Released Body Cam Footage Shows Chicago Cop Shoot And Kill An Unarmed 13-Year-Old
from the why-not-get-the-facts-*before*-making-claims-of-'armed-confrontations' dept
Another shooting of an unarmed person by police officers will likely see parts of Chicago burn over the next few days. But to get to where we are in the aftermath of this very disturbing shooting, we have to start at the beginning.
Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latino seventh grader, was shot dead in an alley by a Chicago police officer on March 29 following a foot chase. His mother had reported Adam missing. When officers came knocking on her door two days later, it was to identify his body. It wasn’t until after that that she was informed he was killed by police.
That's one version. Here's the Chicago PD's take on the killing of Toledo by Officer Eric Stillman:
A Chicago police officer has been placed on administrative duty after fatally shooting a teenager in an incident labeled by one official as an "armed confrontation."
The boy was Adam Toledo, who died by homicide from a gunshot wound to the chest, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Toledo, identified by the medical examiner’s office as a 13-year-old white male, lived in the city’s largely Hispanic Little Village neighborhood on the West Side.
Here's how the prosecutor framed it when handling the criminal charges against the other suspect in the alley that night:
During a bond hearing for 21-year-old Ruben Roman, who was with Adam the night of the shooting, Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described the altercation in a proffer: “The officer tells [Toledo] to drop it as [Toledo] turns towards the officer. [Toledo] has a gun in his right hand.”
The officer who shot Toledo was wearing a body camera. And it wasn't until the city released this footage that the Chicago PD and prosecutors admitted Toledo wasn't armed. In fact, as can clearly be seen in this disturbing footage, he also had his hands in the air. The officer who shot spent 20 seconds in pursuit and gave Toledo less than a second to respond to his orders before pulling the trigger.
Now that the truth has come out, the backtracking has started, starting with the prosecutor's office:
"An attorney who works in this office failed to fully inform himself before speaking in court…"
The footage shows an officer -- responding to a report of fired shots -- chasing Toledo down the alley. Surveillance footage from a nearby building showed Toledo tossing something on the ground by the fence seconds before he was shot. It appears Toledo had been carrying a gun but abandoned it. When he followed the officer's instructions -- "Show me your fucking hands! Drop it!" -- and showed him his empty hands, he was killed.
The Chicago PD apparently doesn't feel like talking about it. Most of the statements following the release of recordings by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability have come from the victim's family or Mayor Lightfoot. And the Mayor still appears to be taking the PD's side in this, even when all evidence shows this was not a justified killing.
[W]hile Lightfoot and other city officials expect tensions to flare after the video is released, she still called for deference to the police. "As the investigation in the police shooting . . . continues, I urge everyone: reserve judgment until the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, that's COPA, has done its work," she said.
The only entity to state publicly that the cop was 100% in the right is, of course, the local police union.
John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the officer was justified.
“He was 100% right,” Catanzara said. “The offender still turned with a gun in his hand. This occurred in eight-tenths of a second.”
First off, here's John Catanzara's pedigree:
Catanzara is one of the most frequently-disciplined officers in the history of the Chicago Police Department. He is believed to be the first police union president ever elected while stripped of his police powers.
Second, the "offender" did not "turn with a gun in his hand." The body cam footage clearly shows his hands were empty. The discovery of the gun several feet away shows it wasn't in his hands when he was shot.
That's where this ends for now. A 13-year-old hanging out with the wrong person ran from the police. Then he did everything he was supposed to. He dropped the gun. He stopped. He turned around with his hands up. And it still wasn't enough to keep him alive. Maybe if the officer had given it another half-second of scrutiny, this kid might still be alive. But the choice to shoot appeared to be a foregone conclusion. Alex Toledo never had a chance.
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Filed Under: adam toledo, bodycam, chicago, police
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Makes sense if their position is 'The police are always right'
"An attorney who works in this office failed to fully inform himself before speaking in court…"
Just... let that excuse sink in for a moment. Giving them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they're not lying that means that the Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney felt confident enough to make definitive statements in court regarding an event that left a 13-year old dead, despite the fact that they hadn't actually bothered to look into what actually happened. The best case scenario is that they are grossly negligent and are willing to pull stuff from their ass when talking in court and to call that 'horrifying' is a monumental understatement.
[W]hile Lightfoot and other city officials expect tensions to flare after the video is released, she still called for deference to the police. "As the investigation in the police shooting . . . continues, I urge everyone: reserve judgment until the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, that's COPA, has done its work," she said.
Yeah, that would have been a weak plea before the video was made public as public trust that the 'official' systems will actually hold police accountable for their actions is absurdly low, but after that release she might as well have told people to just pretend that they hadn't seen anything and wait for the smarter people to tell them what really happened. If she wanted to calm things down then treating the public like idiots was really not the best way to do that.
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Re: Makes sense if their position is 'The police are always righ
Now all we need is for Restless94110 or Baghdad Bob to swing around in defense of the cop because, just like George Floyd, Adam Toledo was clearly a present danger dying of self-inflicted injuries.
You just know, by now, that that's what the alt-right will be pushing.
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"Turn around, so it doesn't look like i shot you in the back."
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Re:
More like "Turn around so that I don't miss and look like a bad shot."
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"Police report indicates that it was the worst case of suicide they'd ever seen."
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"An attorney who works in this office"
LMFTFY
An attorney who formerly worked in this office...
Shot an unarmed 13 yr old in the chest, video showing empty hands, & still people are trying to play the well lets wait till we review & the of course he was right to murder a child i image i see a gun in the video.
People will yell & scream, but lets be honest not a fscking thing will change.
There are to many interested parties hellbent to keep things as they are & they are supported by those with money.
How else can you explain that after every mass shooting, thoughts & prayers are the only thing offered while we wait for the next one.
How many dead children is an outrage to the same people who rail for the unborn & do everything that can to punish women who dared to have sex outside of marriage or for fun instead of procreation?
But when a born child is murdered, oh thoughts & prayers...
Chicago will burn, everyone will deploy their playbooks...
Nothing will change... except the age of the next child murdered by cops.
They will lie about the event, tell you to not believe your own eyes, & just accept that every so often we have to sacrifice children on the altar of the police.
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I actually agree with this. Innocent until proven guilty. Even for cops videoed shooting unarmed teenagers.
BUT... once COPA has done its work, I expect to see accountability of one sort or another. If COPA doesn't hold the officer accountable for their actions, the public had better hold the PD and the Mayor's office accountable for THEIR actions.
