California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool
California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool
www.theguardian.com
California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool
380 comentários
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I didn't even have to open the article to see the boy's skin color. And I'm not remotely shocked.
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Officer was backing away from the kid, and turned to run away from him. The officer was actively retreating from the attack at the time the shots were fired.
Two officers were present. It is not clear from the video who fired the shots. It is very clear, however, that the kid was actively attacking the officer.
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Yea sadly the kid was an aggressor here
But the cops should be using tazers or something non-lethal to deal with this kinda altercation
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Too bad there aren't things cops could do other than murder when this sort of thing happens.
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If only a cop had literally any other option to stop someone with a garden implement other than a gun.
Too bad guns are the only option to stop people....
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Police in other countries are constantly able to non-lethally subdue people wielding knives. Do not normalize this reaction.
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15 yo with a hoe, vs. 2 "trained", "fit" men with weapons specifically designed to kill instantly with a twitch of a finger.
Everywhere else in the world the kid would get a slap on the wrist, parents penalised, settled and sorted.
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Sensationalist bullshit title from the guardian. Typical now. You can't just get unbiased news in many places. They all have to push an agenda.
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There are great questions as to whether it was appropriate to use deadly force against a 15-year-old autistic kid who was having an episode,
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Ooh, I can answer this one:
No
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I'll write that down as a "maybe".
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To the cops? Yes.
Mental illness is always a license for them to kill, it happens ridiculously often even by statistical count.
Something about unexpected responses and unpredictable reactions to shouting and gun waving that give the pigs an excuse to shoot.
Remember that deaf guy that was killed because of his whittling knife? I don't think the cop suffered any consequences except a paid vacation and an innocent and confused life was lost and the world turns on.
Just crossing the street and clueless the cop was even calling out and bam bam bam shot from behind and he died bleeding out in confusion and fear.
And 1/3 of the country applauded the cop for his community centered focus on reducing the number of undesirables.
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US cops really have stored up an incredible amount of badwill, haven't they? Now, I can't help but see Nolan's Batman film (whichever the one is with cops in tunnels), Brooklyn 99 and others as straight up copaganda. Just zero sympathy. The balance will shift at some point, it has to.
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To be fair Brooklyn 99 dunks on cops. Like a lot.
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Most depictions of LE in action movies are copoganda. I mean, shit: the Dirty Harry/ Legal Weapon trope of cops needing to sidestep the rules is so fucked when you think about it
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3rd Batman movie, the one that made even less sense than a superhero movie normally makes.
The entire plan depends on a fusion reactor acting like a fission bomb that Bane didn't even know was down there, Blackgate being moved within city limits after the events of the second movie for no clear reason, and a letter that again no one knew existed while the plan was being carried out.
Also if he broke Batman's back why not just kill him? Why give him a chance to escape?
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Not really. It's just on these forums.
As soon as you go out into the real world, you'll see cops are people too and have about the same amount of respect as everyone else.
First you need to go out into the real world, though.
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Who watches the watchmen?
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Dr. Manhattan
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I hope you have a gun or know how to fight.
Otherwise you need cops to defend you.
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Otherwise you need cops to defend you.
Like the kids in Uvalde?
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But they don't do that. Cops don't defend people, they look for people to prosecute.
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From who? The police?
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Cops are not for personal defense lmao. Who told you that?
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Cops don't fucking defend anyone, the fuck are you on about?
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Is that why cops have no legal requirements to protect and serve, or even save civilians from criminals? Or why they can murder civilians without consequences?
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Just like Uvalde, right?
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Your supreme court already said that police have no obligation to protect citizens.
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The only people who have ever assaulted me were cops.
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Yeah, if your house gets invaded, you better hope you are in a low population area, and the cops happen to be close to your house, or you will wait at least 20 minutes for them to show. You will have been robbed, or worse, before any police can get to the scene under most conditions.
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Fuck rhe police
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I'm just nice so I have a lot of friends. A lot. I'll stick up for them and they'll stick up for me. Don't mess.
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Cops killing children dealing with mental help episodes and get rewarded with more funding is something that makes me sick. Body Cam footage shouldn't depend on if cops feel like releasing it should be sent to an independent party automatically. RIP Ryan.
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So if a cop, afflicted with PTSD from shooting teenagers, points a gun at me and I kill him in self-defense... Do you think the criminal justice system will hand-wave it away as easily as this?
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So if a cop, afflicted with PTSD from shooting teenagers, points a gun at me and I kill him in self-defense…
The thing is, liberals want to see this as some kind of exercise in fairness. "Oh if can shoot me then I can shoot them!"
No. This is a gang-violence thing. The MS-13 gang member can shoot you because he's got a gun and years of psychological scarring and a willingness to kill to survive. You can't shoot the gang member, because all his buddies will show up at your house, hold you down and skin your dog alive while you're forced to watch, then bust out all your teeth and hang you out to dry as an example.
Cops work the same way.
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For some reason this is unpopular, but I don't think a police officer should be allowed to remove their firearm from its holster until actual assault has occurred, unless non-police citizens are in danger.
A cop merely being scared should never be a reason somebody dies.
If you can't handle the pressure, don't be a fucking cop.
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… and I can’t believe I have to add this, but not obeying is almost never a valid reason to just start blasting. If no one is in danger, police have the power of radios, time, reinforcements
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but I don’t think a police officer should be allowed to remove their firearm from its holster until actual assault has occurred, unless non-police citizens are in danger.
This is the norm in many countries. For example anytime a policeman takes out a firearm, they need to file paperwork explaining the encounter, which is suprisingly (or not) a huuge deterrent.
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Yeah but then police would actually have to receive training on de-escalation. Can you imagine paying teachers more? Better to use the traveling drill instructor screaming "SHOOT OR DIE MAGGOT".
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The HBO Watchmen series has this as part of its premise.
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Watch a YouTube channel like Police Activity and you'll see plenty of OIS / body cam videos where if that were the rule there would be a lot of very dead cops.
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And the reality we have now is a lot of dead citizens who didn't sign up to a job inherently involving danger. Is that a preferable situation?
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I have been watching a ton of those channels lately. It’s interesting to see how things go down in the real world without a bunch of annoying editing and interruptions.
There are of course many cases where the cops give somebody a hundred chances to stand down or comply with orders or whatever. But there is probably also a strong bias in choosing the clips. These channels seem to heavily lean towards “criminal’s day went from bad to worse” or the opposite towards “idiot cop tries to arrest innocent person / does not know the law.”
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This piece of shit couldn't fight a 15 year old with a hoe? What a coward. One gut punch and the kid would have folded like a lawn chair.
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kids a buck fifty soaking wet, looks all of 5'5 from the pictures, and the family wasn't helping. Did you kill all of those "15 year old thugs"? seems like we might have heard about you if you were as much of a coward as this cop
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If I encounter a professional boxer in a bad mood, I would shit my pants. If another professional boxer encounters a professional boxer in a bad mood, they would shrug it off and deal with whatever happens.
Cops get trained. Being prepared for dangerous situations is essentially the core of their fucking job. Apparently, that preparation seems to be often simply "if shit gets ugly, shoot the shit out of whatever frightens you". Cops should be better at dealing with this than random citizens with a gun.
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Wow, racism mixed with sexism and slutshaming. you can be really proud of yourself man. go get therapy.
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"by a wide variety of men"
I imagine your ability to definitely determine parentage, i'm assuming through observation and research, got you moved to somewhere your observational talents could be better employed ?
No point in wasting that kind of talent on the streets fighting the statistically high percentage of 15 year old bodybuilding thugs and their mothers.
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Let's list all items that do not look like a gun during a police encounter. I'll start:
Small puppy Couch Basketball Bucket full of fruit Ice
I can't think of anymore at the moment. There's bound to be one or two other items.
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No one has claimed it looked like a gun. He was running towards the police with a gardening hoe with a clear intention to hit him. There's video of it in this thread. This is not an example of a police shooting an innocent person. They shot someone that was attacking them with a lethal weapon.
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Billy club, taser, or just a good old Sparta kick to the chest. If lethal force is your first instinct when a child comes at you with a stick, you should in no way be allowed to carry a weapon.
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Are you aware there are countries all over the world where police don't resort to shooting children when situations become tense and potentially violent?
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I have been assaulted in a very similar fashion, shovel, around same age, and I was also a teenager. I did not need or want a gun to diffuse the situation. And this officer had grown man strength.
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You sure this was what set him off? You sure he didn't hear an acorn drop?
Either one can apparently trigger police officer Psycho Mode.
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Yea, he could have reached for anything other than the gun tho.
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I wonder why they don't shoot in less vital spots like legs or hands in cases like that. Distance seems to be small enough to precise shoot.
Are they undertrained or deliberately escalating?
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Poor kid must have been planting oak trees. The pig thought they were preventing a future massacre.
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So for context my local PD dealt with a fine gentleman who attacked a security guard in his car dual wielding a hatchet and metal pipe. They spent several hours trying to talk him down before charging him with a shield and arresting him without much further ado. If you guessed he was white you guessed correctly.
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complimenting your PD for disarming the situation peacefullycalling your PD racist for not shooting a white Person
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PD as a broader category are racist because they will spend hours and risk gory death to avoid killing a mass shooter or a maniac with a hatchet but will shoot a black child on sight. My local PD's efforts to save the lunatic are actually commendable and just. I'm using that as an obvious contrast to behavior in situations like this one. Their commendable behavior proves that its entirely possible and reasonable to preserve life even in harrowing situations. The tragedy is that other cops as a group don't show the same bravery when a black child's life is in the balance.
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Were you asleep for the last decade? We've seen over and over how people of color get treated by cops.
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Society failed this boy. More spending on medical research, and care could have prevented this event. But instead we spend way more money on killing more people in other countries. And the medical research could help those who serve in the military as well. But no, must cut those costs as much as posdible.
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You forgot to mention how he was murdered.
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I think everyone else had that covered.
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Reagan closed down so many mental health hospitals specifically to make the streets more dangerous and help justify his militarization of the police.
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ACAB
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Whatever happened to tasers? I guess it's not that convenient for the police to have someone capable of suing back, makes one wonder how many cases aren't able to get the attention this kid is.
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The kid's 15!! a Taser will endanger the cop!! Lord have mercy on this poor cop, good thing there wasn't an acorn or someone else might have died
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Tasers are also quite risky.
What they should have is some proper martial arts training so they can deal with most problems in closer encounters. Fucking shit, they have better equipment and bigger numbers. There should be zero reason to pull a gun unless the other party also has one.
Then maybe escalate to tasers if the other party has a knife and seems to actually starting to attack. If they are just standing there (in a defensive stance or whatever), they should still not be tasered.
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Having someone with mental health training would have been more appropriate. This kid was autistic and needed to be calmed down by someone who knows how to de-escalate a situation with an autistic person.
Instead he got a cop who only knows how to shoot people.
To a hammer every problem is a nail.
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Wait, they don't?
In Germany every cop has to learn at least the basics of Jujutsu for exactly this reason. If you go to a jujutsu training as a civilian, usually more than half in the class are cops
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I saw a video from the UK where a guy charged a cop with a knife and the cop just smacked it out of his hand with a baton and put him in handcuffs. Police in the UK only shoot two or three people each year, and the per capita injuries to the police are lower, seems like a better system.
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Any decent martial arts instructor will tell you that if someone has a weapon, your best bet is to run. You can be a master of any art; if your opponent has a knife, you will get cut, or stabbed. It's almost impossible to disarm an aggressive attacker who has a knife without getting cut; unless you get lucky, it usually becomes a struggle to control the knife, and the person holding the handle gets cut up far less. Your martial arts training may allow you to eventually dominate the situation, disarm your attacker, and defeat your opponent -- but you're still going to get cut up in the process. If they have a gun, then all your training for is give you a slight chance of not getting shot, maybe, if everything goes perfectly. The only time things go like in the movies is in the movies. And cops aren't going to be martial arts masters; the best we could hope for for most of them is some basic submission technique, like the shit that murdered George Floyd.
Yes: cops should be getting focused time in de-escalation, but expecting cops to grapple with people, when they have no idea what weapons the person may have concealed in their bodies, or to expect them to perform some Steven Segal weapon disarming is unrealistic.
I agree with you, though; guns are not the answer, and I'm not sure I believe cops should even be armed - although, this is there US, and about 2% of the population goes around daily armed.
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It's far less dangerous than a gun and ideal for melee opponents because cops can still maintain a certain amount of range. You didn't read the article, did you? The kid was approaching fast charging with the sharp end of a gardening tool over his head while being told to back off, I think there is no question that he was suffering a manic episode. There were a number of ways to deal with the situation, but before reaching for the gun they could have reached for the taser. Tasers are quite risky, yes, but less so than shooting several bullets in a residential zone at someone.
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Thugs with badges.
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I saw the body cam, that kid was charging at the cop, he wasn't just sitting in his front lawn taking care of some flowers. The only real question I have is what was that cop doing there in the first place?
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The San Bernardino county sheriff’s department was responding to a 911 call on Saturday from a family reporting that a boy, identified as Ryan Gainer, was attacking his family at their home in Apple Valley, east of Los Angeles.
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Also, why charge a cop with a weapon, though? Teenager at least had the agency to not rush a cop.
Why there? Googled it, this is from a different article:
"The officer-involved shooting was reported before 5 p.m. Saturday, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department received a 911 call about a domestic disturbance in Apple Valley, authorities said.
The caller reported that 15-year-old Ryan Gainer was attacking his sister and smashing up glass and doors at the family home."
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If you can't disarm a 15 year old kid, maybe you should find another job?
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Yep, right up there with that Florida cop freaking out over falling acorns or something.
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A gardening tool?
The plot thickens.
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Title is highly misleading, but that's to be expected of The Guardian.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZgNAa2sXSc
The bodycam footage has been released and the shooting was clearly justified.
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'clearly justified' for shooting and killing a child point blank for threatening violence with a garden hoe? That officer reacted as if he was being hunted by a monster. You people need to learn some fucking empathy and common sense.
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Lick that pig hoof son, I'm sure it'll make them your friends.
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The kid was autistic. It was not justified.
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Since autism isn't an easily visible disability, almost no one will have sympathy. It's a sad truth.
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I'm autistic, does that automatically make me an incompetent who can act with impunity because I can be impulsive? This logic only hurts the people you're pretending to help. Law doesn't care about intent except for sentencing.
Inside his house, you'd be right and the cop ran away. After he's outside, he sees it's a cop, and charges him in anger with a big pointy metal thing. Do you expect the cop to divine someone's psychological diagnosis? What if it's a brain tumor that makes him actively murderous? Is everyone in the walking dead committing murder by killing the poor zombies who cannot help themselves?
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It was and will be ruled so when the investigation is complete. No one wants to see a 15 year old die, but it was clearly justified.
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I'm on the spectrum aswell but I'm under no illusion that it's going to protect me from violence if I go around physically attacking other people.
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I've seen enough body cam incidents to know the papers can say one thing and events revealed later by the footage depict another. General police guidance of use of lethal force is when there is an imminent danger to safety so it boils down to whether the kid charged a cop or a member of his family or not.
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Have you seen the acorn cop video?
