitimate?” If yes the arrest is legitimate, then resisting arrest is not a good idea. Conversely, if the arrest is not legitimate, then resisting arrest is a “good idea”, to the extent to which such resistance can be achieved without getting oneself killed. Given the social context, a black man in American society has to ask themselves in every interaction with a police officer “Am I going to live through this?” And, on average once a day, the answer that they get is “no, I will not, and the guy who pulled the trigger will get a paid vacation.” However, again, Mr. Crutcher did not resist arrest, and he committed no crime. He had a stalled vehicle on the road. That is not a crime. Strike two.
Thirdly, and primarily, on what grounds were they making an arrest that he was resisting? Obstruction of traffic? Technically, this was a misdemeanor, by reading of the Tulsa legal code (for which they could impound the vehicle), but, again: why did it require four police officers to deal with a guy whose car broke down in the middle of the road and needed a tow truck?
You may not have stated that you believe this to be a justified shooting, but your word choice has most definitely implied that belief. Your statements attempt to cast the police officer as having had reasonable doubt and potential emotional excitation for shooting an unarmed man, bringing up his previous police record, drugs in the car, and blaming the victim. In the process of doing so, you checked off the BINGO card of previous patterns of racists attempting to excuse the cops and blame the dead. The only reason I personally did not flag your post is because you were willing to admit that the possibility existed for “negligent discharge” and that the shooting was unjustified, even as the rest of your post had the tacit implication of being a defense of the police officer who murdered a man with his hands up.
Hey, he’s just asking questions here.
Disingenuous questions, that attempt to deflect and derail the conversation.
Those are the only kind of questions that get ‘just asked’
I’ve encountered B-1 in the Guardian comments section. Often paired with B-4 and links to that Amren report/“Color of Crime.” I stopped reading the Guardian though. It wouldn’t be worded that way, but it could be worded in terms of a “Ferguson effect.”
Therefore, questions are not permitted, since they are a form of dissent.
Bad strategy.
So basically they’re saying ‘black people are responsible for the vast majority of crime, so we need to keep them on their toes by keeping a gun close to their head with two fingers on the trigger’.
Jesus. Some people are nucking futs.
False dilemma fallacy. Asking questions is not a forbidden activity, nor are they automatically a form of dissent; in this case and, most importantly in this context, in other cases such as this one, the questions being asked are rhetorical techniques to reframe the narrative in order to shift blame from the perpetrator (i.e. the cop) to the victim (i.e. the dead man). This is done by attempting to shift the burden of proof and assumption of innocence from one party to the other, and is a repeated pattern of victim-blaming in cases such as these.
That does not mean that “questions are not permitted, since they are a form of dissent”. This is a false dilemma (combined with, I think, the reductio ad absurdum fallacy) because it comes with the implication that either all questions are acceptable in all cases, or no questions are acceptable, and no moderate middle ground. Asking these sorts of questions simply indicates that the individual asking them likely has, at best and most generous, the internal bias that they support such actions and wish to have corroborating evidence to that effect–and, in asking such questions, is shifting the burden of proof off of themselves and onto someone else, regardless of their intent.
Questions asked in good faith are fine; even useful to actual problem-solving.
But being intentionally obtuse or just plain unwilling to see the ‘writing on the wall’ is problematic.
Especially when that writing is drawn in blood and bullet holes.
