[Discussion] Mass Shootings - Yeah, we need a thread just for this...

This year is the deadliest year ever in terms of mass shootings. In a political climate of polarization, it becomes harder to suss out legitimate information from the misinformation propagated by those with political agendas. Complicating this more is the continual resistance of 2nd amendment advocates to allow for political talk surrounding these massacres. This will involve political discussion to see if there are ways we can all agree might be good ways to prevent mass shootings.

This discussion should involve the details of any current, or future mass shooting, and how they compare to past mass shootings. How are they the same? How are they different? Do gun laws have an impact? Does the race of the shooter affect how we treat them? What makes one a hate crime and one an act or terrorism? Are these shootings the price of freedom?

Clumber wrote:

One of the things that bugs me in the defense of lethal force is the defense that "A person with a knife can from 20 feet away before a person with a gun can get a shot off". So, there's no answer other than killing that person with a knife, baseball bat, you name it. It is roughly accurate to claim that, but it applies to situations where the weapon needs to be drawn, aimed, and fired. If the officer already has his weapon out, finger near the trigger ready to fire, there is a lot more leeway to deescalate the situation rather than use lethal force as soon as they are twenty five or less feet away.

British police (as well as police in many other national jurisdictions) wear knife resistant armor. They are remarkably effective against knife attacks and allow them to use tactics that let them close distance with a knife wielding suspect. They also practice these tactics so they have the routines and skills necessary to safely apprehend suspects rather than simply killing them. They can do this because their chances of encountering civilian or criminal held firearms is a tiny fraction of what they would be here. They also receive many times the training cops here do.

As I have pointed out numerous times, in many jurisdictions in the United States, the job of sworn law enforcement is at best performed by enthusiastic amateurs. In North Carolina, for instance, one can be fully empowered with a gun and a badge to take a citizen's life or liberty with as little as 600 hours of training. In sharp contrast, you can't legally cut hair for money in NC without 1850 hours. In the Gulf states, the requirement is even less.

Gun control is definitely one important element, but a far larger component, I believe, is the fact that our policing is remarkably unprofessional in America. It suffers from an extraordinary lack of meaningful public investment.

I read that last night. One paragraph struck me particularly because it's something I've been thinking about since posting about this a couple of days ago:

“It’s the Blue Lives Matter More theory of policing,” he said. “When in doubt, shoot. If you can shoot, you should shoot. If you have the choice of waiting that one second to see if you could protect the citizen’s life and put your own life at risk, you must take the citizen’s life.”

The question I have is just what level of responsibility are we expecting from cops? Do we want them to 'take one for the team' in ambiguous circumstances, meaning that we'd rather have an officer injured than a subject* who may not really be a threat? Is that a responsibility we can really expect police to accept? It's a big ask, but on the other hand we lionize police for the risks they take.

From what I've read, and I welcome being told I'm wrong, we do have this expectation of the military, to limit 'collateral damage', even when troops are taken under fire.

* I don't know what word is best here; I want to avoid 'civilian' here because in our system cops are explicitly civilians as well, and ignoring that leads to the 'warrior cop' problem.

It's not that complicated:

IMAGE(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-68c0F6CA2a4/Un4_PDOHE_I/AAAAAAAABls/A37QmTOK9No/s1600/robocopprime1.jpg)

qaraq wrote:

I read that last night. One paragraph struck me particularly because it's something I've been thinking about since posting about this a couple of days ago:

“It’s the Blue Lives Matter More theory of policing,” he said. “When in doubt, shoot. If you can shoot, you should shoot. If you have the choice of waiting that one second to see if you could protect the citizen’s life and put your own life at risk, you must take the citizen’s life.”

The question I have is just what level of responsibility are we expecting from cops? Do we want them to 'take one for the team' in ambiguous circumstances, meaning that we'd rather have an officer injured than a subject* who may not really be a threat? Is that a responsibility we can really expect police to accept? It's a big ask, but on the other hand we lionize police for the risks they take.

From what I've read, and I welcome being told I'm wrong, we do have this expectation of the military, to limit 'collateral damage', even when troops are taken under fire.

* I don't know what word is best here; I want to avoid 'civilian' here because in our system cops are explicitly civilians as well, and ignoring that leads to the 'warrior cop' problem.

I think this binary thinking is part of the problem. If there is a step to take that makes it less likely that ANYONE is injured or killed, it should be taken.

qaraq wrote:

The question I have is just what level of responsibility are we expecting from cops? Do we want them to 'take one for the team' in ambiguous circumstances, meaning that we'd rather have an officer injured than a subject* who may not really be a threat? Is that a responsibility we can really expect police to accept?

