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Reforming police, the Blue Wall of Silence


Ser Scot A Ellison

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15 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Absolutely.  There need to be independent boards who investigate police shootings.  Keeping those investigations internal to departments just begs for cover ups.

Yup, and it’s also important to consider that police officers can unconsciously affect the investigations too.

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2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Do police have no training in dealing with situations with anything other than firearms?  This woman should not have died.

It's bizarre.  And this isn't the only case where you have the police literally saying some form of 'don't worry, we're not going to shoot you....' but the person gets shot anyway.  The same thing happened with the mentally ill woman in Washington.  They told her not to worry....but she gets shot anyway.  

I wonder if they need a sub group of cops who are specially and intensively trained in dealing with the mentally ill?  And then only those guys would go out for calls involving a person who is exhibiting signs of mental illness?  It seems that even when there is a stated intention by police to not see the situation escalate...it escalates anyway.

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2 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

It's bizarre.  And this isn't the only case where you have the police literally saying some form of 'don't worry, we're not going to shoot you....' but the person gets shot anyway.  The same thing happened with the mentally ill woman in Washington.  They told her not to worry....but she gets shot anyway.  

I wonder if they need a sub group of cops who are specially and intensively trained in dealing with the mentally ill?  And then only those guys would go out for calls involving a person who is exhibiting signs of mental illness?  It seems that even when there is a stated intention by police to not see the situation escalate...it escalates anyway.

All need this training --

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/09/19/violence-erupts-at-georgia-tech-after-police-kill-student/?utm_term=.4e02d34cd121

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7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Do police have no training in dealing with situations with anything other than firearms?  This woman should not have died.

In the Seattle area police have something like 700 hours of training with firearms.

They have 40 optional hours of crisis management, and 8 hours of diversity training. 

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32 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

In the Seattle area police have something like 700 hours of training with firearms.

They have 40 optional hours of crisis management, and 8 hours of diversity training. 

It certainly shows where the priorities are placed.  We need people in police departments who can defuse dangerous situations.  We don't need sharpshooters most of the time.

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It certainly shows where the priorities are placed.  We need people in police departments who can defuse dangerous situations.  We don't need sharpshooters most of the time.

We also should look into extensive retraining for veterans who served in an occupying force role in Iraq and Afghanistan. That type of training is not going to be conducive to creating an effective LEO.

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20 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

It's bizarre.  And this isn't the only case where you have the police literally saying some form of 'don't worry, we're not going to shoot you....' but the person gets shot anyway.  The same thing happened with the mentally ill woman in Washington.  They told her not to worry....but she gets shot anyway.  

I wonder if they need a sub group of cops who are specially and intensively trained in dealing with the mentally ill?  And then only those guys would go out for calls involving a person who is exhibiting signs of mental illness?  It seems that even when there is a stated intention by police to not see the situation escalate...it escalates anyway.

I don't know what its like over there, but in the UK whoever is nearest and available takes any immediate call.  This wouldn't be workable. 

That being said, we deal with knife calls all the time, nobody hardly ever dies, police or public. 

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9 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I don't know what its like over there, but in the UK whoever is nearest and available takes any immediate call.  This wouldn't be workable. 

That being said, we deal with knife calls all the time, nobody hardly ever dies, police or public. 

I have a relative who suffers from bi-polar disorder.  In my experience, the police have always been very good at defusing situations that this relative has got involved in.  The police encounter so many people with mental health problems, that a lot of them have become adept at dealing with them,

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The king county LEO has a specific set of crisis experts trained in dealing with mental health issues. The problem is that there are like 4 of them, they're not always called to a scene and king county is about 10k square miles. 

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On 9/19/2017 at 3:47 PM, Tywin et al. said:

We also should look into extensive retraining for veterans who served in an occupying force role in Iraq and Afghanistan. That type of training is not going to be conducive to creating an effective LEO.

Agreed. One hundred percent. This idea that vets are ideal police officers has got to go.

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16 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I don't know what its like over there, but in the UK whoever is nearest and available takes any immediate call.  This wouldn't be workable. 

That being said, we deal with knife calls all the time, nobody hardly ever dies, police or public. 

In America, when cops shoot someone with a knife, all we ever hear is "how dangerous knives are" and "how you have to shoot someone with a knife or you will die. For sure."

 

Oh, I was sidetracked in responses. I came to post this: deaf man shot by cops

Some bullet points:

  • Sanchez, who was murdered, had nothing to do with the incident the police were responding to. His father was ID'd as being involved in a hit a run. 
  • Sanchez was deaf and shot on his front porch
  • Neighbors were yelling at police, "He can't hear you!"
  • The police said Sanchez was "holding a 2-foot-long metal pipe 'wrapped in some type of material' with a small leather loop on the end of it" or, as they initially called it: a walking stick. Now it was a makeshift walking stick, as Sanchez came from a low-income area, and neighbors said he fashioned it because he'd been attacked by stray dogs while walking at night--but either way, a walking stick with a wrist strap.
  • Multiple shots were fired by one officer, and no body camera were in use
  • The police spokesman is hedging on this by saying that when you get in a tense, life or death situation like this, you get tunnel vision. You can't see what's going on around you. Like neighbors screaming that the man is deaf.

