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Lifesaving advice from a black woman held at gunpoint by police

147 points by nafizh 9y ago

cperciva 9y ago
This was flagged away, but I vouched it back; I think it's interesting to hear a story which almost ended in tragedy, just like it's useful to hear about software bugs which almost resulted in data loss or security vulnerabilities.
- narak 9y ago
  In fact the almost case is more valuable because the survivor in this case was doing absolutely nothing wrong and lived to tell the tale.
  - SilasX 9y ago
    "Absolutely nothing wrong" is a little bit overstating it. She wasn't doing anything illegal, sure, but it was a bit reckless to arrange the transfer so that the buyer was expected to go alone, onto someone's driveway, to replace the license plates and drive off with the car without talking to the resident or owner. Imagine if you sold your Magic cards to someone and told them, "oh, they're in my bedroom at 123 Elm Street -- just jimmy open the window and fish 'em out. If anyone asks, just give them this handwritten note." Or, "Cool, just pick up the keys from under my office desk. Walk past security, just ignore them if they stop you, and fish them out of the cabinet. Pick the lock if you have to." No. Bad idea. You look like a thief doing that. Could they have handled the situation better? Definitely. But it's a bit much to act outraged that anyone would misinterpret her actions.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      She wasn't doing anything illegal, sure, but it was a bit reckless Only in a world where random folks from the neighbourhood might come out and point a gun at you instead of simply asking a few logical questions and looking at proffered supporting documentation. But it's a bit much to act outraged that anyone would misinterpret her actions. Who's outraged at her actions being misinterpreted? The outrage is at the fact that a panicky cop saw something they thought was suspicious and reacted by immediately pointing their gun at someone (something any good gun owner knows you never do unless you plan to shoot), creating a potentially life threatening situation, and the person on the other end of it was forced to defuse it.
      - LyndsySimon 9y ago
        > Only in a world where random folks from the neighbourhood might come out and point a gun at you instead of simply asking a few logical questions and looking at proffered supporting documentation. Not random folks - a family member. For what it's worth, I likely would have also come out and challenged someone who behaved the same way she did. I would likely have done so with a rifle in my hands and having already called the police. What I would absolutely not have done was point said weapon at her - that's called "assault". The issue isn't that she was challenged, or even that the guy was armed. The issue is that the guy though that it was appropriate to point a firearm at her, which both constitutes a threat of deadly force and greatly increases the chance of an accidental shooting. Then, after it was all over with, the person that assaulted her was not charged with a crime. The bottom line here is that police officers are allowed to use threats of deadly force in situations where it is wholly inappropriate, are trained to do so, and are protected by their departments (at their victims' expense no less) in the exceptional case where they are actually charged with a crime.
      - SilasX 9y ago
        >Who's outraged at her actions being misinterpreted? Anyone characterizing her behavior as doing "absolutely nothing wrong". You can both believe that the son-in-law and officer overreacted without believing the buyer somehow did everything exactly right. It's not either/or. >The outrage is at the fact that a panicky cop saw something they thought was suspicious ... Yes, people are outraged at that too, but they also blur that with the more dubious claim that "she did nothing wrong". I think that's pushing it. Again, not "either/or".
        zzalpha 9y ago
        Yes, people are outraged at that too, but they also blur that with the more dubious claim that "she did nothing wrong". Let's just admit it: if she were white, it wouldn't have turned out this way She arranged the sale. She had the seller's info. She had the keys. She had the paperwork. Only problem is, she 1) is black, and 2) looked like a guy. Could this situation have been handled differently? Sure. But I struggle to lay more than a small piece of the blame on her. I'd just as soon blame the mother-in-law for not telling her cowboy son that she'd sold the car.
    - mindslight 9y ago
      That is certainly much less "reckless" than pointing a gun at someone. IIRC, the first rule of firearms is to only point them at something you intend to kill. If the assailant were spending several months in jail for assault and kidnapping, you might have a point. But failing that, let's concentrate on the more egregious breach of peace first.
    - justforFranz 9y ago
      She's probably lucky she started putting the license plates on. Imagine if she tried to immediately drive it away. It's very easy to imagine the officer shooting at her with the intent to kill. That's crazy. C-R-A-Z-Y.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Thanks for vouching. I often read HN through the HackerNews Robot on Telegram and more than once I see interesting stories that seems to have been flagged off the site even if they were upvoted a lot.
weberc2 9y ago
This article makes a lot of claims about innocent black people being gunned down by police, but is there any actual evidence of this happening disproportionately to white people? Last year I trawled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset and couldn't find any evidence, and a couple months later a black Harvard economist released a paper saying he couldn't find any evidence in the data he looked at. Between that and all of the bad reporting around the Michael Brown shooting, I'm beginning to believe that the only disparity is in media coverage... This story and its interest don't depend on this (in)accuracy, but it's such a common talking point and it doesn't seem to be substantiated. In particular, I was expecting a lot more drama from a story of a black woman "surviving" an encounter with police. Here's a similar story about a white man in San Fran: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9f53ef6a1c10 https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9.... This sort of stuff makes me think that race is perhaps a red herring, and that the quality of police (or police training) simply vary a lot in our country.
- asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
  Even if you believe that, the two core points of the experience stand: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. > I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.
  - gpm 9y ago
    He acknowledges that in his comment > The story and its interest doesn't hinge on this (in)accuracy ...
- apeace 9y ago
  You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post[0]: > White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. If you look at fatal police shootings so far this year[1], the numbers are the same. You should provide a link to the Harvard study you mentioned. Here[2] is one from Yale which someone once touted to me, which supports your claims. But they only used data from a limited number of police departments in Houston, TX. I'm not sure why anyone would look at that and not the national numbers. In the paper, of their own methods they say, "In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!". There are many places to find this information online. It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fr...
op00to 9y ago
How is property worth pointing a gun at someone over? It's a car. Cars can be replaced.
- bsder 9y ago
  It is true that you can replace your car, but, if something is stolen, you rarely get the full value back. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, getting a car stolen is a matter of life and death. However, the real problem was pulling a gun FIRST instead of hollering across the road or from a porch. A street punk would normally run--somebody legitimate will respond. This idiot cop is actually lucky she wasn't a true violent criminal who had a hidden lookout. Getting that close with a drawn gun if there was a hidden lookout would have gotten him shot.
- tomohawk 9y ago
  How is stealing property worth being shot with a gun? There's no need to steal.
  - thephyber 9y ago
    Seems like a strawman to me. This article is about a man who misinterprets a car purchase and pulls a gun to "protect" property, which was not his and was not being stolen. If someone pulls a gun to "defend their property", they better be really damned sure it is their property and the property was being stolen (not a {leinholder, repoman, undercover police officer, deaf person, autistic person, etc}). The risk of making the wrong decision may not be high, but the impact of the wrong decision is.
- sturgeongeneral 9y ago
  It may be just a car to you, but I have a valuable sports car, and if I caught someone attempting to steal it I wouldn't hesitate to point a gun. Not for a moment. Would the intent be to kill? Of course not. It'd be to deter. Edit for the downvotes: it's not just a car to me, and it's not just about the monetary value. It has sentimental value and I wouldn't be able to replace it easily. I don't see what's so controversial about attempting to protect one's property. That said I did find this story disturbing and I'm not trying to imply that the woman did anything wrong. I was simply replying to the point above.
pacaro 9y ago
I also had to vouch it back, there appears to be a concerted effort to flag this.
- gpm 9y ago
  I too just vouched it back (after seeing this comment so we didn't click vouch simultaneously). If you're flagging this story, perhaps you could leave a comment here about why? Edit: And while posting this comment it got reflagged/revouched again...
  - dTal 9y ago
    I vouched it back after you. And now it's flagged again... Weirdly it's completely gone from the front page (and all subsequent pages). I assume that's not normal for flags? It was at #4 only a moment ago, and it was flagged then... edit: and now it's back, on page 2 this time. The invisible hand of moderation?
  - Erwin 9y ago
    This seems like a long-standing country-specific societal problem to me: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
    - gpm 9y ago
      That's a fair argument. I'd argue it's a new phenomenon in that this is the first time (I've seen anyways) people resigning themselves to simply giving advice on how to de-escelate the situation as a non-cop. But I can see how that seems like a stretch.
- mwambua 9y ago
  I hope it's only being flagged because it's not directly related to technology. Any other reason would make me quite sad.
- sctb 9y ago
  The data don't suggest this. Users flagging the post might be weighing the likelihood of an informative, substantive discussion against a flame-fest. The latter isn't just distracting, it can cause actual harm, and flagging is a self-protective tool for the community. When moderators notice threads like these, we can turn the flags off (at least temporarily) to see how the thread shapes up. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 and marked it off-topic.
shawnee_ 9y ago
Thank you, this was an interesting read. On the tangent of arbitrary and unneeded flagging, there seems to be quite a great deal of it lately... it's not improving the site. After I got off work, I tried to find a story that I'd noticed earlier and wanted to comment on, but it was completely gone from not just the front page but everywhere. A completely benign, tech-related story. Makes no sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745430
- sctb 9y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 and marked it off-topic.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Given that that same submitter submitted at least six copies of essentially the same press release within minutes of each other, I'm not surprised if several received many flags for duplication. Click "Past" on that link to see what I mean.
  - shawnee_ 9y ago
    Okay... but I imagine dupes happen a lot when companies make an announcement. Doesn't mean we should bury all instances of a story. The one I noticed had 19 votes at the time I read it, and this was the one I'd planned to comment on. Isn't there a "merge" feature or something similar you can do to prevent squelching of a topic entirely? Let the site readers be the collective mechanism that votes or ignores something.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dTal 9y ago
The most alarming thing about this story, apart from the suspected racism, is the sheer amount of confirmation bias on display from someone who is quite prepared to shoot you. She offered corroborating evidence from the get go, and even the 911 dispatcher confirms her story, yet the officer is too busy waving his piece around to get off his power trip. I'd be mad too. Some element of this volatile combo of deadly weapons and unprofessional police behavior has to change. Preferably both.
- bsder 9y ago
  We need to have a set of cops who are clearly marked, wired with a body camera, and who don't carry weaponry. Put them in blaze orange or something so criminals can see them coming and run away. You should have to go through this period for some number of years until you get to carry a gun. Most cops go their whole lives without firing their gun--adding an extra gun rarely makes a situation better. While TV and movies like to portray heroic feats of gunplay, in reality, 90+% of the bullets go errant in situations where a gun was actually useful and required.
  - dTal 9y ago
    For anyone who thinks this is a silly idea, this a pretty close description of the average UK police officer.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    I don't think the gun is the issue here - I carry a gun, regularly, and I've never felt the need to draw it and point it at someone who might be stealing something. Police in the US are generally seen as adversarial, while police in the UK are generally seen as mostly helpful. In my estimation, the problem in the US is one of culture. Police here are looking for a reason to charge you with a crime, not trying to keep you out of trouble. It's "us versus them" on both sides.
