Let’s establish in advance that I’m not a mindless cop fanboy; I think it’s long past time for individual cops to carry liability insurance, rather than be covered by hamfisted qualified immunity. That would weed out bad cops and reward good ones, presto.
But if I read another ill-informed activist or reporter nodding askance at a cop killing an “unarmed” person, without any further context, there’s gonna be trouble.
Every year, the homicide and manslaughter toll in MInnesota includes a number of “one punch kills”; episodes where an “unarmed” person’s initial physical contact causes a direct injury (a cerebral hemorrhage) or indirect (knocking a head on a curb or sidewalk) injury that ends up killing the victim.
And that doesn’t even count the “unarmed” subjects who suddenly become armed.
It’s all very easy, in an abstract sense, for people who’ve never seen how fast an “unarmed” assailant can become a lethal threat, to ignore what they don’t know – as Josh Gelernter at National Review points out:
Last year, a self-described “radical political activist” and Black Lives Matter protester named Jarrett Maupin agreed to go through a FATS-style police exercise — not using a FATS machine, but using paintball guns in a parking lot. Maupin was told to question a man behaving suspiciously. The man’s hands disappeared momentarily behind a car, reappeared holding a gun, and Maupin was “killed.” In the next exercise, two unarmed men were having a loud argument. Maupin approached them, one of the men starting walking aggressively toward Maupin — and Maupin shot him dead. A local Fox affiliate in Phoenix filmed Maupin’s experience (you can watch it on YouTube).
You can indeed! And it’s fascinating.
Want to feel very humble, very fast? Go through the 180º simulator at Gander Mountain, which puts you in a number of quick-choice situations. Very, very quick choices. Anyone who is confident of their ability to make decisions under stress under civilian rules of engagement is going to get their world rocked – I guarantee it. =====8
Afterward, one of the local reporters tried the same exercise, and got exactly the same results. The reporter asked Maupin what conclusions he’d drawn from the experience. “I didn’t understand how important compliance was,” said Maupin. “But after going through this, yeah, my attitude has changed. This is all unfolding in 10 to 15 seconds.
And often less.
Which is why after the Jamar Clark, when people (and reporters) were nothing “it all took place in less than a minute”, I thought “A minute? If everyone involved was lucky!”
Gelernter:
Maybe the answer to racial tensions and anti-police protests is for police to offer every member of Black Lives Matter a chance to take the test that Maupin took. Or maybe the police should start doing FATS-machine demos in high-crime neighborhoods, to help people understand the decisions cops are faced with. Maybe they should open FATS arcades. I bet they’d be popular.
I think putting a 180º simulator into a truck and taking it out – to bars in Coates, schools in Richfield, and to the streets of Dayton’s Bluff – would be an eye-opener to a lot of people. We could start with Nekima Levy-Pounds, Keri Miller, and the Strib editorial board, and work our way outward.
Couple thoughts. First, this is why cameras are a good thing for honest coppers. No one is going to question why a 6’5″ 250lb, unarmed man got shot when there is a record of him aggressively charging a solo copper like that.
Second, while some of the recent outrages were real life examples of this training scenario (Michael Brown comes to mind), most of the cases people are pissed about are outrageous examples of coppers clearly abusing their authority like the one in North Charleston.
This excersize was worthwhile in that it showed people not every copper’s shooting of an unarmed person is murder. Still, too many of them are.
The Star Tribune editorial board disagreed with you today. The city should subsidize all police activity. The union doesn’t want accountability. If Minneapolis requires insurance, no cop will work there. Requiring insurance might not be legal and it might not work.
Talk about your arch conservatives – no hope of “innovation” or “thinking outside the box” over there. What has been done, must be done, only harder, and nothing else. That whole Einstein thing about different results? Yeah, well, he was a foreigner, that’s not how we do it here.
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Requiring insurance might not be legal
Really, JD? Ever heard of 0bamacare?
I’d personally love to this, just to see how I’d do. It will be interesting overall to see whose side the democrats come down on eventually. BLM and Police Unions are opposed to each other, who will win? Something has to give at some point.
Can we get the gang-bangers to take the shoot/don’t shoot orientation?
Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just summarizing the editorial.
As to Obama-care, I seem to recall the Roberts did not say the federal government could require citizens to buy insurance; he said the federal government could levy a tax on everybody but give a tax credit to those who fulfilled their obligation in another way, such as buying insurance. Not sure how you’d implement that against cops only. Too easy for Liberals to say “You’re right, everybody with a gun should carry liability insurance” and there’s a back-door to gun control.
Then there are those “un-armed (body camera gets turned off), suddenly armed (when body camera is turned back on) situations.
I don’t think the shoot/don’t shoot exercise would work well for gang bangers. I don’t know if they follow the same shoot/no shoot rules as we do.
Officer: “Okay, start the video.”
Video Actor: “Yo, man, wassup.”
Gang-banger. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Police officer: “Why did you shoot him?”
Gang-banger: “He disrespected me. And he was wearing the wrong colors.”
I laughed way too hard at that…
Philando Castle and Alton Sterling were armed.
Having cops carry individual liability insurance is dumb. It would be like requiring soldiers to carry liability insurance. Both can be required to go into situations where they could very likely die, and can be prosecuted for refusing to go. If they are going to be personally liable, they would need to be given the option of not responding to a call, or just leaving of they don’t like the situation they face. Do you really want that?
I find the Mpls effort strange. They are already at a hiring disadvantage, since many departments are seeking diverse candidates, and have the advantage of a less dangerous and less stressful work environment, in communities where people use all of their fingers to wave at police. Adding one more hurdle is not going to make them more desirable as an employer.
But wendy, the idea is that as a more undesirable employer they can justify lowering their standards to get an increasingly “diverse” workforce. And by requiring liability insurance, they won’t have to pay for the increase in complaints.
By this logic, all of the elected idiots should be required to carry individual liability policies, too. After all, why should they be exempted from consequences of their actions, whether it be enacting dumb laws or inflaming anti police sentiments with ignorant comments, even when they seem intoxicated?
Unarmed != not a life threatening situation. If nothing else, you can use the sidewalk as an implement to bash someone’s brains out (a la Zimmerman).
Philando Castle and Alton Sterling were armed.
Castile, legally so.
Cops don’t need personal insurance, they are insured by the liability insurance of the city that hires them. That is why those insurance policies pay out when cops behave badly.
What we do need is fewer guns in public. Period. The good guy bad guy dichotomy is a bunch of hooey.
and the point trying to be made flies over DG’s head like a fucking frisbee.
What we do need is fewer guns in public. Period.
Except that the facts we’ve shown you over the past half decade have shown that to be utterly untrue.
(P.S. – Writing “period” doesn’t magically make a fatuous argument tight and convincing).
Maybe if she said, “Q.E.D.”?
The title of this post is also appropriate if engaging in a battle of wits – or facts – with DG.
Well crap, if taking guns off the street is all it takes to create Utopia, I can do it in an afternoon.
Get police dispatch on the radio: “Calling all cars, return to base to drop off your weapons, then resume patrols.” There you go – hundreds of guns off the streets, easy as pie.
Why didn’t anybody think of this before?
Maybe if she said, “Q.E.D.”?
That’s three periods, dude!
JPA – 3x as conclusive!
What we need is fewer DGs in public. Period.
Italicized period > standard period. I win.
Maybe after telling the cops to disarm, a public service announcement on the radio telling criminals to do the same? Or maybe even a law prohibiting people from owning a functional firearm. Certainly that would cause crime to drop to imperceptible levels. I’m told that our capital used to have that–I’d guess it worked so well, the cops didn’t even need to carry a taser or billy club, let alone a gun.
Seriously scary that DG believes her tripe, and could not figure out that if officers had to pay their own liability insurance, they might be less likely to cause problems. The flip side, though, is that if officers were financially penalized when accused of brutality, they’d quickly figure out which parts of town had the people most likely to make the accusations and avoid policing there.
Of course, since those parts of town are most likely already the most dangerous for officers, maybe they’re already avoiding those places when they can.
After looking at a number of Left Wing opinion columns, I sense a change in the wind. Last week, America was a terrible place. Right wing corporations controlled our political discourse. Gun violence and especially mass shootings were a permanent crisis. Vicious gangs of hunter-killer racist cops were hunting unarmed black men like animals. Right wing militias were on a mission to kill immigrants.
Then, after Trump’s convention speech, it all changed. Life in America has never been better!
Speaker-for-the-elite Paul Krugman writes:
Crime plunged instead of continuing to rise. Other indicators also improved dramatically — for example, the teen birthrate has fallen 60 percent since 1991. Instead of societal collapse, we’ve seen what amounts to a mass outbreak of societal health.
http://nyti.ms/2anCPxp