Thanatos 2,847 Posted July 16, 2015 The Los Angeles Times just posted this video of yet another police shooting of an unarmed suspect, this time who had both hands in the air and all he did to "provoke" an attack was to remove his ballcap. The actual shooting happened in 2013 but the city had fought for two years to keep this from being released to the public. Yesterday a judge ordered it to be released. There is a serious issue with cops in this country being flagrantly abusive of their power. 7 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
seanbrock 1,684 Posted July 16, 2015 I've said this before, we clearly need to evaluate these guys psychologically before they join the force and continue to evaluate them over time, drug test them and do a much better job training them. I think have camera's on their person would help too. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ATL_Predator+ 1,196 Posted July 16, 2015 They do psych evals, but not detailed enough. I think most police agencies need to do it the way most state police do and go to close friends, family, do an extremely thorough background check and put each and every officer through a polygraph. A polygraph isn't just a lie test, it says a lot about a persons intent/motives. It's a great tool. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Cherry 1,302 Posted July 16, 2015 Given that it's from 2013 I don't see the relevance of it being posted right now. Put more funding towards Law Enforcement and extensive background checks on officers. That's the most you can do. The US is a lot better with a few psycho cops than without cops at all. 7 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Sarge+ 3,436 Posted July 16, 2015 Given that it's from 2013 I don't see the relevance of it being posted right now. - Because the video was just released now, so people just now know what happened. Put more funding towards Law Enforcement and extensive background checks on officers. That's the most you can do. The US is a lot better with a few psycho cops than without cops at all. - Nobody has said in any thread on TGP that we shouldn't have police officers. That would be dumb. They just need to be screened more thoroughly before given a badge & gun and reevaluated as often as possible. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Bucman 891 Posted July 16, 2015 Did they arrest these cops for murder? Because thats what this was. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Maverick 791 Posted July 16, 2015 (edited) DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. I'm going to ask a small question that will probably piss a lot of people off, but I'm curious. I just watched the video without sound at work. Is there a reason the guy didn't keep his hands on top of his head? Why did he remove his ballcap if the officers instructed him to keep his hands on his head? Let me repeat this before I get flamed: DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. Edited July 16, 2015 by Maverick Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Thanatos 2,847 Posted July 16, 2015 Given that it's from 2013 I don't see the relevance of it being posted right now. Put more funding towards Law Enforcement and extensive background checks on officers. That's the most you can do. The US is a lot better with a few psycho cops than without cops at all. Chern, you say some really fucking dumb shit sometimes. A) The video was released very recently, as I said in my original post, so we didn't know what exactly happened until then. B) The shooting isn't that old, it's only two years ago, it's not like this problem didn't exist before then. C) Your "solution" is certainly not the only thing we can do. For starters, body cameras on everyone. Second, mandatory psych evaluations once/year. Third, any time an officer is cited for aggressive force, investigated for such, or has an incident involving any sort of abuse of power, it triggers an automatic temporary suspension while he/she is investigated for the incident. If deemed necessary, a psych eval is given, and/or the officer is removed from the force. Far too often in these cases, when we look back at a cop's record, there will be multiple citations for incidents where its clear the cop used far more force than was necessary. If they aren't disciplined for it ever, they come to believe that its perfectly okay for them to do so. DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. I'm going to ask a small question that will probably piss a lot of people off, but I'm curious. I just watched the video without sound at work. Is there a reason the guy didn't keep his hands on top of his head? Why did he remove his ballcap if the officers instructed him to keep his hands on his head? Let me repeat this before I get flamed: DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. If I remember correctly, there are two reasons: A) he's hispanic and doesn't understand English all that well, and B) He was somewhat impaired from drinking too much. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Zack_of_Steel+ 3,014 Posted July 16, 2015 DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. I'm going to ask a small question that will probably piss a lot of people off, but I'm curious. I just watched the video without sound at work. Is there a reason the guy didn't keep his hands on top of his head? Why did he remove his ballcap if the officers instructed him to keep his hands on his head? Let me repeat this before I get flamed: DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. Okay, now it's oochymp's turn. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BwareDWare94 723 Posted July 16, 2015 Given that it's from 2013 I don't see the relevance of it being posted right now. Put more funding towards Law Enforcement and extensive background checks on officers. That's the most you can do. The US is a lot better with a few psycho cops than without cops at all. Every single piece of police brutality, dating back to the very first incident in American history, is relevant to right now. No instances of a problem are irrelevant. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
