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This is why any footage of an incident used in court must include the entire interaction. Police body cam footage can be rejected as evidence if it does not sta

This is why any footage of an incident used in court must include the entire interaction. Police body cam footage can be rejected as evidence if it does not start with the officer stepping out of his vehicle. This is why so many iPhone recordings from bystanders gets thrown out in trial. Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation. I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.

tartoran 6y ago
Handcuffing a lifeless freshly shot body is more than enough. I’ve seen it over and over. Why is that a policy? Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy? The police rule by fear. I’ve never broken the law and yet Im really affraid of cops in the US. I know I should not have a reason to but can’t help but be intimidated by their tactics, their orders, their demeanour. And I act like a scared ghost anytime I get stopped by them: I am afraid that if any answer I’d give them might make them punish me with one more more tickets.
- racnid 6y ago
  1) Because "freshly shot lifeless" bodies can and have come back to kill people. 2) Because there is no such thing as shoot to wound. If you've gotten to the point where you're shooting at someone they need to be dead. Any bullet holes in your body are potentially fatal. Especially the famous leg shot; damage to your femoral artery will kill you extremely quickly.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Yikes. No. If you don’t get threatened with a gun or another weapon you don’t shoot period. Some people have mental issues and normally they twitch a lot. And cops claim they were afraid for their lives, it’s the easy license to kill. I find that barbaric and no wonder we see so much backlash against the police force!!!
    - wl 6y ago
      It doesn't take a weapon to kill someone. A blow to the head can be fatal. And as we recently saw in the case of George Floyd, positional asphyxiation and/or choking can be fatal, too. When considering whether or not the use of deadly force was justified in a given situation, the lack of a weapon isn't the trump card indicating the force was not justified that many people think it is.
- tlear 6y ago
  1. Simple. People go into shock look incapacitated, then come out of it. People get pumped with a dozen rounds and keep fighting. 2. Have you ever shot a gun? Have you ever shot a pistol? Now to simulate the Andrenaline dump run few sprints then try again. You CAN NOT shoot to disable this is not a Hollywood movie, it does not work. Most people can’t hit anything past few meters away with a pistol. Gun is not a taser or a nightstick. It is a lethal weapon and should only be employed when you have a reason to kill.
  - bhandziuk 6y ago
    Then they shouldn't have a gun at all
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      So they should allow innocent people to be killed?
      - GurnBlandston 6y ago
        That doesn't follow in the slightest. Lethal force is not the only way to protect - de-escalation is how you protect without destroying lives.
        vorpalhex 6y ago
        Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders? And if a bystander is harmed while you are attempting to de-escalate, doesn't that make the officer negligent? Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes. De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.
        freeflight 6y ago
        > Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders? Sure you can, it's what the vast majority of police forces in developed countries are doing all the time [0]. That way they also don't end up shooting innocent bystanders, which is apparently quite a common thing in the US [1] [2] [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/328297/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ge... [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-robbers-hijack-ups-truck https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in-times-square-police-wound-two-bystanders.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in...
- hajile 6y ago
  It's obvious that you've never even shot a gun before. Pistols aren't particularly accurate in a shooting range even if you take lots of time to aim. With a moving target, adrenaline, and all the other factors in an actual situation, you're going to be lucky if all your shots even make contact with the target. Where do you aim if you want to "shoot to incapacitate"? No such place exists on the body. Even using small, low-powered rounds like a .22 rimfire short carry extreme risk of death no matter where you aim. The answer is more simple. Don't pull out that gun unless what the person is doing warrants death. I don't know that attempting to apprehend a DUI is worth killing someone over. If you're responding to a domestic violence situation where someone's running around with a knife though, it's likely that a gun isn't a terrible consideration. I think the real issue is getting in the competitive zone. "I'm not going to let this pero beat me" instead of considering if the cure is worse than the disease.
  - bakuninsbart 6y ago
    Americans certainly know more than western/northern Europe about shooting people, but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work, as the fatality rate of police shootings is only about half as high as in the US.
    - Scarblac 6y ago
      Police in Europe is more trained in general. Something like 9 months of training to become a police officer in the US vs two or three years in western/northern Europe.
    - socraticmethod 6y ago
      "...but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work." I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?
    - ha4fsd3fas 6y ago
      Half seems insignificant since in America the shootings are more commonly two sided, which warrants more deadly use of force. You wouldn't stop with the first bullet if your target had a gun in their hand(as opposed to a knife).
- zepto 6y ago
  I am completely in support of the idea that these videos show unnecessary police brutality, I have no argument with the message here. I just want to answer your question about shooting to kill vs incapacitate. The first part of the answer is that nobody should shoot anyone who they don’t reasonably believe is trying to kill them. This applies to citizens or police. Generally it is the standard applied in citizen self-defense scenarios. The second part is that shooting isn’t that easy or effective. Certainly not how it appears in the movies. It is hard to hit a 6” moving target in a stressful situation, even at relatively close range, and would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops. Added to this, there is no reliable place to shoot someone that will incapacitate them without also being likely to kill them. Surprisingly many people will continue to fight after being shot, so even if the cop had the ability to ‘shoot them in the leg’, for example, they would still be at risk of being killed by an aggressive adversary. In addition, any responsible use of firearms has to take into account the environment. Handgun bullets are still lethal hundreds of meters from where they are fired. When cops miss their targets, bullets can and do kill bystanders, or ricochet or fragment and cause injury to people not even in the line of fire. So the guidance to anyone using a gun in self defense is generally to shoot for the ‘center of mass’. This is primary because hitting the central nervous system or vital organs is the only reliable way to stop someone, but also because it’s impractical and unsafe to aim anywhere else. None of this is meant to justify police shootings. Quite the opposite. I am just explaining why every gun use is necessarily a lethal encounter. If a politician suggests “shooting them in the leg”, the one thing you can be certain of is that they are completely incompetent on this topic, and can not be trusted to improve matters.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    > would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops Generally agree apart from this - if cops don't have training to be expert (or at least above-average good) shooters, then that's a failure. We've read tons of articles about militarization of US police. If they have budget for armored vehicles, for sure they have budget for (very cheap but quality basic) 9mm ammunition for practice.
    - 6y ago
- socraticmethod 6y ago
  "Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?" Most armed folks are taught that when you draw a gun it's to neutralize a threat. To neutralize is to completely eliminate the threat. Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license? Something like 'Don't pull your gun out and point it at someone unless you intend to shoot and kill them. Anything less than that needlessly escalates the severity of a situation by introducing a weapon.' The idea being that if you pull out a gun and don't use it, all of the sudden you have increased the potential for violence, exposed yourself as armed and willing, lost the element of surprise, and given potential assailants the idea/opportunity to match your use of force. Thus, "shoot to kill." One problem is that guns are tools for a task, and when you pull out a tool, you want to leverage it as efficiently as possible. Maybe the answer isn't to use the tool differently, but use a different tool entirely.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Are we talking war combat here? Because in a civilian case shooting legs and taking cover might just as well do it. The real reason they shoot to kill is because they don’t want the victim to sue. A dead man never sued, their families have a lower chance of getting anything though that has started to change with so much footage.
    - nan0 6y ago
      "shooting legs" No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs). Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing. Edit: Spelling
  - CWuestefeld 6y ago
    Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license? Absolutely, I was taught this in my self-defense shooting class. The question of kill or not kill doesn't enter into it at all. We were trained to neutralize the threat, full stop. The effect on the future health of that threat doesn't enter into it. And this makes sense when you understand that gunfights don't happen the way you see on TV. There, when someone is hit with a bullet they fall down and stop being a threat. This is not how the world works. In the real world, unless their circulatory system or nervous system is taken offline, they will continue to be a threat. Even if they've been hit through the aorta or femoral artery or something that is likely to be fatal, it'll take a minute or two at least for the effect to occur, and in the meantime, they're going to keep trying to kill you.
- agensaequivocum 6y ago
  > Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy? Because there is no place to shoot that will simply incapacitate everyone. The policy is generally shoot to stop the threat not to kill per se. There are many instances where a person will take many rounds in potentially fatal spots and continue like nothing has happened. > In this free-for-all, the assailant had, in fact, been struck 14 times. Any one of six of these wounds – in the heart, right lung, left lung, liver, diaphragm, and right kidney – could have produced fatal consequences, “in time,” Gramins emphasizes.[1] [1] https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one-cop-carries-145-rounds-of-ammo-on-the-job-clGBbLYpnqqHxwMq/ https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one...
standardUser 6y ago
"Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely." That's really all we need to know to demand radical changes to police culture, if not the entire concept of ubiquitous armed police forces.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  That isn't a logical conclusion to draw. Are there instances where doctors negligently kill their patients? Absolutely. That does not mean we need to "radically" change doctor culture, if not the entire concept of doctors performing surgeries with sharp objects. The RATE is abuse is more important than the mere existence of abuse. These emotional comments have lost touch with logical thinking. The media is driving people crazy.
  - socraticmethod 6y ago
    "The RATE is abuse is more important than the mere existence of abuse." So what's an acceptable rate for the murder of PoC due to ongoing systemic racism and abuse of authority at the hands of the Police?
  - standardUser 6y ago
    Doctors aren't granted a monopoly on violence by the state, so that comparison makes no sense.
wl 6y ago
> Police body cam footage can be rejected as evidence if it does not start with the officer stepping out of his vehicle. This is why so many iPhone recordings from bystanders gets thrown out in trial. That's nonsense. Evidence is never excluded because it doesn't tell the whole story. If that were the case, admitting any evidence at all would be a rare occurrence. Rather, each side in a case tries to piece together their version of the story with the evidence that is available to them. Generally speaking, evidence is only excluded if it's unreliable (e.g. hearsay) or irrelevant.

