Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Time For You To Go, Officers




North Miami police shoot unarmed black therapist, with hands raised, unarmed, while he was trying to calm down an autistic patient, armed only with a small toy truck.

link

There is preliminary information that North Miami police officers were dispatched to the scene after a 911 call was received of an armed male suspect threatening suicide. Arriving officers attempted to negotiate with two men on the scene, one of whom was later identified as suffering from autism. The other man was later identified as an employee of an assisted living facility. At some point during the on-scene negotiation, one of the responding officers discharged his weapon, striking the employee.
Really, jackasses?!?!?

So finding instead two UNarmed males, attempting in point of fact no crime whatsoever, your Officer Fuckstick carefully and considerately shot the unarmed black man, in broad daylight, with a clear view, and while his hands were documentedly raised far away from his body, hands empty of anything.

Fucking geniuses with badges.

Let's try that again, only with another 70 IQ points applied:

 Officer Random Fuckstick has been fired for cause from the North Miami PD, arrested, and turned over to the Miami-Dade County district attorney, to be prosecuted for one count of attempted murder, which under FL law as attempted murder in the third degree is a second degree felony, and carries a possible sentence of life in prison. He is also being referred to the US Atty.'s office immediately for violation of civil rights under color of authority for further federal prosecution after the state trial. He will also be administratively stripped of all sovereign and qualified immunity for his actions, and plaintiff(s) will therefore be able to recover damages directly from him for his conduct and its consequences, as well as from the city.
 North Miami and their PD has zero tolerance for anyone, citizen or police officer, shooting unarmed innocents, and holds their police to a higher standard.

Absent reality and common sense breaking out, or multiple brain transplants to the Chief of Police in North Miami and his PIO minions, let alone the leadership of the North Miami police union and rank and file, who should be clamoring for this idiot's head to be delivered on a platter - but won't, because Team Blue - let me state for the record, ahead of the BLM useful idiots, that random crazy people clearly haven't gunned down enough police officers yet to fully get your attention, you bunch of cowardly incompetent murderous bastards.

This is only evidentiary item #3,217,723 that the police ARE the problem.

Not all of them, not everywhere, and not every time.
But this incident will doubtless fuel the fires of crazy, and more officers who didn't do this will be gunned down exactly like the last few batches, to punish vicariously the one(s) who do, have, and will continue to act this way, since time beyond accounting.

That this kind of crap continues to occur 25 years after Rodney King, at a time when widespread unrest is poised to explode, precisely when most we need a professional, circumspect, and well-trained police, only makes the continued failure to perform to any bare minimum standard of competence doubly damning.

The only thing that made this "just" a shooting, instead of another police murder execution, was the abysmal marksmanship of the PD's incompetent minions despite total tactical dominance over two unarmed and criminally innocent victims, at a range measured in feet, which is a thin reed for the average citizen to hang his survival on every time any one or more police are anywhere within 100 yards, fangs out, and dumber than a bag of hammers, time after time after time after mother-effing time. The video documents that the PD in this instance were approaching from cover, and that at least one of them was carrying (and pointing) an M-4gery style carbine at the unarmed men at the time of the shooting. If nothing else, fire the shooter and his partner for that: both inappropriate deployment and use of weapons, and lousy accuracy.

I'm henceforth all out of fucks to give for the victims and families of every police officer shot from here on out. You've played your last "one bad apple" card. Burn down the orchard. 
Perhaps it's time to either take all your guns away 24/7/365, and mandate any response will be solely by unarmed officials, or else simply disband entirely all armed and uniformed patrols, and take our chances without police running around armed and stupid, 24/7/365, once and for all. Word to all departments: Police Academy and the sequels were comedies, not training films. (We'll ignore, for the moment, the myriad reasons why feds with guns should be concurrently reduced somewhere between 90 and 99% as well.) Police collectively and individually have blown too many chances, and continue to, and no matter how harsh the blowback, no additional learning occurs. Ever.

This wasn't in some Podunk town with 3 officers averaging 300 pounds, and a weekend correspondence course for training. It was in friggin' North Miami, FL.

Maybe total unemployment, or when their chances in Anytown for making it through a shift alive are lower than for a guy riding shotgun on an Iraqi convoy in 2004, some small number of the police may elect to re-connect with the citizenry as equals, and return to maintaining law and order amongst the community, instead of over it from on untouchable high. In any event, it's probably going to take a Vietnam War-esque body count of officers every year before the light of reality dawns on most of your membership.

You, the police, have become a cancer on the society that hired you and a plague upon those you formerly served, for far too long to tolerate any further.
Hoping for collective change from you is like cheering at the Special Olympics, and ignoring the consequences was never an option.
Blame entirely yourselves.






(Entirely for bonus points, I'd love to hear the exact 911 call(s) in question, and how they were relayed, to determine if the dispatcher fucked up the information by the numbers, and helped create the situation in the first place. It doesn't absolve the officer on the scene, who is theoretically trained to employ the Mk I Mod 0 eyeball in all situations, which should have led to not falling back, and shooting from cover at an unarmed person, with zero appreciation of common sense or what was going on. 
But 3:1 odds some civil service Affirmative Action hire with D-level English skills contributed materially to misinformation to arriving officers, and should similarly be charged with gross incompetence, depraved indifference and reckless endangerment, and similarly terminated for cause and referred for further prosecution, should that turn out to be the case.
Whoever put it out as "armed man threatening suicide", someone else should fry on this.
And if the PIO made it up out of whole cloth, that would be your target, for accessory to attempted murder, after the fact.
100% certainty none of that will ever happen, and 9:1 against any of it coming out until the settlement phase of the inevitable civil suit.)

15 comments:

Ruth said...

I just saw an article stating that the officer MEANT to shoot the autistic guy and missed. Because the officer thought the autistic guy was a threat to the black guy. Now don't get me wrong, I understand that even an unarmed autistic person CAN absolutely be a threat, even to another adult. But the video shows the autistic guy sitting on the ground, not even swinging his arms. Not a threat. Nor does that explanation explain why they then cuffed the black guy and didn't give him any medical treatment for the 20 minutes it took the ambulance to arrive. Even with the reports of someone armed and dangerous in the area, unless we're missing some huge piece of data, I don't see how this could be labeled a "good shoot".

Anonymous said...

There's a reason why cops don't get prosecuted unless what they do is totally beyond the pale:

Prosecutors measure success by convictions. Prosecutors rely on police to handle evidence properly in order to gain those oh-so-precious convictions. Piss off cops, evidence gets mishandled, and convictions start dropping. So the only time a prosecutor will touch a cop with someone else's ten-foot-pole is (a) if the cop did something SO terrible his fellow officers will agree to him being prosecuted and (b) if the prosecutor has political ambitions beyond being DA, i.e. running for Mayor.

This, from what I've seen so far, SHOULD meet the first criteria, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The Thin Blue Line is a thing, and there are plenty of cops who will support their brother-officers no matter what.

Aesop said...

@ Anonymous
Believe me, I get that.
While it explains the problem, it's not sufficient excuse for a double standard.
Nothing is.
But it's good reason for either disarming them, or disbanding them.
Since they demonstrably can't and don't meet basic standards of either safety nor accountability, they can't be trusted with the responsibility.
Easy peasey: no guns for them.

This also undoes the constant whine from the gun control freaks that "the cops are outgunned! Oh Noes!!"
The new answer becomes "Yes, and isn't it wonderful that that's now a feature instead of a bug."

Next problem.

Anonymous said...

I never said it was sufficient excuse for a double standard, I was merely observing.

It's the whole power-corrupts thing, what would you do if you were sure you'd get away with it?

Solutions you ask?

Well, here's a start:

Community policing. Cops police the areas they live in, shop in, go to church in, and where their kids go to school so if they step over the line they're subject to being a pariah in the community. When your local dry cleaner won't do business with you, or your daughter doesn't get asked to the prom, because you're a dick, you're less likely to be a dick. That's probably a bigger issue than criminal prosecution.

Note that small towns where everyone knows one-another seldom have serious problems with police misconduct. You get the occasional bad-apple, but their fellow cops are likely to drag them in rather than be painted with the same brush. It's the big cities, where the cops don't know the people and, more importantly, the people don't know the cops AND their families that misconduct becomes rampant.

Oh, your inner city doesn't produce enough people who want to be cops to police itself? Well, isn't that just too bad. Might want to move to someplace that does. And build a wall around it after you leave (assuming you do) and hope the last thug shoots himself as a service to the community, or because he ran out of crack. Win-win.

I neglected to sign my last comment, so I'll sign this one:

Mark D.

Anonymous said...

To whom it may concern ....... ' Be careful what you wish for ....... you might get it ! "

Longbow said...

Once again, learning the wrong lessons from Dallas.

Yesterday, I said this:

http://pluckingtheyew.blogspot.com/2016/07/this-never-happens-it-didnt-happen.html

http://pluckingtheyew.blogspot.com/2016/07/this-never-happens-it-didnt-happen_21.html

l2a3 said...

That is why you keep your "booger picker" off the trigger until you identify the target and HAZARD!

Anonymous said...

No, it's not only in the big cities. It's everywhere Mark D.

Anonymous said...

Your original commentary is spot-on. And a "witness" report (reported by media) adds this:
When Thomas Matthews noticed North Miami police officers responding to a commotion a block from his usual outdoor sitting spot, he grabbed his binoculars and saw a middle-aged black man and a younger autistic man sitting in an intersection.