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Video doesn’t lie. Cops do. Trust the video over the cop.
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Re:
No Mr. Stone, that's the opposite of true. Yes cops absolutely lie. But all you have to do is watch any non-documentary/home-video "video" to see a video that lies (I may have missed a category, but those two are the two that are most likely to only have accurate footage).
I doubt the video is doctored, but just because the justice system is being abused does not justify sinking to the same level as the group that seems to think they are the villains in life.
To do anything else would be to admit that it isn't justice you want but revenge.
The cop deserves a fair trial. just like anyone else (regardless of skin color, or what ever else may trigger peoples bigotry). Just like the kid he deprive of the chance.
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Re: Re:
Within the context of the discussion (cops and body-cam video), his statement is accurate. If the video is edited, it's not longer a body-cam video, it's a fabrication by cops to hide a lie. And since we are talking about body-cam footage, it's quite easy to analyze it to verify it's veracity.
To produce a manipulated body-cam video that's indistinguishable from real footage is incredible hard and requires a special skillset and almost magical software. Just so you can get an appreciation how
very difficult this is, anyone doing it must be able to accurately simulate the optical aberrations and the environmental reflections in the lens that matches other footage from the same camera and the environment when the photo was supposedly taken. They must also simulate the video noise and other factors introduced by the specific electronics in said camera. They also have to take into consideration how the compressed bit-stream was created so it exactly matches the camera's encoder's bit-budget used in a GOP, and that, is no mean feat since editing the video leaves quite huge tell-tales in the bit-stream which manifests as sudden bitrate spikes or unexplained drops in quality.
Using documentary/home-video as an example of how video "lies" is like saying that you can just use a fancy copier to produce money. It'll look real on a cursory glance, but as soon you start to scrutinize it you will see it's a fake.
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Re: Re: Re:
So much to unpack here. but so much more lazyness. So I'll just hit a few.
First off: AFAIK none of us where there when the cam footage was recovered. And if it's been tampered with or not is for a jury to decide.
Arguing otherwise is basically saying: "Lets brutalize cops because they brutalized others."
Which would make anyone asserting that a monster.
sigh I clearly said anything besides those two. As in most movie/entertainment videos are fictional. AKA not an accurate reflection of reality.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
If the video was tampered with after the police released it to the public, I'm sure the police will be quick to point that out. If the video was tampered with before it was released to the public, one would assume it would be to exonerate the cop. If the video was tampered with before it was released to the public to make the cop look worse... how the hell would that happen?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
lesigh whats your point? My point was always that shorting out due process was not a good idea.
If you are suggesting the video is credible... well, socking I think so to. But that'd still be an issue that would have to be examine in a court room.
If the point is "video, therefore maul bad", then that's not any better than the people who go around murdering civilians.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No one's advocating for due processes to be discarded or ignored.
If all people are doing is saying that he's guilty, without advocating for due process to be ignored, that's not all the same as people going around murdering civilians.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Who. The fuck. Is. Shorting out. Due process?
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And in case you were interested, my point was that dashcam/bodycam video is inherently more credible than the average police officer. Due process shouldn’t come with shortcuts — on this, we can agree. But we’re all human here; we shouldn’t give our complete trust in other people based only on their profession.
When a cop lies and the video proves them wrong, which one would you believe — the video or the cop? And no matter which one you say, for what reason should a lying cop be given more credibility and deference than the evidence that proves they lied?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
You know, we are all free to form an opinion irrespective of the outcome of a trial. We also know how trials work - they tend to exonerate cops of anything, while putting the innocent and minor offenders away for ridiculous amounts of time based on bullshit and the acceptance thereof.
I don't see anyone brutalizing a cop here. We are free to think he is dirt, though. And if the video is doctored... i don't know, i guess the police got something backward and thought it was a rando criminal's bodycam? And, a jury deciding whether something is doctored? I'm sure they are bloody experts.
This sort of legalism fails to hold any water. It doesn't work in accounts of serial harassment and assault, and it doesn't work here. Less reasonable people form crazy-level opinions about all sorts of other crimes, siding with law enforcement or some personal fave or someone with whom they somehow identify, and no one is supposed to say boo about it then. (I don't know you and cannot assume you are one of those people, so let me be clear that i am not claiming that.) But it's interesting how and when people go legalistic and claim no one can make any sort of judgement until years of court cases and appeals occur. Right. Or, say, when that system clearly fails, no one should have an opinion about that, either.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'd be interested in you explaining exactly what you mean by "lazyness". Pray tell?
First off: Why would the cops tamper with body-cam footage to show that they initially lied?
Nice strawman you got there, do you intend to light in on fire too? Because the above statement has zero relevance to what's being discussed.
I missed the non-qualifier, it happens. Regardless, my statement stands, discerning if a video has been tampered with or edited is quite straightforward with the right tools and it's blindingly obvious for videos in the movie/entertainment category which has zero relevance to the discussion at hand.
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Re: Re:
"...just because the justice system is being abused does not justify sinking to the same level as the group that seems to think they are the villains in life."
False assumption. The justice system isn't being abused. It's performing exactly as designed.
The problem here isn't that the occasional cop abuses the system. It's that the US alone suffers an incomprehensible amount of police killing people, at a proportionate rate which exceeds the amount of people murdered by actual criminals in several other countries.
The system you currently have is one which actively opposes justice, at least where officers of the law are concerned. The end result of that is pretty clear throughout history - revolution at some point, once it's become clear no other means will achieve change.
Perhaps ironically what once united the british colonies against the crown and sparked the revolutionary war which ended up forming the United States of America was the Boston Massacre where british law enforcement killed several innocent people in the manner described all too often in recent history.
"The cop deserves a fair trial."
He'll get a trial. Whether it's a fair one is actually in doubt at this point, given examples in recent history. His guilt however, is not in question. Facts are Facts. He shot an unarmed teenager who had his hands in the air and had complied with his instructions.
There is no reasonable doubt. We all have the facts. There is no ambiguity, no possible exculpation, no possible third-party. Guilt is already established by way of detailed photographic evidence of all stages of the event.
The consequences of that guilt are what is in question. Those are for a court of law to decide, and the conclusions of said court will serve to determine the validity of said court as an arbiter of justice.
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Re:
Tell that to the jury. They're the ones that declare someone guilty.
Until then, lobby the DA to prosecute, so that a jury is in a position to declare innocence/guilt. And while you're at it, lobby the DA to charge the accused correctly. Charge an officer wrongly, you get an acquittal. (Charge some random citizen wrongly, you only sometimes get an acquittal.)
