This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates: When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t,…
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I know that headline is unfair clickbait, but there are many things that could be said about this video. Here’s a Daily News story. I think it’s interesting primarily to show what can happen when officers fail to gain control of a situation: a mess. A lethal mess. A cop gets shot. Two of the…
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[See my previous posts 1 and 2 and about NYC.] It’s not unreasonable to believe — even when one knows the vast majority of police-involved shootings to be justified — that three police-involved homicides per day is perhaps two too many. Can the number of police-involved killings be reduced without placing officer’s lives in danger?…
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Uh, it’s his own gun. But headline aside (writers don’t write the headline), I like to think I make some good points in this CNN piece about Robert Bates, the Tulsa County “reserve deputy” who thought his gun was a Taser and shot and killed a criminal.
A 73-year old man, Robert C. Bates, liked to play cops and robbers. He thought he was going to get to Tase a bad guy. But instead of holding his Taser, Bob was holding his personal gun. Bang. You’re dead. Oops. Bates wasn’t a real cop. He was a “reserve deputy sheriff,” which isn’t necessarily…
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This is from back in 2014. This is not a good use of a Taser. It actually makes cuffing him harder. The two really hard parts — getting a guy out of a car and getting hands out from under a resisting person — are done. This the guy is still resisting, so it’s probably…
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Honestly, my eyes glazed over a little bit reading (most) of this. But you should still read it. In much of the country, it’s still kind of a legal gray area about whether or not you can record police. I did an L.A. radio show a while back and a cop called in with a…
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[See parts 1 and 3 and NYC] Using the data from killedbypolice.net, I looked at the race of those killed by police. Though before I give you these numbers, ask yourself this question: what percent of those whom cops kill do you think are white, black, and hispanic. Forgive the callousness, but we’re talking numbers.…
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I thought we all knew this by now, but apparently some people missed the memo. Responding to my Washington Postop-ed, a few people see rather upset that I wrote: In Ferguson, as the Justice Department made very clear, all credible evidence supported officer Darren Wilson’s account of a justified, legal and necessary shooting. Brown robbed…
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Two years ago a somewhat shadowy person or group began compiling all media accounts of people killed by police. It’s at killedbypolice.net. Best I can tell, he/she/it/they do a pretty good job. According to the site: “Corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not,…
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