HOW? How does this keep happening?

You guys can expect this to happen every time a black guy is killed by police and its caught on camera.

Now try and imagine every time police kill a black guy in the same circumstances and nobody was able to catch it on camera.

Racism is still rampant in America but not just racism. There is also normal, everyday prejudice that black people have to deal with that white people don't notice most of the time. That is a big piece of why they keep getting killed by those sworn to protect the public.

Yes, we abolished slavery. Yes, we abolished segregation. But it is from social upheaval and protest that changed these policies. That is what needs to happen now and that is what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish. They are not saying that Black Lives matter more than White Lives. They are simply saying they matter too.

White people very rarely have to deal with losing a son because a cop killed him, and experience the authorities smearing his name as a 'thug' or some kind of criminal. Replace 'thug' with 'nigger' cause that is what they are really saying.

Long story short, we need black lives matter to gain ground because it is the right thing to do. We should be supporting them and not shirking away. You don't have to be out on the street breathing tear gas to help.

Solidarity is key.

Betty Shelby has resigned from TPD, saying in part, "Since being reinstated, I have found that sitting behind a desk, isolated from all my fellow officers and the citizens of Tulsa, is not for me."

cmhbob said:

Betty Shelby has resigned from TPD, saying in part, "Since being reinstated, I have found that sitting behind a desk, isolated from all my fellow officers and the citizens of Tulsa, is not for me."

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How long before she applies for a job at a cop shop in Cleveland, NYC, L.A., Baton Rogue or Ferguson, Mo with her valuable experience and skill in shooting and killing unarmed Black men?

Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis...

A woman was shot to death late Saturday by police responding to a 911 call in south Minneapolis.

Two Minneapolis police officers responded about 11:30 p.m. to a report of a possible assault in the 5100 block of Washburn Avenue South, according to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which is investigating the incident. One of the officers shot and killed the woman.

No further details were released Sunday by the BCA.

The Star Tribune identified the woman as Justine Damond, 40. She used the last name of her fiance and had the maiden name of Ruszczyk, the paper reported.

Zach Damond, who identified himself in a Facebook video as the son of the Damond’s fiance, said she had called police for help after hearing a noise near her house. In the video, which was posted Sunday to the Women’s March Minnesota Facebook page, Zach Damond described Damond as his “best friend.”

“My mom is dead because a police officer shot her for reasons I don’t know,” Zach Damond said. “These cops need to get trained differently. I just know she heard a sound in the alley, so then she called the police, and the cops showed up. … Next thing I know, they take my best friend’s life.”

In an email message on Sunday, Zach Damond said, “Tell people to call the police and demand answers.”

The Star Tribune reported that three sources with knowledge of the shooting said the incident involved two officers who pulled into an alley while responding to the 911 call. Damond was at the driver’s side door and talking to the driver when the officer in the passenger seat shot Damond through the driver’s side door, sources told the paper.

There was no weapon recovered at the scene, the paper reported.


This isn't a unique situation. More than 500 people have been killed by the police in 2017. Justine Damond is a different sort of victim than Philando Castile or Terrence Crutcher for reasons which are obvious. It will be interesting (and revealing) to learn if the results end up the same.

Looks like we could drop the murder rate a bit if we took the guns away from the cops...

Another senseless tragedy caused by the guys whose jobs it is to protect us from senseless tragedies.

This latest one's odd. Justine Damond was an Australian woman who'd lived in the U.S. for three years. She wasn't involved in any sort of altercation, but had reported hearing suspicious noises behind her home. The police had turned all cameras (body and squad car) off. From the initial description, it sounds like the officer on the passenger side shot her at the driver's side window, which would mean he fired *past* his fellow officer's head, which is probably not standard procedure.

If the officers come to trial, this may be sort of a test case. Can police get away with shooting Caucasians with the same impunity as they do black people? And have many officers reached a stage of paranoia where they see potential killers everywhere they look?

