Daniel - this NYT article has an excellent breakdown of what happens in the videos.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...ries&pgtype=Homepage

Scroll down to 1123pm, you’ll see the warnings in front video with the exchange of shots.

Jon, looks like we were simul posting, be sure to check my replies to you above Daniel's if you missed them.

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:

quote:

I think you're making assumptions like 'if only the cop hadn't shot him, Brooks would have stopped trying to taze him and just ran away.

I am indeed making those kinds of assumptions.

I also have as a starting assumption that we must hold police officers to the highest possible standard, that we must expect them to make nearly impossible decisions in a split second, and that those decisions should always lean toward deescalation.

Firing a pistol at the back of someone holding a taser is not deescalation.

It's been interesting to talk with Mr. SK about this, because we're comparing it to policing in Japan of course. Japanese police officers do carry guns, but they are trained not to think of those guns as tools to be used in the duties of policing. Instead, they are trained to view those guns as weapons whose only purpose is to kill another human being. Mr. SK was careful to make the distinction that they are not even supposed to see their guns as tools for self-defense. And so pulling out one's gun is to be avoided at all costs.... There's a very different sensibility there. Sorry, it's a bit of thread drift though.

Back to the US... when we give a police officer a firearm, we need to hold them to the absolute highest standard.

In the US, we have not been doing that yet. It's long past time to start.

Yes, Rayshard Brooks had a taser, and yes, he fired it at the police officer. The officer than made a choice to escalate, and now Mr. Brooks is dead. I still maintain that someone who is running away is not an imminent threat, and it's near impossible to reconcile bullets in the back.

These are agreeable stands to take, being for de-escalation and holding cops to high standards. It seems to me though that the most important question to be answered here is whether one believes this cop should be tried and imprisoned for murder. I don't believe that, personally. I do think the cop needs to be off the force, for the practical reason of being infamous for this.

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
Daniel - this NYT article has an excellent breakdown of what happens in the videos.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...ries&pgtype=Homepage

Scroll down to 1123pm, you’ll see the warnings in front video with the exchange of shots.

Thanks. I still say it was murder. Aside from everything else they did wrong, they knew or should have known Brooks wasn't an imminent danger. Yet they ended the situation the way they started it. They escalated it. They made sure he was dead.

Totally senseless, IMO.

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:

quote:

Originally posted by rontuner:
Something I haven't seen addressed in this thread:

It appears that there is a race of people in America that systematically have received different responses from police...

Imagine, if you will that any contact with a person in uniform is seen as a potential kidnap and/or murder about to happen. Videos and witnesses for generations document that 'going peacefully' is just as likely to end up in a kidnap or murder for this group of people. Do you 'go quietly' to slaughter, or fight for your life??

If you lived your whole life as part of that group, do you think your response to any contact with police might cause you to behave in unpredictable ways?

I think that's heavily debatable in 2020 - for example, the data on police killing of unarmed suspects seems to have the opposite racial valence - with white suspects more likely to take a bullet than blacks.


But even if it were true, or believed to be true - how does that translate into policy?

You can arrest black makes for crimes if they agree to be arrested but if they resist, you should let them walk?


I know you're not suggesting that, but really, what would be the policy implications of what you are saying?

If the arrest can't be made safely with the force available, then call for backup or arrange to go and get him at another time if not a direct danger himself or others. I assume they knew his name by then and had the registration data on the vehicle.

SK - Seems that someone running away can be an imminent threat if they're shooting at you while running. I think the 'in the back' heuristic usually precludes self-defense, but in this case we have video so we know the imminent threat existed.



Regarding 'deescalation' - what does that mean in particular? Go back to when he cuffed him, or rather tired to. He immediately offered resistance. What would deescalation mean there specifically?


Would it mean to not try to physically subdue him?

quote:

Originally posted by rontuner:
If the arrest can't be made safely with the force available, then call for backup or arrange to go and get him at another time if not a direct danger himself or others. I assume they knew his name by then and had the registration data on the vehicle.

Well, the gun was part of the force available but I assume you mean try to overpower him in hand-to-hand combat but if you can't, he walks.



Have you thought this through?

While in this case they knew who the guy was, in the general case that won't be true. So that would set up some really unfortunate incentives. If a cop grabs you but doesn't have your ID, if you can kick his ass, you walk.

quote:

Have you thought this through?

This is the problem right here, I am trying to think it through in ways that get us to the end result of fewer people being killed by police officers...

It's pretty obvious that minimizing that number would have predictable consequences which would weigh pretty heavily on the souls of the highly compassionate. Anybody not thinking explicitly and carefully about those consequences is not thinking at all.