Yes. That should literally be their job. They are the team intended to takes ones for the rest of us.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
qaraq wrote:

The question I have is just what level of responsibility are we expecting from cops? Do we want them to 'take one for the team' in ambiguous circumstances, meaning that we'd rather have an officer injured than a subject* who may not really be a threat? Is that a responsibility we can really expect police to accept?

Yes. That should literally be their job. They are the team intended to takes ones for the rest of us.

Agreed. And when it comes to assessing what is prudent in making general societal policy in areas regarding risk, the numbers matter. We're not talking 1/100 chance. Humans are teeeeerrible at assessing risk. In this matter that human deficiency is literally killing us at the micro and macro scale.

What I expect from law enforcement officers is - use lethal force only when lives (their own or others) are in immediate threat, if and only if, there is no other means available. What I expect from law enforcement agencies is to appropriately train their officers to understand lethal threat, as well as train and equip them to provide more options (along the lines of what Paleo wrote inre British police)

I think there is also the dubious nature of "armed suspect".
Armed with what? Because a grandma with an AK is different than a 6'6" body builder with a butter knife.

fangblackbone wrote:

I think there is also the dubious nature of "armed suspect".
Armed with what? Because a grandma with an AK is different than a 6'6" body builder with a butter knife.

thats true, the grandma has far far far more killing ability.

It just highlights that both "armed" and "suspect" are too vague to judge threat from.

I think one of the choicest nuggets from Paleocon's post is the statement that police in other countries are trained a whole lot better, which seems to have a pretty direct correlation with fatalities involving law enforcement. The Global Village definitely seems to be a one-way concept for much of the US: even though the answers are literally being demonstrated on the doorstep in a whole bunch of countries, there still seems to be a lot of tortured 'BUT HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY DO IT ANY DIFFERENTLY?' conversation going on.

Stop. Observe. Reflect. Adapt. Adopt.

DC Malleus wrote:

I think one of the choicest nuggets from Paleocon's post is the statement that police in other countries are trained a whole lot better, which seems to have a pretty direct correlation with fatalities involving law enforcement. The Global Village definitely seems to be a one-way concept for much of the US: even though the answers are literally being demonstrated on the doorstep in a whole bunch of countries, there still seems to be a lot of tortured 'BUT HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY DO IT ANY DIFFERENTLY?' conversation going on.

Stop. Observe. Reflect. Adapt. Adopt.

Policing in America is fundamentally broken on so many levels. Training is certainly one of them, but certainly not all of it. It all stems from an overriding (and historically recent) American ethic that civil service is a cost to be minimized in a sort of max/min game for billionaires. We (and by "we", I mean primarily Baby Boomers) have been robbing the community chest by underinvesting in everything from basic infrastructure to education, civil regulation, disaster preparedness, and yes, even law enforcement to the point that the outcomes are predictably sub par.

Specific to law enforcement, the formula we have arrived at for policing in America is one in which localities compete with one another for lower property taxes while cutting costs to law enforcement for which they are responsible for funding. And in order to pretend that they are not, they spend lavishly on conspicuous shows like new vehicles and shiny assault rifles. This is helped along by federal transfer programs sending them retired military gear including, but not limited to grenade launchers and tanks. They, however, skimp severely on training. I have interviewed dozens of officers in different departments. Even the well funded ones complain that training budgets are always tight, time to attend is tighter, and incentive to participate is lacking.

Add to this how American police are recruited, compensated, and evaluated and you see nothing but a cascade of failure. Officer candidates are overwhelmingly favored if they have prior law enforcement experience, but lacking a national database or mandatory accreditation, there is simply no way to reliably determine if the applying officer was a bad officer. As a result, bad officers tend to bounce from department to department who seem perfectly happy to avoid the cost of sending a "newbie" to the academy.

Compensation is generally on the low side of trade professions and the only real way to increase one's pay to a living wage in many areas is to maximize overtime. In a perverse way, this actually incents the officers to create the circumstances for civil unrest, but on a more prosaic example, it provides even more perverse incentive to make bogus arrests and nuisance citations as court appearances generally count as "overtime pay". Considering that many of these nuisance citations FUND departments, one can already see the conflict of interest.

Evaluation, even in the best of departments, is almost all "metrics driven" now. Just about every department in the US has gone to some form of COMPSTAT which is a fancy word for "arrest and citation quotas". Fail to meet your quotas and fail to get promoted, get your leave approved, get overtime, or get desired assignments. Blow out your quota and find yourself in the police equivalent of the President's club trip to the Virgin Islands. So instead of a focus on public safety, we have created a professional ethic that looks for or invents criminality.