The officers, he said, grabbed rifles from the patrol cars' trunks and crept toward the men. The autistic man was holding something in his hand. Peering through his binoculars, he could see the object was a toy truck. Matthews says he tried to tell an officer who had stayed behind for crowd control, but she told him to back up.

Soon, three shots rang out and therapist Charles Kinsey, who had been trying to coax his 27-year-old autistic client back to a nearby facility, was wounded in the leg. The shooting drew national attention because much of what happened before the shooting was captured on video.

"If she would have told the other officers, maybe they wouldn't have shot," said Matthews, a 73-year-old African-American. He ran a North Miami flower shop before retiring and has lived in the area for years. He said he has never had a problem with North Miami police.

Anonymous said...

Take away their qualified immunity and watch BS like this stop as soon as a few of them go to prison and are driven into bankruptcy.

Oregon Hobo said...

Dallas, Baton Rouge, and all the others that will come after it will mean more of this, not less.

In all dealings with police there are two key things one should keep in mind at all times.

This:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/nyregion/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge-rules-that-police-can-bar-high-iq-scores.html

...and this:
http://law.justia.com/cases/district-of-columbia/court-of-appeals/1981/79-6-3.html

This all goes to illustrate why I always opt to resolve matters on my own rather than involve police. Absolutely no matter what, even when I was kidnapped 16 years ago during a 3am home invasion at gunpoint for 6 hours by a skinhead with purple lightning bolts tattooed on his scalp, coming down from a 3-day meth bender (ie spastically freaked-out and violently hyper-paranoid), and on the run from a police manhunt for murdering a security guard earlier that night. Even that long ago I calculated that unless I'm already dead, there is no situation so bad that the police can't f*** it up even worse.
http://investorplace.com/2014/04/tosh-0-john-winkler-killed-by-police/

It's not just a matter of recognizing that you're on your own, it's a matter of recognizing that you're better off doing everything in your power to keep it that way.

#OREGON HOBO#

BigCountryExpat said...

EXACTLY!!!!The BIGGEST problem police have (outside of poor training) is that I have YET to hear ANY police, either among friends or family state PUBLICALLY or ON THE RECORD that cops like this ARE THE PROBLEM. THEY... his PEERS should be calling for his head, if not figuratively, but metaphorically... (or possibly physically... this assclown who shot this poor bastard needs his trigger finger chopped off with a hatchet) HIS PEERS should be PUBLICALLY CONDEMNING This and ANY cop who does or acts similarly... strip them of 'sovereign immunity' and jail him as a peon would be in similar circumstances... but you know what? They won't haven't and hence, more cops are going to get killed because guys like Officer Itchy McTriggerfinger The Fucktard does shit like this....

fjord said...

It's *almost* like they are purposely hiring those with poor impulse control, delusions of grandeur and training them that the populace at large is to be subjugated as if a caste system were in place with the blue at the top and john q. Public only understands force like a wild animal.


Which might be true in certain areas, but when violent crime is at a low, everything still looks like a nail when you're a hammer.

Sitting in the dmv recently, mr testosterone threw himself into the only available chair next to me, exuding hostility and aggression.
Hearing conversation between him and the license maker lady i realized he was an off duty cop.
The horror of having to wait your turn like a lowly peasant.

And, though i don't live in the hood, but an agricultural based rural area, you can be arrested in your home on the basis of some anonymous person calling into the police that you are drunk driving and weaving all over the road. A back country road where you're more likely to end up in a ditch or pasture.
Threatened that if you dont come voluntarily, you will be made to come forcefully with several episodes of "falling down stairs"
So much for due process and reasonable suspicion.

swampfox said...

Sounds good on paper, But how many cops live in the inner city, poor part of a small town, etc. It would be nice for the police departments to hire locally, and have police live in the town they police.
Do away with police getting in trouble in one department and transferring to another state. ONLY hire locals, who have lived and gone to school in the area. Maybe start a police activity similar to ROTC .
However it is done, police MUST change their perception of "Us against Them." They MUST become known in the neighborhood as church going, helpful neighbors . Other wise it will only get worst.

Anonymous said...

Dade county cops have been crooked and out of control for so long that this incident doesn't even shock me. The federal government was going to indict the entire Miami/Dade police force as a corrupt criminal organization and then 9/11 happened and the Feds lost interest. Let's also remember there were four riots in the 1980's sparked by cops killing people and the criminal cops who worked as hit men for the drug cartels calling themselves the cocaine cowboys. Dade county with it's high percentage of foreigners has been a like a third world country for a long time. From the people to the politicians to the cops they all act like they live in a third world country.