I don’t post a lot of these videos, but this one is revealing. I honestly didn’t know which way this was going to go. Indian River Country, Florida, December, 2015. 3AM. A man has just gone to the convenience store to buy cigarettes. He’s riding a scooter without tags (that’s southern for “license plate”). Stop the video right at 00:15.…
Tag: police-involved shooting
Stop paperwork (2)
An email from a Chicago Police Officer (emphasis added by me): I wanted to go through our new “investigatory stop report (ISR)” training before I replied. By now you realize we have an extremely long form to fill out every time we do a street stop. The form is ridiculous and redundant but fortunately the department has created a shorter…
NYPD Officer Liang found guilty
Do I think Peter Liang wanted to kill Akai Gurley? No. Do I think Liang messed up so bad that he should be found criminally guilty of manslaughter and official misconduct for failing to help Mr. Gurley as he lay dying in a public housing stairwell? Yeah. But, as a side note, Liang is right about this: He felt unqualified…
“Justice 4 Whom”?!
Generally I couldn’t care less what Beyonce’s dancers think. But “Justice 4 Mario Woods” and a black power salute? Are you effing kidding me? Mario Woods was shot and killed by San Francisco police back in December. It was a good shooting. Christ almighty there are plenty of bad police shootings. Not this one. Woods doesn’t need justice. “Justice 4…
Just counting people killed by police won’t fix problems. We need better data.
I and Nick Selby wrote this one for the Washington Post.
Courage, not fear
I still can’t believe this guy got shot down by a cop playing whack-a-mole with his service weapon. The D.A. said: The evidence in this case shows the shooting to be accidental, and possibly negligent, but not criminally so. “This shooting is not justified, but also not criminal.” I don’t know if I buy the stutter-step no-double-tap explanation. But at…
Perhaps the worst police-involved shooting ever
I don’t say that lightly. There have been some bad ones. Click on this link or you can jump to about 0:50 sec on this: Andrew Thomas, the victim, a drunk driver, is paralyzed. He is white. So is Paradise, California. 1:35: “I got a male in the car refusing to get out.” Maybe, you think, just maybe, it’s because…
Chicago Cover Up
From the mayor on down to the officer on scene, the cover-up seems pretty big. Multiple false reports are very worrisome. Though a detective taking a statement from Van Dyke shouldn’t qualify as another false report. But Van Dyke’s partner, Walsh, is certainly culpable. Update: The New York Timessays “at least five other officers on the scene that night corroborated…
“The Deadliest County for Police Killings in America”
Oh, Bakersfield. Now it’s in the Atlantic. Of course you heard about Bakersfield and Kern County here first, back in April. And even gave Bakersfield an honorary mention, back in 2014, too.) The actual reporting is going on in the Guardian, the only paper, and an English paper, that seems to honestly care about investigating the issue of trigger happy…
Does rhetoric incite violence?
Why don’t anti-abortion politicians who say #BlackLivesMatter-rhetoric endangers cops take responsibility for Officer Swasey’s murder at Planned Parenthood? If anti-abortion rhetoric doesn’t have any relation to the murder of Officer Swasey and innocent women at Planned Parenthood, how could anti-cop rhetoric have any relation to people attacking cops? On the flip side, if anti-abortion rhetoric does incite violence against abortion…