Apparently stupidity and/or incompentance does not necessarily have a racial component. I suppose that could be considered progress.

There is no information available yet, but to me it sounds like an accidental discharge. It's hard to see how that could have happened, but it does. I'm familiar with a case where an officer accidentally shot his partner who was sitting next to him in their car during a stakeout, with no other individuals involved or even near.

Twick said:

This latest one's odd. Justine Damond was an Australian woman who'd lived in the U.S. for three years. She wasn't involved in any sort of altercation, but had reported hearing suspicious noises behind her home. The police had turned all cameras (body and squad car) off.
(snip)
If the officers come to trial, this may be sort of a test case. Can police get away with shooting Caucasians with the same impunity as they do black people? And have many officers reached a stage of paranoia where they see potential killers everywhere they look?

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It was probably dark in the alley. Maybe they thought she was black? And, the big red flag -they had turned all the cameras off. Now, did they turn the cameras off because they expected to do something dodgy in the alley, or did they routinely ride with no cameras, and only turn them on when they were sure that the recording would show them in a good light? Why do the police cameras have an 'off' button, anyway?

Twick said:

The police had turned all cameras (body and squad car) off.

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Clarification: cruiser cameras typically aren't activated until the overhead lights are. Again, typically, once they're turned on, they save the last 30 seconds of A/V, then start recording from there. That last 30 seconds is saved to a memory buffer and constantly overwritten. Also, a cruiser camera typically faces front, so wouldn't have recorded anything to the sides. I do note though that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol at least uses an inside-faceing camera, although that faces the driver from the front, so also wouldn't have caught action to the sides. So this lack of cruiser video doesn't bother me at this point, because tactically they're not going to be rolling up on a disturbance call with overhead lights on. Could they have turned their system on? Again, typically, yes. But it sounds at this point that things happened very quickly.

And I think this one will be investigated a little more closely because it's a white female immigrant. But I also think the results will be the same.

frimble3 said:

It was probably dark in the alley. Maybe they thought she was black? And, the big red flag -they had turned all the cameras off. Now, did they turn the cameras off because they expected to do something dodgy in the alley, or did they routinely ride with no cameras, and only turn them on when they were sure that the recording would show them in a good light? Why do the police cameras have an 'off' button, anyway?

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Very disturbing and good question. May the victim of this senseless killing RIP. I'm so tired of these stories and I hope they never make me numb and insensitive since they seem to occur more and more frequently.

rugcat said:

There is no information available yet, but to me it sounds like an accidental discharge.

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I don't accept the use of the word "accidental" here. If it was unintended, then it was negligent.

If it's as described, it's rather inexplicable. The dead woman was making the sort of a call a good citizen would. She was apparently talking to them from outside their squad car, so it's unlikely that the officers could claim "she was reaching for what we thought was a gun." Just why the officer in question would have drawn his gun within the car has yet to be explained.

Perhaps there really has been a terrible failure of training in the U.S. police force. Perhaps they've been encouraged to be trigger-happy, or coached into a twitchy paranoia. Because this just doesn't sound sane any more. If they're really convinced an Australian yoga instructor is out to kill them when she's standing beside their squad car, they're in the wrong line of work.

Police are paranoid and jumpy these days. I get it. We live in a society where, increasingly, anyone can be armed at any time. A cop was shot in the face here in Sacramento a couple weeks back. The assailant used the officer's own gun against him. In a world where this kind of thing can happen at any time, even when the assailant doesn't have a gun of his own, it's understandable that cops are on high alert all the time. That state leads to mistakes and misjudgements, and in a world filled with racial prejudice (of both the conscious and unconscious kind), black people bear the brunt of the consequences. Cops are increasingly occupying neighborhoods, not protecting them. At some point, some (at least) feel justified in turning off the cameras, covering up their "mistakes," not to mention the deliberate abuses.

A couple of things I don't get, however.