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Re: Re:
Juries decide if someone is to be punished by the state. No one here is encouraging people to extra-judicially punish the cop, they're just stating what they believe to be true.
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I neither condone nor encourage vigilante violence. As someone’s dream version of Barack Obama once said, “Violence for violence is the rule of beasts.”
Besides, I believe one can only justify violence when one commits it for the sake of defense of self or others. Shooting an armed gunman in the midst of a mass casualty event? Justified. Shooting an unarmed teenager? Not fucking justified.
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Re:
"Shooting an unarmed teenager? Not fucking justified."
One thing I'm not seeing stressed enough here is that the kid did have a gun, but he dropped it when ordered to put his hands up.
So, this is shooting a teenager for following officer's direct commands, which seems more problematic to me than it just being another case of cops blindly shooting.
It seems to me that the kid was dead whether or not he complied with the officer, which is supported by the short time he gave between issuing the order and firing. Just another case of a cop wanting to cosplay Judge Dredd, knowing that he'll literally get away with murder.
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Re: Re: He had a gun
Ys, this is the part we haven't fully heard.
There was a gun.
Allegedly the 13yo was running away with a gun, which had been fired before the officers arrived.
He stopped at a hole in the fence, appeared to start climbing through it.
Then the boy stopped and turned, raising his hands.
The gun was found (allegedly) behind the fence) presumably he tossed it before turning to surrender.
It's a split second decision in a volatile situation - is he turning to surrender (after running half a block away from the officer carrying a gun?) or to aim? The officer had a half a second to make up his mind in a dark setting.
I would classify this as unfortunate but valid shooting.
When the police talk about "split second decisions" sometimes they're right.
Unlike Floyd - killed by a cop asserting his right to bully, or Wright shot through hyper-excited stupidity that rises to criminal negligence...
Or any other examples of murderous intent or criminal stupidity (or both) that police have displayed over the last few years of news cycles...
What's missing with this is the detail -
Did the kid have the gun or was it planted later behind the fence as justification? Not obvious from the video.
Was this the gun fired that caused the 911 call, or are the police lying about that?
Did the police officer say "he had a gun when I shot him"? OR " I thought he had a gun"? Falsifying reports is a crime and if so should be punished since uncalled for in this case.
If the officer simple honestly did his job and made a mistake... IF.
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Re: Re: Re: He had a gun
"When the police talk about "split second decisions" sometimes they're right"
The problem isn't the "split second decision" as such, it's the regularity in which the inability to de-escalate situations makes them necessary. Also, the fact that cops in the US are trained to bark conflicting orders so that no matter what action the target makes they can be deemed as disobeying orders and can thus be executed.
Bear in mind also that there was someone else who had to make a split second decision - the kid who was murdered. One party was a supposedly highly trained peace keeping force, the other was a scared 13 year old. Yet, it seems the latter was the one who reacted in the correct way, but died for it.
"Did the kid have the gun or was it planted later behind the fence as justification? Not obvious from the video."
I've seen footage that shows that the kid did indeed have a gun previously. But, that's not the point. He was ordered to drop his weapon and raise his arms, then he was shot anyway after he did exactly what was asked of him.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: He had a gun
No disagreement from me - "cops bark orders". We see in the video of the police confronting the soldier, the police are expecting to bark orders and have them obeyed without question, then throw their full weight around (or put it on necks) when the people fail to comprehend and obey instantly - or often, don't even wait for compliance. Sadly "I wanna be a policeman" seems to attract this particular bully mentality.
What we need to see, I suppose, is whether the police interaction at the beginning before the tape was sufficiently hostile to instill fear and flight in the child. (If the soldier tape had started with the guy trying to hold his door closed halfway through, we'd have a different view of that confrontation).
The child's error was in trying to hide the gun - a definitely childish impulse to hide evidence of guilt. More earlier view of the interaction would indicate whether this was a bully act by the police that intimidated the child enough to make him run, which could imply the intent to shoot by the police might contain an element of malice - the "I'll tech ya!" mentality, or was it simply some police officer realizing he's chasing an erratic person with a gun?
This is why trials take 2 weeks or more and see more than just one 5-second video. There may be a lot more to this that what I see. Was it a bully or a scared cop? Did (like Chauvin dragging his fellow officers down) some other police officer create/escalate a situation where this cop was put in a dangerous situation? The police investigation service knows and are not telling us.
The important thing, to my mind, is regardless of motive (which may/should carry its own punishment) is the tendency to falsify reports - there should be consequences all up and down the line for those actions. Correcting this will go a long way to ensuring public trust.
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The cops shouldn’t have punished that error with an extrajudicial death sentence. You seemingly want to justify the actions of the police to an absurd degree, and that is the point with which some of us take issue.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: He had a gun
"Was it a bully or a scared cop?"
It could be both, but the question becomes why are there so many scared cops? There's been a rash of stories about such people, ranging from cops being "scared" that people aren't complying quickly enough to cops shooting people dead because in the heat of the moment they forgot which gun was the taser. The bully mentality seems to lead them into "split second decisions" more often than they should, but there also seems to be a culture of fear that leads them to make the wrong choices in those situation.
"The important thing, to my mind, is regardless of motive (which may/should carry its own punishment) is the tendency to falsify reports"
This is true. This would still be a problematic shooting, but the misinformation about it and delay in informing the family raise larger issues. The tendency to state one story until some video proves that original story false breeds a lot of distrust, and makes everyone wonder how much they were getting away with before video evidence was so easily available.
"Correcting this will go a long way to ensuring public trust"
The only way to do that is to refer back to the original meaning of the old proverb about bad apples. The problem isn't that the bad apples exist. It's that they are allowed to remain in the barrel and spoil everything. Until police behaviour switches from backing the blue to holding the bad cops liable for what they did, this will keep happening.
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Which is why I find Judge Dredd as depicted in cinematic adaptations to be barely indistinguishable from IRL American cops.
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Sorry, should be "barely distinguishable". Derp. I should really preview before submitting.
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Which is a damn shame because it was meant to be ridiculous satire in the original comics.
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Much like how Onion headlines have started to reflect real life, reality looks at satire and says “hold my fuckin’ beer”.
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In response to school shootings a few years ago, The Onion wrote their headline "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens". It's sad to see that people unironically repeat this sentiment every time there's another mass shooting.
Same in these situations - cops deciding to summarily execute people who don't follow orders should be the realm of dystopian fiction, but here the US is...
