Oversimplification makes you stupid. Or at least unaware.
That's why one of the things seriously holding a lot of social justice movements back is the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between individual acts in favor of lumping them all together and blaming large, easy targets.
Case in point, police shootings. There's about three broad types of them. Which only helps us so much because they can and do overlap on the edges. But lumping them all together hurts far more than it helps.
In order of likelihood, they are...
Legitimate shootings
These happen a few hundred times a year. You never hear about most of them, because most of them are not only legitimate, but fairly obviously legitimate. In the case of Rodrigo Guardiola, he ran from a DUI checkpoint, crashed into a patrol car, ran on foot, fought a state trooper hand-to-hand for over a minute, then attempted to drown the trooper in a creek. The trooper shot and killed him.
Contrary to popular belief, even police officers need more than a Jimbo on South Park "They're coming right for us!" excuse. While it varies slightly from state to state, in general terms, an officer needs to face three things in a suspect before using lethal force:
Ability: The ability to cause death or grievous bodily harm in another person.
This is usually described as a weapon, but any sort of serious physical disparity will do: size difference, male vs female, young vs elderly, able vs disabled, ect. If it's fairly obvious "who would win/cause some serious damage in a fight" there's the ability.
Opportunity: The opportunity to inflict death or great harm on another person.
The ability doesn't mean much if they're not there to exercise it. Someone standing on the next subway platform couldn't touch you without a firearm, ergo, they don't currently have the opportunity.
Jeopardy: Demonstrating an immediate ~intent~ to inflict death or grievous bodily harm in another person.
That's the last part of the trinity: the intent. Yeah, someone my size can put the hurt on most folks. But an officer (or civilian) isn't justified in shooting me if I'm just standing next to them, Facebooking on my phone.
ALL THREE ELEMENTS NEED TO BE THERE!
Of the three, Jeopardy is the most subjective and the most debated about. The key to remember is what a reasonable person would think AT THE TIME. Human beings aren't mind readers, and the courts recognize that. Someone who does use lethal force has to be able to articulate reasonably that all three were present as they saw it.
Of course, where Jeopardy really gets argued about is that everyone has an asshole/opinion about what constitutes it.
I'm 6'7", can palm a basketball, and have made a living off of my potential for violence in the past. If I'm within speaking distance of someone, I have ability and opportunity. Which means my behavior and the interpretation of it by people around me determine whether or not I put them in jeopardy.
This is why I'm soft-spoken and wear silly tshirts and have a stuffed animal tattoo, folks. It's not that I'm incapable of anger. I was just born looking like a second-tier villain and I'm trying not to get shot. I'm told it sucks.
Back to police shootings:
Ability to do so, close enough to do so now, looked like they were attempting to do so.
Those three steps are what determines whether an officer will or will not shoot.
On top of that is what's called a use of force pyramid. I'm simplifying this to keep from writing a novel, but long story short: the guideline is to use one step higher of force than what the suspect is using OR IS ABOUT TO USE in order to ensure compliance. What that means is, ideally a cop stays one step higher on the force pyramid than their suspect. However, it's more of a dial than a ladder. When a suspect suddenly flips the dial all the way over to "lethal," the officer not only needs to do so as well, but needs to get to that end of the dial first to keep themselves and innocent bystanders alive.
The problem with lumping legitimate shoots in with police brutality is that you wind up punishing officers (and those who came after them) who did nothing wrong.
Let me repeat that again.
PUNISHING PEOPLE WHO DID NOTHING WRONG!
It's really easy to armchair quarterback and say, "oh, he shot someone and now gets a paid vacation."
He gets a vacation because the department does in fact have to determine whether or not the shoot was legit. If it was (and the vast majority of the time it is), they need to send him back out into the streets again. If not, then he needs to be off the streets and stay off from the word go.
Do you know anyone who would go back out if they had to face a full-blown trial with the possibility of conviction every single time? I don't.
"But can't they {insert alternative here}?"
Maybe. Every shooting is different. and the Navy SEAL phrase "situation dictates" applies to every situation. Again, the unholy trinity and use of force pyramid applies.
But I'll remind you now, the trinity mentioned above describes the officer and/or innocent bystanders being in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm.
Respond too late to a threat like that and you wind up like Deputy Dinkheller.
In 1999, Dinkheller pulled over a mentally disturbed old man. The man ignored commands, screamed threats, danced around, and in general acted like an asshole. Until he drew a rifle from the back of his truck and shot Dinkheller repeatedly. Dinkheller managed to wound the old man, but not before being mortally wounded himself.
The entire incident was caught on camera. You can hear Dinkheller's dying screams very clearly.
What most don't know is that Dinkheller had recently been chewed out by a superior for being too quick to draw his weapon in an earlier incident. Thus his hesitation despite seeing all three pieces of the above mentioned trinity. He hesitated and he died in agony.
The line is decidedly fine. Waiting too long, as shown, gets you killed.
Reacting too fast, on the other hand, leads into our second category.
Tragic fuckups
This is the category you're most likely to see televised because, by its nature, the circumstances surrounding a shooting are subjective. It's not a case of justified or otherwise, it's on a continuum of who's at fault in particular.
The vast majority of this, again, revolves around Jeopardy. Did the suspect reach for a gun? Or did they reach for a wallet? Both are commonly carried behind the back. And how fast do you reach for a wallet when asked for ID?
In some cases, the question revolves around, "was the trinity established? Or did the officer get a 'man with a gun' call and open fire before they could tell whether or not the trinity was in place?" The answer to that question is the difference between a legitimate shoot and a tragic fuckup that's punishable or even criminally liable.
In some cases, the fuckup is neither in the officer nor in the suspect, but in the institution. If there's no shoot/don't shoot training available (and in too many departments, there isn't) and an officer shoots someone reaching for a wallet, do we apply the trinity? Prosecute the officer? Or censure the department?
(It will boggle the mind of most of America how little firearms training is mandated by most police forces. And a lot of it boils down to department budgets. Do you want more officers? Do you want them to have body armor and body cameras? Do you want them to have shoot/don't shoot training? Pick one. Two, in a good year.
This also brings up officer quality. If there's no budget in a rural area, then yes, a cheif can and will hire cousins to work for cheap. Losing a single officer means either waiting a year for a candidate to come through the academy, or hiring from another department, who may be glad to see the back of an officer who's now your problem.)
And in some cases it's a fuckup combo.
Take the Eric Gardner case. In NYC, cigarettes are heavily taxed. Hence the ancient custom of bootlegging. Buying cartons and cases in another state, going back to the city and selling them at a discount. Shop owners, who are paying these onerous taxes, see folks selling untaxed ones outside their shops and see the money flying out of their pocket. So they complain to the mayor, who complains to the chief. Who comes down on high and removes officer discretion. Word is: if they're selling loosies, they're being arrested.
There's Eric, selling as usual. Cops roll up, arrest him. He resists. One makes the clumsiest, most ineffective choke hold I'd ever seen before backup helps him cuff the man. He dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
So let's count the fuckups: one department removing officer discretion, one officer who can't apply a proper hold, and one suspect who resists arrest knowing how aerobic an activity that is and what a laundry list of medical problems he's got. How do you cut the slices of the fuckup pie?
And some fuckups you can only see if you look into the human heart. When Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, was it a tragic fuckup committed by an undertrained, hopped-up-on-adrenaline cop? Or was it our third category?
Outright murders
These I almost never see in the context of police shootings as we know them now. Premeditated murder by officers usually happens off the clock (as in the assassination of Derwin Brown).
Some are currently awaiting trial, and could be regarded as either an outright murder or a tragic fuckup. Cases like the Walter Scott shooting are particularly notable, as witness video has already caught the officer there in one lie. The trial is set for October. October is also when the trial of the officer who shot Samuel DuBose in Ohio is set to begin.
The problems with lumping them together
This has already gotten longer than i'd like, but you can already see where I'm going with the breadth of the problem.
When you refer to every publicized police shooting as a murder, your credibility dies.
Pointing something out as a tragic fuckup means nothing unless you look deeper and find out who fucked up and how badly.
This isn't helped by a 24/7 news cycle that only knows that seeing people bleed pisses people off, and pissed off people bring clicks.
All of this is on top of the really bad unintended consequences of those who claim they seek justice when what they really want is vengeance.
By the same token, we need to realize what a nuanced skill is really needed in order to shoot only when necessary, while ~still~ using the force needed to defend officers and innocents alike. Ways to implement and maintain that skill needs to happen. Above all, education needs to happen to show beyond the blood.
