Reply to Three Officers and Two Paramedics Are Charged in Elijah McClain’s Death

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "Three Officers and Two Paramedics Are Charged in Elijah McClain’s Death"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think there are generally hard situations where officers make a bad decision and then there are cases like this that are just so shocking that it would appear to me that all policing is fundamentally sick on some level. This is one of those cases.

This case has shades of Kelly Thomas but the dirt bag cops got a not guilty verdict there on worse facts for the cops.

I think that whatever presumption or benefit of the doubt police are legally getting needs to be walked back if this kind of situation keeps happening. [/quote]
And it DOES keep happening. It does. Black innocent or black people guilty, at best, of misdemeanors keep getting murdered by police.

Not every person in the Washington Post database of gunshot victims of the police is Black and some are probably “justified,” but this paragraph should be instructive for the cop’s wife whose spouse and his colleagues can do no wrong (italics mine):

“After Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that the FBI undercounted fatal police shootings by more than half. [i]This is because reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so.[/i]” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

There. is. a. problem. and police and their advocates pretending that there is not is entrenching the problem. “Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.” And that database doesn’t even count the people who are killed by the police or their actions like George Floyd, Sandra Bland and Elijah McClain, nor does it cover other sorts of police abuse of their power like planting evidence and raping people. Daniel Holtzclaw is an extreme example, but he’s probably not the only one.

But sure. The police force is a pure as the driven snow and anyone with any evidence to the contrary is crazy or something. [/quote]

Officer's wife here. Literally NOBODY, including me, is saying that a police force is as "pure as the driven snow." Let's stop the hyperbole, shall we? It doesn't help your argument at all. I have already... repeatedly.. said that there are officer-involved shootings in which the officer is CLEARLY in the wrong. What I take great offense to is the notion that 800,000 officers should be held as inherently bad because of the actions of the few.

There were 1,021 officer-involved shootings in 2021, of which 32 were of unarmed citizens. (This information came from the Washington Post database.) That's in a population of over 333,000,000. There are over 800,000 police officers in the United States, and the majority of them have not even touched a weapon in months except for mandatory training. Over 99% of police interactions have no use-of-force. Do horrific shootings occur? Of course. Nobody... again: nobody... is denying that.  The issue I have is with blatantly ignoring the facts and assuming officers are evil. It's not true and it's actually dangerous rhetoric that leads to understaffed shifts.

I've said this before: you are welcome to hate police, but if you post inaccurate information, I will be here to correct it.[/quote]
Honestly, lady, lol. You have been on here trying to claim that the police forces in this country aren’t riddled with violent and racist people who abuse their power. You refuse to acknowledge that “good” cops looking the other way does, in fact, make them bad cops. You seem like a nice enough person but I don’t think you have any distance on this issue nor can you step back and examine how the experience of policing looks and feels for people in those communities who get brutalized in a way that you, a wife of a police officer, and I, a White upper middle class woman, are hugely unlikely to ever experience.

Breonna Taylor and Amir Locke say hello. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics