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So a white woman gets unjustly shot by the police and the police chief is forced to resign
How many times has this happened when a black person was unjustly shot by the police?.
There may be partial video of the police encounter with Justine. A bicyclist riding by took some video. My feeling is that it will be after the shooting, not before. Hope I’m wrong:
The witness, who was seen bicycling east on W. 51st Street immediately before the shooting and who stopped and watched officers perform CPR “has been cooperative and provided an interview today,” according to a news release from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
She was a special kind of person. Not many women would climb down a storm sewer wearing a long skirt and rescue some baby ducks and return them to their mother. This happened shortly before the shooting. Her neighbor who filmed the rescue worked for a media outlet, she filmed it because it happened in front of her house. She got permission from the family before posting the video. You can see it here:
Similar resignations are requested, or rather, demanded of straight white male police chiefs all the time, especially in the wake of unjustifiable police murders of young black males. NOT!
Actually, it has happened before. It also happened in Baltimore, Chicago and San Francisco.
Link:
Suhr becomes the third police chief of a major police department to be dismissed after fatal shootings sparked demonstrations and anger.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) removed his police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy, after heavy protests prompted by video footage of an officer shooting a teenager 16 times. Before that, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, saying he had been a distraction as the city reeled from rioting after the death of Freddie Gray.
The head of the police union (unsurprisingly, alas) sounds like some kind of real asswipe. In his first sentence, the woman police chief had to resign because she did a bad job; in his second sentence, the woman mayor did a bad thing firing her. Makes you wonder (see also lawsuit against police for life-threatening discrimination against fellow officers) how much of the problem can be laid at his door and that of his cronies.
(police unions are like that line about democracy, only moreso)
Wow! Hundreds of African-American’s have been killed by police in the Minnieapolis-St. Paul area AND one white woman from Australia gets killed by police…and now the Chief resigns!
Boy the US is one totally screwed up racist nation!
Allow the murder of numerous black folks - keep your job. A black cop shoots one white lady - lose your job. But it’s not about race, because, as Charlie Pierce says, it’s never about race. Welcome to the handbasket.
Witless hyperbole—and it serves no one well.
I think Chief Darrel Gates ultimately went down due to the Rodney King beating and horseshit verdict.
The town was in tatters.
On a side note, we got way too inebriated and crazy at an LA football game once about two rows in front of Chief Gates and I just knew he was going to have us arrested as soon as we hit the streets but apparently he had bigger fish to fry.
The Mayor could be the next to go, her backing of the Chiefs resignation was purely political and had been brewing for years.
The buck didn’t stop at the Chief.
The Chief was caught in a series of bad circumstances and this last incident just caused the last straw to break. She was basically in a lose/lose position and after accomplishing all that she had to get where she was, it was best to step down before her entire career was trashed.
You wonder how a certain Australian media mogul and US “citizen” outlets will be covering this tragic incident. Since their meme has always been law enforcement is always right. They must never have their judgement doubted. Unless it’s the Bundy clan or the Waco incident.
Message couldn’t be clearer. It’s acceptable to the Mayor when black men are killed by the police, but when a white woman is?
Hey, now, someone has to PAY.
I tried not to go there but it is impossible. Not only is the crime dramatically increased because the victim is white, the fact that the policeman was Muslim also seems to blow the tops off of the usual bigoted suspects. As a cherry on top, one of the very few police chiefs who have been held accountable is a gay Native American woman. Is this a trifecta?
Let’s just do the thought exercise - instead of the actual facts, let’s guess what would have happened if the victim was a black male, the cop was a white male, and the police chief was a white male. Oh, wait, we don’t have to do a thought experiment, we already have multiple control groups out there in recent history.
And people think the worst thing happening in this country is reverse racism. Doesn’t the actual problem have something to do with the ubiquity of guns and the lack of adequate training for policemen? Oh, never mind.
I had to go give away some excess green bell peppers from my garden and mow my lawn. Now that I’m done and have had a bite to eat, I forgot to mention that even though the police chief was gay, she was very conservative politically. The Mayor was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the police chief, they’ve had many public spats since day one. Just a couple months ago they had another public spat when the chief appointed a very conservative person to an important position in the police department, the mayor overrode her and cancelled the appointment. It was only about the 20th time they hit the papers with a disagreement. Being from Minnesota, I keep up on this kind of shit. Also, this was the third time an unarmed person was unjustifiably shot. The Mayor used to live in the neighborhood Justine was shot in, a upper middle class neighborhood.The papers showed many photos of angry neighbors marching peacefully the other day, these are people politicians and police listen to when they get upset. Even a 71 year old ex cop came to the memorial and expressed his disgust to the reporter and others.
What will happen is that affirmative-action will take a hit. My sources within the police department say that this Somali officer’s gun training and testing was totally inept and he should never of been graduated to be a street officer
Whilst I agree there is certainly a fair measure of imbalance in the response it is not only because it was a white woman. It is also was because her death caused a fair degree of attention in Australia so the Australian media (Murdoch and otherwise) are all over it like a rash. It has been mentioned by various pollies (generally only in response to media dig for comment) and the Minneapolis police are dealing with attention they would not normally get - even for the death of a white woman. It is also because, quite rightly, the black community have used it to highlight their own experience (Castillo most recently) whilst the extra attention is there.
I am sorry, but the Australian media doesn’t have that much influence in a Midwestern American city. Philando Castile was not killed by MPD, so that case had no effect on what’s happening in Minneapolis.
You are ignoring the speed at which this officer was thrown under the bus. I don’t know how much you have paid attention to previous high-profile shootings of unarmed people by police, but the speed at which the mayor, police department and police union reacted is unheard of in America. The fact that all three AGREE that the officer is responsible at all is amazing. In Chicago, the police union is still defending Jason Van Dyke as his murder trial approaches- they hired him to work for the union after he was fired by CPD. In general, you never hear American Police Unions criticize officers, even ones found guilty of crimes.
If the investigation into what happened had been completed, then I might agree that race wasn’t a huge factor here, but I have NEVER seen this type of public unified response before. There is nothing magical about international media attention.
Let’s take it a step further. In so many cases of police shooting people, we see an intense effort to paint the victim as something other than the victim. There’s an effort to prove the victim somehow deserved to be shot and killed. Mike Brown attacked the officer in Ferguson. Freddie Grey ran from the police in Baltimore. Tamir Rice didn’t drop his BB gun in Cleveland. Rahkia Boyd’s boyfriend was arguing with the off-duty cop in Chicago. In this case, there was no effort to smear the victim.
We also usually see an effort to defend the officers. Usually, the records of the officers involved doesn’t come up for weeks or months. In this case, the officers record was made an issue within a week. Even in the case of the reserve duty in Oklahoma that shot a suspect who was being cuffed, his record wasn’t an issue for weeks. And when an officer’s record is brought into the discussion, it is NEVER the police union doing it. What is so different about this case? And again, the Aussie media isn’t a big factor.