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It’s sad that The Onion has to repeat the story after damn near every mass shooting.
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Re:
Trouble is no justice system that is independent of the police or has any way to prove them guilty without relying on them to help do it themselves. They are often caught making an unusually high number of "mistakes" when investigating their own and we have no reason to think the number of times they aren't caught isn't way higher.
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I actually don't agree. Innocent until proven guilty should only be for those that isn't above the law. Here it isn't the officer who is above the law (as he will likely be punished) but the police and the justicesystem as a whole. This isn't "a man killing a teenager", this is a cop who is trained and hence the training is also to blame, otherwise this wouldn't happen again and again. IMO those that make the rules and train these cops are to blame for the killings, more so than the cop himself, as they should (and do!) know that the whole system behind the cop on the street has failed in training cops that are safe to let out with a gun.
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Re:
"Innocent until proven guilty."
Yes. And the video does prove guilt. An officer of the law shot an unarmed 13 year old with his hands raised in surrender, to death. These are the incontrovertible and irreduceable facts.
The only proof required is that the video be certified as untampered with, which, if it has been released, should already be the case.
Although I agree that sanction and penalty of law should wait until after a judgment is handed down with observed jurisprudens in a court of law there is no question of the officer's guilt. None. Facts are facts and don't get overridden by principle.
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Gun Control for cops
The Gun Control Advocates are absolutely correct -- Guns are inherently dangerous -- even when cops have them.
The vast (and constantly expanding) number of firearms possessed/carried by LEO's and many other government civilian employees MUST be sharply reduced and closely controlled.
A LEO badge is highly insufficient to grant blanket approval of firearms carry to any person in the U.S.
LEO Firearms rules and training vary wildly in the thousands of American police districts/agencies.
Special Federal firearms certification and licensing should be required for all LEO's and armed government civilian personnel.
Off-duty and retires government personnel should be required to follow exactly the same firearms laws/regulations as any other resident.
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His homie should have blasted at the cops, might have given him time to get away.
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How about not handing them justification to shoot instead?
Because if there's one thing that will result in less trigger-happy cops and resulting corpses it's if people actually started shooting at them...
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Re: How about not handing them justification to shoot instead?
Well according to police testimony, officers living in state of constant terror of squirrels, and leaves, and humans are infinitely worse. Actual gun shots might make them so terrified they pass out,
(note: not an endorsement of action, just a mockery of liers)
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Re:
Only criminals will be that stupid to shoot at trigger happy cops in full gear. The one statistic we can trust, that most criminals are stupid.
Cops are humans too. They need to eat, sleep, socialize, shop for groceries, etc. There are so many attack vectors to pick from that are much better, have a high success rate and can bring the living fear in cops and their families. A team of 5 to 20 people could do so much damage in a short period of time when lead and trained correctly. So it's very good that most criminals are stupid.
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So here's the thing...
Nobody is actually capable of handling the job of "cop" as presently constituted. Literally nobody.
What I saw in that video was an overstressed, adrenalized guy fucking up and shooting a kid. Yeah, he probably had an above average willingness to do that. But "adrenalized" matters, too.
It's night. It's a really dangerous situation. There has been real violence. The kid had had a gun in his hand a few seconds before, and even if the cop wasn't sure of that, he had been with a guy who had actually been firing a gun. You're trying to see what's going on at a dead run in weird lighting. You have zero chance to pause and think about anything. In that kind of situation, you, yes you, are going to "see things" and overreact. Training only goes so far.
And if the kid had had a gun and intended to use it, another half second spent assessing the situation would probably have in fact gotten the cop shot. Not that the cop (or you) would have had time to really weigh that consciously even if he were in a purely rational condition. Regardless of what training he'd had.
People talk about military rules of engagement. I have zero military experience, but I don't think military tactics generally involve putting yourself into that kind of situation to begin with, if you can avoid it. And if you're forced to do it, you go in with a plan.
If you're a cop, you're expected to just give chase in situations that arise suddenly, with no advance plan of action.
Every time this shit happens, people scream about how evil the cops are. And I'm not saying that there aren't evil cops, even many evil cops. And I'm not saying that most cops aren't arrogant, full of themselves, massively overconfident in their prejudices, in love with their own authority, prone to solve problems with violence first, racist, and whatever else. Cops routinely act badly in "cold" situations as well as "hot" ones... although you might wonder what it is about the job that tends to make them that way...
What I am saying is that if you set up a world where a goddamned saint has to deal with the sort of situation in that video, that saint is still going to fuck it up way too much of the time. If you have 50 or 100 of those situations happening in a country, some of them are going to end up as "bad shoots" regardless of who the cops are.
If you want to get rid of that kind of thing, first cut down on that pressure to chase. Accept that somebody might get away occasionally.
Then get some serious gun control, so that the overall number of incidents goes down, and the default assumption is more that somebody is unarmed than that they're armed. A total, no-excuses ban on private possession of firearms and ammunition wouldn't be going too far. After that's been around long enough to cut down on the amount of firepower in circulation, you can probably disarm the cops as well. From the very beginning, you sure as hell disarm them when they're off duty.
Fuck your hunters and collectors, and your Rambo "self defense" fantasies are frankly part of the problem itself. For every "good guy with a gun" anecdote you can tell, there are 10 where the gun made the situation worse. Constitutional problem? Amend it or stop pretending to be serious.
Then, take a good hard look at what's driving crime in general, and see what you can do about it. The original meaning of "defund the police" was to move the money into services that stop problems from happening in the first place.
Have a look at technology. Robots aren't worried about getting shot. But don't dream they'll be good enough to just take over the whole job, any time this decade or the next. Maybe there are also ways to control a whole area, avoiding the need to engage... without creating a surveillance dystopia, although I have my doubts.
What will not help is obsessing about who's "good" or "bad", or whose fault anything is, or punishing anybody, cop or non-cop.
Even if you don't believe what I said, and think that the cops in these cases are always 10000 percent blameworthy, the bottom line is that there will still be more blameworthy cops available no matter how many you punish. You're not going to eliminate them, and you're not going to deter them, either. Just like random criminals aren't usually thinking about punishment when they decide to commit random crimes, cops, good or bad, are not going to be thinking about punishment in situations like that video.
Drop the punishment and blame and try to actually fix something. "Justice" and "accountability" don't necessarily do anything. Which, by the way, is another reason to cut down on the pressure to chase people...
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Re: So here's the thing...
