Those US Police killers again!

[buttslinger]

I guess this is a bad forum to celebrate racism, no one will bite on my digs. Even the upcoming 2016 election has every promise of being a real snoozer, Hillary is a shoe-in, and for a while at least, the Republicans will have the governors and police chiefs and dog catchers in their states, and the Democrats will have the governors and police chiefs in theirs. The Democrats will have the Presidency, and hopefully the Supreme Court, and that is about as good as it gets for all the underdogs.
If a black person says "let me axe you a question" nobody is going to take them seriously.
If a black person puts his hand on a police officer's uniform, they are going DOWN!
This isn't England, this is the United States of America.

You could take any Stavros article and copy and paste it to a newspaper op-ed section, Ben puts thought into all the articles he cuts and pastes here.

I don't think I'll really be satisfied until I start insulting all the guys that start gobbling hormone pills so they can get a free dinner and a free fuck.
And start insulting all the guys who find magic in a pretty girl.....with a DICK!!!!!

Maybe then we could get some real passion going on down here again.

[broncofan]

If that cop can get a jury to believe that Walter Scott was trying to steal his tazer so he could zap him and possibly shoot him, then Walter Scott goes from a guy guilty of a broken tail light to a guy guilty of attempted murder. You can't let an attempted murderer run off into the general population! If he wasn't guilty, why did he run?? Just like Travon Martin, they're going to start a smear campaign against Walter Scott, you watch. Don't believe your eyes.
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I wouldn't be surprised if there's a smear campaign or even if it works. But often it's difficult to comment on the verdicts of juries because they are finders of fact and they don't reveal what their factual determinations are when they render a verdict. Here, the facts are generally well known, although various facts may be emphasized differently by the jurors the only significant matter left for them is an application of a legal standard to these facts. If a jury acquits the officer, it will be a case of jury nullification. If you were to give a law student a hypothetical in a criminal law class telling him that a police officer was assaulted and then shot an unarmed man as he was running away, he would not be very smart to argue that the officer acted in self-defense or had a legal privilege to apprehend the criminal by shooting him. What would his argument be? That an unarmed man who committed an assault is such a danger to the public that the police should shoot him if he doesn't surrender immediately? That would be to sanction summary executions.

Interestingly, in old-timey gangster movies, they would often show officers shooting people accused of serious crimes because they wouldn't surrender. I'm not sure if that was ever considered acceptable practice or if it was just not prosecuted or even if the movies portrayed something that actually took place.

[broncofan]

BTW, from my recollection it's very hard to prove attempted murder. If someone dies because their assailant tried to cause them serious bodily injury, there is a plausible argument for second degree murder. You can argue that they intentionally committed acts intended to cause serious bodily harm, which resulted in death, even if death was not certain to flow from those actions. But to commit attempted murder, you need specific intent. You need to be trying to kill them. If you shoot someone in the leg and they die, it may be second degree murder. But if you shoot them in the leg and they survive it's probably not attempted murder.

Anyhow, my point is that even if Walter Scott had tried to grab the officer's gun that's not attempted murder. Arguing that it's attempted murder when you taser an officer, because then you'd be free to grab their gun doesn't make much sense to me. That would be like arguing that it's attempted murder to run from a cop because then you could ambush them when they chase you. So, if Walter Scott tasered the officer, it's assault…and as he was running away unarmed the threat to officer safety had ended.

[Stavros]

I guess this is a bad forum to celebrate racism, no one will bite on my digs. Even the upcoming 2016 election has every promise of being a real snoozer, Hillary is a shoe-in, and for a while at least, the Republicans will have the governors and police chiefs and dog catchers in their states, and the Democrats will have the governors and police chiefs in theirs. The Democrats will have the Presidency, and hopefully the Supreme Court, and that is about as good as it gets for all the underdogs.
If a black person says "let me axe you a question" nobody is going to take them seriously.
If a black person puts his hand on a police officer's uniform, they are going DOWN!
This isn't England, this is the United States of America.

We may not have gun crime at the level of the USA, but we have it. Stop and search tactics which the police use to prevent crime regularly target Black and Asian male youths more than any other identifiable group in society -yes, this is 'England', and our police are not always so wonderful. Thus:

21,937 prisoners, was from a minority ethnic group. This compares to around one in 10 of the general population.

Out of the British national prison population, 11% are black and 6% are Asian. For black Britons this is significantly higher than the 2.8% of the general population they represent.

Overall black prisoners account for the largest number of minority ethnic prisoners (50%).

At the end of June 2012, 29% of minority ethnic prisoners were foreign nationals.

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, there is now greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than in the United States.

from
http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/...sresearch/race

[celticgrafix]

Why run? If you are innocent and there is no reason for them to charge or arrest you for anything, then why give them a reason? Innocent people don't flee

[martin48]

A little naive thought! What are the reasons a law officer should shoot to kill anyone? My view is only when the suspect is most likely to be a lethal danger to others or the officer. It is difficult to be a "lethal danger" if you are running away.

Why run? If you are innocent and there is no reason for them to charge or arrest you for anything, then why give them a reason? Innocent people don't flee

[trish]

If you run away at near the speed of light your gain in kinetic energy could warp space-time around you and drag innocent bystanders into your gravitational wake endangering their lives...or not. Here in the U.S. of A., we rather shoot than take the risk. It's better, not to mention more fun, to shoot and kill one innocent man (especially if he's black) than risk letting him get away and never knowing whether he was innocent or not.

[broncofan]

Why run? If you are innocent and there is no reason for them to charge or arrest you for anything, then why give them a reason? Innocent people don't flee

Innocent of what? I don't think there was any dispute Mr. Scott was pulled over for legitimate reasons and the officer had a right and duty to try to apprehend him when he fled. Juries are often instructed that fleeing can be seen as consciousness of guilt.

The issue is whether an officer has a right to kill a suspect who is trying to evade him. Not unless that person poses an immediate lethal threat to the officer or others. Not a general threat to public safety based on what they've already done, but an imminent threat of that proportion.

[fred41]

Innocent of what? I don't think there was any dispute Mr. Scott was pulled over for legitimate reasons and the officer had a right and duty to try to apprehend him when he fled. Juries are often instructed that fleeing can be seen as consciousness of guilt.

The issue is whether an officer has a right to kill a suspect who is trying to evade him. Not unless that person poses an immediate lethal threat to the officer or others. Not a general threat to public safety based on what they've already done, but an imminent threat of that proportion.

That's true in Mr. Scott's case, but I assume you know the law changes if Mr. Scott had a gun. There are a few other situations where an officer could use deadly physical force against a person running...but what usually prohibits a majority of this in the United States (and this has been mentioned before) is Tennessee vs. Garner.


I should note however, police officers aren't trained to shoot to 'kill'. All future sarcastic posts aside, this is an important distinction.

[broncofan]

.but what usually prohibits a majority of this in the United States (and this has been mentioned before) is Tennessee vs. Garner.
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I actually haven't read Tennesse v. Garner and should…..

Edit: I just looked at a case synopsis. This is what I remember from criminal procedure. That under the 4th amendment, killing someone is a seizure and requires probable cause that they are a serious threat of death or serious injury. I wonder if just having a gun on one's person is enough…certainly if the person has it out, they pose that kind of threat to others.

Interestingly, the synopsis I read said that at common law officers were allowed to shoot fleeing individuals suspected of felonies. So that explains why in The Public Enemy and Little Caesar and all those movies the officers were just blasting away.