That's why one of the things seriously holding a lot of social justice movements back is the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between individual acts in favor of lumping them all together and blaming large, easy targets.
Case in point, police shootings. There's about three broad types of them. Which only helps us so much because they can and do overlap on the edges. But lumping them all together hurts far more than it helps.
In order of likelihood, they are...
Legitimate shootings
These happen a few hundred times a year. You never hear about most of them, because most of them are not only legitimate, but fairly obviously legitimate. In the case of Rodrigo Guardiola, he ran from a DUI checkpoint, crashed into a patrol car, ran on foot, fought a state trooper hand-to-hand for over a minute, then attempted to drown the trooper in a creek. The trooper shot and killed him.
Contrary to popular belief, even police officers need more than a Jimbo on South Park "They're coming right for us!" excuse. While it varies slightly from state to state, in general terms, an officer needs to face three things in a suspect before using lethal force:
Ability: The ability to cause death or grievous bodily harm in another person.
This is usually described as a weapon, but any sort of serious physical disparity will do: size difference, male vs female, young vs elderly, able vs disabled, ect. If it's fairly obvious "who would win/cause some serious damage in a fight" there's the ability.
Opportunity: The opportunity to inflict death or great harm on another person.
The ability doesn't mean much if they're not there to exercise it. Someone standing on the next subway platform couldn't touch you without a firearm, ergo, they don't currently have the opportunity.
Jeopardy: Demonstrating an immediate ~intent~ to inflict death or grievous bodily harm in another person.
That's the last part of the trinity: the intent. Yeah, someone my size can put the hurt on most folks. But an officer (or civilian) isn't justified in shooting me if I'm just standing next to them, Facebooking on my phone.
ALL THREE ELEMENTS NEED TO BE THERE!
Of the three, Jeopardy is the most subjective and the most debated about. The key to remember is what a reasonable person would think AT THE TIME. Human beings aren't mind readers, and the courts recognize that. Someone who does use lethal force has to be able to articulate reasonably that all three were present as they saw it.
Of course, where Jeopardy really gets argued about is that everyone has an asshole/opinion about what constitutes it.
I'm 6'7", can palm a basketball, and have made a living off of my potential for violence in the past. If I'm within speaking distance of someone, I have ability and opportunity. Which means my behavior and the interpretation of it by people around me determine whether or not I put them in jeopardy.
This is why I'm soft-spoken and wear silly tshirts and have a stuffed animal tattoo, folks. It's not that I'm incapable of anger. I was just born looking like a second-tier villain and I'm trying not to get shot. I'm told it sucks.
Back to police shootings:
Ability to do so, close enough to do so now, looked like they were attempting to do so.
Those three steps are what determines whether an officer will or will not shoot.
On top of that is what's called a use of force pyramid. I'm simplifying this to keep from writing a novel, but long story short: the guideline is to use one step higher of force than what the suspect is using OR IS ABOUT TO USE in order to ensure compliance. What that means is, ideally a cop stays one step higher on the force pyramid than their suspect. However, it's more of a dial than a ladder. When a suspect suddenly flips the dial all the way over to "lethal," the officer not only needs to do so as well, but needs to get to that end of the dial first to keep themselves and innocent bystanders alive.
The problem with lumping legitimate shoots in with police brutality is that you wind up punishing officers (and those who came after them) who did nothing wrong.
Let me repeat that again.
PUNISHING PEOPLE WHO DID NOTHING WRONG!
It's really easy to armchair quarterback and say, "oh, he shot someone and now gets a paid vacation."
He gets a vacation because the department does in fact have to determine whether or not the shoot was legit. If it was (and the vast majority of the time it is), they need to send him back out into the streets again. If not, then he needs to be off the streets and stay off from the word go.
Do you know anyone who would go back out if they had to face a full-blown trial with the possibility of conviction every single time? I don't.
"But can't they {insert alternative here}?"
Maybe. Every shooting is different. and the Navy SEAL phrase "situation dictates" applies to every situation. Again, the unholy trinity and use of force pyramid applies.
But I'll remind you now, the trinity mentioned above describes the officer and/or innocent bystanders being in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm.
Respond too late to a threat like that and you wind up like Deputy Dinkheller.