Literally no one forces cops to put themselves in that position. It's like high-speed chases. Even when the courts explicitly ban some department from engaging in them due to their incredibly awful handling of chases, resulting in the deaths of other people who are not involved, etc., they violate the law and the courts and do it anyway.
On the cops end, they have proven in court repeatedly that they aren't actually required to help anybody, or do anything really. It's their own culture, and the people they attract, hire, and acculturate.
Not saying that you do not make some good points, but honestly, the cops are the ones deciding to shoot someone after 20 seconds of contact. In a better world, sure it would happen sometimes, but not like it does hypermilitarized cops, their hormones, and their culture and training. I mean, if you are literally scared of getting shot, don't chase the guy? Apparently no amount of submission makes them feel safe enough to talk to someone of effectuate an arrest without excessive violence.
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Re: Re: So here's the thing...
This is still trying to decide who to blame. That doesn't actually fix anything. It just makes you feel better.
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Re: Re: Re: So here's the thing...
Nothing is changed, how can it make me feel better? Fixing involves removing the unhealthy system and individuals from power, and changing. Not in a court case or outrage over this one guy, but holding people to account (like, you know, supposedly this officer was doing, but maybe he is trigger happy because it makes him feel better) one at a time is how the larger justice system currently works. Removing and replacing large swathes (but individually wrapped) of that system needs to start somewhere. A handful of legislators and DAs have tried to shift that system, massive numbers of people protest it, but apparently all that does is make the cops more likely to use excessive and lethal force. So, you take what you can get, and certainly this cop should not be above the law. (Although they usually are.)
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Re: So here's the thing...
Assaulting an enemy position is a more dangerous situation, and soldiers are expected to carry out assaults. Also, the military carry out lots and lots of scenario simulation, so that they can function under stress. As far as I can see, US cops do not have such training, and are qualified to carry a gun if their score on standard targets is good enough.
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Re: Re: So here's the thing...
"... if you can avoid it. And if you're forced to do so, you go in with a plan".
What you did there is some of the most dishonest quote editing I've ever seen...
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Re: So here's the thing...
Not quite a fair assessment of the situation. Try, instead: Cop yells at kid to stop, drop it, put hands up. Kid does so. Trigger-happy cop blasts away, expecting that there will be no prosecution and that the union will protect his job.
As follow up, city officials urge public to relax, and not get upset about another police homicide. Public will please wait until the matter is forgotten, at which time the cop's paid desk duty may end in favor of releasing him back on the streets to shoot another kid.
And, of course, the police union is fully behind the shooter. Not behind the victim, they do not care about the dead or their families; the police union is backing the killer.
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Re: Re: So here's the thing...
Try again. When you are keyed up like that, you do not see clearly, especially if you're trying to assess things rapidly without a God's-eye view. The cop probably did in fact think he saw a gun. By the time the cop yelled "drop it", the kid had already gotten rid of his gun, so obviously the cop was wrong about something. He may have been primed by his prejudices, but that's something you anticipate and avoid.
Give it a rest. The guy wasn't sitting there at leisure thinking through whether he'd get prosecuted. At most he had sat around in the past rehearsing his probably distorted idea of what a situation like this would be, feeding those prejudices and deciding in advance that "he wasn't going to be the one to go home in a box".
And it's irrelevant anyway. You are so obsessed with placing the blame that you're not interested in fixing the problem.
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Re: Re: Re: So here's the thing...
Try again. When you are keyed up like that, you do not see clearly, especially if you're trying to assess things rapidly without a God's-eye view.
So now extrapolate that feeling to the shooting victim.
You know what else isn't helpful to fixing the problem? Continuing to make fucking excuses for asshole cops doing shit work. Because it sure sounds like you're piling on excuse after excuse for an incompetent cop shooting a kid who did what the cop told him to do.
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Re: Re: Re: So here's the thing...
"When you are keyed up like that, you do not see clearly, especially if you're trying to assess things rapidly without a God's-eye view."
So, again, you're making excuses for the kid to be executed while complying because the officer had problems with some previous action that had been taken. Meaning that whether or not the kid complied, the punishment was death. Also, you know who else is scared and not thinking clearly? The 13 year old being told to comply or die.
There's a whole other conversation about the problems with police training, whatever issues led to the situation being so escalated that a highly trained police officer is so easily panicked, and the very fact that it's possible for 13 year olds to be running around with guns. But, looking at just the subject at hand here, the kid was killed despite following direct orders.
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Re: Re: Re: So here's the thing...
"Try again. When you are keyed up like that, you do not see clearly, especially if you're trying to assess things rapidly without a God's-eye view."
And yet in other nations in the world police officers seem to manage just fine without killing more people by capita than actual criminals do.
Try again. But this time preferably without the excuse of "Only in the US do we suck and fail so hard we literally can't accomplish what to everyone else is a done deal".
What the hell is up with so damn many americans falling all over themselves trying to prove that they are a nation of hopeless losers who can't get anything done these days?
If proper policing and law enforcement was rocket science you'd expect to see similar headlines out of Europe.
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Re: So here's the thing...
"What I saw in that video was an overstressed, adrenalized guy fucking up and shooting a kid. Yeah, he probably had an above average willingness to do that. But "adrenalized" matters, too."
All I got from that long post of yours was "Yeah, for some reason US cops alone are inherently unable to do their job without murdering more people per capita than other nations actual criminals do. Because US officers are either stressed-out snowflakes or the US urban environment a hostile war zone."
I'm getting sick and tired of every bloody time the US demonstrates a fucking horrifying issue no one else is suffering from and then tries to holler about why they, alone among the G20, are utterly fucking unable to fix it.
Here's the real reason; The US doesn't want to change.
As demonstrated by the last presidential election one in three american voters are such horrible assholes they'll accept anyone for candidate as long as he provides them with someone to hate. And those people keep sending people into congress who in most other first world nations would have been committed to an asylum and/or extensive deprogramming therapy.
The US police being beyond help is just a symptom of the entire nation falling apart at the seams.
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Re: Re: So here's the thing...
"But "adrenalized" matters, too."
That's the weird tell. You know who else was "adrenalized"? The 13 year old kid who realised he was fucked, and probably had some understanding that he was about to be shot whether or not he complied.
Now, there's some dumb reasons it got to that point, some of them purely the fault of the kid. But, if you're going to use the "scared / wired" excuse for one party without considering the other, that reveals something.
But, you know what's going to be really messy? The next kid cornered might remember this story (and others, like cops being too incompetent to remember which gun is lethal), and decide that he has to kill the cop because there's no way he's being taken alive no matter what he does. He might normally comply, but if he thinks he's dead either way, might as well go out fighting. Then, that reaction will be used by cops to use less discretion in future incidents.