    - extra88 9y ago
      > I carry a gun, regularly, and I've never felt the need to draw it and point it at someone who might be stealing something. And yet you wrote in another comment that had you been the son-in-law, you would've brought your rifle to go talk to the person at the car. Why? In your scenario, you already called 911, what's the point of brandishing the weapon if you're not prepared to shoot someone for possibly stealing a car?
covercash 9y ago
Relevant comic: http://christopherkeelty.com/surviving-a-police-encounter/ http://christopherkeelty.com/surviving-a-police-encounter/
johngalt 9y ago
Here's the test. Reverse the situation. Off-duty cop is buying a car and random good neighbor black person sees all the same "suspicious behaviors" and begins an armed confrontation with the person they believe to be stealing a car. Suddenly pointing a gun at a "suspicious person" is no longer "lawful and proper" behavior. At a minimum, the civilian goes to jail for being reckless.
- loco5niner 9y ago
  Sorry, but that is not a good comparison. I would assume that off-duty cops (rightly) have more authority when it comes to these types of situations.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    I would assume that off-duty cops (rightly) have more authority when it comes to these types of situations. And yet, when they make a mistake, they aren't held to a higher standard, despite we, as citizens, granting that authority to them.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      No. Police are necessarily involved in more risky encounters than laypeople. They have manyfold the opportunities to make a mistake than laypeople. Training offsets some of that risk, but not all of it.
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        No. Police are necessarily involved in more risky encounters than laypeople. They have manyfold the opportunities to make a mistake than laypeople. That's illogical. There are myriad professions where trust is delegated to the person in that profession, and consequences to go with it. A doctor doesn't get a free pass if they kill someone due to incompetence when performing a surgery just because they do it more often. Heck, engineers are held liable if their work results in injury or death. Yet, with law enforcement, the opposite is often true, even when the facts clearly demonstrate fault on the part of the police. You couple that with the "thin blue line" culture that results in police circling the wagons whenever one of their own screws up, and it's no wonder that trust in the police has eroded. The perception is that there's simply no consequences to police misconduct. And in many cases, that perception unfortunately matches reality.
justifier 9y ago
This articles bothers me Both the individual's story and her message here I am glad it is here to bring further attention to these issues and even how this specific event happened to this woman Both the encounter and how the police later handled the 'investigation' are both disgusting and why serious reform is anything but a top priority for officers and politicians is completely revolting to me But I wish the author was more clear on what she meant in saying 'prevent the next philando castile' Was she going to prevent it by filing the complaint and removing that officer from the street or was she insisting she would help prevent more philandos by educating others in saying: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. Because Castile did comply and was still murdered This clip discusses how the definition of 'comply' changes with each high profile murder https://youtu.be/aufMdURbitU https://youtu.be/aufMdURbitU Trevor Noah and the writers of the daily show have been discussing the issues in a way that I think has been highlighting some of the problems very clearly, and with great respect and composure This clip calls out the silence from a leading voice defending law abiding citizens' rights to carry firearms, especially in regard to doing so without fear of being murdered by the police for carrying a firearm https://youtu.be/0IJSSBMLz6g?t=250s https://youtu.be/0IJSSBMLz6g?t=250s And this video showcases the newly released dashcam footage of the philando murder https://youtu.be/wqgz7kRGVxg https://youtu.be/wqgz7kRGVxg We need to talk about these issues but insinuating blame on the victim is the wrong way to do it I hope the article was actually focused on the prevention method of filing complaints but I wish that was more clear So please, until this is solved, comply like Castile did and if you live to tell your side of the encounter then please report these offenders

