HOW? How does this keep happening?

cmhbob said:

And from a liability standpoint, do you really want the shooter to be rendering aid to the person they just shot?

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From a humanity standpoint, I do - for both of them.

cmhbob said:

And from a liability standpoint, do you really want the shooter to be rendering aid to the person they just shot?

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Absolutely. The only reason police are allowed to use force is to defend themselves/others or to prevent greater harm from occurring. Part of using force responsibly is assisting an injured suspect once the threat has passed. Even if a police officer acts in error, I think not assisting the person who's been hurt is a much greater liability. It can imply that the officer was unconcerned.

"Your Honor, it's clear from the result that not only did Officer Smith commit a grievous harm upon Mr Doe, he then took it upon himself to make sure Mr Doe wouldn't survive to present his side of the story!"

ElaineA said:

Sorry, Bob. Won't agree with you on this one. The harm was already done. Saying police should not render aid in that situation doesn't fit with recommended protocol.

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I'm not saying police shouldn't render aid. I'm saying that the officer who injured the person shouldn't be the one to render aid. In this case, i don't think Shelby should have been the one to try and help Crutcher. But if you watch the cruiser dashcam, I believe she's the one who moves the one cruiser around to the other side of the crime scene, and then grabs the aid bag from that car.

ETA: Local article concerning this issue. Looks like I was wrong AFA her being the one to render aid. http://www.newson6.com/story/331633...ined-as-emts-best-to-call-help-after-shooting

Alpha Echo said:

NT, I always agree with your posts. But I don't agree with this one. You can't convince me that these "protests" are a good idea.

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I'm perfectly fine with you not agreeing with this post, but then I'm wasn't trying to convince you these protests are a good idea. Conversely, you can't convince those people in the streets in Charlotte their protests are a bad idea.

Alpha Echo said:

Sounds to me like a protest is in direct response to something. These people are protesting then against the store owners and employees and other innocent people for what? There is a state of emergency in Charlotte. People are being asked to not leave their homes because it is too dangerous. Dangerous because their own neighbors - not terrorists, but their neighbors - are running around in the streets demonstrating violence.

I have been just as outraged as you with what's happening. But this isn't the way to respond. I don't know the answer, but I know this can't be it.

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It's not your call to make and it's not my call either. I'm not about to be painted into a corner where I have to defend both the right of citizens to protest and the handful of losers and opportunists who are tagging along hoping to stir up shit.

The protests will go on and they should until the killing of innocent Black people STOP.

cmhbob said:

Why? They did render aid. It took them about a minute and a half, but they did. At least two of them brought aid bags, then at least one put his away.

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That's false and it is demonstrably false. In a 4:40 video no one approaches Crutcher for nearly two minutes until at the 1:52 mark, a female officer puts on rubber gloves and appears to be searching Crutcher while another male officer assists. No one is rendering any aid.

The three cops mill around the fallen motorist until 2:30 when another runs up with a bag and drops to a knee next to Crutcher. A fifth one enters and then exits. Nobody performs CPR.

cmhbob said:

They cleared the car first (2 of them walking around the car), then checked themselves out (when they backed away), then secured the scene (moving the one cruiser), then began rendering what aid they could. EMSA was on the scene within 4 minutes, which is half the standard response time.

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The cops did NOT render what aid they could. They were concerned about routing traffic, not doing a damn thing to save a life. If Black Lives Matter, Terence Crutcher's life didn't mean a damn thing to the Tulsa cops.

“If you see someone as human, as someone who is susceptible to pain, if you view their humanity the same as yours, you’re going to try to find a way to help,” said Rashad Robinson, the executive director of the civil rights group Color of Change. “You’re going to try to get them medical attention.”

The lack of medical attention to those shot by police has been a central grievance in protests over police shootings of black people over the last two years. But, policing experts note, while best practices dictate that aid should be provided as soon as officers no longer feel they are facing a threat of violence, officers’ judgment of when that is the case — especially in the moments after a violent incident — are likely to differ from that of the public.

“People have a belief, and it’s a justifiable belief, that the officers should go from a tactical situation to a medical situation very quickly,” said Jim Bueermann, a retired police chief and president of the Police Foundation, a national police research organization.

In New York, officers listened to Eric Garner declare “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he died on a Staten Island sidewalk. In Cleveland, residents were outraged that video showed that more than four minutes elapsed before anyone attempted to aid 12-year-old Tamir Rice after he was shot by an officer. And in Falcon Heights, Minn., earlier this year, Philando Castile could be seen in the live video broadcast by his girlfriend writhing in pain as he bled out after being shot by an officer. The video shows Officer Jeronimo Yanez, seemingly in shock after having just shot Castile, providing no medical response.

“I’m not sure that this is completely anchored in the culture of policing yet, but once a shooting occurs and the officers are safe they should be administering emergency first aid as fast as they can,” Bueermann said.

“When they don’t do this, or when officers leave a wounded or dead person uncovered on the ground, as they did in Ferguson, it inflames people,” he said. “People go: This shooting may have been justified, but that person is no longer a threat so they should be helping him.”

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Pretty much this. If cops have the ability to take a life it also carries the responsibility to try and save one.

cmhbob said:

And from a liability standpoint, do you really want the shooter to be rendering aid to the person they just shot?

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Oh, so you're saying when a cop guns down an unarmed person they're freed from any responsibility to take any actions to render aid?

That's nonsense and it didn't work for Peter Liang when he shot Akai Gurley, but apparently you say it should have. It was nonsense when the cops shot Tamir Rice and he laid on the ground dying with his intestines exposed until a detective and an FBI agent arrived to provide assistance 3:49 minutes after Timothy Loehmann shot Rice.

A fucking dog in the street hit by a cop car would have received more attention than these butchers provided their Black victims.

You're worried about the liability standpoint. I'm worried about the humanity standpoint.

It is one thing to say that the violence in protests isn't justified. It's another to say it isn't understood. I can empathize with the former, but not with the latter. If you are going to criticize the violent response to a thing, you need to understand and properly evaluate the thing that provoked the response. Getting pissed off at people rioting because a black man with his hands up gets shot in the back and killed by a white police officer doesn't exactly address the core problem, does it?

caw

Update:

After allegedly criminally shooting Terence Crutcher (because despite two separate videos showing her shooting an unarmed man walking away from her with his hands in the air, we still must legally preface any accusation with “allegedly”), Tulsa, Okla., Police Officer Betty Jo “Bad Dude” Shelby has been reprimanded by a District Court judge for her continuing efforts to try her case through the media.

In a five-page formal rebuke, Judge Doug Drummond reminded Shelby that, “It is obvious this case has drawn significant media interest nationwide since the beginning.” The judge warned that Shelby’s willingness to tell her side of the story to the press could taint her upcoming trial, writing, “The court is, at a minimum, hopeful that all parties ... recognize that pretrial publicity potentially hampers prospects for a fair and impartial trial for both sides.”

After a local TV station’s helicopter footage of the shooting of Crutcher went viral, Shelby, whose name resembles that of a third-shift Waffle House waitress, was charged with manslaughter. She is expected to stand trial later this year.

News outlets across the country reported on Shelby’s April 2 appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes, although every one of them failed to highlight the real story: how Shelby—in two simple sentences—summed up the widespread mentality of police who know they can kill the citizens they are sworn to protect with little or no repercussions:

MadNorthNorthwest said:

I maybe talking about things I know nothing of, but as to the how and why of it, I'd humbly submit The Wire into evidence. It seems like a number of police officers no longer exist as agents of society and members of the community, sworn to serve and protect; now they're an occupying force that doesn't quite speak the language and exists primarily to protect certain interests and put down anything resembling disorder.

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I'd disagree with the "no longer" part, because it implies that police weren't doing shit like this decades ago, or even longer ago. I suspect they've always done this kind of thing and that overall they've been treating black people differently all along. We're just catching it on camera now.

Meanwhile, a disturbingly high percentage of white people shrug it off, or worse yet, insist we have to support the police, because subjecting them to scrutiny or sanctions when they take life without cause, it is bad for their morale. "Police are under siege," they say.

Why is police morale more important than black lives?

To be fair, she wasn't the one who said "Bad dude." That came from the observer or pilot in the police helicopter. (See the label top center of the video).

cmhbob said:

To be fair, she wasn't the one who said "Bad dude." That came from the observer or pilot in the police helicopter. (See the label top center of the video).

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To be fair, it doesn't matter who said it. To be fair, I don't care what's fair to Betty Jo Shelby. To be fair, she should her have her badge and her gun stripped away from her, convicted of manslaughter and tossed in the deepest, darkest shithole prison in Oklahoma.

Now that...THAT'S FAIR.

I don't disagree with you on her punishment. My point was that someone else deserves the blame for the bad dude comment, and that that person shouldn't be ignored.

Closing arguments were today. The jury got the case around noon, and came back with a decision by about 9. At one point they asked the judge if they could explain their decision; he said not in open court.

She was found not guilty. Jurors are crying, according to one tweet.

I'll link to articles when they come up.

Edit: one article: http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/bett...cle_cfdc970b-2b10-5f15-b4c1-711c5da4cc03.html

That is a travesty.

Sometimes when this happens I get mad and I want to curse the absence of justice, the sanctioning of slaughtering Black men, women and children because White people are scared of them. Sometimes I want to pick up the torch, the brick, the knife or the gun and I want to lash out and be cruel and brutal and savage. In the face of such unrelenting cruelty, brutality and savagery, what other response makes any sense?

Then I recall I'm a rational and reasoning human being who doesn't surrender to his more barbaric instincts. Responding to a clenched fist with another clenched fist is very satisfying. It also gets you nowhere. Acts of violence cannot be met with more acts of violence.

But here we are, 25 years removed from America's last great race riots and we have learned nothing. We are even more angry with each other. We are more suspicious of each other. We are more distrustful of each other.

And when shit like this happens our vast racial chasm makes a lot of sense to me. I will never understand how someone like Betty Shelby goes free for murdering someone like Terrence Crutcher, but the power of White Fear and how mercilessly it snuffs out Black Lives is nothing to scoff at.