Broken. Fundamentally broken.

Yeah, that's a terrifying summary. The apex of capitalism indeed.

Paleocon wrote:

We (and by "we", I mean primarily Baby Boomers) have been robbing the community chest by underinvesting in everything from basic infrastructure to education, civil regulation, disaster preparedness, and yes, even law enforcement to the point that the outcomes are predictably sub par.

It's a nice story, but unfortunately it isn't true. In 1977, state and local law enforcement spending was $58 billion (in 2015 inflation-adjusted dollars). In 2015, it was $181 billion - an almost 300% increase. As a percentage of total spending, law enforcement increased from 5% to 6% of total state and local spending. And as far as I can tell, that doesn't include the billions per year that Homeland Security grants to local police forces.

Now, it's certainly possible to argue that's not enough. However, it's not possible to argue that there's been skimping relative to previous generations - particularly when crime rates are half what they were in 1977, and absolute numbers are down 15%. A Vox article from 2016 discussing policing problems in America doesn't even mention money, except in one area - as a way of increasing officer quality.

In short, police in America have a lot of problems, but availability of funding isn't one of them. It's a fundamental problem of priorities, not resources.

Way to ignore the nuanced content of a post there.

He was offering a counterpoint to one specific point in the post, not ignoring the entirety.

I've always thought that the Overtime aspect of police work was something that didn't receive anywhere near the amount of attention it should. I know that in some instances police officers work 90+ hours a week to make as much money as they can. I've always thought that the sleep deprivation and strain of doing that in the long term may be an important part of them screwing up instant life-or-death decisions.

I would love if every police shooting was logged to a central database,, and I think a really important part of that database would be "how far into his shift was the officer, how many hours had he worked in the last 3 days, how many hours had he worked in the last 2 weeks". Maybe there is no correlation, but I bet there is.

And honestly on principle, even without that correlation, I think it's ridiculous that they aren't capped to 60 hours a week or something. Just bullsh*t that you are super, super regularly paying officers with 10-15 years of raises time and a half for overtime (and a lot of time once you hit a certain number of hours that turns into overtime 2, with a higher bonus) so that you can "save money" over training and hiring new recruits. It's a laughably obvious lie to cover for the gravy train.

Also it belies the fact that there are more types of crime requiring more resources in 2015 than 1977, and a huge population increase.

Mixolyde wrote:

Also it belies the fact that there are more types of crime requiring more resources in 2015 than 1977, and a huge population increase.

And, understandably, greater expectations of the role of police in a civilized society. Except among the libertarian class who view the law enforcement ideal as Marshall Matt Dillon from the old TV show Gunsmoke (yeah. Really. This is pretty commonly articulated and often includes his clearly expressed racism.), most folks accept that society as complex as ours requires more professional policing.

Speaking of broken policing, I just came across this article from a few weeks back. It's a pretty sober read considering the department's problems go back decades.

ProPublica/South Bend Tribune wrote:

When Ed Windbigler became Elkhart’s police chief in January 2016, one of his first tasks was selecting his top command staff.

For assistant chief, his second in command, Windbigler named Todd Thayer. Less than three years before, Thayer had been demoted two ranks for making flippant comments about a fatal shooting. Witnesses reported he said a fellow officer could now check shooting a person off his “bucket list.”

For patrol captain, Windbigler named Brent Long. Less than two years before, Long had received a four-day suspension for sending inappropriate emails to fellow officers. One email included gruesome photos of a man in another city who, while running from police, jumped or fell from an overpass and was decapitated on a wrought-iron fence.

Under Windbigler, Thayer and Long are not aberrations, according to a review of personnel files by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica. Twenty-eight of the Elkhart Police Department’s 34 supervisors, from chief down to sergeant, have disciplinary records. The reasons range from carelessness to incompetence to serious, even criminal, misconduct. Fifteen of them have served suspensions, including Windbigler himself, who was once suspended for three days — and ordered to pay punitive damages in a federal lawsuit alleging excessive force.

One officer promoted to sergeant by Windbigler has been disciplined more than two dozen times, once for using police communications equipment to refer to “white power.” Another sergeant choked a man in custody. Another failed to report domestic violence by a fellow officer, who had battered a woman and shot her cat. Still another habitually skipped mandatory training and then lied about why, saying he had been attending to police union business.

At least three current supervisors have been convicted of crimes during their careers.

