Last Friday, Los Angeles Police Department officers shot dead a mentally ill man who had already gotten out of his car after a police chase with his hands up.
The incident, which was broadcast on national television for all to judge, was the latest in a string of more than a dozen police shootings that have surfaced in the news just in the last few months. Before that, it was the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Tyler Comstock after his father called the cops to report that his son drove away in his car. And other incidents involved death during traffic stop, calls to police for help with a mentally ill family member, and a man whose watering hose was mistaken for a gun.
While national data is not collected on police shootings, available studies suggest excessive use of police force is rarely punished. In the Iowa incident, the county attorney deemed the shooting legally justified, raising renewed questions about when police can and should turn to use of a gun, when another tactic or tool might do the job. While the LAPD incident is still under investigation, a critical look back at several of the other recent incidents through ThinkProgress interviews with former officers, firearms trainers, and academics, reveal that policy and training may be as much to blame as human error.
Having no conscience may be the true cause of so many ‘executions by cop’.
How can the cops not understand the law of the harvest: what goes around comes around, sometimes in multiples?
How can the cops not ask themselves, what if this person was a member of my own family? Does that thought never cross their minds?
I admit to having led a sheltered life, but I am truly baffled as to how one human being can think to bring destruction to another human being, and reason that the perpetrator not be negatively affected by their own actions.
“How can the cops not understand the law of the harvest: what goes around comes around, sometimes in multiples?”
Because what you describe does not happen (in modern times) and the cops know they will not be held to account (~99.99% of the time) so they don’t care. Even in those vanishingly remote instances where enough stink is made that some minor charge is applied, the pig has all the resources of the state at his defense, a judge paid by the same people that pay the pig, and a populace that cares about nothing that does not happen directly to them.
Those who have government’s monopoly on legal violence on their side think it never will come around to them. In most cases they are correct.
Now karma wise some more may be struck by things that aren’t related. But that’s a matter of belief. When I hear goes around comes around I think more of what has happened to a variety of dictators. They got what they dished out when power changed hands before they died naturally. However statistically speaking I think this has only happened to a small percentage of offenders of the state both large and petty.
Yep.
I often make the politically incorrect observation that, for the most part, the leaders and enforcers of Soviet communism – which racked up the highest body count in modern human history – mostly died peacefully in bed. Molotov, for instance.
Yet the lowliest 17-year-old camp guard who did a four month tour in the winter-spring of 1944 will be hounded to the gates of hell 60-plus years after the fact by the Nazi hunters.
One can safely walk down any street in the USA wearing a T shirt with Marx’s (or Stalin’s) face on it.
Try that with a Hitler shirt.
Mind, I am not defending Hitler and the Nazis (the usual Clover response). I am pointing out the facts – and the double standards.
“Try that with a Hitler shirt.”
Or Snowden, or Manning.
Assuming the ignorant cretins would be able to identify any of them. I mean, it’s not like they were on Idol or Dancing.
If it was not for Hitlers stupid mustache, few would be able to pick him out of a lineup.
Nazis are really the exception. It’s because Nazi hunting became a business and the irrational ideas about Israel are wrapped up in it too. Problem is Nazi hunting is running out of people to hunt, so they are finding older and older people with less and less link to anything of significance. Now they seem to be going after mere conscripts who just happened to get assigned to the wrong places no matter how brief.
As to what society permits, it all comes from those who control the media and the schools. It’s all about disguising their desires and keeping people from really understanding what’s going on. Examination of nazi Germany would wake people up. Same with understanding what communism really is. Both get obscured in different ways so people never look into either and support what those with power want. More control.