The city of Columbus, Ohio has been gripped by protests after a police killing of a Black girl was reported within 20 minutes of the Derek Chauvin verdict being announced in Minneapolis on Tuesday.
Did I get that right? 10 seconds from arrival to firing shots? Just like Tamir Rice no time to even minimally assess the situation, and unlike with Tamir Rice they knew in advance from the call that the weapon was a knife, not a gun, so they knew they were not in immediate danger for their lives. I’m not a 100 percent defund advocate, but clearly public safety needs a total overhaul and rethinking from the ground up, not just incremental reforms, with way more focus on situational reconnaissance and assessment.
More facts will be illuminating, and we may learn that this killing was completely at odds with policy and wholly unjustified. It still seems worth drawing a distinction between a police officer making a potentially terrible split-second error in judgment and the sort of extended and depraved indifference that was immediately obvious in the Chauvin-Floyd murder.
I suspect we will learn that the kids who came to “jump” the honor roll student killed were not academic scholars. It’s sickening that she called police knowing she was in danger & she’s dead.
I taught my children to never call police unless they are safely indoors & to not answer the door when/if they knock. They were allowed to call EMT & fire department as they are unarmed & trained to help & assist.
The female in the jeans is clearly wielding a substantial knife, has barged another female wearing pink onto the hood of a car and is swinging the knife in to stab. That girl was intent on doing serious harm.
Given the situation, I’m not sure a taser would have been sufficient. The dispatch was for “female with knife stabbing people.” The policeman draws and points his gun as he approaches a chaotic situation. A male pushes a female down to the ground and kicks her right next to him as the girl in jeans charges the girl in pink, knife in hand.
Because I imagined it goes without saying, I’ve never got around to teaching him that when he hears approaching sirens, it’s time to stop stabbing people.
I said this after the Tamir Rice killing, and I keep saying it, seconds to react to someone who is yelling at you is not enough time to process what they are saying.
If I’m focused on another person, and you come up behind me it’s going to take time to register that 1) you are there, 2) who you are, and 3) what you are saying. This is especially true if I happen to be in a heated argument with someone.
And this goes triple if I’m walking down the street and have my headphones on.
It’s so difficult to accept contradictory facts once you’ve dug in at a position. It’s humiliating. Spare yourself that. Watch the video before digging in further.
It’s truly unfair and tragic people can’t brandish knives and guns and wave them around menacingly in public without having to suffer negative consequences as a direct or indirect result of doing so.