Crutcher had PCP in his system. Crutcher may not have fully complied to the officers' commands. Crutcher was not armed. Crutcher's hands were empty and raised. Crutcher was a large brother. Crutcher did not charge or attack the officers. Crutcher didn't do anything to deserve being dead, but he's dead anyway.

It's like acid dripping on your arm. It burns, it sears, it hurts. It hurts like hell and as it burns deep, the anger and the hate grows. It grows like a flame and it burns hot and high.

Someone should pay for this, but nobody will. Next time it might be me who does something a fearful cop with a gun doesn't like. Mostly because I'm walking around in this Black skin suit that doesn't come off.

If it happens, whose fault will it be? My fault, of course. I'm Black. I must have done something. I must be guilty until proven innocent.

Don't think of Terrence Crutcher as a victim. Think of him of just another piece of dead wood thrown on a quiet, but growing fire.

Betty Shelby is back on active duty, but not on patrol. TPD is pushing to have body cams on all field officers by the end of the year. Then again, Shelby could have activated her cruiser camera with a button on her duty belt, but chose not to. The geek in me wonders if there couldn't be some sort of magnetic micro-switch in the holster so that the cameras come on as soon as the weapon is drawn.

The jury asked for hr to not go back to patrol in their post-verdict letter, which the judge agreed to enter into the trial record. The letter says that they believed that any other officer would have fired at the moment she did, but that she screwed up by letting the situation get to that point, and I agree. She had ample opportunity to tase him, or even go hands-on as he walked from the side of the road to his car. There was just no reason to escalate so quickly to guns. A friend on another forum said this a while back:

The Taser generation as they are also called. They have been so ingrained not to fight in schools etc., that they will not go hands on with bad guys. When the Taser fails, and they won’t fight or don’t know how to because they were never allowed, then they have one last backup and that’s a firearm.

Sobering thought: An entire generation of cops from the suburbs who have never fought anyone in any real capacity outside of a training environment being put out into the real world with a bunch of people whose pecking order depends on who can fight and who can’t.

Yep. Those worlds are going to collide.

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That's not a perfect generalization for this case, but it does fit to some extent.

We in in a society where police are trained to be thugs for a corrupt government. They rarely if ever get punished for doing crimes against innocent citizens when you have a justice system that works hand in hand turning a blind eye to police corruption and thus perpetuating the problem. Also when you have politicians out there funded by the likes of drug companies, and for profit prisons, that see the war on drugs as a way to incarcerate young black men by giving police another excuse to search them for no reason and beat them up, then we are part of the problem. Eventually it all comes back to us as citizens and our votes. If we continue to elect politicians that are bribed by big corporations, we will never see the change we want no matter how much we might bitch about it.

The head of very single police department in this country should be fired and strict rules should be put in place. If cops mess up, then they should go to prison. All the other policemen should be retrained. Our justice system needs to be reformed and we should make it easier to have judges removed from office and lawyers disbarred. We as citizens need to have a way to rate those who rule over us and if they fall below a certain threshold, they should be booted. But that is just my opinion.

More insight from the jury.

He said the jury felt “at least somewhat” that what Shelby did was wrong, but they all agreed it didn’t meet the criteria to convict under first-degree manslaughter.

“We all kind of felt that maybe the law wasn’t that good,” he said.

“I talked to one juror about how unhappy we were with the system and how it’s kind of broken, and what could we do about it,” he said. ”

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cmhbob said:

More insight from the jury.

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There's no insight there. Only appalling ignorance. "Kind of broken?" Terrence Crutcher was unarmed and he's dead. Betty Jo Shelby is free to go back to work and kill some more bad dudes just like him.

The system isn't kind of broken. It's royally fucked up and these 12 drooling idiots HAD their chance to do something about it. They took the safe and chickenshit way out. Same as they always do.

DancingMaenid said:

I get that there's no easy answer, and that cops face a lot of danger.

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Except yes there is, and cops aren't even on the top ten list of most dangerous jobs around.

It is my job to deal with individuals that are no longer allowed to be on the street unattended. People who are mentally ill and prone to lashing out violently for things like 'the squirrel ate the bread they tossed out for the birds'. I have people coming at me with the intention of strangling me, regularly disarm people coming at me with knives and scissors, and deal with people off their meds or having a bad trip every single workday.

I do it unarmed, and the vast majority of the time I do it without anybody getting hurt.

How?

Deescalation tactics. They work. They work amazingly well. My staff members get about 4 hours of deescalation training before stepping into the ring with violent schizophrenics, and 99.9% of the time everybody goes home safely.

Cops get hurt because they turn every single situation they encounter into a power struggle instead of ever taking a step back themselves. Cops are what makes the life of a cop dangerous. Deescalation involves the ability to gain trust, and cops repeatedly demonstrate they cannot be trusted.

Alpha Echo said:

Why turn to violence?

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A reporter once asked a young black man involved in a riot that very same question. The young man's response 'because last week when we protested nicely and civilly, none of you paid any attention'.