Police who're trained to be brutal
Police shoot an (armed, apparently threatening) man in a wheelchair.
"At least 10 gunshots" were used to kill this man, after police pointed shotguns and handguns at him and repeatedly yelled at him to put his own handgun down. That seems to be how it works in America. You get shouted at for a while, and if you don't do what the police want you to do, and they think you're still a significant threat, then they kill you.
I don't see any villains here. There's no particular reason to believe that the police officers were psychopaths, and the guy in the wheelchair seems to have been more disturbed than vicious. The police officers were simply dealing with the situation the way they were trained to: point their guns at the person they see as a threat, then shout loud clear orders at them.
Does this work? A lot of the time, it no doubt does. But there are far, far too many videos out there showing incidents where, often tragically, it didn't work at all.
From time to time, after reading news like this, I wonder how I'd respond if a police officer pointed a gun at me and shouted at me to get down on the ground. My first instinct to that kind of peremptory order is to respond, "No" - a vehement, indignant rejection of arbitrary and domineering authority. Yes, I'd probably get down, but only because I was either terrified, or I'd made a conscious choice to abandon dignity in favour of pragmatism. Either way, I'd feel I'd been made to eat shit.
I've recently been reading up on negotiation, and, time and again, I find myself struck by how critical it is to understand what people are thinking before you ask them to do something. Negotiation starts with respect for the other party.
Sure I'm a lily-livered liberal lightweight, but I have to ask myself: how might this situation have ended if the first policeman had not pointed a shotgun at the victim, but instead had ducked behind his car's engine block and, from that relative safety, asked, "What do you need?"
I've no doubt that policing in America sometimes brings stark challenges that are hard to address without force, in some cases lethal force. What's disturbing about this case is that it shows, right from the start, how the police were trained to act with no visible regard to the principles of policing by consent, without which no civil police force can long maintain the respect and goodwill of the citizens among whom it works.
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This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.
"At least 10 gunshots" were used to kill this man, after police pointed shotguns and handguns at him and repeatedly yelled at him to put his own handgun down. That seems to be how it works in America. You get shouted at for a while, and if you don't do what the police want you to do, and they think you're still a significant threat, then they kill you.
I don't see any villains here. There's no particular reason to believe that the police officers were psychopaths, and the guy in the wheelchair seems to have been more disturbed than vicious. The police officers were simply dealing with the situation the way they were trained to: point their guns at the person they see as a threat, then shout loud clear orders at them.
Does this work? A lot of the time, it no doubt does. But there are far, far too many videos out there showing incidents where, often tragically, it didn't work at all.
From time to time, after reading news like this, I wonder how I'd respond if a police officer pointed a gun at me and shouted at me to get down on the ground. My first instinct to that kind of peremptory order is to respond, "No" - a vehement, indignant rejection of arbitrary and domineering authority. Yes, I'd probably get down, but only because I was either terrified, or I'd made a conscious choice to abandon dignity in favour of pragmatism. Either way, I'd feel I'd been made to eat shit.
I've recently been reading up on negotiation, and, time and again, I find myself struck by how critical it is to understand what people are thinking before you ask them to do something. Negotiation starts with respect for the other party.
Sure I'm a lily-livered liberal lightweight, but I have to ask myself: how might this situation have ended if the first policeman had not pointed a shotgun at the victim, but instead had ducked behind his car's engine block and, from that relative safety, asked, "What do you need?"
I've no doubt that policing in America sometimes brings stark challenges that are hard to address without force, in some cases lethal force. What's disturbing about this case is that it shows, right from the start, how the police were trained to act with no visible regard to the principles of policing by consent, without which no civil police force can long maintain the respect and goodwill of the citizens among whom it works.
-
This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ.