And lets not forget the police are quite capable of killing people without using their guns!

No, the problem was that they shot someone who was doing nothing that could possibly constitute a threat to anyone. Clerical errors are going to happen, there is zero reason why that should end with an innocent person getting killed. Rule-1 though 10 with any firearm is that you don’t pull the trigger unless you know what you are shooting at and why. Far too many Americans learn everything they “know” about guns from watching action movies.

edit: lol I had no idea that would show up as a warning without the - after rule

Or Atatiana Jefferson Fort Worth, shot through her bedroom window by a police officer trespassing in her garden.

I think you're wrong.

I think the odds of - not exclusively but mainly - a black person having an interaction with police that does not meet the standards that should be expected of a community policed by consent are way higher than you're making out. You're taking a symptom and calling it the whole problem.

If each and every one of the incidents to which you refer were properly investigated and the criminals in uniform (yes, that's what they are) were properly prosecuted then one could be happy that a system was in place to deal with corrupt and plain violent policemen, but they are not.

What does that say about every other interaction, no matter how minor, where policemen abuse their power and privilege? If they can literally get away with murder, then there's absolutely no hope of ensuring they maintain high standards of behaviour when they manage to stop short of killing innocent people.

I'm afraid you're wrong, it both is a problem and is indicitive of a much greater one.

Didn't the police open fire in this case after one of them had already been shot in the leg? They knew what they were shooting at and why. They were returning fire on somebody who they believed was a threat - Kenneth Walker.

Agreed. The attempts to lay the blame solely on the cops that performed the no-knock raid is misguided.

Any police system that accepts no-knock raids as acceptable is one that is showing intense indifference to life. Any reasonable person understands that no-announce raids are extremely dangerous and will lead to deaths that otherwise might be avoided by police not acting like home invaders in the middle of the night.

That said, "just following orders" doesn't cut the mustard for me either. The cops that killed Taylor while Walker legally and rightly defended himself from unannounced home intruders should be prosecuted, and the entire department should be reformed for ever allowing such idiotic and murderous policies to exist. Perhaps seeing their fellow cops going to jail for following immoral policies will be the impetus needed for other cops to push back against this insanity.

And when cops do needlessly kill white people, you know who complains loudest?

Not the "All Lives Matter" crowd.

How many unarmed black people do you think would get shot per year if the police weren't racist? You will still have cases like Jacob Blake because at least half of the cases where unarmed black people are shot by cops are justified. My impression is that nobody actually cares what happened in these cases. As I said (I think) to a different poster, I don't think the riots are about the deaths that nominally spark them.

Isn't that because the "All Lives Matter" people's thing isn't police brutality, but more like disputing that the US is institutionally racist and that "through the lense of race" is the correct way to look at absolutely everything?

Irreverent. Again, if you are going to fire a gun it’s on you to know what you are shooting .

If they knew they were shooting an unarmed women, that just makes it premeditated murder.

He wasn’t who they thought, ergo they could not have known what they were shooting at. Killing someone else in the process because you don’t consider what else could get hit is pure incompetence and criminal negligence.

Not to digress too far, but the cops fired more than 20 shots in an apartment building, including at least one cop who was firing from outside through a curtained window. Bullets don't stop at wallboard. Anybody inside that building or around it could have been killed.

Only up to a point.

You know perfectly well that that wasn't what I was saying.

They were shooting at him because he was shooting at them. His identity was irrelevant from the point he put a bullet in the leg of one of the police.

Perhaps, having said that... if the police end up in a gunfight in an apartment, following your advice means the police would be unable to return fire. I would agree that those situations need to be avoided wherever possible, but they are still going to happen.

Someone in the house opened fire on the police... which from their perspective (believing they were at the right location) was an appropriate reason for them to return fire. The police were wrong to do so - they were in the wrong location for the suspect, and the suspect was already in custody. But it's seems a stretch to think that the police should NOT return fire when they are fired upon by someone else. Rules of firearms are great... but from the police perspective, they "knew" they were being fired upon by someone dangerous enough to merit a no-knock warrant, and they "knew" they were returning fire to that dangerous person. What they knew was false, and I don't approve of them having the no-knock warrant in the first place. It just seems a bit of a square peg in a round hole to include Breonna Taylor in this discussion.

Especially since JoeMorgue keeps bring her up as an example of police mistreatment of black people, not as a general statement of problems with our judicial system.

That sounds criminally reckless.

