“It was not clear whether Clark would have survived if he had gotten immediate medical attention.”
It was very clear, however, that he would have survived if he hadn’t been shot in the back.
This only happens because police have been trained to be hostile and fearful. They see themselves in a war zone and act accordingly.
Objectively, if you based your information on news reports alone, you’d have to be nuts to call the police in any city in America for any reason. They are quick to pull the trigger and to say afterwards “oops.” This is borne out by the appalling statistics of Americans killed by police versus any other industrial country, triple digits vs. single digits. More of us are killed by police in one year than in most countries in 10 years.
We had a remarkable opportunity after 9/11 to become the moral leader of the world, which we entirely abrogated in favor of venal pettiness and grandiose inflation. Now we are rightly despised for our lack of morality, intelligence and just plain common decency on the world stage. There’s no more apt portrait of this country than the trashing of the Parkland survivors by the media and the shooting of the innocent and unarmed. This is what we have become.
I fully agree with your entire post, and more importantly, that no one, of any race, creed or color, should be repeatedly shot in the back.
But in reality, I put as much, if not more, blame for these types of shootings on the NRA. Any police officer going on duty knows they are going out on the street where they are very likely heavily out-gunned, due to pathetically weak gun control laws, and criminals having virtually unfettered access to high power weaponry.
I don’t think we can solve the problem of unjustified police shootings until we start getting some of the firepower off the streets.
"Halt or [pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow] I’ll shoot.
“I thought he had Skittles.”
And if you wonder why upticks in crime in certain areas, this could be at least part of the reason. For too many people, calling the police has turned out to be worse than not calling the police. (E.g. if a neighbor or a family member is acting in a way that might be dangerous.)
It’s all Don Jr.'s fault. He raised the false fear that Skittles could kill us:
urged them to follow the lead of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
and his advocacy of nonviolent protest.
A racist policeman sees a gun that does not exist. Why? He can’t see it because it does not exist yet he says he sees it and usually gets by with murder.
Does he think he sees a gun because he is racist and does not see a human being but a perceived gun?
A policeman does not react the same to a white man in a back yard. He does not see a nonexistent gun. Why the different response?
Should a policeman get by with murder because he is racist?
Police are too quick to shoot these days.
Hostile and fearful of African Americans. How many videos have we seen of White guys openly attacking police and they are not shot. Officers only seem to be in fear of their lives when the person they shoot is BLACK.
After watching the body cam footage, the world ought to be outraged. They fired on this guy before they established that he was a threat or had a gun. Then again, that’s what happened with Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Philando Castile and a growing list of African Americans. Rekia Boyd didn’t even have a gun, the officer claimed her boyfriend did when he casually fired his gun over his left shoulder and ended up shooting the boyfriend and Boyd. It’s so bad that an officer can pull out his personal AK47 and shoot someone after a chase and get away with it.
Hearing these two cops in near panic tells me that they have no business being police officers. Their behavior after shooting Mr. Clark was even worse. If he was still alive, these two cowards waited five minutes before approaching him- thinking he was still alive and had a gun.They didn’t attempt to render aide, and shut off the audio on their body cams. They were trying to cover up what they had done.
This has me sick, not just because of the actions of these officers, but the media listed every offense Mr. Clark ever had, while not naming the officers. The usual playbook is in action, and we can expect these two chumps to avoid criminal charges and/or conviction. They might be fired, but will probably be allowed to quit and go plague some other community of color.
We have seen, time after time, that police are very quick to turn hostile if a subject does not immediately and fully comply, in the view of the police, with police orders.
Many subjects who have been shot by police who perceived lack of compliance: were suffering from medical (either physical or mental) conditions that made it hard for the subject to hear or understand the orders; did not have adequate English skills; were slow to react in a very stressful and confusing situation, including when multiple officers were shouting orders; or were making innocent reflex motions, such as adjusting clothing, wiping something from the face or eyes, shifting into a more comfortable position, or reacting to a painful hold.
We have seen also that the reaction to lack of compliance is especially magnified when subjects are minorities or when the police believe the subject might be high on something (noncommunicative and/or don’t appear to recognize that they are dealing with police officers). The prevalence of guns and of drug use certainly feed into this, but I think we have to put a lot of the blame on culture (both general US culture and specific police culture), inadequate training, and a too-cozy relationship between prosecutors and police.
In a society awash in guns, anyone can be carrying. And any cop entering an uncertain situation knows it — and so is more likely to be on “hair-trigger alert” than otherwise. There is no excuse for what happened here, but isn’t it possible that in a less gun-saturated world that a nervous cop is less likely to start shooting? I put this forward as another argument for restricting not only who gets to carry a gun, but of what kind of gun — and above all what kind of ammunition. Have you heard of the type of bullet known as a “cop-killer”?
I understand that the police are scared. Guns are frigging everywhere. But killing black men running away from you is not a capitol offense. The police should start joining the Parkland kids demanding gun control.
Please edit your comment to make it say what I hope you mean to say.
Glad to see Dr. Bennet Omalu continue to make extremely important contributions to our society, after being totally mistreated by the NFL and their well paid lackeys in the media and medical research.
Not to worry, police gangsters! According to Prez Racist Chaos, nothing to see here, it’s “a local matter.” In other words, carry on with your gang mentality, cops.