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I've seen plenty of clips where the cops are in the wrong. Idiot cops firing pistols by accident or shooting in the absence of imminent threat. And that's why I support body worn cameras and full disclosure. Is is also why I am extremely skeptical of newspapers jumping to conclusions in the absence of the footage. It is very easy for relatives of the deceased to decry the cops as racist, or trigger happy and it be reported as such. And then the footage comes out and it shows something completely different.
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A lot of people voting me down very clearly know the truth because the newspaper told them so. Despite lacking the footage to make that judgement.
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Kid ran towards the officer with an axe, don't run towards someone with an axe if they have a gun.
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You saw everyone else getting downvoted to hell for this bad take, and decided you wanted some too huh? Much obliged.
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Da fug you rambling about?
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seems like someone prompted chatgpt with "write a very racist response to this thread while unsuccessfully trying to disguise your racism"
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Racism
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Klan recruitment bullshit.
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W ratio
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Racism much?
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I'm just quoting sources...infer what you want
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TLDR: What is the "5 foot garden tool"? That's all I want to know!
So many details and blame thrown about, but suddenly vague on "gardening tool?" It was 5 feet of something. A rake? A scythe? A stick?
It sort of matters what is in your hands when you approach police; not that that's ever a good idea. Even with a disability, he could be dangerous.
I'm astounded by The Guardian. How does an article explain is such detail the events of an altercation and aftermath yet space so terribly on such basic information?
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Maybe don't take a job of protecting and serving if a kid with a gardening tool is a bit too frightening for you to handle non-lethally.
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Yeah, the kid didn't have something dangerous like an acorn.
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How should police have handled it?
The bodycam video shows the officer approaching with his gun holstered, drawing it while backing up, turning and trying to run away, while the kid quickly closes the distance and tries to strike the officer's face, head, and upper body with a long-handled tool.
How should the officer have handled this?
How would you have handled this?
If a random person were attacked in such a manner, is it possible that they could have lost an eye? Is it possible that they could have been permanently disfigured? Had their carotid artery severed and quickly bled out? Been knocked out?
Is it possible that a reasonable person could have reasonably believed this attacker posed a credible, criminal, imminent, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to an innocent person?
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That's the beauty of it, police don't have to protect and serve in America. Courts made sure of that. Don't need to know the laws they're enforcing either. Just run an obstacle course and take a 40 hr course on killology - the idea that policing is the most dangerous job on the planet and everyone is trying to kill you at all times- and presto, they give you a gun, body armor, and protection from the legal and financial repercussions of your actions.
Plus, there's lots of networking opportunities with local white supremacist and christofascist organizations.
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I can crack your skull with a single swing of a gardening hoe. It's hilariously unreasonable to expect police not to treat this as a lethal weapon. Look at the video; they're telling him to stop or they'll shoot and even turn around and start running away in order to avoid doing that.
Also the "kid" is a 15 year old adult sized man.
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I have plenty of dangerous gardening tools in my shed.
The fact is, and point I was trying to make, we don't know what the tool was therefore, we can't draw conclusions about acceptable risk yet.
Protecting includes the family, the ones who called the police in the first place, from danger too.
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Too bad he wasn't a big white man with a knife! Then the cops would have tried to talk him down!
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I hear what you're saying, and black people are targeted disproportionally for these sorts of extra judicial killings, but there are plenty of videos of white people being executed by cops and also facing the same cushy "repercussions".
If minorities aren't safe then nobody is safe.
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Aren't police carrying non-lethal stuff like tasers and trained in deescalation techniques that could be used to subdue someone without shooting them?
Edit: not 'desecration', although maybe they are
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Some do carry batons, pepper spray, or tasers. All carry guns.
Some might be trained in deescalation. Some might be trained in "killology": https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html
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Desecration is definitely not the right word but I'm having trouble inferring the one you meant to use. De-escalation perhaps?
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FYI, tazers aren’t “non-lethal.”
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From the body cam videos you can easily glean the size and shape of the tool in question and how the kid was handling it, but the clarity isn't enough to conclusively determine the specific tool.
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I think it might be a clipper for branches hard to reach.
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380 comentários
Not a good look.
They don't care how bad it looks cause they get away with it
They constantly get away with it too, i wonder what the stat is for the amount of cops that get put away for misconduct like this versus the ones that don't, it's gotta be like 1 out of every 10/100/1000 or something similar.
Yet it happens every fucking time. 😡
Saw body cam footage like that once. Guy is on the ground bleeding out and the cop is searching the car for the gun that will justify it. Guy was bleeding out because when asked for his ID reached for his wallet
Probably should go watch the actual video: https://dailycaller.com/2024/03/11/ryan-gainer-video-deputy-fatally-shooting-15-year-old-boy-autism/?utmsource=ground.news&utmmedium=referral
He's told to drop it, and literally chases the officer out of the house with it trying to kill him. Bodycam from 2 angles.
Edit: Ok, I read the article. Yeah, him charging at the cop with that tool was a really bad move. I still think the situation could have been handled differently. Could have.
Tasers, batons, or just run away. Diffuse the situation. Imagine a judge saying "You charged against a cop with a gardening tool? Sentenced to DEATH!"
The boy didn't get a fair trial. He was murdered with no justification.
As a father of a child with Autism I feel I am more than adequately equipped to respond to this.
I don't think many, if any, neurotypical people understand how Autism can impact a person's ability to process the world in a way that is deemed "normal". This child may not be verbal, may have aggression issues, may have a learning disability, etc.
The last thing that should have happened is someone pulling a gun.
I cry thinking something like this could happen with my son. All it takes is one bad interaction with someone who has absolutely no experience with Autism and this can happen.
For anyone reading this, do yourself a favour. Volunteer with autistic people. It could be at school or in the community but you all need to learn that Autism does not look like the doctor in The Good Doctor.
In Canada (afaik) cops rarely kill anyone who is not wielding a gun, this includes people out of their minds on drugs wielding knives. They are usually able to disarm and subdue the suspect by non-lethal means.
The idea that a 15 year old kid running at a cop should be shot on sight is absolutely absurd and only normalized in the US, please reconsider your perspective.
All that said cops still fucking suck in Canada and have a history of being racists and abusive.
... So why didn't the officers just fucking leave the house?! There's no reason for them to stand their ground here. Retreat to safety and call for a crisis counselor and psychiatrist to come help. Call the boy's parents.
Fragile masculinity is why those pussy ass cops shot a kid. I hope it tortures them for the rest of their days. And I hope whenever they see a kid with autism from here on out, they're forced to realize what they've done.
Father of an autistic teen here - very good chance that kid couldn't even begin to understand that the police gun would not only harm him, but kill him dead.
He possibly didn't understand or was too deep into an autistic meltdown (overstimulated fight or flight response) by that point to possibly comply with the commands from the officer, and (looking at my own son as an example) I doubt that he comprehended the seriousness of wielding such a weapon at the cop or at anyone.
My son knows he has to be careful with knives, and that he generally shouldn't touch them unsupervised.
Does he know he could hurt someone with it? Yes I think so.
Does he know it's even possible to stab someone to death with it? He doesn't even have a concept of "dead" vs "asleep" and has never witnessed a wound that couldn't be healed with a bandaid. Explaining these concepts in abstract is of very limited value with him.
They need to send more cops, and with
nonlethalsless lethals, and try harder not to kill these kids - many of whom exist in a world that almost entirely works in a way they don't understand, no matter how intelligent they may be otherwise.Elijah McClain
Linden Cameron (not dead, but not for lack of trying)
Ryan Gainer
My list of "names of autistic kids shot or killed by cops" that I can list off without trying is slowly getting longer.
As I always say - I can't imagine more a of a nightmare than my son interacting with police while neither me nor my wife is present. I'd be less worried if he was playing in traffic. At least I can count on people driving down the street trying not to kill him. And that's really sad because I wish I could count on the help of police if ever he would need it.
He's also autistic and a pig shouting at him probably didn't even register as anything but a threat.