No, it’s not a good idea.
But it’s not deserving of an extra-judicial execution.
ETA: I should have phrased that differently:
Do you think resisting arrest is generally deserving of an extra-judicial execution*?
* While this is extra-judicial, “execution” could possible be weaseled out of. In bad faith.
Yep. And don’t forget the 1939 “Voyage Of The Damned”, where a ship of over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany were turned away by Cuba, the USA, and Canada; a little under a third of them were allowed to disembark in the UK, and the remainder were returned to Europe, where almost half were killed in the Holocaust.
Just to be clear, the phrase “one bad apple spoils the barrel” means that if there is one corrupt person in an organization, they will eventually cause corruption in the organization itself.
So, to the people who say, “well, it’s just a few bad apples”, we know. That’s the whole fucking point. Find these bad apples, and drum them out of policing before the entire force becomes corrupt.
My point. Yes.
I know. I should have worded it better, but what I was trying to say was, “The people who would vote for Trump might agree with the Skittles analogy for refugees (for which it is a terrible analogy), but probably wouldn’t agree with the Skittles analogy for cops (for which it is a much better analogy).”
I apologize if I gave you the impression otherwise.
But that sentence implies that you think there could be justified shootings.
Which I would state should occur so rarely that our first instinct should be to say “don’t you think that we should have as many facts as possible before we say it might be justified”.
The burden is on those that wish to justify this killing.
Do you think he deserves to be punched in the head?
…just asking…
I think the presumption of innocence is supposed to protect the people against state power.
Each individual officer needs that so they don’t get Serpico’d or Schoolcrafted.
The whole institution doesn’t need that because it is state power.
Wait, who? Antecedent unclear! There’s a lot of people who oughta be punched in the head, and I’m just the schmuck to do it.
There’s people who deserve to be shot, too, in my opinion. I have had long difficult conversations with Quakers and Unitarian Universalist ministers about this issue on occasion. But somebody has to shoot back or the most murderous always wins… I typically use the example of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to make my position clear. I stand with the Deacons, not the the pacifists.
@bibliophile20, @Melizmatic, thank you for making your positions understood.
On bOINGbOING, people upset by what @Antinous used to call “Cory’s latest outrage bait” sometimes turn on each other, and one of the ways this tends to spiral out of control starts with what happened here. Someone says maybe we don’t have all the facts yet, or uses a phrase like legitimate or justified killing, and that person becomes something like a piñata, a target for the justified and legitimate rage of the community.
I like to point this out from time to time, although frankly I usually avoid these threads.
I guess the information issue is illustrative. You might not have noticed, but people are becoming increasingly polarized in their views, most worryingly in the media. The end result is that most news sources are going to omit or modify some of the facts to support their political views. It becomes propaganda. I don’t like being deceived, even if it is by someone with whom I share a basic political philosophy. Some people feel differently, and only want to listen to things that confirm what they already believe to be true.
“Further details and minutia will only serve to exonerate the officer by obfuscating…” Not necessarily. Further details will likely give us a more complete understanding of the events in question, so that we can understand exactly what went wrong, and find solutions. I think everyone, especially the officers involved and Mr. Crutcher’s family, feel that something went terribly wrong.
I am not familiar enough with Oklahoma law to say whether he resisted arrest or not. The officers claim that she ordered him to get on the ground, and he instead began walking towards his truck, and reached inside it.
I am not familiar enough with Oklahoma law to say whether he resisted arrest or not. The officers claim that she ordered him to get on the ground, and he instead began walking towards his truck, and reached inside it.
At no point did they see a gun.
At no point did they hear shots fired.
At no point were any of them hit by bullets.
Disproportionate response by the people who were supposed to help him.
I am pretty sure that a person can resist arrest without firing a gun at police
But I guess in Oklahoma, we are talking about “obstructing an officer”. “Oklahoma law prohibits willfully delaying or obstructing any public officer in the discharge of his duties.
This definition of obstruction is broad and can encompass almost anything that could prevent an officer from investigating or arresting a crime or person.
Giving false information, for example, can be construed as obstructing an officer in Oklahoma.
A defendant is also not required to physically obstruct the officer to be convicted of this crime. (Ok. Stat. Tit. 21 Sec 540).”
So it’s “contempt of cop.”
Oh, he was convicted prior to his public execution?
I AM missing some of the pertinent facts!
Yep. It’s very illustrative in what is being said, and what is not being said.
How can I not have noticed, in a world in which Faux News and Breitbart exist?
BTW, this is a leading question towards an off-topic concept in this context. This specific thread is in regards to an incident that has been primarily sourced using local news. Attempting to rhetorically expand it to larger media bias considerations is fallacious in this context (specifically the Gish Gallop, formally known as “spreading”), as the bias of such media organizations have no bearing on this specific incident, nor with your previous arguments.
Again, how will a “more complete understanding” of what happened change the essential facts I listed above? Will it bring back Mr. Crutcher? Will the fact that Officer Shelby disobeyed the basic rules of gun safety somehow change in the face of a larger context? Will such greater understanding of the events answer the question of why they immediately escalated to firearms instead of simply talking with an unresisting man, or alternately instead escalating to nonlethal force and compliance holds in the case that he resisted?
No, they won’t. And that is why the suggestion that we “wait for a full investigation” is fallacious; it will not change the basic essential facts of the situation, which are:
A man is dead.
He was shot by a cop.
He was not a threat to the cops or anyone else.
Finding out that, for example, he and Officer Shelby had a verbal altercation before the video started will not change the fact that Shelby shot him when he was unresisting. Neither will such hypotheticals as his past arrest record, the presence or absence of drugs in his car, or other such details. However, if and when this goes to court or is fully investigated, it has been demonstrated, repeatedly and nation-wide, that the US police force will happily use any such “larger context” to excuse misconduct by their officers.
In the end, “what went wrong” is that, again, a black man has been killed by a police officer when they were no threat, bodily or otherwise. We don’t know if Officer Shelby herself is racist, or if she was jittery or undertrained, or any of a number of other potential triggers that resulted in her killing another person (and, if you are right in your assessment of it being an unintentional discharge, she killed him by accident), but there is no question that she is unfit to be an armed police officer.
Again, what were they arresting him for!? And, again, even if they were arresting him on some charge that they have yet to state, resisting arrest is not a capital crime.
Oklahoma law also prohibits litter. There is still no legal theory under which an officer can legally execute an unarmed person for dropping a gum wrapper next to the highway.
This is so very surprising to see coming from you!
Alright, burden of proof is on the cops then to answer the following questions as part of the “further details” that apparently a larger investigation will uncover in the pursuit of “understanding what went wrong”:
What, specifically, did Mr. Crutcher do to obstruct the officer that was sufficient to warrant arrest?
What, specifically, did Mr. Crutcher do in the course of said obstruction that was sufficient to require the attentions of 4 officers?
What, specifically, did Mr. Crutcher do in the course of not resisting four arresting officers that warranted having an unsafed firearm pointed in his direction, which is universally agreed upon to be a threat of lethal force?
Since apparently details of what specifically happened matter before we condemn the cops for killing a citizen under their protection, it’s very important that we get answers to these questions in order to determine if it was either negligence or malfeasance, because there’s really no other options, and no amount of additional information will change that, or the fact that a man is dead.
According to every police department ever, when someone dies at the hands of a cop, no matter how pointlessly or wrongly, they claim a third option:
“The officer acted according to their training and did nothing wrong.”
Because “training” to a chief of police is equivalent to carte blanche for officers to wantonly maim and kill. “They were trained this way, therefore they did nothing wrong, and nothing has to change, because we all know our officers get the best training.”
