How to End Police Shootings

radcen said:

Problem is, the cases that are egregious, when they do happen, almost always get swept under the rug. You can't just say, "Most cases are legit.", feel satisfied, and walk away. If you don't like the second-guessing, you need to help eliminate the need for second-guessing.

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We have done that, by having an investigative team actually look into incidents that deserve it. In many cases, though, this hasn't even been allowed to happen before something was automatically being cried as "racial injustice". Justice didn't even get a chance to begin to occur. The incidents had literally just occurred and no one can do an investigation that quickly. And then, on top of that, not only are people yelling that there should be some "justice" for someone (when they don't have all the details), but also claim that just because the person who is being identified as the "victim" is black, then that must mean he or she was treated in some unjust way due to that, without any actual evidence of this being the case.

radcen said:

It does happen, yes. How often?

In the interest of fairness, I don't think a definitive answer with citations and hard exact numbers is possible, for either side to tout.

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Thats what makes all this so hard. And relative. There are on the order of 62 million police contacts in the country annually. Something around 900,000 full time law enforcement officers. Around 600 (thats a high estimate) officer involved shootings and of those, approx 2/3 involve armed perpetrators firing at law enforcement. That doesnt count incidents involving violent contact...cant even imagine how many of those contacts involve physical altercations. So the numbers games dont really work and thats why we are left with the actual incidents. Where actual abuse occurs...and it does...it should be investigated. Those incidents will forever be clouded when people cite incidents like the one involving Alton Sterling.

roguenuke said:

We have done that, by having an investigative team actually look into incidents that deserve it. In many cases, though, this hasn't even been allowed to happen before something was automatically being cried as "racial injustice". Justice didn't even get a chance to begin to occur. The incidents had literally just occurred and no one can do an investigation that quickly. And then, on top of that, not only are people yelling that there should be some "justice" for someone (when they don't have all the details), but also claim that just because the person who is being identified as the "victim" is black, then that must mean he or she was treated in some unjust way due to that, without any actual evidence of this being the case.

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Internal Affairs? The police policing themselves? Sometimes literally their own departments?

The 'toy / fake' gun issue would be easily resolved if they banned makers from producing fake weapons that looked REAL.

If a cop is permitted to make a split second decision about someone's threat level and SHOOT - then they need to design fake guns that take a split second to determine if they're real or not.

radcen said:

Internal Affairs? The police policing themselves? Sometimes literally their own departments?

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And others. It isn't like these are the first incidents to ever come up for police. There are plenty of incidents that don't get out into the news.

And it is one thing to be upset about justice not happening after months or years, and/or seeing the evidence doesn't fit the description of events relayed by the police, yet nothing is done. It is quite another to take every single incident and automatically scream about it without even a chance to wait to see what the investigators of the incident do. That is the issue I have. In most of these cases, the information released by the press initially, generally by the family/friends of the person killed, didn't match the evidence, at the very least not completely.

The jumping the gun on both demanding "justice" and claims of racism are the problem. If there really is something that needs to be delved deeper into, after the initial investigation, or nothing being done, then there should be a push for justice for that person. But it still needs to be given that time. And it shouldn't have anything to do with that person's race.

Aunt Spiker said:

The 'toy / fake' gun issue would be easily resolved if they banned makers from producing fake weapons that looked REAL.

If a cop is permitted to make a split second decision about someone's threat level and SHOOT - then they need to design fake guns that take a split second to determine if they're real or not.

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Even when they required the manufacturers to add orange tips, people still broke them off. But if every toy gun looked like a bright purple nerf gun...I agree it would be tough to mistake that as a real gun.