I'm mostly agreed with this. I'm willing to be a little bit more lenient toward the cops at the scene, who were working in good faith under false information. I'm more inclined to go after the cop who requested the no-knock and the judge who approved it. I think they're the ones who hold most of the blame for this incident.

The part that really pissed me off at the time was that after they figured out that he wasn't the right guy... they arrested him for shooting at the police who invaded his home! That made me super angry, because that's exactly what he should do to a home invader in the middle of the night! Arresting him for the cops' screw up after they had killed is girlfriend was unconscionable.

Actually, it's because "All Lives Matter" is not a movement, or a group of organizations at all, but rather a cynical and bad faith screech aimed at black people with legitimate greivances - much like people who scream "What about 'black on black' crime!?" and ignore the numerous organizations in black communities that address gang violence, domestic violence, and so on. In other word, it's a screech by people who actually don't care about "all lives" and would rather mindlessly defend what they see as the good guys - in this case, white cops - and by extension, themselves.

This is also why they continuously shout "But one of the cops involved was black! That means race isn't a factor!" whenever possible - as if black people are not aware of black cops, and haven't stated for decades that black cops are even more violent and brutal than their white colleagues towards black people, or as though the BLM weren't actually started due to the refusal of the justice system to hold racist wannabe vigilante George Zimmerman accountable for his murder of teenage pedestrian Trayvon Martin - IOW, this is about the overall view of society of black people as inherently inferior, not just white cops, or cops in general.

(Or, for that matter, why the same people insist that BLM are "the real racists" because they don't protest some random murder of a white person by a black goon -despite the fact that the murderers are almost always arrested and charged, and bing held without bond before these demands for protests are made, meaning that the legal system is functioning properly and making protests against it wrong-headed.)

So why fixate on police? Simply put, they're the violent enforcers of the US' racial order, and have been for roughly 200 years, since the first police force was founded in Boston Massachusetts. This has not stopped BLM members from bringing resources to bear when police kill people who aren't black - thus their protests against victims like Justine Damond, and their joining West Virginia coal miners and indigenous anti-DAPL protestors when they were attacked by cops.

Why not fall back and assess the situation?
Work out who is firing, where from and why.
Locate and identify a target.

Or, as is usual in every other civilised country, knock on the door and identify yourself.
Get rid of rules that will inevitably lead to the police shooting people.

The description of the shooting makes it seem like they indiscriminately opened fire, hitting multiple rooms. One cop even fired blindly from outside through a window with closed curtains and blinds. Taylor, who was unarmed, was hit 8 times. Being generous, this is at least reckless manslaughter, even if it turned out to be a drug house.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooti...aylor#Shooting


Cops do no-knock raids in the middle of the night and blind fire into the home when the homeowner rightly defends himself from unannounced invaders. I see plenty of personal culpability here for the cops who shot, regardless of who sent them.

Atatiana Jefferson was shot by cops through her bedroom window when she looked out to see who was in her garden. Cops were in her garden and one of them shot her when she appeared in the window.
It's all on video.

They thought they knew who was firing. They were wrong, but they thought they knew.

100% agreed.

I'm not arguing that the cops at the scene should be held completely harmless. My objective is to take action against the people who made the situation possible in the first place - the cop who requested a no-knock with incorrect information for a subject already in custody, and the judge who approved it.

Yep. And I believe the cop in question was charged for murder, wasn't he? that situation was completely indefensible.

Half? The vast majority of the black people who are killed by police are doing something that requires the police to respond the way they did. Even the far more numerous White people who are killed by the police were acting in a way that justified being killed.

Not even the most ardent cop apologist could defend that one, and they were able to defend the guys who beat up Rodney King.

Sometimes violent, confrontational, adrenalized methods of policing are dangerous not just to the public, but to the officers themselves.

Man that start traffic stop agitated gets tazed, pepper sprayed, and beaten into a frenzy that ends with one cop shot dead, another hospitalized.

Maybe that dead cop wishes he had tried de-escalating.

Content warning, video shows a shooting death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSa2...ature=youtu.be

Considering that

1) they had a total of 4 locations to raid in connection with the single supposed suspect;

2) they already had the supposed suspect in custody at the time they attacked her and her boyfriend;

3) the entire justification for the raid on Taylor's house was that she occasionally visited the supposed suspect (to receive packages that were not in any way considered suspicious by the postal service)

4) they outright lied to a judge about point 3 in order to obtain their no-knock warrant and to justify their attack, by accusing her of retrieving "suspicious" packages connected to the suspect's drug smuggling;

I consider this entire justification extremely questionable. It's far more likely that they simply accused her of aiding his drug smuggling because she was his ex-girlfriend, and thus, according to racist and sexist stereotypes, involved in his illegal (though nonviolent) activities. This would also explain why they tried to pressure the boyfriend who shot at them to state that she was smuggling drugs for her ex.