1. When did cops start thinking that their lives are worth more than those of the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting. Yes, it's a dangerous, stressful job, though less so than some others (and cop deaths are still in car accidents, not shootings). Sometimes cops have to make split-second decisions about whether or not hesitating to shoot will put other lives at risk, but what happened to cops expecting that they should put their lives on the line sometimes, err on the side of protecting the lives of others (even suspects) at the expense of their own? Fearing for his/her own life is increasingly seen as justification, or at least an excuse that negates criminal liability, for a cop shooting someone (usually black) who was pulling out their wallet or reaching for their registration in the glove box. Cops have a job where they could logically be in danger during each and every traffic stop or interaction with the public. How far does this logic have to go before courts stop excusing shootings by police of unarmed civilians on those grounds?

2. Why do cops overwhelmingly conservative and vote for the politicians who insist that everyone going about armed all the time is a God-given, Constitutional right in the US? You think they'd be ardent gun-control/safety advocates and that their voting patterns would reflect this. You think they'd be in favor of social programs and education spending, which would reduce crime, and of infrastructure spending that would make communities safer and more pleasant places to live and work. You think they'd favor approaches to policing that make them valued, respected members of the communities they serve again instead of feared, resented authority figures. The political party that is against any form of gun control is also about slashing public spending, which also isn't great for the police.

Roxxsmom said:

1. When did cops start thinking that their lives are worth more than those of the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting. Yes, it's a dangerous, stressful job, though less so than some others (and cop deaths are still in car accidents, not shootings). Sometimes cops have to make split-second decisions about whether or not hesitating to shoot will put other lives at risk, but what happened to cops expecting that they should put their lives on the line sometimes, err on the side of protecting the lives of others (even suspects) at the expense of their own? Fearing for his/her own life is increasingly seen as justification, or at least an excuse that negates criminal liability, for a cop shooting someone (usually black) who was pulling out their wallet or reaching for their registration in the glove box. Cops have a job where they could logically be in danger during each and every traffic stop or interaction with the public. How far does this logic have to go before courts stop excusing shootings by police of unarmed civilians on those grounds?

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This was happening already in the ealry 90s. I went through the academy in SE Ohio in 1992, and that was the heyday of "officer survival" getting preached hard in the academies. "Your most important job is to go home at the end of your shift" was the way it was often expressed. No, that couldn't have helped create the situation we're in now, I'm sure of it.

I created this meme a while back. I think it's still valid.


As to your second point, remember that there are three "communities" in law enforcement: the beat cops aren't the same as the politically-active or -appointed chiefs, and both are usually different than the union membership. They all have different lines of thought about what works best "out there," and they're often widely differing.

ElaineA said:

I was thinking about this very thing yesterday. Firefighters don't have this extreme mindset. What causes the difference? I completely understand if you [general] don't want to be the one who might get injured or, worse, wind up dead, but if that's the case, don't be a public servant.

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I suspect that it's because, as a rule, their deaths or injuries aren't perceived as (usually) coming from the direct, hostile action of another person. Cops see the worse of aggressive and dishonest human nature as a part of their jobs, and it's often directed at them. This likely makes many of them cynical and paranoid, over time if they weren't initially. Yes, there's arson, and sometimes paramedics (who are also usually firefighters) have to deal with violent patients from drug overdoses or mental illnesses), but the perpetrator isn't going to be in direct contact with firefighters in the first case, while in the second case, there would usually be police involved too. We don't live in a culture where people (however rarely it actually happens to cops, it does happen, and it's always well publicized) come up and shoot firefighters very often because they are feared authority figures.

The firefighters I've known do get pretty passionate and ardent about people who don't have sufficient smoke alarms or fire extinguishers in their homes, and one of my students who was a firefighter was horrified when he found out I sleep with my bedroom door open (so the cat can get in and out of the room at night without scratching the door, meowing and waking me up over and over. "Would you rather sleep with your cat and both of you die in your sleep of smoke inhalation from a fire?" he asked, clearly exasperated with my flippant stupidity. My answer was that it wouldn't be a question of my sleeping at all if the cat couldn't come and go as he pleased.