147 points by nafizh 9y ago

This was flagged away, but I vouched it back; I think it's interesting to hear a story which almost ended in tragedy, just like it's useful to hear about software bugs which almost resulted in data loss or security vulnerabilities.

narak 9y ago
In fact the almost case is more valuable because the survivor in this case was doing absolutely nothing wrong and lived to tell the tale.
- SilasX 9y ago
  "Absolutely nothing wrong" is a little bit overstating it. She wasn't doing anything illegal, sure, but it was a bit reckless to arrange the transfer so that the buyer was expected to go alone, onto someone's driveway, to replace the license plates and drive off with the car without talking to the resident or owner. Imagine if you sold your Magic cards to someone and told them, "oh, they're in my bedroom at 123 Elm Street -- just jimmy open the window and fish 'em out. If anyone asks, just give them this handwritten note." Or, "Cool, just pick up the keys from under my office desk. Walk past security, just ignore them if they stop you, and fish them out of the cabinet. Pick the lock if you have to." No. Bad idea. You look like a thief doing that. Could they have handled the situation better? Definitely. But it's a bit much to act outraged that anyone would misinterpret her actions.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    She wasn't doing anything illegal, sure, but it was a bit reckless Only in a world where random folks from the neighbourhood might come out and point a gun at you instead of simply asking a few logical questions and looking at proffered supporting documentation. But it's a bit much to act outraged that anyone would misinterpret her actions. Who's outraged at her actions being misinterpreted? The outrage is at the fact that a panicky cop saw something they thought was suspicious and reacted by immediately pointing their gun at someone (something any good gun owner knows you never do unless you plan to shoot), creating a potentially life threatening situation, and the person on the other end of it was forced to defuse it.
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      > Only in a world where random folks from the neighbourhood might come out and point a gun at you instead of simply asking a few logical questions and looking at proffered supporting documentation. Not random folks - a family member. For what it's worth, I likely would have also come out and challenged someone who behaved the same way she did. I would likely have done so with a rifle in my hands and having already called the police. What I would absolutely not have done was point said weapon at her - that's called "assault". The issue isn't that she was challenged, or even that the guy was armed. The issue is that the guy though that it was appropriate to point a firearm at her, which both constitutes a threat of deadly force and greatly increases the chance of an accidental shooting. Then, after it was all over with, the person that assaulted her was not charged with a crime. The bottom line here is that police officers are allowed to use threats of deadly force in situations where it is wholly inappropriate, are trained to do so, and are protected by their departments (at their victims' expense no less) in the exceptional case where they are actually charged with a crime.
    - SilasX 9y ago
      >Who's outraged at her actions being misinterpreted? Anyone characterizing her behavior as doing "absolutely nothing wrong". You can both believe that the son-in-law and officer overreacted without believing the buyer somehow did everything exactly right. It's not either/or. >The outrage is at the fact that a panicky cop saw something they thought was suspicious ... Yes, people are outraged at that too, but they also blur that with the more dubious claim that "she did nothing wrong". I think that's pushing it. Again, not "either/or".
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        Yes, people are outraged at that too, but they also blur that with the more dubious claim that "she did nothing wrong". Let's just admit it: if she were white, it wouldn't have turned out this way She arranged the sale. She had the seller's info. She had the keys. She had the paperwork. Only problem is, she 1) is black, and 2) looked like a guy. Could this situation have been handled differently? Sure. But I struggle to lay more than a small piece of the blame on her. I'd just as soon blame the mother-in-law for not telling her cowboy son that she'd sold the car.
  - mindslight 9y ago
    That is certainly much less "reckless" than pointing a gun at someone. IIRC, the first rule of firearms is to only point them at something you intend to kill. If the assailant were spending several months in jail for assault and kidnapping, you might have a point. But failing that, let's concentrate on the more egregious breach of peace first.
  - justforFranz 9y ago
    She's probably lucky she started putting the license plates on. Imagine if she tried to immediately drive it away. It's very easy to imagine the officer shooting at her with the intent to kill. That's crazy. C-R-A-Z-Y.
reitanqild 9y ago
Thanks for vouching. I often read HN through the HackerNews Robot on Telegram and more than once I see interesting stories that seems to have been flagged off the site even if they were upvoted a lot.

weberc2 9y ago

This article makes a lot of claims about innocent black people being gunned down by police, but is there any actual evidence of this happening disproportionately to white people? Last year I trawled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset and couldn't find any evidence, and a couple months later a black Harvard economist released a paper saying he couldn't find any evidence in the data he looked at. Between that and all of the bad reporting around the Michael Brown shooting, I'm beginning to believe that the only disparity is in media coverage... This story and its interest don't depend on this (in)accuracy, but it's such a common talking point and it doesn't seem to be substantiated. In particular, I was expecting a lot more drama from a story of a black woman "surviving" an encounter with police. Here's a similar story about a white man in San Fran: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9f53ef6a1c10 https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9.... This sort of stuff makes me think that race is perhaps a red herring, and that the quality of police (or police training) simply vary a lot in our country.

asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
Even if you believe that, the two core points of the experience stand: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. > I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.
- gpm 9y ago
  He acknowledges that in his comment > The story and its interest doesn't hinge on this (in)accuracy ...
apeace 9y ago
You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post[0]: > White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. If you look at fatal police shootings so far this year[1], the numbers are the same. You should provide a link to the Harvard study you mentioned. Here[2] is one from Yale which someone once touted to me, which supports your claims. But they only used data from a limited number of police departments in Houston, TX. I'm not sure why anyone would look at that and not the national numbers. In the paper, of their own methods they say, "In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!". There are many places to find this information online. It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fr...

op00to 9y ago

How is property worth pointing a gun at someone over? It's a car. Cars can be replaced.

bsder 9y ago
It is true that you can replace your car, but, if something is stolen, you rarely get the full value back. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, getting a car stolen is a matter of life and death. However, the real problem was pulling a gun FIRST instead of hollering across the road or from a porch. A street punk would normally run--somebody legitimate will respond. This idiot cop is actually lucky she wasn't a true violent criminal who had a hidden lookout. Getting that close with a drawn gun if there was a hidden lookout would have gotten him shot.
tomohawk 9y ago
How is stealing property worth being shot with a gun? There's no need to steal.
- thephyber 9y ago
  Seems like a strawman to me. This article is about a man who misinterprets a car purchase and pulls a gun to "protect" property, which was not his and was not being stolen. If someone pulls a gun to "defend their property", they better be really damned sure it is their property and the property was being stolen (not a {leinholder, repoman, undercover police officer, deaf person, autistic person, etc}). The risk of making the wrong decision may not be high, but the impact of the wrong decision is.
sturgeongeneral 9y ago
It may be just a car to you, but I have a valuable sports car, and if I caught someone attempting to steal it I wouldn't hesitate to point a gun. Not for a moment. Would the intent be to kill? Of course not. It'd be to deter. Edit for the downvotes: it's not just a car to me, and it's not just about the monetary value. It has sentimental value and I wouldn't be able to replace it easily. I don't see what's so controversial about attempting to protect one's property. That said I did find this story disturbing and I'm not trying to imply that the woman did anything wrong. I was simply replying to the point above.

pacaro 9y ago

I also had to vouch it back, there appears to be a concerted effort to flag this.

gpm 9y ago
I too just vouched it back (after seeing this comment so we didn't click vouch simultaneously). If you're flagging this story, perhaps you could leave a comment here about why? Edit: And while posting this comment it got reflagged/revouched again...
- dTal 9y ago
  I vouched it back after you. And now it's flagged again... Weirdly it's completely gone from the front page (and all subsequent pages). I assume that's not normal for flags? It was at #4 only a moment ago, and it was flagged then... edit: and now it's back, on page 2 this time. The invisible hand of moderation?
- Erwin 9y ago
  This seems like a long-standing country-specific societal problem to me: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
  - gpm 9y ago
    That's a fair argument. I'd argue it's a new phenomenon in that this is the first time (I've seen anyways) people resigning themselves to simply giving advice on how to de-escelate the situation as a non-cop. But I can see how that seems like a stretch.
mwambua 9y ago
I hope it's only being flagged because it's not directly related to technology. Any other reason would make me quite sad.
sctb 9y ago
The data don't suggest this. Users flagging the post might be weighing the likelihood of an informative, substantive discussion against a flame-fest. The latter isn't just distracting, it can cause actual harm, and flagging is a self-protective tool for the community. When moderators notice threads like these, we can turn the flags off (at least temporarily) to see how the thread shapes up. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 and marked it off-topic.

shawnee_ 9y ago

Thank you, this was an interesting read. On the tangent of arbitrary and unneeded flagging, there seems to be quite a great deal of it lately... it's not improving the site. After I got off work, I tried to find a story that I'd noticed earlier and wanted to comment on, but it was completely gone from not just the front page but everywhere. A completely benign, tech-related story. Makes no sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745430

sctb 9y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748443 and marked it off-topic.
DrScump 9y ago
Given that that same submitter submitted at least six copies of essentially the same press release within minutes of each other, I'm not surprised if several received many flags for duplication. Click "Past" on that link to see what I mean.
- shawnee_ 9y ago
  Okay... but I imagine dupes happen a lot when companies make an announcement. Doesn't mean we should bury all instances of a story. The one I noticed had 19 votes at the time I read it, and this was the one I'd planned to comment on. Isn't there a "merge" feature or something similar you can do to prevent squelching of a topic entirely? Let the site readers be the collective mechanism that votes or ignores something.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dTal 9y ago

The most alarming thing about this story, apart from the suspected racism, is the sheer amount of confirmation bias on display from someone who is quite prepared to shoot you. She offered corroborating evidence from the get go, and even the 911 dispatcher confirms her story, yet the officer is too busy waving his piece around to get off his power trip. I'd be mad too. Some element of this volatile combo of deadly weapons and unprofessional police behavior has to change. Preferably both.