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Self-fulfilling prophecies
He might normally comply, but if he thinks he's dead either way, might as well go out fighting. Then, that reaction will be used by cops to use less discretion in future incidents.
... Which in turn will result in members of the public being even quicker and more likely to open fire on police in the belief that that's the only thing that will protect them, the police will use that to justify using deadly force quicker in response, and things will continue to get more and more bloody as the body count will continue to rise.
Between police treating the public as the enemies with their rights and even lives annoyances to be ignored on a whim, their unions and politicians screaming at the very hint of accountability and judges acting as though police are the dumbest people on the planet who should never be expected to have even the barest glimmer of critical thinking skills things are likely to get a lot worse for the public and the police unless something huge changes in how the police are seen and treated by the legal system, with the most messed up part being that a large chunk of the problem stems from the belief that the best way to 'protect' police is to place them above the law and immune from personal responsibility.
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Re: Re: Re: So here's the thing...
"That's the weird tell."
It really is. I mean, you can tell where they're coming from as soon as they discard the dead brown child from the debate as irrelevant.
But also because only the american alt-right are such dumb motherfuckers all their apologism relies on the idea that the US is a nation of "No we can't" now. As in "We can't do anything everyone else somehow manages to do".
Meanwhile literally everyone from outside of the US is fucking horrified when observing the unholy shit-show of a joke they call "police" because that shit simply doesn't happen in civilized countries.
It's the same with universal health care as it is with law enforcement, infrastructure, basic education, etc etc etc...the US is sitting there with an outright murderous police force, 32 million - almost 10% - of the adult population not being able to read, 1 in 3 american voters being happy with a white supremacist presidential candidate...
And every time it's the same excuse. The conservatives who used to be the party of "Can Do" in the 60's has become the party of "Can't Do". From keyboard warriors to congressmen and senators the same cry is raised from the conservative side of the aisle; "We can't afford it! It's Too Hard! We can't do ANYTHING!".
Meanwhile in the rest of the damn world where we've somehow managed to do everything US conservatives claim is impossible we just look on to this farce and shake out heads.
This part where someone comes along and tries to tell us - yet again - how a trained and armed police officer was unable to refrain from shooting a 13 year old unarmed kid who complied with directions because...reasons...just comes off as yet another soldier in the vast army of american incompetents blustering about why the US is inherently unable to meet any standards of adequacy these days.
Man, that's some "leadership by example" they're offering...
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Re: So here's the thing...
Funnily enough, from time to time we do hear from people (from Military Police to soldiers with multiple tours in Afghanistan or Iraq) who do have that military experience with rules of engagement in difficult, often confusing, stressful and "adrenalized" circumstances -- and they seem to be rather consistently... unimpressed... with how poorly police in the USA handle themselves in these situations.
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Well, two out of three isn't *that* bad
Never underestimate those darn squirrels...
https://bloggingwv.com/biker-squirrel-from-hell/
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Toledo didn't follow instructions. He was still running after being told to stop initially and when he decided to finally stop and show his hands, he decided that was the right moment to try and ditch the gun. Then instead of just showing his hands, he turned around. Those are all ways in which Toledo did not comply with the instructions. To say he complied and was shot is misleading to the point of outright fabricating events.
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Re:
The police aren't supposed to shoot guilty people either.
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“Contempt of cop” is not, and should never be, an offense penalized by death — especially when the cop serves as the judge, jury, and executioner for such “cases”. And even the guilty deserve their day in an actual court.
The police have often punished both compliance and non-compliance with violence. What message does police violence for its own sake send to the people whom the police ostensibly serve?
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Re:
Nowhere in my comment did I say he deserved to be shot or killed. I didn't even imply that in any way shape or form. I simply said he didn't follow instructions, thus to say he did and was shot for it is an incorrect statement.
If you want to have an informed opinion on the subject and propose change maybe you need to actually understand the situation and not base your arguments on literally re-writing the statements you're arguing against.
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The implied meaning of such a statement is “he didn’t follow instructions and that’s why he got shot”. As I said: Someone committing “contempt of cop” shouldn’t die for doing so.
If you believe the kid didn’t deserve an on-the-spot execution for not following instructions, you should have no problem with saying so — in your own words, not mine.
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Re:
That is not the implied meaning of the statement. The implied meaning is the reality of the situation is he didn't follow the instructions of the officer. I can believe he shouldn't have been shot and that he also didn't comply with the instructions of the officer chasing him just by complying with only one of them and ignoring everything else.
How in the hell can you honestly believe the only possible opposite of "didn't comply with orders" is "deserve to be shot". Those two are unrelated at all. Toledo shouldn't have been shot and he also didn't comply with the orders of the police. Those two things are not contradictory.
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Your initial statement implied that the shooting of Toledo was justified by his non-compliance with police orders. Even now, you’ve refused to explicitly rebuke the idea that his non-compliance justifies his execution. Will you say “he didn’t deserve to be shot for his refusal to follow orders” in your own words and without deflection from that specific point? Hell, can you say that?
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Re:
No, I can't say that. Because you're pushing an opinion as fact. Was he shot for refusing to follow orders? That is one interpretation of events, but not the only one, and not a fact as far as I'm aware. Has the officer made a statement as to why he shot Toledo?
I can say that if the cop shot him because of a failure to comply with his orders then the cop was wrong and Toledo didn't deserve to be shot.
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That’s literally the only thing I was asking you to say, and I’m glad you finally said it, but you still had to preface it with some “blue lives matter”-level bullshit before you said it. Goddamn, that’s sad.
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Re:
Glad you turned my original post about factual reporting error into a character attack to avoid acknowledging the error.
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You were the one who implied that the victim deserved to be shot because he, and I quote, “did not comply with the instructions”. If I was supposed to interpret your initial post in any other way, you should’ve made sure of that.
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Re:
Maybe interpret them the way they were written. Toledo did not comply with the instructions. How is that confusing or open to interpretation? If you felt that statement had a hidden implication then please walk me through the logic of that. I legitimately and seriously do not understand how you could interpret those words as anything other than as literally written.
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In a self-contained vacuum, the statement is inert. But we’re not discussing that point in a vacuum — we’re discussing it in the context of a cop ostensibly shooting a 13-year-old child because the child “did not comply with instructions”. Your entire original post in this discussion thread says nothing about the kid not deserving to die because of his non-compliance. When you go on and on and on about his non-compliance but also say nothing about whether that non-compliance deserved a lethal response (or pussyfoot around the issue like you believe in the “blue lives matter” ideology), the only interpretation I can follow is “he didn’t comply, so he deserved to die”.