I'm guessing that people who see (or hear about, at least) the worst case scenarios as a regular part of their job will not make the same everyday choices of convenience as the rest of us, who have never had a house fire, make. I also suspect that cops attribute very different motives to ordinary people, especially from members of marginalized groups of people who have a history of conflict with police, than the rest of us do.

One's work experiences (and the focus of one's attention as well) will skew perception of overall risk in the opposite direction from most people's. I'm hypothesizing that the overall conservatism of cops stems from the fear and anxiety (and cynicism about human nature). But RC and others on this forum know what it feels like to be a police officer far more intimately (obviously) than I do, so they would have better insights.

What I also don't know is how we can fix the issue when there's so much fear and anger on the part of the people who have the most power in society.

cmhbob said:

I don't accept the use of the word "accidental" here. If it was unintended, then it was negligent.

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By accidental I mean exactly that. Namely, the person with the gun did not intend for it to go off. For example, there are weapons that will go off when they're dropped, though that's unusual. It may well be negligent as well as accidental, but there's a difference between pulling the trigger when you shouldn't have and having no intention whatsoever of firing your weapon and having it go off. Without further information there's no way to know which this was, or whether the officer intentionally fired.

Roxxmom said:

When did cops start thinking that their lives are worth more than those of the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting.

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Cops are individuals. Some are more willing to put their lives at risk than others.

If a mentally disturbed individual start approaching you holding a knife and refuses to stop or drop it, some cops will instantly shoot. Some cops will back away and talk, sometimes for an extended period until they feel have no option left. Many of the cops I worked with absolutely felt that it was their job to avoid shooting whenever possible, even if it put their lives at some risk. Others just as strongly did not feel that way at all. "I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six" is a common cop meme.

That's one of the reasons cops are reluctant to criticize another officer's actions – an officer may do something that you personally would not do, but often it's not clear-cut which is the right thing and which is the wrong thing to do.

None of that, of course, appears to have any relevance to this particular situation.

As to why most cops are conservative in their political ( and cultural) views, it may have something to do with the belief that order and authority or important for society. In the same sense, most individuals in the military are also quite conservative. Not all of course, but most. Why those with conservative viewpoints seem to be disproportionately drawn to law enforcement and the military is a matter of speculation, but I believe it's true.

Do White Lives Matter...more?

We're about to find out.

Or, were Black Lives just ... practice? Test cases, to set precedents, and see what the response would be like?

frimble3 said:

Or, were Black Lives just ... practice? Test cases, to set precedents, and see what the response would be like?

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First they came for Black Lives....

The Damond case gets odder. The officer who shot her is named Mohammed Noor, who immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. According to reports, he "already has a pending federal complaint against him despite his relatively short tenure on the Minneapolis police force."

So, I guess we'll see how juries view black officers who shoot white people.

Twick said:

The Damond case gets odder. The officer who shot her is named Mohammed Noor, who immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. According to reports, he "already has a pending federal complaint against him despite his relatively short tenure on the Minneapolis police force."

So, I guess we'll see how juries view black officers who shoot white people.

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Where did he immigrate from b/c he may not be "black" even though he looks it.

Splendor said:

Where did he immigrate from b/c he may not be "black" even though he looks it.

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Mohamed Noor is a Somali-American on the Minneapolis police force (but he's still considered Black) and has been a cop for only two years.

That's enough time to rack up three formal complaints against Noor, including an open one from may when a woman said Noor entered her home and inflicted "false imprisonment, assault and battery" upon her person.

Come to America, learn the language, become a cop and shoot Australians. This guy's got star potential.

Precedent suggests that the officer need only say these five words: "I feared for my life." And he'll get off scot-free.