bsder 9y ago
We need to have a set of cops who are clearly marked, wired with a body camera, and who don't carry weaponry. Put them in blaze orange or something so criminals can see them coming and run away. You should have to go through this period for some number of years until you get to carry a gun. Most cops go their whole lives without firing their gun--adding an extra gun rarely makes a situation better. While TV and movies like to portray heroic feats of gunplay, in reality, 90+% of the bullets go errant in situations where a gun was actually useful and required.
- dTal 9y ago
  For anyone who thinks this is a silly idea, this a pretty close description of the average UK police officer.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  I don't think the gun is the issue here - I carry a gun, regularly, and I've never felt the need to draw it and point it at someone who might be stealing something. Police in the US are generally seen as adversarial, while police in the UK are generally seen as mostly helpful. In my estimation, the problem in the US is one of culture. Police here are looking for a reason to charge you with a crime, not trying to keep you out of trouble. It's "us versus them" on both sides.
  - extra88 9y ago
    > I carry a gun, regularly, and I've never felt the need to draw it and point it at someone who might be stealing something. And yet you wrote in another comment that had you been the son-in-law, you would've brought your rifle to go talk to the person at the car. Why? In your scenario, you already called 911, what's the point of brandishing the weapon if you're not prepared to shoot someone for possibly stealing a car?

covercash 9y ago

Relevant comic: http://christopherkeelty.com/surviving-a-police-encounter/ http://christopherkeelty.com/surviving-a-police-encounter/

johngalt 9y ago

Here's the test. Reverse the situation. Off-duty cop is buying a car and random good neighbor black person sees all the same "suspicious behaviors" and begins an armed confrontation with the person they believe to be stealing a car. Suddenly pointing a gun at a "suspicious person" is no longer "lawful and proper" behavior. At a minimum, the civilian goes to jail for being reckless.

loco5niner 9y ago
Sorry, but that is not a good comparison. I would assume that off-duty cops (rightly) have more authority when it comes to these types of situations.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  I would assume that off-duty cops (rightly) have more authority when it comes to these types of situations. And yet, when they make a mistake, they aren't held to a higher standard, despite we, as citizens, granting that authority to them.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    No. Police are necessarily involved in more risky encounters than laypeople. They have manyfold the opportunities to make a mistake than laypeople. Training offsets some of that risk, but not all of it.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      No. Police are necessarily involved in more risky encounters than laypeople. They have manyfold the opportunities to make a mistake than laypeople. That's illogical. There are myriad professions where trust is delegated to the person in that profession, and consequences to go with it. A doctor doesn't get a free pass if they kill someone due to incompetence when performing a surgery just because they do it more often. Heck, engineers are held liable if their work results in injury or death. Yet, with law enforcement, the opposite is often true, even when the facts clearly demonstrate fault on the part of the police. You couple that with the "thin blue line" culture that results in police circling the wagons whenever one of their own screws up, and it's no wonder that trust in the police has eroded. The perception is that there's simply no consequences to police misconduct. And in many cases, that perception unfortunately matches reality.

justifier 9y ago

This articles bothers me Both the individual's story and her message here I am glad it is here to bring further attention to these issues and even how this specific event happened to this woman Both the encounter and how the police later handled the 'investigation' are both disgusting and why serious reform is anything but a top priority for officers and politicians is completely revolting to me But I wish the author was more clear on what she meant in saying 'prevent the next philando castile' Was she going to prevent it by filing the complaint and removing that officer from the street or was she insisting she would help prevent more philandos by educating others in saying: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. Because Castile did comply and was still murdered This clip discusses how the definition of 'comply' changes with each high profile murder https://youtu.be/aufMdURbitU https://youtu.be/aufMdURbitU Trevor Noah and the writers of the daily show have been discussing the issues in a way that I think has been highlighting some of the problems very clearly, and with great respect and composure This clip calls out the silence from a leading voice defending law abiding citizens' rights to carry firearms, especially in regard to doing so without fear of being murdered by the police for carrying a firearm https://youtu.be/0IJSSBMLz6g?t=250s https://youtu.be/0IJSSBMLz6g?t=250s And this video showcases the newly released dashcam footage of the philando murder https://youtu.be/wqgz7kRGVxg https://youtu.be/wqgz7kRGVxg We need to talk about these issues but insinuating blame on the victim is the wrong way to do it I hope the article was actually focused on the prevention method of filing complaints but I wish that was more clear So please, until this is solved, comply like Castile did and if you live to tell your side of the encounter then please report these offenders