That’s a silly authoritarian position you take. Its really not as wise and profound as you think it is. You like Cops…that’s obvious. I don’t mind them but I sure as hell don’t want one to kill me for selling cigarettes.
You failed to mention that the situation in which Mr. Garner was “the victim of himself” was provoked by the Cop…not Garner. Garner may have had a history of petty crime…( that does not warrant summary execution ) but the cop in this case did not witness a crime. He had no probable cause to act.
That’s violation one by the Cop.
The choke hold used is illegal. It is a prohibited hold and forbidden for use by the NYPD. It is so because it is impossible to control and easily fatal.
Violation 2 by the cop.
We can go on and on. If the Cop did his job in accordance with the law Garner is alive. To casually blow off, as you are doing, a citizen being killed by a man that is sworn to protect him is not consistent with American values. This situation is avoidable if the COP…not Garner wants it avoided. Garner did not provoke it. The Cop did.
The Confederate says something that I, as one of those “minority under-persons”, can hang on to!! This isn’t really nasty. The word “unfortunate” is used.
I know one thing to say: we need to seriously examine this “I was in fear for my life” business. Allowing police officers to act out of fear has not been good for public safety. It creates a situation where an officer can pretty much say “I was afraid, so I over-reacted and did something irrational, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you told me it was ok.” We need a larger helping of calm and brave in our police officers, and a considerably smaller load of cya.
Strangely, this stand-your ground stuff has evolved alongside the trend toward providing officers with ever-more body armor and weaponry.
So here’s what I have to say: suck it up, boys and girls–deal competently and bravely with the public, and if you can’t, you should walk away from this job because paper tigers like you are making it more dangerous for people who are actually good at it. (Hopefully from my keypad to Jon Stewart’s ears, because I sure wish somebody would say this out loud.)
It’s not just the police. Allowing any and all paranoid fanatics and cowards to kill anyone they’re scared of is the entire premise of stand your ground laws.
If you want to get away with murder, all you have to do is convince twelve people that you’re a chickenshit.
holy cow, people actually think what you wrote? the downfall of logic is the premise you start out with, I reckon. In this case, your erroneous premise is that you don’t have an iota of a clue what is actually going on in this country.
What the fuck is your glitch, you non-human piece of shit? May you experience ten times over the same absence of rational thought and human compassion you have demonstrated here today.
Yes, a petty criminal because one of the few avenues of making money open to him was made illegal, not because it did any real harm to anyone (at least not even close to the harm that, say, Phillip Morris does), but because it is engaged in by poor people and we have to have crimes that criminalize poverty lest the poor rise up together and kill us. And these cops were just doing our (craven) bidding, so the finger points at us who cause this to happen.
It’s true. I’m a little more ok with “I was in fear” for ordinary citizens, but for police officers? Give me a break. They are supposed to be trained to act calmly and rationally in spite of their fear, not like knee-jerk fools because of it.
(And with regard to ordinary citizens packing guns, the fact that ordinary people get scared and angry and make bad decisions while carrying a handgun, is why I don’t think ordinary citizens ought to have them. It’s hard enough to keep supposedly well-trained, calm and brave police officers on the right path, never mind the rest of the public.)
Very much like the debate on immigration reform, the reason why there is so much discord in this debate is because both sides are approaching the issue from different places; thus causing a rhetorical disconnect right from the start. For the most part, white people see it like this: percentage-wise, black people commit more crimes than anyone else. Moreover, if these people would stop resisting arrest, none of these bad things would happen.
Fair enough.
But African Americans know that the issue is far more problematic than that. For the most part, they argue that a quasi-legal culture of racial profiling among police officers is to blame because this has fostered an inherent distrust between white cops and black citizens. This mutual distrust is the source of the paranoia and vitriol that creates many of the situations that we see every day in this country (Michael Brown and Eric Garner only being the extreme cases).
You do not need to be a professional rhetorician to understand that until both sides begin approaching the argument from approximately the same place (at least in the same ballpark), then they will continue a frustrating discourse in which both sides talk past each other to no real avail.
In a sense you are correct- since chokeholds are technically legal, tho banned, perhaps the cop could not be convicted, therefore grand jury, etc…
But really, who was the victim here? Society because of loosie sales? Are you really positing that on Staten Island, which is, let’s face it, a quite bigoted borough, a white offender would have been met with such treatment? Congressman King is saying if he wasn’t so fat he wouldn’t have died. So there are a hundred ways to blame the victim.
I will quote Atrios in full here:
I’m not going to pretend police abuses are a new thing, but I honestly seem to remember a time when it was an issue when a cop killed someone. That is, it was thought to be a situation in which something went wrong. That didn’t mean the cop was prosecuted, or even lost their job, but that if a civilian was killed by a cop it meant that we all agreed that it shouldn’t have happened that way. Not really anymore.
Then there’s this:
Obviously the example is from the UK, but there are certainly no shortage of examples from the US either of the differences between the treatment of Caucasian and other suspects, the many examples of which would be beyond the scope of a comments section.
People are protesting not because of one guy or two dying from police mis- or malfeasance. It is because this shit has been going on for a really long time and people are pissed. Not because of some made-up Fox news talking points bullshit fear mongering, but actual dads and kids are getting bullets in the skull because whatever powers-that-be don’t give a fuck.
The statue that represents justice is shown to be blind. Why do you think that is?
This point doesn’t do anything to argue that excessive force wasn’t employed in other instances, only that there were no other known incidents resulting in death. Ask minority citizens of New York City if they’ve experienced search and detainment without probable cause, violence or force beyond what is acceptable or prudent in the given circumstances, or just simple, flagrant police bias. I imagine you’d get more than your share of earnest anecdotes to accompany the hard data that shows this type of behavior exists in many areas of the country. That, beyond Garner’s untimely death, is what is unfortunate.
Adding to the problem is that neither side wants to look at nuance, except when it supports their side. For instance, blacks are not more likely to commit crimes than whites (given equal socioeconomic status), but they are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and jailed for the same crimes. The “there is no racism” crowd wants to ignore this nuance. On the other side, there are different laws for cops from those for ordinary citizens in the use of deadly force, and these rules need to be the standard by which criminality is judged and there is (disputable) evidence that Darren Wilson followed those rules; this nuance is often ignored by the “Michael Brown was completely innocent guy shot by a marauding cop” crowd. Facts need to be considered on all sides. I found this article in the Nation a fairly good resource on this latter issue: http://m.thenation.com/article/190937-why-its-impossible-indict-cop
Really a good article here that lacks the hysteria usually seen on both sides of the issue, yet firmly supports the idea that too many civilians, especially blacks are killed by white police officers and at the same time illustrates why it is so hard to prove criminal liability for an individual officer. The convictions are usually by the USDOJ and occur in the extreme cases where there is overwhelming evidence that the officer was far outside of the very broad latitude allowed by law and jurisprudence. The most interesting part to me was the less well known efforts by DOJ to reform whole police forces by coercion and inducement. Everyone concerned about the issue should read the article.
