
Shot by Cops and Forgotten - jmaygarden
https://news.vice.com/story/shot-by-cops
======
Meekro
In the past, I didn't buy into the Black Lives Matter message because I didn't
like their poster child, Michael Brown.

But recently I've become convinced that BLM was right, and the thing that
changed my mind was the story of Daniel Shaver. Google it and watch the video
if you haven't seen it yet -- it might change your mind, too.

He wasn't armed, hadn't committed a crime earlier that day, didn't disrespect
the officers, complied with police orders, and had the same skin color as the
policeman who shot him. And they executed him anyway.

A jury then acquitted his killer of all charges.

I don't know what to think anymore.

~~~
astanway
You severely need to check your bias if, after years of extremely similar
incidences, it took a white death instead of a black death to convince you.

~~~
jaccarmac
It's sobering for sure to realize those biases exist. I am a white man, who
was extremely skeptical of the first few police shooting stories, starting
with Trayvon Martin, then Michael Brown et al.

Trayvon was killed during a time when I was extremely politically
conservative, but later that year I actively participated in a Republican
campaign in Florida. That moment is when I really started to criticize my own
political and religious beliefs.

Since then, mostly thanks to moving away from my parents and heading to
university, I've continued to drift away from my old viewpoints. I can't say I
am 100% onboard with every position BLM has advocated but the same story told
year after year has started to change my mind.

And this case has a shock factor for a white man that the others did not. I'm
ashamed to admit that. It's an uncomfortable way to be woken up to one's own
biases. I hope it's not too late to help change things for both black and
white Americans. And I hope it's not too late to fix my own thinking.

~~~
freeflight
It's not just shootings, it's also utterly horrible incidents like the killing
of Keith Vidal [0], civil forfeiture [1] and the generally increasing
militarization of US police, not just in equipment but also tactics [2], like
running off-the-book black sites [3].

I'm not even from the US, but these worrisome trends have been obvious for
quite a while now, in many different ways. Like the mere existence of
crowdsourced maps of police killing family pets [4] and something like
"swatting people" actually being a thing, which is reserved in its severity
pretty much to the US [5].

Note: I'm not trying to paint a super bleak picture of "all US police are
evil", I just think there's a very real problem there. A problem that seems to
be mostly driven by a culture of "War", like on drugs and on terror.

[0] [http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/justice/north-carolina-
tee...](http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/justice/north-carolina-teen-
killed/index.html)

[1] [https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-
from...](https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-
innocent/)

[2] [https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-
po...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-
practices/war-comes-home)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-
square...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-
chicago-police-disappeared-thousands)

[4] [https://puppycidedb.com/](https://puppycidedb.com/)

[5] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-
mcdaid...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-mcdaid-
charged-tyran-dobbs-swatting-hoax-call-swat-terrorism-maryland-shot-gun-
explosives-a7677071.html)

~~~
lsh123
The police is just a part of the problem. The real problem here is the jury
who let the cop walk. This is the real issue: no accountability for bad police
behavior including unnecessary shootings, civil forfeiture, black ops sites,
etc. Our political system is designed around balance of power. What we observe
now is that the executive branch (including police) got too much power and the
other branches of the government have to take it back.

------
crispinb
I'm trying to picture a nation in which public and cops, both armed-to-the-
teeth, coexist within a culture totally smitten with violence, yet by some
magic they don't end up shooting each other a lot. I can't do it. No-one can
without being ideologically severed from physical reality.

One of these states of affairs must prevail for the US, from most to least
likely (and least to most desirable): (1) it continues to lose more of its
people than any comparable wealthy nation to violence, (2) it hugely reduces
the amount of ready-to-hand weaponry (on one side or both), or (3) it
diminishes its love affair with violence. The last can nearly be discounted,
as it is by now too deeply embedded in the US's economy, history, culture and
ideology. (2) seems like a distant prospect for similar reasons. (1) would be
a safe bet.

~~~
DoreenMichele
4\. We stop relying on the cultural paradigms that foster this mess and it
gets better, likely for reasons people will not understand and will not
credit.

Einstein said _No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness
that created it._ The odds are good that the current framing of the problem is
part of the problem.

~~~
crispinb
I'd concur with less hesitation if not for the fact that many nations are so
much more successful than the US (in this respect). There are alternate
framings up the wazoo on offer, with hard examples to back them up.

That caveat aside, I suspect you're right: America is stuck, and getting
unstuck will need a novel stimulus of some sort. As to what that might be and
where it will lead? Not necessarily 'upwards'.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Other nations don't have our exact history and circumstances. I am not aware
of another nation that historically used skin color to demarcate slaves from
free.* The original pilgrims came here voluntarily because they could not fit
in back in Europe, so comparing it to European norms isn't likely to ever
work. If Americans could go along and get along with European norms, the
country would have never been born.