If that truly isn’t what you meant, the fault on that fuck-up lies with you. I didn’t write your post, and I sure as shit don’t have a responsibility to make your post unambiguous in its meaning.
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Re:
The article, of which my comment is directly replying to, discusses how Toledo was shot while complying with instructions. My comment was pointing out how he did not comply with instructions. So the context of my comment was a correction to the article, not about how "a cop ostensibly shooting a 13-year-old child because the child 'did not comply with instructions'." I made no comment about why the cop shot Toledo. You added that context. If you're blaming me for the implication of my comment altered by your context, it's not my fuck up.
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That is exactly why I interpreted your comment the way I did. Judging from the fact that said comment sits behind a “this comment has been flagged” warning, so did a lot of other people.
You made yourself sound like you supported the idea of the kid being executed for non-compliance. Nobody but you shoulders the blame for that.
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Re:
It's not flagged on my screen. As for the rest maybe you're right, but after this conversation I'm not even sure if I said "And Toledo didn't deserve to be shot" or whatever else you may think I should have said would have made a big of difference. If you, or others, are so hell bent to assume bad faith from anyont criticizing the article then what can anyone say to have a fair discussion?
Especially seeing some of the other comments here that are outright factually wrong, including yours.
For example, you and and the article have stated that Toledo was not holding the gun when he turned to face the officer. Yet the body camera footage (specifically here in this frame https://imgur.com/a/4vttnND) shows Toledo already halfway through his turn to the cop but still holding the gun.
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Re: Re:
Shit. The downside to posting anonymously is inability to edit. I had more written that I deleted and meant to also delete everything after "For example" because I went back to the comment I was thinking of where you had said he wasn't holding the gun as he turned, but it wasn't you that said that specifically. The article does say it, but I meant to delete everything and not bother with remaking the paragraph.
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Re: Re: Re:
"The downside to posting anonymously is inability to edit. "
People with accounts can't edit either. While this can be annoying, it means that the types of disingenuous liars we get here sometimes can't retroactively change their words when people explain to them why they're idiots. A price worth paying, IMHO.
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Re: Re: Re:
"Shit. The downside to posting anonymously is inability to edit."
No one with an account can, either. What you post here on TD stays up in the same way it looked when you hit "submit".
Which at least for me has resulted in some memorable whoppers necessitating a big "whoops. Mea culpa".
Here's the problem; a lot of more informed americans and a few europeans are posting here. We know what american law enforcement looks like, in the numbers, as compared to the rest of the world.
So how come, with other national police forces also being armed and dealing with criminals, the US is the only nation in the G20 whose police officers kill more people per capita than criminals do in a few other countries?
We're talking about people, including children, being gunned down for no reason. This doesn't happen elsewhere. Is the US truly so inadequate as a nation it can't hack basic standards of civilization?
The cops point of view isn't relevant. It might have been, if this was the first time in a decade or hell, even just in this year this sort of shit happened. But it's not. Adam Toledo is just the latest victim in a very long, very rich and very sustained killing spree where once again someone shows up and tries to exculpate the cop because, apparently not killing people is something uniquely hard to do in the US specifically.
Is it something in the water? Are police officers all on bad drug trips when they hit their beat? How come they have a worse record of not shooting people than US military peacekeepers in hostile areas?
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We might be arguing about different points, sure. But we wouldn’t be arguing about whether you believe non-compliance with police orders is a death penalty offense.
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Re: Re:
"I simply said he didn't follow instructions"
The issue being that he did follow instructions. Not that it matters, as it seems he would have been killed whether or not he obeyed them.
He received a direct instruction to drop the weapon and put his hands up. He did both and was killed. It seems clear that if he had not dropped the weapon, he would also have been killed.
The only way around this fact is to argue that he deserved to be shot because he ignored previous instructions before the order to put his hands up, which definitely places it in the arena of "contempt of cop requires summary execution", which is very troubling for most people. Or, as you seem to be implying, that he followed instructions but didn't do it in the "right" way, which is equally problematic.
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Re: Re: Re:
I've already explained how he wasn't following instructions. Following a single order doesn't equal "comply with instructions" if you're ignoring everything else. Would you say you've complied with instructions on landing an airplane if you deployed the flaps but not the landing gear?
And whether he complied with instructions has no relation to whether he should have been shot and killed. How are those things related? Why is it so impossible for you to understand I can believe he shouldn't have been shot but that can also acknowledge the facts of the video show he wasn't complying with instructions by the police. That doesn't mean I think he should have been shot.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I don't think the kid should have been shot, but I think showing both perspectives of this clearly lopsided power dynamic is so important I'm going to herniate my own back discussing all the ways the kid done fucked up which led to the police concluding that he had to be shot."
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Following a single order doesn't equal "comply with instructions" if you're ignoring everything else"
So, you're agreeing with what I said - it didn't matter what the kid did when he was ordered to drop the weapon and put his hands up, because the officer had already decided that the punishment for earlier disobedience was summary execution. Even though he had given up resisting and was complying, he was shot because of something he did earlier.
"And whether he complied with instructions has no relation to whether he should have been shot and killed. How are those things related? "
Unless I missed something, it's literally the reason the officer gave for murdering him.
"Why is it so impossible for you to understand I can believe he shouldn't have been shot but that can also acknowledge the facts of the video show he wasn't complying with instructions by the police"
Again, he was complying at the time he was shot. So, what you are saying is that he deserved to be shot because of something he did earlier in the incident.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Complying with instructions means that there is no immediate danger to a cops life, and so shooting is murder, and not self defence.
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Re:
In civilised countries, disobeying an officer does not carry the death penalty. Actually, most civilised countries have abolished the death penalty altogether and they expect courts of law to decide non-lethal punishment for criminals after following due process.
Why is the US not civilised, to the point where you think that immediate summary execution for disobeying a police officer is the correct action?
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Re:
Failing to comply immediately with police orders does not of itself pose an immediate danger to life, and therefore is not a justification for shooting someone.
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Re:
I'm sorry, but "failure to comply with police orders" should not equal a death sentence.
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Re:
I seem to have read something else about 'split second decisions' in other parts of the thread. Seems like you want to give cops the monopoly on those...