oochymp 2,393 Posted July 16, 2015 Okay, now it's oochymp's turn. my turn to do what? justify murder? not gonna do it (FTR, I don't think that's what Mav was doing either, just asking an honest question) I'm typically a police apologist but there's no excuse for this, any part of it, the biggest question I have is why the hell did they already have their guns drawn when they approached? The official line apparently is that the victim reached behind him to where they couldn't see his hand, I call bullshit on that because (1) his hands were in front of him (the same direction the first shots came from) the entire time and (2) from the video it looks like they have at least three officers looking at him from different angles, the way they were positioned at least one of them would see everything he did I also think it's worth noting, in light of the discussion of body cameras, that the video we have is from the police dashboard cameras, I'm not saying that this means cameras are a bad thing or a useless deterrent, but that police violence is a complex issue that's going to need a complex answer, it's not as simple as more cameras 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BwareDWare94 723 Posted July 16, 2015 DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. I'm going to ask a small question that will probably piss a lot of people off, but I'm curious. I just watched the video without sound at work. Is there a reason the guy didn't keep his hands on top of his head? Why did he remove his ballcap if the officers instructed him to keep his hands on his head? Let me repeat this before I get flamed: DISCLAIMER: Yes, the cops handled that situation very poorly and there was no need to shoot him. Irrelevant question. Stop. 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Cherry 1,302 Posted July 16, 2015 Lmao y'all need to chill the fuck out Let me repeat what I said. Put more funding towards Law Enforcement and extensive background checks on officers. Every time the issue of police brutality comes up on TGP, people seem to flip their shit. I wasn't addressing anyone in particular, I was making a broad statement. That statement was that a few bad cops is better than no cops at all. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Cherry 1,302 Posted July 16, 2015 Chern, you say some really fucking dumb shit sometimes. A) The video was released very recently, as I said in my original post, so we didn't know what exactly happened until then. B) The shooting isn't that old, it's only two years ago, it's not like this problem didn't exist before then. C) Your "solution" is certainly not the only thing we can do. For starters, body cameras on everyone. Second, mandatory psych evaluations once/year. Third, any time an officer is cited for aggressive force, investigated for such, or has an incident involving any sort of abuse of power, it triggers an automatic temporary suspension while he/she is investigated for the incident. If deemed necessary, a psych eval is given, and/or the officer is removed from the force. Far too often in these cases, when we look back at a cop's record, there will be multiple citations for incidents where its clear the cop used far more force than was necessary. If they aren't disciplined for it ever, they come to believe that its perfectly okay for them to do so. If I remember correctly, there are two reasons: A) he's hispanic and doesn't understand English all that well, and B) He was somewhat impaired from drinking too much. Given that it's such an old video I assumed it's not as meaningful to release it now, since it's been so dead and buried. A video from 2015 has more importance than one from 2013, I'd say. That's up for debate though. I support body cameras, definitely. A lot of officers could be suspended in situations where they did nothing wrong. I think that'd be pushing the limit. He's hispanic and doesn't understand English is just a bad situation overall. Cops can't communicate. He can't communicate. What do you propose? 6 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
theMileHighGuy 656 Posted July 16, 2015 The instance in the OP is totally fucked up. However, the number of times police officers have the chance to kill a person and don't is probably astronomically higher, but you're never going to hear about those stories. I don't think it's a growing problem in the sense that it's happening more often. This shit has been going on since the 80s - it's just now that every single one is hitting the media machine because we live in a world that thrives on civil unrest. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BwareDWare94 723 Posted July 16, 2015 (edited) We live in a country where law enforcement is out of hand, where a firearm association has more political power than any peace organization, where the wealthy (who are either politicians or directly paying the politicians to be in their back pocket) control everything, fleecing the majority middle class for every dime possible, and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to laying out our problems. The mere fact that there isn't more civil unrest is downright disturbing. Without freedom of the press, there'd be hardly any civil unrest. I don't like when freedom of the press ruins peoples' reputations over false information or information eventually proven to be false, but if they keep us aware and in line, it's worth it. Edited July 16, 2015 by BwareDWare94 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Thanatos 2,847 Posted July 17, 2015 Given that it's such an old video I assumed it's not as meaningful to release it now, since it's been so dead and buried. A video from 2015 has more importance than one from 2013, I'd say. That's up for debate though. I support body cameras, definitely. A lot of officers could be suspended in situations where they did nothing wrong. I think that'd be pushing the limit. He's hispanic and doesn't understand English is just a bad situation overall. Cops can't communicate. He can't communicate. What do you propose? Maybe don't kill someone for taking off their cap. Cops lives are not more important than the people they serve, and that's what this is about. "HIS HAND IS MISSING HE MAY OR MAY NOT BE PULLING A GUN! Clearly the only solution is to kill him." 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BwareDWare94 723 Posted July 17, 2015 Given that it's such an old video I assumed it's not as meaningful to release it now, since it's been so dead and buried. A video from 2015 has more importance than one from 2013, I'd say. That's up for debate though. I support body cameras, definitely. A lot of officers could be suspended in situations where they did nothing wrong. I think that'd be pushing the limit. He's hispanic and doesn't understand English is just a bad situation overall. Cops can't communicate. He can't communicate. What do you propose? I propose that the law enforcement members don't shoot the Hispanic guy. Seems the most logical and least messy solution. Maybe don't kill someone for taking off their cap. Cops lives are not more important than the people they serve, and that's what this is about. "HIS HAND IS MISSING HE MAY OR MAY NOT BE PULLING A GUN! Clearly the only solution is to kill him." You hit the nail on the head. Until this farce of a belief is removed from law enforcement circles, we will have police brutality. We're all equal. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
