Dash Camera video released earlier today shows the shooting of a man in the back by a Fort Worth police officer in July of this year. David Collie, who survived, but was paralyzed as a result, had not committed any actual crime at the time and was unarmed when shot.
Prior to the release of the video, the Fort Worth Police Department had claimed Collie pulled a razor knife out of his pocket and pointed it at the two officers present during the shooting. However, they now acknowledge that a razor knife found in the area did not belong to him.
In order to justify the shooting, Collie was charged with aggravated assault on a public servant. The video pretty clearly shows that Collie was walking away from the “public servants” and also that they never got anywhere close enough to him in order for him to assault them prior to him being shot. In addition, that shooting happened just 10 seconds after the two unnamed officers, who were using taxpayer funded equipment to work side-jobs as apartment maintenance, arrived. A grand jury later refused to indict Collie for the imaginary assault.
Via TheGuardian.com:
A police dashcam video appears to show a Texas officer shooting a black man as he is walking away from the officer and not posing any immediate threat.
A lawyer for David Collie released a copy of the video showing the July encounter with a Fort Worth officer and a Tarrant County sheriff’s deputy. The officer and deputy were off duty at the time and working a security detail together at an apartment complex, attorney Nate Washington said on Wednesday.
He said Collie was shot in the back, leaving him paralyzed…
Police at the time were searching for two shirtless black men who they believed had committed a robbery near a gas station, Washington said. Authorities said in a news release they issued at the time that Collie had pulled a box cutter from his pocket and pointed it at the officers.
Collie was charged with aggravated assault on a public servant but a grand jury declined to indict him…
Collie, 33, was walking from work to a friend’s apartment when the officers approached him in the patrol vehicle, Washington said. It was the Fort Worth officer who shot Collie, Washington said, and the video appears to show the officer firing his weapon about 10 seconds after exiting the vehicle, as Collie walked away.
Collie’s lawyer, Nate Washington, says that he released the video to bring attention to a previously released videotaped incident (embedded below) in which a mother named Jacqueline Craig and two of her teenage daughters were arrested after she called the police to report a man had choked her seven year-old son. Washington stated that he released the earlier video to show that this type of behavior was not an isolated event and that “many members of our community have been assaulted, handled roughly by Fort Worth police officers.”
Atticus the Epicurean, best friend of Cicero the statist…
Epicurus claimed that nature teaches us that pleasure is the only human good, and that life should therefore be guided by the pursuit of pleasure.
He meant by pleasure the absence of pain, including the pain caused by desires for wealth, fame, or power.
This did not mean living life as one long Bacchanalia. Instead it meant withdrawing from politics and public life and living quietly with friends, engaged in the study of philosophy, which provided the highest pleasure possible.
The notion that the life of philosophy is the most pleasant life, of course, also comes from Socrates another statist dummy sucker.
Epicureans were publicly atheists. Their atheism was based on a theory of atomism, which they were the first to propose.
Everything in the universe, they argued, was made up of atoms, including the heavenly bodies; the gods did not exist.
This knowledge was not a cause of despair but a cause of joy, they believed, since one of the greatest human pains is the pain caused by the fear of death and what lies beyond it.
According to the Epicureans, death simply meant the end of sensation, as one’s atoms came apart. Thus there was no reason to fear it, because there was no divine judgment or afterlife.
Principals of Epicurus
http://www.epicurus.net/en/principal.html
1. A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is free from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness.
3. The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.
5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.
6. In order to obtain protection from other men, any means for attaining this end is a natural good.
8. No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.
11. If we had never been troubled by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by fears about death, nor by our ignorance of the limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need of natural science.
12. It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn’t know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.
13. There is no advantage to obtaining protection from other men so long as we are alarmed by events above or below the earth or in general by whatever happens in the boundless universe.
14. Protection from other men, secured to some extent by the power to expel and by material prosperity, in its purest form comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude.
15. The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.
16. Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.
21. He who understands the limits of life knows that it is easy to obtain that which removes the pain of want and makes the whole of life complete and perfect. Thus he has no longer any need of things which involve struggle.
27. Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.
28. The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration, also enables us to see that in the limited evils of this life nothing enhances our security so much as friendship.
31. Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.
32. Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.
33. There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
36. In general justice is the same for all, for it is something found mutually beneficial in men’s dealings, but in its application to particular places or other circumstances the same thing is not necessarily just for everyone.
39. The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.
40. Those who possess the power to defend themselves against threats by their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee of security, live the most pleasant life with one another.
http://www.epicurus.net/en/principal.html
Any old port in a storm….or any nail to drive is a good enough excuse.
I knew a guy driving his old Datsun pickup down I-20….30 years ago. A DPS comes up behind so he pulls over. The screamer then ordered him out of his pickup and moved him into the barditch at the point of a gun. This entire time he doesn’t ask for ID or the guy’s name or anything else. He knocks him down on his face and has him spreadeagle with a cocked .357 to his head and about to cuff him when he gets something on the radio that tells him to go to someplace and he just hauls ass to his car leaving the guy lying there. The poor guy doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind so he gradually raises up making sure no more LEO’s of any sort are watching. He picks grassburrs and cactus out of himself, gets in his pickup and leaves. The whole time he’s thinking “I lived through Vietnam and am about to be executed on the side of the road for no known reason”. It turned out some person was wanted who ended up not being remotely similar to this guy. He was driving an import pickup but not the same brand or even close to the same color. But a “man” in a Japanese pickup was all that was needed to send that trooper into execution mode. This guy drives to the convenience store, buys some beer and drive way out into the boonies where he lives and drinks beer and tries to explain it to his Vietnamese wife. I think she understood it all too well. Welcome to Planet Prison USA.
BTW, did anyone see where Alex is suing NYT and Wapo? They doctored videos of him, mis-quoted him and slandered him. It’s said the last person he sued not only didn’t win but the legal team was disbarred. Go get ’em Alex.
Eightsouthman,
I did read about the Alex Jones suit. I agree w/you: Go get ’em Alex.
Sometimes the only way some people listen is through the pocketbook.
The problem is that it doesn’t come out of their pocketbooks. It comes out of the taxpayers. There’s a reform I could back. All public officials and employees must pay their own judgements, from their own funds or their own insurance (which they pay for, not their employers).
ARYLIOA,
Very true. Public officials being personally responsible for any negative consequences of their act actions would do much to correct the problems.
• Insurance companies would not continue to insure problems or demand ever increasing premiums to cover said problems.
• The more thoughtful people would think more before performing questionable actions.
• Less thoughtful individuals would hopefully be taken care of in short order for their poor choices.
Another way is to have the funds for any civil award to come from the police budget, not the general fund. Once the police chiefs understand that this will cost them, watch how fast they rein their “troops” in.
Mith, that’s a good play for people like Alex. I can’t help but wonder if simply killing the badged crowd where they stand isn’t a better answer for the average person with little to none political power. Get that going hard…..on a nationwide scale and see how unpopular that job would become. Seriously, $100K a year…..for the bullet I never hear? No thanks, I’ll work at Home Depot and sell tree saws or plumbing supplies.