{"id":59514,"date":"2016-07-08T13:47:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T18:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59514"},"modified":"2017-06-21T15:53:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T20:53:14","slug":"falcon-heights-and-dallas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59514","title":{"rendered":"Falcon Heights And Dallas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to take a moment to cite Berg&#8217;s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency:\u00a0 &#8220;<em>Nothing the media writes\/says about any emotionally charged event &#8211; a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything &#8211; should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. \u00a0It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to &#8220;scoop&#8221; each other even on incorrect facts.<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday was a pretty crappy day for everyone &#8211; except the &#8220;let&#8217;s force everyone to one extreme or the other, for easier framing&#8221; community.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n<p>First, let&#8217;s talk about Falcon Heights.<\/p>\n<p><strong>On Edge<\/strong>: \u00a0Watch this video:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LsrC5QV_Yrc\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Kinda scary, huh?<\/p>\n<p>Kinda makes you want to curl up in an armored coccoon, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Sources in law enforcement tell me that this video is shown to most new police recruits on or about their first day of training, these days.<\/p>\n<p>Not a video of a cop settling a dispute between errant neigbhors.<\/p>\n<p>Not a video of a cop catching a sex trafficker (<a href=\"http:\/\/hiiraan.org\/news4\/2016\/Mar\/104405\/st_paul_cop_on_leave_amid_claims_she_lied_to_grand_jury.aspx\">let&#8217;s assume they&#8217;re real, while we&#8217;re up<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Not one of a cop setting a young stalker straight before he\u00a0<em>seriously\u00a0<\/em>screws up his life.<\/p>\n<p>No &#8211; the impression that police departments start their rookies off with is that &#8220;<em>any situation you&#8217;re in, any contact you make, anything you do and anything you don&#8217;t do, can end up with you being gunned down like Old Yeller by the side of the road. \u00a0Be careful out there<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>What message does this send to new cops? \u00a0&#8220;There are two kinds of people out there; people in badges, and people who\u00a0<em>might\u00a0<\/em>kill people in badges. \u00a0Be careful out there&#8221;. \u00a0 \u00a0It&#8217;s a sort of siege mentality.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n<p>Take a little siege mentality. \u00a0Add in what may have been really poor training; the Saint Anthony Police Department <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/justice\/2016\/07\/07\/3796266\/philando-castile-shooting-st-anthony-police-falcon-heights-improper-stops\/\">has come in for some criticism<\/a>\u00a0even before Wednesday&#8217;s events.<\/p>\n<p>Part of that poor training, perhaps? \u00a0 In carry permit training, students (of all races) are warned; handling cops if you get pulled over is one of the most dangerous parts of having a carry permit. \u00a0All cops get cautious when the &#8220;g&#8221; word comes up; some of them go way beyond (notwithstanding the fact that carry permittees are a couple orders of magnitude less likely to shoot anyone, much less a cop, than the general public). \u00a0If it turns out Castile was a carry permit holder, and he was (as his girlfriend pointed out in the video she shot from the scene) reaching for his permit\u00a0<em>as most people are taught in their carry permit training<\/em>, then at least one cop needed some better training on that subject.<\/p>\n<p>Was Castile the victim of racism? \u00a0Perhaps. \u00a0Although the herd consensus that there&#8217;s an epidemic of racist cops killing black people is <a href=\"https:\/\/news.wsu.edu\/2014\/09\/02\/deadly-force-lab-finds-racial-disparities-in-shootings\/\">not exactly statistically clear-cut, much less unanimous<\/a>. \u00a0 All shootings, including those involving the police, are complicated.<\/p>\n<p>So on the one hand, you have a police force that operates from a basis of &#8220;force protection&#8221;, rather than &#8220;protecting and serving the community&#8221; &#8211; more of a military than civil concept &#8211; and a community with some serious beefs over how that works\u00a0<em>in<\/em> the community, at a time when racial tensions are the highest they&#8217;ve been in fifty years (thanks, President Obama, for all that racial healing), in a state where the dominant political establishment is politically tied to both the police unions and the non-profit &#8220;social justice&#8221; sector&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Sound like it&#8217;ll be hard to unravel? \u00a0You&#8217;re probably right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dallas<\/strong>: \u00a0And any chance of unraveling that first Gordian Knot got blown away in a fusillade of sniper fire last night in Dallas.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t begin to comment; Berg&#8217;s Eighteenth Law applies to me, too.<\/p>\n<p>More on the show tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to take a moment to cite Berg&#8217;s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency:\u00a0 &#8220;Nothing the media writes\/says about any emotionally charged event &#8211; a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything &#8211; should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. \u00a0It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to &#8220;scoop&#8221; each [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,54],"tags":[378],"class_list":["post-59514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-ebony-and-ivory","tag-castile-case"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59518,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59514\/revisions\/59518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}