What fucking difference does the way he's facing make? If his hands are up, his hands are up. The cop didn't order him to turn one way or the other, nor did he order him not to turn one way or the other.
Keep sending the message that it doesn't matter if you put your hands up or not. There's nothing more dangerous than putting a bunch of people in a no-win situation.
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The only thing that is truly surprising is that they actually released the body cam footage. And that is truely saddening
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Police unions are the problem
Outlaw the police unions. Arrest and charge every officer of the union under RICO. They are a direct and present danger to all Americans, especially POC, more so than any terrorist organization.
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Re: Police unions are the problem
It's not RICO.
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"gave Toledo less than a second to respond to his orders before pulling the trigger."
Damn! Shoot to kill (ask questions later... or don't, if the person is dead)?
Hey, you're right! The cop was scared, or hyped up on adrenaline, or confused and thought a person with arms raised and hands up was actually pointing a weapon at him, or whatever. The time has come to finally...
replace cops with ED-209!
I mean, at least the robot give you 20 seconds to comply.
Or, maybe, if we had pre-crime, then we could arrest all the bad and itchy trigger-finger cops before they kill.
What the hell, just send in the kill bots. We don't care about differentiating between guilt and innocence, or severity of the punishment, just kill em all.
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Oopsie
More body cam footage shows the Lil Homicide Thug had a gun and threw it.
Oops. Busted.
Try to find a 13 year old who doesn't hang at 3AM in Chicago with gangsters next time.
It would make your phony Narrative a bit more believable. Still not believable, but maybe a few more retarded morons would believe that 13 year olds that call themselves Lil Homicide and run around with guns at 3 in the morning are "victims."
It looks more like you are a "victim" of stupidity.
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Your racist bullshit aside: The victim had a gun. According to the video, he was unarmed at the time he was shot. Yes or no: Do you truly believe he deserved to be executed even though he no longer had a gun in his hand?
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Re: Oopsie
More body cam footage shows the Lil Homicide Thug had a gun and threw it.
Oops. Busted.
So he wasn't armed when he was shot.
It looks more like you are a "victim" of stupidity.
Funny you mention it. I was thinking about how stupid an individual would have to be to think the fact that the victim threw their gun, making him an unarmed person, furthers the narrative that the cop was in danger.
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Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
"he did everything he was supposed to."
Carrying a gun in Chicago at 2:30am when you are 13 is NOT doing everything you are supposed to do. Staying the $*%& home at 13, and being ready for school the next day IS.
I am VERY leery of government power, but doing dumb $#!+ has consequences. This does not fall into the same category as sitting on a man's neck for 9 minutes.
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Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
"Carrying a gun in Chicago at 2:30am when you are 13 is NOT doing everything you are supposed to do. Staying the $*%& home at 13, and being ready for school the next day IS."
How many 13 year olds do exactly what they're supposed to all the time? True, most don't run around with guns, but until there's some way of stopping them accessing them, that might well happen.
"I am VERY leery of government power, but doing dumb $#!+ has consequences"
It does, and people would support reasonable punishment for what he did. The thing being questioned is whether summary execution while complying with police orders is the correct consequence.
"This does not fall into the same category as sitting on a man's neck for 9 minutes"
Different sides of the same die. Chauvin spent 9 minutes deciding that Floyd deserved death, this cop decided it in a split second. But, the reasons they took those decisions are most likely related.
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Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
"while complying with police orders"
No, he wasn't 'complying with police orders'. The police told him to stop running and drop the pistol for several minutes.
'Complying with police orders' doesn't mean 'do whatever I want until I get too tired to run further'. It doesn't mean 'get out of the car after 10 minutes of them telling me to, break the window, resist for 5 more minutes, and suddenly decide to comply when I'm about to be peppersprayed and tazed.'
It's weird... the guys who don't fight cops and run away never seem to end up on a slab.
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Re: Re: Re:
Oh, is that what happened to the guy who got shot with a "taser"?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Oh, you're Didn't Watch The Video guy.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not the one with a mancrush on the cops, sunshine.
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Re: Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
So, again, you assert that him complying with the order to surrender is irrelevant, any suspect who surrenders can just be summarily executed if the cop feels he showed enough disrespect beforehand.
"It's weird... the guys who don't fight cops and run away never seem to end up on a slab."
Do you want the list that proves you're not right about that? Because I have a list of examples of people who didn't do that and still occupied a place in the morgue.
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Re: Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
Cops should be well aware that they will not always get immediate compliance, and that shooting someone after they comply looks like an execution for contempt of cop.
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Re: Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
No, he wasn't 'complying with police orders'. The police told him to stop running and drop the pistol for several minutes.
So then he was shot for what he did prior to throwing the gun and putting his hands up?
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Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
Carrying a gun in Chicago at 2:30am when you are 13 is NOT doing everything you are supposed to do.
But what about his god-given 2nd amendment right? It's obviously dangerous out there, otherwise the kid wouldn't be dead. Why shouldn't the kid be able to protect himself?
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Re: Re: Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
Don't you know? The 2nd Amendment is only for white people.
/s if that wasn't clear.
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Re: Hardly "he did everything he was supposed to."
"This does not fall into the same category as sitting on a man's neck for 9 minutes."
No, it falls into the category of a 13 year old child complying with the directives of a police officer and then being shot. Because the OP makes it pretty damn clear that from the moment the officer laid eyes on the kid this would end with the klid being dead no matter what they did.
"Carrying a gun in Chicago at 2:30am when you are 13 is NOT doing everything you are supposed to do."
You know, I wish it was the first time I heard someone advocating the death penalty for kids doing dumb stuff.
Obviously our european police forces are on to some mysterious secret well beyond the capacity of american police, because I have yet to hear of 13 year olds being shot in dark alleys after complying with police orders over here.
Yeah, the kid was'nt smart. Carrying a gun in general if you are a brown person and meet cops you're done for. As a white person they could get away with open carry of an AR-15 no problem, but as a brown guy?
Nevertheless in any halfway sane society if the suspect has dropped their weapon and has their hands visibly in the air, pulling the trigger is not policing. It's execution-style murder.
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Interesting photo choice...
... Odd that Cushing didn't show the photo 2 seconds before showing him holding the pistol.
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Re: Interesting photo choice...
You mean the photo from before he was issued the order to drop the weapon and raised his hands, and him complying?
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Re: Interesting photo choice...
Odd that Cushing didn't show the photo 2 seconds before showing him holding the pistol.
Are you the same asshole that mentioned that he had a gun and threw it, thus making him unarmed? Or are you a different asshole?
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