Nice cherries you picked there. =)
You literally said that people should stop defending criminals (which is also why I believe that you don't know much about America, let alone its legal systems). You literally tried to hand-wave incidents on excessive force that have gotten people killed unnecessarily because "it happens rarely." You yourself attempted to hand-wave George Floyds pleads for help and his subsequent murder because he committed the high crime of...using a counterfit bill. Oh, and because he "resisted a lot." These are all things
that you have said.
You don't get to make statements like that, then get upset when people draw reasonable conclusions from them in a thread centered on police brutality.
Daniel shaver situation was ugly. Police had information about armed man pointing a long gun out the window. There are situations where the suspect acts like Daniel did and they indeed pull out a gun and there are situations where there is no gun. It's hard to predict what will the suspect do when he reaches, especially in a stressed situation. I'm not defending excessive force and police brutality.
It was way more than just ugly. The man was literally on the ground, begging for the officer not to kill him, while also complying with every single conflicting order the officer gave him (which, btw, the officer straight-up implies to Shaver that if he makes any kind of mistake, he'd die). As someone who has actually watched the footage of the incident, there was
absolutely nothing to indicate that Shaver was a threat at the time. Considering that Shaver was literally being held at gunpoint, and officers are pretty much never alone in calls of that nature, there were so many other ways that that could've happened, least of which being for one officer to cuff Shaver while he was on the ground.
The officer in question
was also investigated for using excessive force after physically assaulting a bunch of teenagers at a local gas station, and also hade the words "You're 🤬ed" on the rifle that was used to gun down Daniel Shaver. Not only was he cleared of excessive force in both instances,
he was re-hired by the police department who fired him after the Shaver shooting, and (for a while at least) made $2,500 a month from a police pension.
Are you seriously going to tell me that you don't understand why people have less faith in police when officers like that are not only cleared of wrongdoing, but are also rewarded for their actions following?
Philando Castile. Like I said, it's a rare situation.
Quote: -"St. Anthony's interim police chief Jon Mangseth said that the shooting was the first officer-involved shooting that the department had experienced in at least thirty years."
I'm not defending excessive force and police brutality
You
are defending excessive force and police brutality by saying "It's a rare situation," and parroting statements about how it hasn't happened in X amount of time, as if that's supposed to make the incident not seem as bad when it did happen. Incidents that claim the lives of Philando Castile, Daniel Shave and Breonna Taylor shouldn't be happening at all, yet when it does happen, there has been a very consistent and concerning pattern of officers being let go of all charges, even when there's
clear-as-day evidence of
officers overstepping their bounds.
Saying "it's a rare situation" downplays the significance of the occurrence when it does happen. It
is a defense of excessive force, and is one of the key reasons that we're in our current situation when it comes to anti-police sentiment.
I'm not admitting to missing the days where officers could beat the crap out of suspects without question. This is BS you made up.
You literally said that you missed the days when officers could use nightsticks after complaining that police officers are too restricted in how they're allowed to handle suspects. You
do get how that makes you sound, right?
I don't know why you think it's so easy to catch suspects and what kind of force you count as not excessive? If a guy is violent what are you going to do? Shoot him with a tazer and poke holes in him, shock with electricity and make him hit his head on the pavement or hit him with a baton? Both are pretty painful methods. And quite a lot of tazer deployment results in failure. They can't penetrate thick or tough clothes.
What I want is for officers first instinct not to be to go for the gun at the
slightest chance of being in a bad situation. Sure, if someone's being violent, than responding with equal force by itself is not unreasonable, but it's also dynamic, which I think is something that's missed way too often.
I genuinely believe that officers are trained to be scared of the possibility of being hurt and/or killed, and are more concerned with protecting themselves than protecting the public (the multiple negligent discharges in the Breonna Taylor shooting solidify this belief). One of the things that people generally accept when they sign up for police work is that the chances of them getting significantly hurt and even killed are increased exponentially. If a person can't handle that possibility when they put on their uniform, they have zero business being an officer.
Believe it or not, I actually do want police to operate at a much higher standard than they do now, and to be given better training as well as adequate resources to tackle situations that a normal officer may not be qualified to handle (i.e having a soical worker present for a case where police are responding to a call involving a mentally-challenged individual). With that there also needs to be a higher level of competency expected from police officers, as well as a
much higher level of accountability when officers make mistakes, which needs to start right now. These are things that are advocated in the actual reasonable take on the Defund the Police movement, not the ridiculous one that BLM The Organization (which is separate from the movement) is trying to push. Defund the Police =/= take away training and resources, and this has been explained to you at least a couple times already.
I'm not defending excessive force and police brutality. You are missing the point.
Except you have been. And what point, exactly?
Oh right you said: -"Through actual proper procedure and by respecting the individual rights that said criminals have as American citizens."
You may be surprised to learn that criminals have rights in this country, moreso if they're citizens. There's no asterisk that removes that idea when they're
suspected of a crime (and if there's something that says otherwise, then that's an unjust law that needs to change).
George Floyds rights weren't respected in his detainment, nor were the rights of Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and several other individuals.