My opinion is this: That was a completely unjustified police shooting, and it isn't even a close call.

It is abundantly clear in the law that a police officer cannot shoot a person who runs away unless that person is an imminent threat to the officer or someone else. Like, an officer sees a man shoot someone and flee with a gun, so the officer is justified in using deadly force to arrest that person.

As others have said, a taser is not deadly force. More to the point, a reasonable officer would have not pursued this man at all once he was running away with the taser. The reasonable response would be to call for back-up, give the direction of travel, corner the guy, and arrest him. Easy peasy. I mean, you already know his name, and he ran off without his car. You can definitely find him later, safely.

One thing to keep in mind about tasers is that they have a range of only about 15 feet. All the officer had to do was stay back 15 feet while he awaited back-up. Some people say that you have to chase people and can't let them just run away. Well, yes you can when it is safer for everyone to let them run away and apprehend them later. There used to be a time in our country when officers engaged in high-speed pursuits when people fled in vehicles, but now we know that the risk to public safety often doesn't justify these pursuits. So we don't do them anymore.

Now, could the victim have turned around and charged the officer and attacked him with the taser or his hands? Sure. That possibility doesn't justify the use of deadly force. The officer has to wait until the man actually does *something* that suggests he means to inflict serious injury or death on the officer. Running away is the opposite of that.

I cannot explain why the victim suddenly became resistive in the way he did. It is odd. I will say that, personally, I think these officers handled the DUI issue incorrectly. Based on what I've seen, this man was not that drunk, he was respectful, and they didn't see him operate the motor vehicle at all. Why not move it over to a parking space and let him walk home? They could write him a ticket and send him on his way.

I'm afraid that this officer was likely just angry that this man had punched him and snatched a taser. He lost his head. And now he has lost his career and possibly his freedom. And a man is dead.

One more interesting thing I saw in the video.

While they are struggling on the ground, one officer pulls out his taser and uses it on the man in what is called "drive stun mode."

A taser has two modes: probe mode (where it fires like a gun and if the probes connect it will create an electrical circuit that paralyzes the person) and drive stun mode (where you press the taser against the skin, which is very painful but does not paralyze the person).

Well, the problem with drive stun mode is that it hurt but doesn't incapacitate, so in some situations it only makes the person more mad and determined to resist. So when the officer drive-stunned the man on his leg, of course the man grabbed for the taser because it hurt. That's how he disarmed the officer and had the taser.

I was once told that once an officer picks a force option (say, takes out the taser), that cuts off the officer's other options. You can't fight someone if you have your taser in your hand, for instance. But that is what these officers did, and that's how the taser got away from them.

quote:

Now, could the victim have turned around and charged the officer and attacked him with the taser or his hands? Sure. That possibility doesn't justify the use of deadly force. The officer has to wait until the man actually does *something* that suggests he means to inflict serious injury or death on the officer. Running away is the opposite of that.

Like the others you slide over the inconvenient fact of him shooting the taser. He did just what you said he ‘could’ do, turned around and shot at the cop.


It seems to me if you want to indict this cop (figuratively) you have to be able to say “a cop should knowingly accept a taser hit without pulling his weapon”. I mean, you gotta own that.


You can’t just say ‘don’t shoot a guy running away’. You can’t just will this into the Walter Scott case.

I’m not skipping over the taser.

I’m saying that he could have ten tasers and try to fire them all and the shooting is not justified.

He fired the taser as he ran away. He was not coming at the officer with the taser. That would be a completely different situation.

Instead of a taser, imagine he had picked yo a rock and chucked it over his shoulder at the officer from 15 feet as he ran. Do you really think the officer would be justified in responding with deadly force?

The only way the taser could conceivably be enough of a threat is if he is coming toward the officer in a menacing way (as opposed to surrendering). But then the taser doesn’t matter, does it? If you advance on an officer with nothing in your hands, the officer can definitely shoot you. The officer doesn’t have to wait to see if he can win the fight.

This guy was running away. And that makes all the difference. Once this officer was out of taser range, there was zero threat.

But he wasn’t out of range when he shot it, at least not in any way that would be obvious to the cop. So again, you’re effectively saying ‘a cop needs to smile and say cheese when the pero aims the taser’. Really, that’s your standard.

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
Would it happen to a white guy?

We have a lot white guys here. Any of you feel confident that if you wrestle a taser off a cop’s belt and aim it at him your skin color will prevent him from using the only force escalation at his disposal?

I sure as hell don’t. It’s not an experiment I’d be willing to run.

We’ll never know, Jon.

Cause the cop would never have decided to arrest you in the first place.