We are misfits and mavericks and we are coping with an ugly racial legacy that
is quite challenging to fully resolve. And maybe part of the answer lies in
the current calls for reparations to African Americans. Maybe that will both
make Blacks less angry and Whites less likely to feel that Black anger is
unjustified, thus ill behaved.

Jane Jacobs wrote that _eyes on the street_ is the key to safety. Fostering a
safe and civilized climate means working on ideas like that. Confining these
discussions to what should happen at the point where a cop has pulled a gun is
pretty much guaranteed to fail to solve it.

* [http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_s...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/why_america_adopted_race_based_slavery.html)

~~~
bambax
> _We are misfits and mavericks_

Just because _some_ of today's Americans' ancestors _may_ have been misfits in
their home country 400 years ago, doesn't mean every American today is a
maverick.

And what about Australia? Many Australians descend from actual criminals. Yet
when they thought their gun problem was getting out of hand, they decided to
fix it... and they did.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Australia was a penal colony. They did not choose to go there. They were sent.
American colonists _chose_ the hardship of leaving their known world for a
harsh and deadly new world, often on the idea that you could not _make_ them
deny their true religious beliefs merely to get along with the rest of
society.

~~~
crispinb
OK the settler-historical determinism is getting the dramatic overreach
treatment here. Nearly 30% of Australia's contemporary population are
migrants. Of those born here, only a minority (estimates vary) are descended
from convicts. Of those convicts, many committed 'crimes' (such as cussing
their master or stealing a cake) quite deliberately in order to be transported
rather than rot their days away in Old Blighty's grinding poverty and
injustice. And then there were large numbers of free settlers, during and
after the convict period.

Obviously Australian culture has not come out of nowhere, but a simple line
from its 'convict' past cannot be drawn as anything other than a very poor
caricature.

Whereas there are of course historical/cultural contributors to Australia's
sanity re arms (notably: a liking of order, and tolerance of authority where
it can help maintain that order), there are many others more contemporary in
origin. We don't have a large arms industry (our governments choose instead to
be corrupted by fossil fuel corporations; arguably just as dangerous). We have
had genuinely courageous leadership at pivotal moments. We are not burdened
with an archaic constitution. We tend to dissimulate regarding our violent
history rather than valorise it. All of these features have their negative
contributions in some policy arenas, but have helped nudge us away from a
strong gun culture (which has at moments had the potential to emerge).