tartoran 6y ago

Handcuffing a lifeless freshly shot body is more than enough. I’ve seen it over and over. Why is that a policy? Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy? The police rule by fear. I’ve never broken the law and yet Im really affraid of cops in the US. I know I should not have a reason to but can’t help but be intimidated by their tactics, their orders, their demeanour. And I act like a scared ghost anytime I get stopped by them: I am afraid that if any answer I’d give them might make them punish me with one more more tickets.

racnid 6y ago
1) Because "freshly shot lifeless" bodies can and have come back to kill people. 2) Because there is no such thing as shoot to wound. If you've gotten to the point where you're shooting at someone they need to be dead. Any bullet holes in your body are potentially fatal. Especially the famous leg shot; damage to your femoral artery will kill you extremely quickly.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Yikes. No. If you don’t get threatened with a gun or another weapon you don’t shoot period. Some people have mental issues and normally they twitch a lot. And cops claim they were afraid for their lives, it’s the easy license to kill. I find that barbaric and no wonder we see so much backlash against the police force!!!
  - wl 6y ago
    It doesn't take a weapon to kill someone. A blow to the head can be fatal. And as we recently saw in the case of George Floyd, positional asphyxiation and/or choking can be fatal, too. When considering whether or not the use of deadly force was justified in a given situation, the lack of a weapon isn't the trump card indicating the force was not justified that many people think it is.
tlear 6y ago
1. Simple. People go into shock look incapacitated, then come out of it. People get pumped with a dozen rounds and keep fighting. 2. Have you ever shot a gun? Have you ever shot a pistol? Now to simulate the Andrenaline dump run few sprints then try again. You CAN NOT shoot to disable this is not a Hollywood movie, it does not work. Most people can’t hit anything past few meters away with a pistol. Gun is not a taser or a nightstick. It is a lethal weapon and should only be employed when you have a reason to kill.
- bhandziuk 6y ago
  Then they shouldn't have a gun at all
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    So they should allow innocent people to be killed?
    - GurnBlandston 6y ago
      That doesn't follow in the slightest. Lethal force is not the only way to protect - de-escalation is how you protect without destroying lives.
      - vorpalhex 6y ago
        Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders? And if a bystander is harmed while you are attempting to de-escalate, doesn't that make the officer negligent? Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes. De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.
        freeflight 6y ago
        > Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders? Sure you can, it's what the vast majority of police forces in developed countries are doing all the time [0]. That way they also don't end up shooting innocent bystanders, which is apparently quite a common thing in the US [1] [2] [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/328297/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ge... [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-robbers-hijack-ups-truck https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in-times-square-police-wound-two-bystanders.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in...
hajile 6y ago
It's obvious that you've never even shot a gun before. Pistols aren't particularly accurate in a shooting range even if you take lots of time to aim. With a moving target, adrenaline, and all the other factors in an actual situation, you're going to be lucky if all your shots even make contact with the target. Where do you aim if you want to "shoot to incapacitate"? No such place exists on the body. Even using small, low-powered rounds like a .22 rimfire short carry extreme risk of death no matter where you aim. The answer is more simple. Don't pull out that gun unless what the person is doing warrants death. I don't know that attempting to apprehend a DUI is worth killing someone over. If you're responding to a domestic violence situation where someone's running around with a knife though, it's likely that a gun isn't a terrible consideration. I think the real issue is getting in the competitive zone. "I'm not going to let this pero beat me" instead of considering if the cure is worse than the disease.
- bakuninsbart 6y ago
  Americans certainly know more than western/northern Europe about shooting people, but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work, as the fatality rate of police shootings is only about half as high as in the US.
  - Scarblac 6y ago
    Police in Europe is more trained in general. Something like 9 months of training to become a police officer in the US vs two or three years in western/northern Europe.
  - socraticmethod 6y ago
    "...but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work." I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?
  - ha4fsd3fas 6y ago
    Half seems insignificant since in America the shootings are more commonly two sided, which warrants more deadly use of force. You wouldn't stop with the first bullet if your target had a gun in their hand(as opposed to a knife).
zepto 6y ago
I am completely in support of the idea that these videos show unnecessary police brutality, I have no argument with the message here. I just want to answer your question about shooting to kill vs incapacitate. The first part of the answer is that nobody should shoot anyone who they don’t reasonably believe is trying to kill them. This applies to citizens or police. Generally it is the standard applied in citizen self-defense scenarios. The second part is that shooting isn’t that easy or effective. Certainly not how it appears in the movies. It is hard to hit a 6” moving target in a stressful situation, even at relatively close range, and would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops. Added to this, there is no reliable place to shoot someone that will incapacitate them without also being likely to kill them. Surprisingly many people will continue to fight after being shot, so even if the cop had the ability to ‘shoot them in the leg’, for example, they would still be at risk of being killed by an aggressive adversary. In addition, any responsible use of firearms has to take into account the environment. Handgun bullets are still lethal hundreds of meters from where they are fired. When cops miss their targets, bullets can and do kill bystanders, or ricochet or fragment and cause injury to people not even in the line of fire. So the guidance to anyone using a gun in self defense is generally to shoot for the ‘center of mass’. This is primary because hitting the central nervous system or vital organs is the only reliable way to stop someone, but also because it’s impractical and unsafe to aim anywhere else. None of this is meant to justify police shootings. Quite the opposite. I am just explaining why every gun use is necessarily a lethal encounter. If a politician suggests “shooting them in the leg”, the one thing you can be certain of is that they are completely incompetent on this topic, and can not be trusted to improve matters.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  > would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops Generally agree apart from this - if cops don't have training to be expert (or at least above-average good) shooters, then that's a failure. We've read tons of articles about militarization of US police. If they have budget for armored vehicles, for sure they have budget for (very cheap but quality basic) 9mm ammunition for practice.
  - 6y ago
socraticmethod 6y ago
"Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?" Most armed folks are taught that when you draw a gun it's to neutralize a threat. To neutralize is to completely eliminate the threat. Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license? Something like 'Don't pull your gun out and point it at someone unless you intend to shoot and kill them. Anything less than that needlessly escalates the severity of a situation by introducing a weapon.' The idea being that if you pull out a gun and don't use it, all of the sudden you have increased the potential for violence, exposed yourself as armed and willing, lost the element of surprise, and given potential assailants the idea/opportunity to match your use of force. Thus, "shoot to kill." One problem is that guns are tools for a task, and when you pull out a tool, you want to leverage it as efficiently as possible. Maybe the answer isn't to use the tool differently, but use a different tool entirely.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Are we talking war combat here? Because in a civilian case shooting legs and taking cover might just as well do it. The real reason they shoot to kill is because they don’t want the victim to sue. A dead man never sued, their families have a lower chance of getting anything though that has started to change with so much footage.
  - nan0 6y ago
    "shooting legs" No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs). Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing. Edit: Spelling
- CWuestefeld 6y ago
  Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license? Absolutely, I was taught this in my self-defense shooting class. The question of kill or not kill doesn't enter into it at all. We were trained to neutralize the threat, full stop. The effect on the future health of that threat doesn't enter into it. And this makes sense when you understand that gunfights don't happen the way you see on TV. There, when someone is hit with a bullet they fall down and stop being a threat. This is not how the world works. In the real world, unless their circulatory system or nervous system is taken offline, they will continue to be a threat. Even if they've been hit through the aorta or femoral artery or something that is likely to be fatal, it'll take a minute or two at least for the effect to occur, and in the meantime, they're going to keep trying to kill you.
agensaequivocum 6y ago
> Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy? Because there is no place to shoot that will simply incapacitate everyone. The policy is generally shoot to stop the threat not to kill per se. There are many instances where a person will take many rounds in potentially fatal spots and continue like nothing has happened. > In this free-for-all, the assailant had, in fact, been struck 14 times. Any one of six of these wounds – in the heart, right lung, left lung, liver, diaphragm, and right kidney – could have produced fatal consequences, “in time,” Gramins emphasizes.[1] [1] https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one-cop-carries-145-rounds-of-ammo-on-the-job-clGBbLYpnqqHxwMq/ https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one...

