4 ms·

Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and

by andreyk 10y ago

Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance: "Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies." Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.

adamors 10y ago
Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.
- hueving 10y ago
  So assume all police are lying and the people fighting them had good intentions?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Always assume those with power over you are lying to you. It's sort of a reverse Pascal's wager.
    - crusso 10y ago
      Then we should get rid of all police?
      - eropple 10y ago
        "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. But, for an example of how we can counteract the likelihood of those in power lying to the people they serve? In urban and suburban areas at least (rural policing is a little bit of a different thing), consider a twofold approach: 1) Provide body cameras that cannot be turned off while in uniform under any circumstances (sew them into the uniform top?), with draconian penalties in any case where they're disabled or obscured in the field. Multiple battery slots to allow hot-swapping, a low-battery warning informs dispatch, all of that. Allowing your camera to go offline is a strict-liability federal offense; the only disproof is another officer's video evidence that an assailant removed the camera from the officer. (This is not a cheap tool, and it does imply that officers should be dispatched in pairs or more. I am OK with that. We should be willing to spend money for better policing.) 2) Remove all weapons that are not less-lethal from beat police. Batons, tasers, OC spray. You can kill someone with these weapons, but it takes a hell of a lot more work (and it's harder to obfuscate when a suspect has surrendered and is complying than when you can shoot them to death at range). If you need someone with a gun, you should be calling in backup dispatched directly from a station.
        crusso 10y ago
        "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. Fair enough. I felt that I was responding to something that was absurd on the face of it, but I appreciate that you offered suggestions to try to keep it from being absurd. That said, if we assume that all people in authority are lying to us, we have a really poor system of governance that relies on putting people into authority positions who we assume are all lying. For your suggestions: 1) Strict liability if a piece of electronics fails in a way that the officer can't prove was a technical malfunction? I would never ever accept that kind of liability for myself without a great deal of compensation and some form of insurance to protect myself from the inevitable glitch. While I expect LEO to be held to a strict standard, it has to be reasonable. 2) I've seen that suggestion. I don't know how well it would work given the prevalence of guns in the USA, but I'd be interested in some form of experiment being conducted in a metropolitan area to see what kind of statistics could be drawn from it. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to be police officer in the USA. If you'd want to send me out there unarmed, you'd need to triple my salary.
        eropple 10y ago
        > That said, if we assume that all people in authority are lying to us, we have a really poor system of governance that relies on putting people into authority positions who we assume are all lying. Sure. But that's basically the heart of every non-autocratic (and even some autocratic!) system of government in the history of the world, though. Having the people with the levers of power lie to the populace goes back to Greece. > Strict liability if a piece of electronics fails in a way that the officer can't prove was a technical malfunction? This is the one thing that gives me pause about that approach, to be fair. And I'd be willing to flex on the details, but any unrecorded police interaction with the populace that must trust them must be strictly proscribed. There must be eyes on the police at all times, and they must be impartial. How we get there, we can discuss, but that's the goal. > Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to be police officer in the USA. If you'd want to send me out there unarmed, you'd need to triple my salary. That's a fair way to feel. I wouldn't want to be a police officer under any circumstances, because I understand that I could be tempted by that power. To that end, I feel that we need to remove the attraction of policing from the bullies and power-trippers of the world. Policing should not be a glamorous job (and I don't really feel it should be well-respected, except insofar as any profession should be), but in turn it should be well-compensated.