I was unaware of the fourth item. If true, that does make this a different situation. RE: item 3, I had thought it was her boyfriend's apartment, and that it had been a previous residence of the actual suspect, who hadn't lived there in several years? i didn't think there was any connection between Taylor and her boyfriend and the suspect at all.

Don't forget, after the fact they tried to get the arrested suspect to implicate Breonna Taylor as part of a plea deal. Basically, they tried to coerce the actual criminal into lying and saying Taylor was part of his crimes in order to paper over the senseless killing by the cops.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/90862...d-crime-syndic

I was only looking at 2019 for unarmed black people shot by police. A quick look at the cases seemed to come down around 50/50. I suppose the Washington Posts collection methodology may be off? I'm not planning on doing the same level of analysis for armed black people shot by the police, but The Washington Post has 177/236 (75%) as having attacked the police.

Certainly true. 72% of the 378 armed white people who were shot by the police attacked them. I'm a little surprised how close those two percentages are.

So they were badly trained and undisciplined?

Even worse.

Alright, that's just despicable.

Not usually defending cops here, but it looks like they were a lot more patient with a spacey white guy than they might have been with a black teenager. After the initial violation, they found he didn't have a license, he had no record of insurance, and his tags were more than two months expired. It also looked like he was impaired. And they spent 10 minutes practically begging him to step out of his car. They used a taser and pepper spray, but they never pulled their guns. It doesn't look like they ever hit him. I dunno what the cops could have done except ignore multiple infractions.

And I couldn't tell where the gun came from. Did he grab a cop's, or did he have it on him, which might be why he didn't want to get out of the car?

For my own edification, I thought it might be interested in looking at unarmed white folks who were shot dead by police in 2019.

My first impressions are that the quality and volume of the reporting is much worse than for the black victims. For many of the cases, there is only local news coverage and often barely even that. It's pretty clear that it isn't safe to walk at police when they tell you not to, or to reach for things police can't see when you are white. You can go from minding your own business to shot while white no problem. There is a case here that seems very similar to, and arguably worse than, Breonna Taylor (Rhogena Nicholas). Also a shooting things you weren't aiming for one (Margarita Victoria Brooks). There is also a cop shooting his cop girlfriend in some weird Russian Roulette thing.

I make it 25 cases out of which maybe 19 (76%) were potentially OK. It is hard to tell because the information is so sparse. I'm effectively taking the police's initial description for what happened for most of it. Given that, I'm not sure that one can directly compare the number of "good" and "bad" shoots.

Aaron Allen Przekop - crashed his car. informed officers that he was armed. ignored commands and walked towards officers with his hand concealed. Does this count as one of those death from non-compliance we were discussing? Should the police have waited to find out what was in fact in his hand?
Andrew John Mason - Non-compliant, walked towards office, knocked taser out of officers hand, attacked officer and there was a struggle for the officers gun. Officer managed to get away, but was pursued by the screaming attacker who was shot dead.
Cameron Ely - had stabbed his mother to death.Told police he had a gun and motioned as if drawing it, they shot him 24 times, he did not have a gun.
Chad Michael Breinholt - Bizarre story. Shot while in custody while struggling for an officers gun while handcuffed.
David Ingle - schizophrenic, charged at police.
David Wayne West - fighting with police.
Dewayne Morgan - fighting with police.
Donnell James Lang - Compliant, your classic somebody reports somebody who they think looks suspicious. Tried to get up off the ground and was shot by police. Oddly the Washington post database has this down as him being shot attacking officers.
Eric Young - schizophrenic shot trying to get into a police car. I'm not clear what the threat was given that he was shot from 30-50 feet away.
Ethan Austin Murray - Mentally ill homeless man. Chased by officers. Reached into his waistband and was shot.
John Carras - Domestic violence call. Police got into a struggle with the man they were called on.
Joshua Ortiz - Attacked officer.
Katlyn Alix - Shot by her boyfriend in some crazy Russian Roulette situation.
Luke H. Patterson - odd one. Wandering down the side of the road. Non-compliant. Tried to get into moving police car and was shot.
Margarita Victoria Brooks - Officer tried to shoot a charging dog, accidentally shot and killed the woman he was there to do a welfare check on.
Matthew Jonathan Krupar - attacked police.
Matthew Neil Tuhkanen - police called to a domestic dispute. Man shot after not complying with officers and reaching into location where the officers couldn't see what he was going for.
Morgan Shane West - fighting with police - the only story I could find just said "an altercation began".
Preston Oszust - shot after his friend shot at police fleeing a traffic stop.
Rhogena Nicholas - this one is very much like Breonna Taylor. No knock raid based on bad info. Police lied to get the warrant. Police shot the dog, the occupants tried to defend themselves and all hell broke loose. Police outside fired blindly through the walls. If anything this is worse than Breonna Taylor since here the police seem to have shot first.
Riley Eugene Peay - attacked officer.
Robert Sikon - shot running from police.
Shawn Joseph Billinger - walked towards police saying "kill me". Officer killed him. Officer was acquitted.
Tyler J. Meier - Crazy man attacked police and was struggling for their gun.