standardUser 6y ago

"Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely." That's really all we need to know to demand radical changes to police culture, if not the entire concept of ubiquitous armed police forces.

koheripbal 6y ago
That isn't a logical conclusion to draw. Are there instances where doctors negligently kill their patients? Absolutely. That does not mean we need to "radically" change doctor culture, if not the entire concept of doctors performing surgeries with sharp objects. The RATE is abuse is more important than the mere existence of abuse. These emotional comments have lost touch with logical thinking. The media is driving people crazy.
- socraticmethod 6y ago
  "The RATE is abuse is more important than the mere existence of abuse." So what's an acceptable rate for the murder of PoC due to ongoing systemic racism and abuse of authority at the hands of the Police?
- standardUser 6y ago
  Doctors aren't granted a monopoly on violence by the state, so that comparison makes no sense.

wl 6y ago

> Police body cam footage can be rejected as evidence if it does not start with the officer stepping out of his vehicle. This is why so many iPhone recordings from bystanders gets thrown out in trial. That's nonsense. Evidence is never excluded because it doesn't tell the whole story. If that were the case, admitting any evidence at all would be a rare occurrence. Rather, each side in a case tries to piece together their version of the story with the evidence that is available to them. Generally speaking, evidence is only excluded if it's unreliable (e.g. hearsay) or irrelevant.