This has very little to do with "us" having been "sent here".

~~~
DoreenMichele
I am not suggesting cultural determinism. I am suggesting that culture has
roots in past events and that the origin story of the US and Australia are not
identical. That they have some things in common, yet have not turned out
identical, is not a good rebuttal to or dismissal of the idea that America's
current situation has roots in a long, ugly past that we are struggling to
live down.

------
tzs
> VICE News examined both fatal and nonfatal incidents to determine that cops
> in the 50 largest local departments shot at least 3,631 people from 2010
> through 2016.

But then right below that they give a graphic which covers the same period and
breaks the shootings down into fatal (1378), nonfatal (2720), and unknown
(283). That's a total of 4381, or 750 more than the number give in the
paragraph above the graphic.

Also, note that they say their data is for the 50 largest departments. They
say 1378 fatal shootings for 2010 through 2016. Add in the 283 unknown
shootings because they might have also been fatal, and that gives 1661 fatal
shootings.

It's interesting to compare to the data from killedbypolice.net. KBP data
starts 2013-05-01, and here are the fatal shooting counts by year:

    
    
      2013:  779
      2014: 1114
      2015: 1220
      2016: 1165
    

That comes to 4278 in 43 months, or 99.5/month. Compare to Vice's 1661 in 84
months, or 19.8/month.

Vice says their data covers about 148k police officers serving 54 million
Americans. That's about 1/5th of all police officers [1], so it looks like the
ratio of fatal shootings per month from all departments to those from the 50
largest departments is about the same as the ratio of number of offices to
number of office in the 50 largest departments. That suggests there isn't much
difference between large departments and small departments.

[1] Based on numbers I Googled, although I was only able to find 2008 numbers.

------
Growlzler
I am concerned with the proclivity of police to "empty the clip" into an
individual. At some point they seem to just make the switch to a violent video
game without remorse or empathy for their actions. Shouldn't this be something
that should be asked in gauging a police prospect before "arming" them with a
license to kill?

------
RickJWagner
Cops have a scary, dangerous job. There are all kinds of people just waiting
to harm them, and now they are politicized.

I've known several cops, they are without exception good people who would
never harm someone intentionally. (I do believe there are a few bad ones, but
I've never met them.)

I can't wait for this issue to become de-politicized again. Cops are totally
undercompensated, under appreciated and deserve much better than this.

------
InclinedPlane
As horrid as this problem is, it's also an extension of a much wider and more
pervasive problem. One that is hugely corrosive to the foundational principles
of rule of law and guarantees of liberty that this nation allegedly holds so
dear. That problem is, for lack of a better term, street justice. In principle
our criminal justice system works like so: an allegation is made, evidence is
collected, a prosecutor decides to press charges, a defendant is placed in
custody, a fair and speedy trial is performed, a verdict is made by a jury of
peers, and if a guilty verdict was attained then the defendant simply serves
out a sentence kept away from society at large with no "cruel or unusual
punishments" performed. There are problems with this system but it has a lot
of merits. However, today basically every aspect of this system is corrupted
and destroyed beyond belief.

Relevant here is that the police, with effectively the tacit approval of the
public at large, have created an alternate criminal justice pipeline. One
where punishment is not merely meted out at the end of a fair trial, but
rather one where every aspect of the _system itself_ is a punishment. Even in
the best case scenarios being arrested and detained is a traumatic experience.
Indeed, the police have often used just this alone, with or without any
charges, as a means to punish. In more common worse case scenarios the police
use brutal force and the most extreme dehumanizing and degrading methods of
bringing someone into custody. You will be injured, you will be humiliated,
you will be reduced to inconsequentiality within the meat grinder of the
criminal justice system. It's _designed_ to wear people down, to reduce their
resistance, to serve as a punishment all on its own.

And in the very most extreme examples the system extends this system of
impromptu extra judicial justice dispensed by police officers to street
executions. Failing to comply with police (regardless of the details) is a
capital offense that can result in immediate summary execution. Running away
from the police (regardless of the details) can be met with immediate summary
execution. Talking back to the police can potentially result in immediate
summary execution. Being a person of a body type or an ethnicity that causes a
police officer to fear for their life can result in immediate summary
execution. And for every example of a police officer being fired or, rarer
still, brought to justice for these heinous acts there are countless more of
police officers experiencing no consequences. For every objectively unjust
street execution where the police kill someone "innocent" there are many more
where the police unjustly execute a "bad guy" (rapist, thief, what-have-you)
in a way that is much harder to prove as objectively unjust.

And that's the core of the problem. The police are out on the street and they
have tremendous power in their hands these days. The power to dispense
"justice" through their own volition on the spur of the moment, even including
executions. So the police spend a lot of time working on how to systematically
categorize people on the street into the "good guy" or "bad guy" buckets. They
don't have the luxury of letting the justice system figure it out, they _are_
the justice system. Worse, they revel in it. Once the "bad guy" bit is
flipped, everything is on the table, including summary street execution. For
people with power fantasies this is a gold mine. And they've been living it
out for years, decades. The system today is designed to encourage, coddle, and
facilitate officers who act this way. If you are rough with the "bad guys"
you're a hero. If you are aggressive on the street you will make your quotas.
And so on.

Today in the America of 2017 it is very difficult to argue with the fact that
we live in a police state. It's a hard truth to swallow but every indication
is that it's the case. The vast majority of executions (by maybe 10-20:1,
statistics aren't even collected) happen extra-judicially by police, on the
street. One third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.
One third. Legally, civilians have the right to resist unlawful police orders,
even up to and including using lethal force against the police if necessary.
As a practical matter however, that's a fiction, on the street civilians have
no rights, you can be executed for the slightest infraction if you are
unfortunate enough to come into conflict with the police in the wrong
circumstances.

P.S. Consider how much the popular culture has bought into this conception of
the police. Look at the lionization of the "rogue cop" working outside the
rules but doing what's right to take down the bad guys (Dirty Harry, Lethal
Weapon, Die Hard). Look at the acceptance of allowing the law or norms of
human decency to be bent or broken. From Jack Bauer to Batman our "heroes" are
willing and able to use torture to extract information from the "villains",
and we applaud them for it. All of this is just tacitly accepted by society
without even the blink of an eye, we don't think "oh, but Jack Bauer isn't
REALLY a good guy if he uses torture", we barely even care. And all of this
absolutely does filter in to how the police are allowed to operate within
society.

~~~
jacquesm
For some alternative context: A police officer drawing a weapon - let alone
firing it - will have a lot of paperwork to do here in NL and the very few
cases where the police take a life are litigated until the very last option
has been exhausted.

I feel pretty safe on the streets here and in general have high respect for
the police force, something that I did not have in Canada (RCMP excepted,
they're very good) or in the United States.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Police in the US have a much looser set of "rules of engagement" than US armed
forces do overseas. The police will draw and point their guns for a huge
variety of reasons, because they feel afraid, because of the skin color of
someone they're approaching, or simply because they want to encourage
compliance. And the police are often quite free with using non-lethal forms of
violence, from tazers to pepper spray. It's really rather shocking that these
things alone are tolerated, but of course in a country where hundreds are
killed by police every year it's obvious that the line is well past where it
should be.

