warb17

warb17 OP t1_j8ivcb7 wrote

a person with a knife is generally a threat that can be contained and so as a general practice i'm going to default to assuming that the police acted irresponsibly if they shot the person.

i genuinely appreciate that you are willing to consider some reforms; we have some common ground there. i don't mean this in an antagonizing way but please keep in mind that my stance is not reform of police - it's abolition - so i'm not surprised if you feel like my stance is somewhat at odds with yours, because it is.

have you seen this pdf? if you haven't, it's a great tool for thinking about reforms that do or do not move towards abolition. you've mentioned some of the things in green, and so like i said, we do have common ground.

but my position is that policing and prisons as we know them are fundamentally problematic institutions and our aim should be to build a society free of them.

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warb17 OP t1_j8ipxxb wrote

the whole point of de-escalation is to apply it to someone originally intending to do violence.

also, i haven't said that lethal force is never required, even with a knife. i've said that it's heavily overused. if my sentiments feel extreme to you, maybe you should do some more reading on police and prison abolition. this article was written by someone skeptical of police abolition and might be useful: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/12/21283813/george-floyd-blm-abolish-the-police-8cantwait-minneapolis

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warb17 OP t1_j8dp53s wrote

a knife is rarely sufficient cause for a shooting. even a gun isn't necessarily sufficient cause.

the Post link is paywalled for me, but looking at the Guardian's database for 2016, half of those killed by police had a firearm. i don't think all of those were likely justified uses of lethal force because sometimes the killed person never fires their weapon, but lets assume they were all justified. That's about 500 people per year killed without cause.

i don't have stats on hand for how many times police use lethal force without actually killing the person, but i think it's reasonable to say it's at least the same frequency, if not twice or thrice as frequent. so that's 1,000 instances of unjustified lethal force, conservatively, per year. so we hit 10,000 in a decade or less of policing. if we're less conservative, that's 10,000 in 5-7 years.

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warb17 OP t1_j8dmsm5 wrote

then let's do both lol

the difference though is that police & their violence are a major means by which oppression is conducted. police violently enforce laws that contribute to racism, pollution, poverty, and more. police violently suppress protest against those laws. and because the government depends on police to fill those roles, the government tends to look the other way when police do shit like this.

government gets more corrupt when it has a militia it can use to suppress the public's discontent. if we want a truly accountable government, we need to get rid of the police as they currently exist.

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warb17 OP t1_j8dljj5 wrote

the point is that "drugs" is a convenient excuse for police brutality.

the war on drugs was a racist policy from the start, cops plant drugs on people, and even if they guy was carrying drugs we don't know what they were. and then on top of that regardless of the criminality of the drugs, it's included in the article in a way that's meant to bias the reader against the shooting victim and to partially justify the cop's actions. even though the possession of drugs is not a violent offense and provides no justification for attempted murder.

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warb17 OP t1_j8dl0hj wrote

lol you're living a delusion.

did you read the initial report that the Memphis police filed after the Tyre Nichols murder? they knew that bodycam footage would likely get out eventually and they lied through their teeth. if they'll lie about that they'll lie about anything. it's called damage control and getting ahead of the narrative.

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warb17 OP t1_j8dj6kd wrote

sure, if they find a gun in the car and the body cam footage shows that the man pointed the gun at the officer, then i'll revise my opinion.

but there are thousands of cases where police have shot someone with no provocation at all and then lie about it afterwards, so my priors are to assume the man was actually unarmed.

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warb17 OP t1_j8dieht wrote

My point is that the original suspect wasn't reported to have a gun, he was reported to have a pipe. Presumably if this wrongfully shot man was "reaching" for something, it would've been a pipe. But we don't even know if he was reaching for anything or what the cop said, because cops lie all the time. Nothing they say can be trusted until we see the body cam footage.

It's amazing to me that you can be alive here in 2023 with the tens of thousands of documented cases of police overreacting with lethal force and give them any benefit of the doubt.

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