.AirMcNair. 1,232 Posted July 17, 2015 Yeah, pretty awful on behalf of those cops. I was actually expecting the shooting to happen when he went to his back pocket early in the video. The fact that they didn't shoot then, but did when he removed his cap confuses me. There was more reason to do it then than there was when he removed the cap. The video doesn't exactly do the whole scenario justice in terms of how bad it is, though. The cops were responding to someone's bike being stolen, and the people there with the guy who got shot are the ones who called about the bike being stolen, and they tried to tell the cops he wasn't the guy who did it. Not sure how that big of a mix up occurs, but I guess the language barrier came in there too? Who knows. Sucks that it happened, though. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
oochymp 2,393 Posted July 17, 2015 Cops lives are not more important than the people they serve, and that's what this is about. I absolutely disagree with the notion that we shouldn't put any more value on the life of an officer on duty than we put on everyone else because of the situations we ask them to put themselves into. We ask police officers to continuously be willing to put themselves in harms way so that we don't have to and if we expect officers to run into, rather than out of, dangerous situations then we have to acknowledge and respect that danger. Unless we're willing to put a high value on their safety and provide them legal protection when they act reasonably nobody is going to be willing to serve that role. To be clear, the case at issue in this thread does not appear to involve that sort of scenario. There is very little (if any) doubt that the officers were not in any actual danger and it's hard to understand any perceived threat based on the video, so "benefit of the doubt" doesn't really apply here. These officers did not act rationally in response to the scenario they faced and they should be treated accordingly. To me one of the biggest issues in most of these scenarios is the role officers play in escalating the violence. Here, the officers already have their guns drawn and pointed at the victims before they start talking to them, that's a huge problem. I think just about anyone who knows anything about gun safety would tell you the most important rule is some variant of "don't point your gun at anything you're not ready to shoot." As I said in another thread I think officers have a duty to calm down any situation they find themselves in, that didn't happen here. Instead, like in most of the cases of police violence that have made the rounds on various media platforms recently, the officers made the situation much more contentious than it needed to be. 1 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
seanbrock 1,684 Posted July 17, 2015 Did the guy being arrested handle the situation poorly? Yeah, but are we really comparing a cop who is supposedly a professional to a guy who is drunk and doesn't speak English? Bottom line, the officer's training should have prepared him to handle the situation without taking somebodies life and he didn't. He needs to face the consequences of his actions which resulted in the loss of somebodies life who was innocent. We also need to look at how we can stop this trend of violence with police on civilians. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Sarge+ 3,436 Posted July 17, 2015 One thing that could have prevented this is to require officers in heavy Spanish-speaking populations to speak Spanish themselves. I know this is a requirement in some police departments, but it should be a requirement in all of them in these areas. There are plenty of qualified people who speak Spanish who can be police officers. More than likely would have saved this guy's life if someone was able to communicate with him. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
seanbrock 1,684 Posted July 17, 2015 One thing that could have prevented this is to require officers in heavy Spanish-speaking populations to speak Spanish themselves. I know this is a requirement in some police departments, but it should be a requirement in all of them in these areas. There are plenty of qualified people who speak Spanish who can be police officers. More than likely would have saved this guy's life if someone was able to communicate with him. Yeah and the guys who DON'T speak Spanish should work with somebody who does. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
oochymp 2,393 Posted July 17, 2015 where is this language barrier issue coming from? a few people here have mentioned it but I haven't been able to find any references to it elsewhere, in fact a few articles I've found said the officers gave commands in English and Spanish, I couldn't hear the voices well enough on the video to confirm, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is making that an issue Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Sarge+ 3,436 Posted July 17, 2015 where is this language barrier issue coming from? a few people here have mentioned it but I haven't been able to find any references to it elsewhere, in fact a few articles I've found said the officers gave commands in English and Spanish, I couldn't hear the voices well enough on the video to confirm, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is making that an issue If that's true then these guys fucked up something awful. But my point still stands. I think in general it's a good idea to have officers who speak Spanish in heavy Latino populated areas. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites