Discussion: Pathologist: Sacramento Police Shot Stephon Clark 7 Times In The Back

This will just turn into another “justified” shooting by the PD…

Nothing to see here, folks, move on…

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Make them explicitly justify shooting him seven times in the back.

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They yelled: GUN!!! After that everything is justified. If they hadn’t turned off the mics, they will be able to show us.

I am proponent of banning magazine fed handguns, even for cops, and this is the reason why. They would not be as trigger happy with a wheelgun.

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What happened to using taser to subdue a person?

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Not if you’re black.

@machopicasso Yes have them do that. Also charge them with murder cause that’s what this was.

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You don’t spend untold hours at the gun ranging shooting at human shaped targets and talking about “bullet penetration in soft tissue” to taze a guy when you can just as easily shoot him. Remember, a lot of the guys in the police forces joined because they like guns and daydream of shooting bad guys, and black males are by definition bad.

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All consistent with departmental policy and procedures, so case closed. And, of course, departmental policy and procedure is sacrosanct even it it leads to unjustified shootings.

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How could they not shoot a threatening man with such advanced space-bending powers that he could be shot in the back while advancing toward them?

What is it about black men and their ability to violate the laws of spacetime?

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This is what I don’t get, if police are trained to shoot until the suspect becomes incapacitated then with the amount of bullets being fired will most likely cause death, either outright, or they bleed out because no aid is given.
I had this argument with some one online that how do you hold a person “accountable” for their actions if the police just shoot to kill them? His answer was police shooting him is holding him accountable.

This just puts in mind of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, pick a number of people to atone for all the sins of the community and stone them (or in this case shoot) to death.

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I used to teach firearms to LEOs and others, in California. Even if Clark had been HOLDING A PISTOL IN HIS HAND these cops would have had no legal right to open fire until he either overtly threatened them with it or refused to drop it on command. If their department finds a way to call this outright homicide a “good shoot” there is no hope for any police department in this country to recover from the Police Riot USA we are living through today.

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Hey what do they teach officer’s about reactions times? I had read that Clark had a phone with headphones around his neck at the time of the shooting.

For murder, you’d have to demonstrate malice aforethought. It’s more likely they’d be charged with voluntary manslaughter, as the cops thinking he had a gun would mean it was a homicide “based on an honest but unreasonable belief in the need to defend oneself (imperfect self-defense)”.

Note that I’m not saying the cops did think he had a gun, but the bodycam footage/audio demonstrates that they’ll claim they thought he had one. From what was said in the press conference from Dr. Omalu, it sounds like the most charitable reading of this is that he had his phone in his hand as he was facing the door of the house, and the police mistook the shadow from the porch lights as the shape of a gun. Then the first shot (in the side, from more rear than front) spun him, and bad lighting caused the officers to think he was rounding on them, so they continued firing. Continuing in the ‘most charitable’ vein, the officers’ adrenaline levels were up because of the bad information they were relayed from the helicopter observer, who claimed he was ‘running’ when he visibly was not moving quickly at all.

Again: that’s the most charitable reconstruction I can come up with: bad information, poor lighting, and bad judgment, resulting in voluntary manslaughter, with a maximum of 11 years. I think it’s likely that they were amped up because of the bad information, and probably did misread the shadows at the door… but that at that point, they panicked, and weren’t going to hold fire no matter what he did. At no point did they call for him to disarm or drop the perceived weapon, which is pretty damning: they didn’t care what he did, as soon as they thought there was a gun, they were gonna fire.

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Shot a black guy eight times in the back?

Sounds like a “local problem”.

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And for that you have to thank the NRA. There are 300 million guns in the US. So the probability of any given individual carrying one is very high. I am the last guy to defend trigger-happy cops, but they do have a very plausible defense there.

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Egregious…in his grandparents BACKYARD. I don’t give a sweet sht WHAT the cops ‘thought’. C’mon. This was murder.

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More like an “individual” problem as just one guy got shot. Nothing to see here, lets move on.

In truth, I have no idea what they are teaching in the post-9/11 militarized idiocy of today. Doctrine in my day was strongly biased against bad shoots, but at the same time we had films and other materials to demonstrate that perceived reactions times are generally shorter than reality, i.e. most trainees took too long to make a shoot/no-shoot decision.

Even if Clark had been HOLDING A PISTOL IN HIS HAND these cops would have had no legal right to open fire until he either overtly threatened them with it or refused to drop it on command.

Sir, it has been demonstrated, time and again, that the ONLY THING a cop has to do is say that he was in fear of his life. That’s it. Regardless of what Clark was or was not holding in his hand, many juries have gone along with the idea that a cop being afraid tops everything else to anyone else.

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75% of Americans do not own a gun. Over 50% of the guns in the US are owned by less than 10% of the people.

The odds are not so high as you might think.

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