Based on 2019, I'm not at all sure that there is a proof by anecdotes case for unarmed shootings by police being a racial thing.

Of course they're off - there's simply no definitive list of police killings and brutality cases. Aside from the complete lack of recordkeeping among many departments...

What counts as "unarmed"? Police consider Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, Philando Castile, and John Crawford 3rd as "armed", despite the fact that none of them actually attacked anyone. Grey had a knife in his pocket, Castile a legally-owned firearm. Rice and Crawford had unloaded airsoft guns.

(I suspect Darien Hunt would be considered "armed" due to his plastic toy katana he wore as his cosplay outfit, but I can't say for sure)

Second, how many people who "attacked" officers were considered such because they brushed against an officer that was beating them mercilessly? This is the old trick where 3-4 cops will club, punch, or tase a helpless person while yelling "stop resisting!" - as though a person under attack can be blamed for not lying motionless with their hands behind their back, or a person being electrocuted can control their muscles at all.

And, yet again, this by definition does not count those strangled, beaten to death, tasered numerous times, injected with ketamines, and so forth - or those who survive but often with debilitating injuries.

It's a pretty poor state of affairs if the question is whether it was legally acceptable to shoot, rather than asking if it was possible to resolve the situation without shooting.

"Not committing a crime" when shooting is a pretty low bar for police behavior. You'd think that professional law enforcement types would be better than most at resolving situations and taking people into custody with everyone still alive.

I see multiple example of "suicide by cop" on your list. Perhaps cops shouldn't be such useful means for mentally unwell people to bring about their own deaths.

I'm not constantly bringing up Breonna Taylor just because she's black or just because of this or this because of that.

I constantly bring her up to counter the biggest narrative that deny's the reality of what is happening; the whole "Oh just do whatever you're told and the cop won't kill you..." nonsense.

1. As many other people have pointed out that's a functionally insane, psychopathic defense of a living in a police state.
2. As noted by myself and other people that doesn't help you when police scream contradicting instructions at you and shot you for not doing both at the same time.
3. But most importantly, as I said, it counters the "Well if they had just have done this they would have still been alive" because I can offer a scenario where they did do the thing and question are are still dead.

Daniel Shaver would like a word with you.. Oh wait he can't..

Nothing in that case contradicts what I said. I don't see how a single case could contradict what I said.

I am aware of that.

That is defined by the Washington Post. If you are found to have a weapon, even if you weren't using it, even if it was a toy, you don't count as unarmed.

The Washington Post database only goes back to 2015, so that case isn't on there.

It is possible. As I said, with several of the white people getting shot cases all I have is "the was an altercation". I don't think I've seen a case in 2019 that matches your description on the evidence available.

It would be much more common on the list for the taser not to stop them and for the person who got shot to then fight off several cops and try to get one of their guns. I can't think of any in 2019 that match your description.

No indeed, I was just looking at the Washington Post database of police shooting deaths. They don't seem to match well with your description of police shooting people because they twitched when they were tased.

I'm not sure that I was going with an "is it legal" standard. That is clearly relevant and part of it, but I agree there are other questions. One can clearly get to the point where shooting is legal, and perhaps even necessary, and yet have failed by allowing the situation to get to that point.

Normally they do. Ultimately if you get in a situation where somebody is non-compliant and charging at police, or gives police reason to believe they are going for a weapon I don't see what else one expects to happen. In several of these cases the person who got shot was clearly physically stronger than the police.

It would be nice, but I don't know what can be done about that that wouldn't result in the police not being allowed to shoot people who meant them genuine harm. Even the ones you are counting as "suicide by cop", I'm not sure how we know that the officer wouldn't have been harmed if they hadn't fired.