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Texas Shooting


nappyroots

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19 hours ago, tvc184 said:

I have yet to read any facts or even what is reported to be facts other than an officer shot someone and a 15 year old child is dead. 

Not that it matters what I think but.......

1. A 15 year old child was needlessly killed. He is an innocent victim no matter what happened.

2. Was the vehicle driving away or toward the officer? The chief changed the "facts" but said the car was not in reverse but was moving forward. Okay, but what gear he was in might mean nothing. Was he driving forward toward or away from the officer?

3. What is the time span from the shots fired on scene and the officer opening fire?

4. What was the distance between the officer and the vehicle that he fired into?

5. Did the officer see muzzle flashes in the vicinity of the vehicle whether it was heading toward or away from him?

In the late 80's in San Bernardino, CA an officer responded to an armed person on school grounds late at night or early in the morning. As the officer was walking around the school he saw a man with a gun that turned toward the officer and fired. The officer saw the flash of light and returned fire, killing a teenager. No problem..... except it was some people playing Laser Tag. The officer killed a kid with a toy that likely had no idea the officer was there other than to think it was one of his friends playing the game. 

No, it isn't the same scenario but in a way it is. It is perception. What did a officer reasonably believe? The SCOTUS has set the standard of viewing such incidents from the eyes of an officer responding to a situation. It is not viewed from the eyes of a person in his living room or in a judge's chambers a few months later. The ruling (Graham v. Connor) said that such uses of force are to be viewed from an officer responding to a possible violent situation and not from the totality of circumstances as we might later find. It was a unanimous ruling.

In a recent case the SCOTUS (2014 Plumhoff v. Rickard) a unanimous Court found that an officer could not be sued for firing into a car and killing not only the driver but an innocent passenger. Note again that it was a unanimous ruling. 

In 2007 in Scott v. Harris the SCOTUS ruled in an 8-1 decision that ramming a car off the roadway in a chase and causing a person to be a quadriplegic was not an unlawful use of force. 

In 2015 in another 8-1 ruling the SCOTUS said that a Texas DPS trooper was entitled to qualified immunity from even a lawsuit after he fired into a fleeing car and killed the driver. At the time the trooper was on top of an overpass and was in no danger from being struck. He had just been ordered not to shoot by his supervisor but he opened fire anyway. 

In all of these cases the SCOTUS has ruled that a decision must be based on what an officer sees and what he reasonably believes. In these decisions we have an innocent person killed and an officer disobeying a direct order. In 9-0 and 8-1 rulings the officers were cleared. When we often have 5-4 and 6-3 split decisions all the time from the SCOTUS, in these four police cases on use of force there were 34 votes in favor of the officers and 2 against. That is overwhelming. 

While none of these is the same scenario as in Balch Springs, the point is that you cannot simply say a person that was unarmed/not a threat/innocent automatically makes the officer wrong. These were civil suits where the burden of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt such as it is for a criminal conviction but a burden of a preponderance of the evidence or roughly more than 50%. 

There is a good likelihood that this officer will be convicted although maybe not for Murder. I can envision Manslaughter or Criminally Negligent Homicide. But who knows, maybe the "facts" will show enough for a Murder conviction. If so, great. We still have seen nothing publicly released that show what happened other than the aforementioned a 15 year old is dead and an officer fired the shot. 

Maybe the officer has a history of stupid decisions and this one rises to Murder and he needs to get a life sentence. Maybe he was responding to a legally defensible situation and will be cleared by a jury. If anyone can actually report any known "facts", please point out the source. 

As usual, an Excellent, Fact Filled, Informative post.  The SCOTUS decisions in the above cases show an unusual amount of common sense we don't ordinarily see from that group.  It was refreshing information.  

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1 hour ago, nappyroots said:

Why do we never hear of black cops shooting innocent people? What if a black cop shot a innocent white kid in a car?

The black cop in Die Hard killed an innocent kid. He was still on patrol and helping Bruce Willis against the bad guys. It's how Hollywood wants it played and, to be honest, the liberal media. What makes you think it DOESN'T happen? Do you read every news story? Actually, it's probably not newsworthy because of what Nash said.

Also, most cops are white, and ambushing them with police calls doesn't help the trigger finger. Do you think it does?

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1 hour ago, baddog said:

The black cop in Die Hard killed an innocent kid. He was still on patrol and helping Bruce Willis against the bad guys. It's how Hollywood wants it played and, to be honest, the liberal media. What makes you think it DOESN'T happen? Do you read every news story? Actually, it's probably not newsworthy because of what Nash said.

Also, most cops are white, and ambushing them with police calls doesn't help the trigger finger. Do you think it does?

Black cops are just not out to shoot , no matter what the consequences

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4 hours ago, nappyroots said:

Why do we never hear of black cops shooting innocent people? What if a black cop shot a innocent white kid in a car?

When you look at the cases that are thrown around, very few of the people who are shot are innocent.  A better question is why does the media strive so hard to turn justifiable shootings of young black men by white cops into race baiting news stories?  The amount of heinously bad killings by cops is extremely low. We're talking about maybe 1 or 2 a year where you can honestly look at it and say "that was murder", and there's no reasonable defense to the officer's actions (the Walter Scott shooting, for example).  When you consider the hundreds of millions of police interactions a year with the public (many of which are with violent criminals), that number is very good.  We all make mistakes at our job, but most of our jobs aren't life and death.  a bad decision by a police officer could mean someone is killed, and police have to make these decisions knowing that the person who might be killed if they make a mistake is themselves.  When you consider that, it's amazing that they show the restraint that they do.   As for the "white officers shooting innocent black people", while I disagree with the media as to just how "innocent" most of the "victims" are in these shootings, it's mostly a numbers game.  Approximately 73% of law enforcement officers in the US are white.  Around 12% are black.  Add to that the fact that black males commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crimes in the US (8% of the population committing well over 40% of violent crimes), and the odds of a white officer responding to a call involving a black perpetrator or complainant is extremely high, and happens thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of times daily across the country. It's really no surprise that a good chunk of police shootings involve white officers and black criminals, and when they don't, the news has little to no incentive to report about it.

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8 minutes ago, bullets13 said:

When you look at the cases that are thrown around, very few of the people who are shot are innocent.  A better question is why does the media strive so hard to turn justifiable shootings of young black men by white cops into race baiting news stories?  The amount of heinously bad killings by cops is extremely low. We're talking about maybe 1 or 2 a year where you can honestly look at it and say "that was murder", and there's no reasonable defense to the officer's actions (the Walter Scott shooting, for example).  When you consider the hundreds of millions of police interactions a year with the public (many of whom are criminals), that number is very good.  We all make mistakes at our job, but most of our jobs aren't life and death.  a bad decision by a police officer could mean someone is killed, and police have to make these decisions knowing that the person who might be killed if they make a mistake is themselves.  When you consider that, it's amazing that they show the restraint that they do.   As for the "white officers shooting innocent black people", while I disagree with the media as to just how "innocent" most of the "victims" are in these shootings, it's mostly a numbers game.  Approximately 73% of law enforcement officers in the US are white.  Around 12% are black.  Add to that the fact that black males commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crimes in the US (8% of the population committing well over 40% of violent crimes), and the odds of a white officer responding to a call involving a black perpetrator or complainant is extremely high, and happens hundreds of thousands of times daily. While major cities tend to have more minority officers, there are still a majority of white officers on those police forces, and a white officer in those forces (depending on their beat) will work almost exclusively with minority criminals and victims.  It's not really hard to determine why we mostly hear about white cops shooting black men, especially when you throw in the media agenda behind it. 

Good post bullets. Couldn't agree more and it hit on some points I tried to make.

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On 5/8/2017 at 9:07 AM, nappyroots said:

Why do we never hear of black cops shooting innocent people? What if a black cop shot a innocent white kid in a car?

Because the fake news doesn't report it......Whitey doesn't riot and destroy their own neighborhoods so it's hardly news worthy. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, stevenash said:

Oh Nappy, in case you didn't read or purposefully ingored the last post, let me show you again:

 

This is the hidden content, please

And I would never defend the black cop. If Trayvon  Martin were white I would still defend him in that case. Never seen you defend anybody black on anything Steve. You seem to think that all blacks are wrong and all democrats are wrong in every situation.

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23 minutes ago, nappyroots said:

And I would never defend the black cop. If Trayvon  Martin were white I would still defend him in that case. Never seen you defend anybody black on anything Steve. You seem to think that all blacks are wrong and all democrats are wrong in every situation.

If Trayvon was white you would have never heard of him. Defend that.

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26 minutes ago, nappyroots said:

And I would never defend the black cop. If Trayvon  Martin were white I would still defend him in that case. Never seen you defend anybody black on anything Steve. You seem to think that all blacks are wrong and all democrats are wrong in every situation.

Haven't seen you defend the white Grandma in my "What a Punk" thread. Let's hear it.

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49 minutes ago, nappyroots said:

And I would never defend the black cop. If Trayvon  Martin were white I would still defend him in that case. Never seen you defend anybody black on anything Steve. You seem to think that all blacks are wrong and all democrats are wrong in every situation.

Believe it or not ( and , you of course, will not) I don't defend or promote anybody based upon skin color.  So I seem to think that all blacks are wrong and all democrats are wrong in every situation.  Of what situations do you speak?  Are you talking about violent situations where police are involved?  As for Democrats, are  you talking about economic beliefs?  If you are, I would agree that most of the time, I am on the opposite side of the fence of the Democrats.

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 News is about sensationalism, not news in itself. 

 Not seeing something on the does does not mean that it does not exist. It only means someone in the news department did not feel that it would get enough people talking. 

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