In 1999, Dinkheller pulled over a mentally disturbed old man. The man ignored commands, screamed threats, danced around, and in general acted like an asshole. Until he drew a rifle from the back of his truck and shot Dinkheller repeatedly. Dinkheller managed to wound the old man, but not before being mortally wounded himself.
The entire incident was caught on camera. You can hear Dinkheller's dying screams very clearly.
What most don't know is that Dinkheller had recently been chewed out by a superior for being too quick to draw his weapon in an earlier incident. Thus his hesitation despite seeing all three pieces of the above mentioned trinity. He hesitated and he died in agony.
The line is decidedly fine. Waiting too long, as shown, gets you killed.
Reacting too fast, on the other hand, leads into our second category.
Tragic fuckups
This is the category you're most likely to see televised because, by its nature, the circumstances surrounding a shooting are subjective. It's not a case of justified or otherwise, it's on a continuum of who's at fault in particular.
The vast majority of this, again, revolves around Jeopardy. Did the suspect reach for a gun? Or did they reach for a wallet? Both are commonly carried behind the back. And how fast do you reach for a wallet when asked for ID?
In some cases, the question revolves around, "was the trinity established? Or did the officer get a 'man with a gun' call and open fire before they could tell whether or not the trinity was in place?" The answer to that question is the difference between a legitimate shoot and a tragic fuckup that's punishable or even criminally liable.
In some cases, the fuckup is neither in the officer nor in the suspect, but in the institution. If there's no shoot/don't shoot training available (and in too many departments, there isn't) and an officer shoots someone reaching for a wallet, do we apply the trinity? Prosecute the officer? Or censure the department?
(It will boggle the mind of most of America how little firearms training is mandated by most police forces. And a lot of it boils down to department budgets. Do you want more officers? Do you want them to have body armor and body cameras? Do you want them to have shoot/don't shoot training? Pick one. Two, in a good year.
This also brings up officer quality. If there's no budget in a rural area, then yes, a cheif can and will hire cousins to work for cheap. Losing a single officer means either waiting a year for a candidate to come through the academy, or hiring from another department, who may be glad to see the back of an officer who's now your problem.)
And in some cases it's a fuckup combo.
Take the Eric Gardner case. In NYC, cigarettes are heavily taxed. Hence the ancient custom of bootlegging. Buying cartons and cases in another state, going back to the city and selling them at a discount. Shop owners, who are paying these onerous taxes, see folks selling untaxed ones outside their shops and see the money flying out of their pocket. So they complain to the mayor, who complains to the chief. Who comes down on high and removes officer discretion. Word is: if they're selling loosies, they're being arrested.
There's Eric, selling as usual. Cops roll up, arrest him. He resists. One makes the clumsiest, most ineffective choke hold I'd ever seen before backup helps him cuff the man. He dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
So let's count the fuckups: one department removing officer discretion, one officer who can't apply a proper hold, and one suspect who resists arrest knowing how aerobic an activity that is and what a laundry list of medical problems he's got. How do you cut the slices of the fuckup pie?
And some fuckups you can only see if you look into the human heart. When Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, was it a tragic fuckup committed by an undertrained, hopped-up-on-adrenaline cop? Or was it our third category?
Outright murders
These I almost never see in the context of police shootings as we know them now. Premeditated murder by officers usually happens off the clock (as in the assassination of Derwin Brown).
Some are currently awaiting trial, and could be regarded as either an outright murder or a tragic fuckup. Cases like the Walter Scott shooting are particularly notable, as witness video has already caught the officer there in one lie. The trial is set for October. October is also when the trial of the officer who shot Samuel DuBose in Ohio is set to begin.
The problems with lumping them together
This has already gotten longer than i'd like, but you can already see where I'm going with the breadth of the problem.
When you refer to every publicized police shooting as a murder, your credibility dies.
Pointing something out as a tragic fuckup means nothing unless you look deeper and find out who fucked up and how badly.
This isn't helped by a 24/7 news cycle that only knows that seeing people bleed pisses people off, and pissed off people bring clicks.
All of this is on top of the really bad unintended consequences of those who claim they seek justice when what they really want is vengeance.
By the same token, we need to realize what a nuanced skill is really needed in order to shoot only when necessary, while ~still~ using the force needed to defend officers and innocents alike. Ways to implement and maintain that skill needs to happen. Above all, education needs to happen to show beyond the blood.
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