  - travmatt 10y ago
    Conflating "take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt" to mean what you just said is intellectually dishonest, and probably deceptive.
  - kmkemp 10y ago
    Assume that people are rational actors that will have no problem lying when their career and/or freedom are at risk. Especially if they aren't aware of any contradictory evidence.
  - allemagne 10y ago
    Would you rather trust someone in power to act based on their self-interest or on their personal morality? That's the question.
- andreyk 10y ago
  Very true, I am not claiming otherwise. Precisely the reason to argue for body cams or other means to enforce honesty and transparency about reports. Just making the point that the 41:1000 ratio does not take into account the fact that many of the 1000 are indeed armed and aggressive, and it is the officers' jobs to subdue them even if deadly force is necessary. More training or non-lethal weapons will only go so far to change this, it seems.
- HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  Going to need some sources for this fact.
nrb 10y ago
In the age of smart guns that only the owner can fire, why is "he was reaching for my gun" a valid reason?!? How many wrongful death lawsuit settlements does it take to retrofit or replace the existing firearms?
- modoc 10y ago
  Because smart guns aren't even close to 100% reliable yet. A "false negative" locking you out of operating your weapon at a key moment will likely mean your death, so there's a VERY high bar for adopting new mechanisms like smart guns. The iPhone has probably the best, affordable, fingerprint sensor out there, and yet if ever time it failed to unlock (wet skin, dry skin, dirty skin, oil on your skin, etc...) you might end up dead... you wouldn't want to trust it..
Malice 10y ago
> Deputies say There are very strong incentives for the Deputies to paint themselves in the best possible light in this situation. I would go as far as to say there is literally no value in what the Deputies say happened. Video of the incident, uninvolved bystander reports are what's needed.
- mod 10y ago
  Bystander reports are often worth about as much as a deputy's report. People can't remember how things actually happened.
  - eumoria 10y ago
    This is exactly true even people with the best intentions trying to explain exactly what happened in an unbiased way will still screw up a ton of things.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      aka: eyewitness testimony is unreliable because our memory rewrites our memory every time we access it again, our current biases affect how we remember it next time.
- ashark 10y ago
  A couple weeks back one of the officers involved in catching (and ultimately killing) the San Bernardino shooters gave an extended interview on NPR. AFAIK there was nothing about the incident that anyone's got a problem with, where the police are concerned. He defaulted to using language so biased that it amounted to lying anyway. Every single time an officer fired in his story, they "placed rounds downrange", while the shooters invariably "fired indiscriminately", even when that was plainly not true from his story (he proceeds in one case to name a target and state that he's certain they had opened fire, in that case, specifically to shoot a given officer, which is the opposite of indiscriminate). It seems like he was so set on using a kind of template for biasing anyone listening against the accused that he couldn't turn it off, even when that language made what he was saying plainly incorrect. This is in a case where he wasn't trying to defend himself or any other officers against accusations of wrongdoing. If you pay attention this kind of thing is really common when cops discuss events. Biased language that can easily slip into outright lies is built into police culture, even when there's not (direct) pressure to lie.