Seven have opened fire in at least one fatal shooting. One officer made sergeant by Windbigler fired his gun in three fatal shootings in a little more than four years, including one that led to a lawsuit and settlement. Another used his Taser on a high school student while working as a resource officer, then, a week later, shot and killed a man who turned out to be unarmed.

“That’s high. That’s high,” said Walter Signorelli, a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, of the number of fatal shootings by Elkhart police. Signorelli worked over 30 years for the New York City Police Department before retiring as inspector. “I don’t know what kind of place this Elkhart is.”

From 2013 to 2017, Elkhart police shot and killed six people while New York City police killed 43. Elkhart’s population is 53,000 — New York City’s, 8.6 million. The NYPD had about seven times more police shootings — in a city with more than 160 times the people.

NYT: Black Man Killed by Police in Alabama Was Shot From Behind, Autopsy Shows (Video)

A black man killed by the police in an Alabama mall in November was shot three times from behind, according to a forensic examination commissioned by the man’s family.

The finding, announced in a news conference on Monday, was seen by the man’s family and lawyers as evidence he was running away and posed no threat to the officer who shot him.

Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was fatally shot in the middle of a panicked crowd at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Ala., on Nov. 22, as officers responded to reports of gunshots on Thanksgiving night. Witnesses said Mr. Bradford, who was legally carrying a handgun, was directing shoppers to safety.

So former soldier, carrying a registered firearm with a permit, directing innocent bystanders to safety while a shooting is going on, and he's the one the cops shoot in the back. If that magical shield of military training, lawful weapon ownership, and righteous intent doesn't keep you safe from the police, what do they think does? Spin it NRA, spin it!

You know those shield are all negated by the color of his skin - like the Green Lantern, all blacks are vulnerable to brownness.

Kehama wrote:

So former soldier, carrying a registered firearm with a permit, directing innocent bystanders to safety while a shooting is going on, and he's the one the cops shoot in the back. If that magical shield of military training, lawful weapon ownership, and righteous intent doesn't keep you safe from the police, what do they think does? Spin it NRA, spin it!

Edit:

I found the article. The quoted eyewitness I was thinking of stated she saw him with his weapon hosltered as he was directing other bystanders.

Edit 2:
NRA Spin - Something something training.

Reaper81 wrote:
Kehama wrote:

So former soldier, carrying a registered firearm with a permit, directing innocent bystanders to safety while a shooting is going on, and he's the one the cops shoot in the back. If that magical shield of military training, lawful weapon ownership, and righteous intent doesn't keep you safe from the police, what do they think does? Spin it NRA, spin it!

Edit:

I found the article. The quoted eyewitness I was thinking of stated she saw him with his weapon hosltered as he was directing other bystanders.

It;s nice to see the definition of "brandish" has been extended to include "in a visible holster"

I wonder just how damning the unreleased body-cam footage is. Just to state the obvious, but we have a problem when cops at shootings are more dangerous than the original shooter.

From the autopsy and eyewitnesses it sounds like on a scale of 1 to 10 it's "repeatedly shoot unarmed good Samaritan in the back".

(Unarmed isn't a great word, what is the term for someone that is armed, but their weapon is not being used and hasn't been drawn?)

Yonder wrote:

From the autopsy and eyewitnesses it sounds like on a scale of 1 to 10 it's "repeatedly shoot unarmed good Samaritan in the back".

(Unarmed isn't a great word, what is the term for someone that is armed, but their weapon is not being used and hasn't been drawn?)

You could go with unlimbered weapon (I think) but it does not flow well.

EDIT - I think it should be limbered.

Garrcia wrote:
Yonder wrote:

From the autopsy and eyewitnesses it sounds like on a scale of 1 to 10 it's "repeatedly shoot unarmed good Samaritan in the back".

(Unarmed isn't a great word, what is the term for someone that is armed, but their weapon is not being used and hasn't been drawn?)

You could go with unlimbered weapon (I think) but it does not flow well.

EDIT - I think it should be limbered.

The proper term would be "holstered" or "secured".

Paleocon wrote:
Garrcia wrote:
Yonder wrote:

From the autopsy and eyewitnesses it sounds like on a scale of 1 to 10 it's "repeatedly shoot unarmed good Samaritan in the back".

(Unarmed isn't a great word, what is the term for someone that is armed, but their weapon is not being used and hasn't been drawn?)

You could go with unlimbered weapon (I think) but it does not flow well.

EDIT - I think it should be limbered.

The proper term would be "holstered" or "secured".

Definitely not "brandished."

Unbrandished?
Disbrandished?
Subbrandished?
Antibrandished?