Upthread it was mentioned police get a majority of training in firearm training, and I believe Scot pointed out we know where the priorities lie. In fact, we can posit, not only does all that training not better equip officers to handle encounters with citizens--innocent humans--but turns people into firing range target simulations where the police tune everything out but their target.

How quickly must this have happened? I can't imagine the poor man would continue approaching when he saw guns drawn. They must have drawn and fired. This is really sad.

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47 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

In America, when cops shoot someone with a knife, all we ever hear is "how dangerous knives are" and "how you have to shoot someone with a knife or you will die. For sure."

 

Oh, I was sidetracked in responses. I came to post this: deaf man shot by cops

Some bullet points:

  • Sanchez, who was murdered, had nothing to do with the incident the police were responding to. His father was ID'd as being involved in a hit a run. 
  • Sanchez was deaf and shot on his front porch
  • Neighbors were yelling at police, "He can't hear you!"
  • The police said Sanchez was "holding a 2-foot-long metal pipe 'wrapped in some type of material' with a small leather loop on the end of it" or, as they initially called it: a walking stick. Now it was a makeshift walking stick, as Sanchez came from a low-income area, and neighbors said he fashioned it because he'd been attacked by stray dogs while walking at night--but either way, a walking stick with a wrist strap.
  • Multiple shots were fired by one officer, and no body camera were in use
  • The police spokesman is hedging on this by saying that when you get in a tense, life or death situation like this, you get tunnel vision. You can't see what's going on around you. Like neighbors screaming that the man is deaf.

Upthread it was mentioned police get a majority of training in firearm training, and I believe Scot pointed out we know where the priorities lie. In fact, we can posit, not only does all that training not better equip officers to handle encounters with citizens--innocent humans--but turns people into firing range target simulations where the police tune everything out but their target.

How quickly must this have happened? I can't imagine the poor man would continue approaching when he saw guns drawn. They must have drawn and fired. This is really sad.

Motherfucker.  This shit happened in my neck of the woods. This happened on the Southside, which has a large Latino population, and I bet dollars to donuts that the officer called for backup was part of Gang Task, who are a bunch of roided out, bullying assholes.

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This is from NPR and with a comment from the OCPD spokesperson:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/21/552527929/oklahoma-city-police-fatally-shoot-deaf-man-despite-yells-of-he-cant-hear-you?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170921

From the article:

"In those situations, very volatile situations, when you have a weapon out, you can get what they call tunnel vision or you can really lock into just the person that has the weapon that'd be the threat against you," Mathews told reporters. "I don't know exactly what the officers were thinking at that point, because I was not there. But they very well could not have heard, you know, everybody yelling, everybody yelling around them."

 

 

He says this as thought this excuses the officers for killing a man who likely couldn't hear their orders.  I submit that if your officers get "Tunnel Vision" and "can't hear" when they draw their weapons the OCPD has a fundamental problem with their officers training that is leading to innocents being killed.  

I further submit that this attitude extends to most departments in the US.

:(

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I'm rapidly becoming convinced that ALL cops are sadistic, power tripping psychopaths. I totally get why no one trusts them. Even if this man could have heard them and complied, he'd probably still be dead. 

This is what happens when you militarize police. Now the cops think they're in a combat zone, and We the People are the enemy. 

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I'm hearing, on the NPR thread, a number of people claiming that the spokesman for the OCPD was simply pointing out that physiologically, the officers couldn't hear the people telling them that the person they were yelling at couldn't hear.  I would love it if a reporter would ask this spokesman whether the same physiologic reaction would serve as a defense to an ordinary citizen who in the throws of a frightening encounter with police shot or killed one of their number?

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9 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

Agreed. One hundred percent. This idea that vets are ideal police officers has got to go.

Well I wouldn’t go that far. I’m specifically talking about vets who were trained to be an occupying force. That becomes problematic because they tend to bring that mentality back home when they become police officers and treat citizens like they’re enemy combatants.

Also, I’m getting sick of this tunnel vision excuse. If you can’t properly train a person to handle these types of situations than you need to not be the person training them and they don’t need to be cops. Full stop. It’s not a justifiable excuse to be murdering citizens you’re paid to protect.

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I agree. This will probably be unpopular, but I suggest that the problem with police isn't racism but training....we see women, men, seniors, children and people of all races get shot when the danger level to police is marginal at best and at worst, is imaginary.  I would also suggest that a focus on training will be much more likely to end in a positive outcome than attacks against police for being sadistic, racist thugs.  When you have a police spokesperson literally saying that police training causes them to zero out everything but the 'target'......there is no more compelling evidence than that their training needs an overhaul from A to Z.

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44 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I agree. This will probably be unpopular, but I suggest that the problem with police isn't racism but training....we see women, men, seniors, children and people of all races get shot when the danger level to police is marginal at best and at worst, is imaginary.  I would also suggest that a focus on training will be much more likely to end in a positive outcome than attacks against police for being sadistic, racist thugs.  When you have a police spokesperson literally saying that police training causes them to zero out everything but the 'target'......there is no more compelling evidence than that their training needs an overhaul from A to Z.

I would love to see the training change from "everyone other than officers is always a threat" to "you are part of the community find a peaceful way to de-escalate the situations before you start shooting".

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