by andreyk 10y ago

adamors 10y ago

Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.

hueving 10y ago
So assume all police are lying and the people fighting them had good intentions?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  Always assume those with power over you are lying to you. It's sort of a reverse Pascal's wager.
  - crusso 10y ago
    Then we should get rid of all police?
    - eropple 10y ago
      "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. But, for an example of how we can counteract the likelihood of those in power lying to the people they serve? In urban and suburban areas at least (rural policing is a little bit of a different thing), consider a twofold approach: 1) Provide body cameras that cannot be turned off while in uniform under any circumstances (sew them into the uniform top?), with draconian penalties in any case where they're disabled or obscured in the field. Multiple battery slots to allow hot-swapping, a low-battery warning informs dispatch, all of that. Allowing your camera to go offline is a strict-liability federal offense; the only disproof is another officer's video evidence that an assailant removed the camera from the officer. (This is not a cheap tool, and it does imply that officers should be dispatched in pairs or more. I am OK with that. We should be willing to spend money for better policing.) 2) Remove all weapons that are not less-lethal from beat police. Batons, tasers, OC spray. You can kill someone with these weapons, but it takes a hell of a lot more work (and it's harder to obfuscate when a suspect has surrendered and is complying than when you can shoot them to death at range). If you need someone with a gun, you should be calling in backup dispatched directly from a station.
      - crusso 10y ago
        "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. Fair enough. I felt that I was responding to something that was absurd on the face of it, but I appreciate that you offered suggestions to try to keep it from being absurd. That said, if we assume that all people in authority are lying to us, we have a really poor system of governance that relies on putting people into authority positions who we assume are all lying. For your suggestions: 1) Strict liability if a piece of electronics fails in a way that the officer can't prove was a technical malfunction? I would never ever accept that kind of liability for myself without a great deal of compensation and some form of insurance to protect myself from the inevitable glitch. While I expect LEO to be held to a strict standard, it has to be reasonable. 2) I've seen that suggestion. I don't know how well it would work given the prevalence of guns in the USA, but I'd be interested in some form of experiment being conducted in a metropolitan area to see what kind of statistics could be drawn from it. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to be police officer in the USA. If you'd want to send me out there unarmed, you'd need to triple my salary.
        eropple 10y ago
        > That said, if we assume that all people in authority are lying to us, we have a really poor system of governance that relies on putting people into authority positions who we assume are all lying. Sure. But that's basically the heart of every non-autocratic (and even some autocratic!) system of government in the history of the world, though. Having the people with the levers of power lie to the populace goes back to Greece. > Strict liability if a piece of electronics fails in a way that the officer can't prove was a technical malfunction? This is the one thing that gives me pause about that approach, to be fair. And I'd be willing to flex on the details, but any unrecorded police interaction with the populace that must trust them must be strictly proscribed. There must be eyes on the police at all times, and they must be impartial. How we get there, we can discuss, but that's the goal. > Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to be police officer in the USA. If you'd want to send me out there unarmed, you'd need to triple my salary. That's a fair way to feel. I wouldn't want to be a police officer under any circumstances, because I understand that I could be tempted by that power. To that end, I feel that we need to remove the attraction of policing from the bullies and power-trippers of the world. Policing should not be a glamorous job (and I don't really feel it should be well-respected, except insofar as any profession should be), but in turn it should be well-compensated.
- travmatt 10y ago
  Conflating "take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt" to mean what you just said is intellectually dishonest, and probably deceptive.
- kmkemp 10y ago
  Assume that people are rational actors that will have no problem lying when their career and/or freedom are at risk. Especially if they aren't aware of any contradictory evidence.
- allemagne 10y ago
  Would you rather trust someone in power to act based on their self-interest or on their personal morality? That's the question.
andreyk 10y ago
Very true, I am not claiming otherwise. Precisely the reason to argue for body cams or other means to enforce honesty and transparency about reports. Just making the point that the 41:1000 ratio does not take into account the fact that many of the 1000 are indeed armed and aggressive, and it is the officers' jobs to subdue them even if deadly force is necessary. More training or non-lethal weapons will only go so far to change this, it seems.
HemanHeartYou 10y ago
Going to need some sources for this fact.

nrb 10y ago

In the age of smart guns that only the owner can fire, why is "he was reaching for my gun" a valid reason?!? How many wrongful death lawsuit settlements does it take to retrofit or replace the existing firearms?

modoc 10y ago
Because smart guns aren't even close to 100% reliable yet. A "false negative" locking you out of operating your weapon at a key moment will likely mean your death, so there's a VERY high bar for adopting new mechanisms like smart guns. The iPhone has probably the best, affordable, fingerprint sensor out there, and yet if ever time it failed to unlock (wet skin, dry skin, dirty skin, oil on your skin, etc...) you might end up dead... you wouldn't want to trust it..

Malice 10y ago

> Deputies say There are very strong incentives for the Deputies to paint themselves in the best possible light in this situation. I would go as far as to say there is literally no value in what the Deputies say happened. Video of the incident, uninvolved bystander reports are what's needed.

mod 10y ago
Bystander reports are often worth about as much as a deputy's report. People can't remember how things actually happened.
- eumoria 10y ago
  This is exactly true even people with the best intentions trying to explain exactly what happened in an unbiased way will still screw up a ton of things.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    aka: eyewitness testimony is unreliable because our memory rewrites our memory every time we access it again, our current biases affect how we remember it next time.
ashark 10y ago
A couple weeks back one of the officers involved in catching (and ultimately killing) the San Bernardino shooters gave an extended interview on NPR. AFAIK there was nothing about the incident that anyone's got a problem with, where the police are concerned. He defaulted to using language so biased that it amounted to lying anyway. Every single time an officer fired in his story, they "placed rounds downrange", while the shooters invariably "fired indiscriminately", even when that was plainly not true from his story (he proceeds in one case to name a target and state that he's certain they had opened fire, in that case, specifically to shoot a given officer, which is the opposite of indiscriminate). It seems like he was so set on using a kind of template for biasing anyone listening against the accused that he couldn't turn it off, even when that language made what he was saying plainly incorrect. This is in a case where he wasn't trying to defend himself or any other officers against accusations of wrongdoing. If you pay attention this kind of thing is really common when cops discuss events. Biased language that can easily slip into outright lies is built into police culture, even when there's not (direct) pressure to lie.