Felblood wrote:Where to even start.
Okay first of all, paid leave for officers who have been involved in a shooting is a basically a global standard for police departments not run by assholes.
Hell, most same chiefs will put their guys on "paid leave" just for witnessing a particularly gruesome crime scene.
This isn't a normal "paid vacation"; that guy is being forced into psychiatric counseling. Legally, he doesn't have to accept the treatment, but he can basically kiss whatever might be left of his career goodbye, if he doesn't take it. Even if the investigation fully exonerates him, his colleagues won't trust him to carry a gun beside them until a headshrinker says his nerves are okay. They need to know he won't embarass them again, but they also need to know that if the time comes, he'll be ready to fight with them.
Since he killed someone rather unjustly I'd prefer that any therapy he got was mostly behind bars. The dead black kid is more of an issue to me than his emotional state, and I'm more worried about the emotional state of the family whose son he murdered than him.
If you think public trust for the police is essential, think how much more important it is for the police to trust each other. As much as they might bitch about the body cameras, inquests and ombudsmen, at the end of the day the police know that it takes more than goodwill and hopeful feelings to keep their compatriots on the straight and narrow.
I don't think the police should trust each other with this, they should be worried that if they murder people then other police won't lie to cover up their crimes and be worried they may face some consequences. The blue line of silence is a serious issue.
If a person is the sort of person who ought to be allowed to walk the streets armed, actually needing to shoot somebody in the line of duty will be a deeply traumatic experience for them. Contrary to what you see in Hollywood, most cops will never shoot more than one person in their entire career. --because most people hang up the badge after the first one.
Do you have evidence for this?
Remember that bit in Diehard where Al Powell's character explains that he accepted a dead-end desk job, over shooting an unarmed kid? Knowing that he made a bad call and shot an unarmed suspect, he doesn't think he has the courage to draw his weapon again if he ever needs to. That's a pretty normal response to a thing like this. After such a massive failure, how do you know you can trust your own judgement without gambling the lives of other on it.
You probably shouldn't, this is a question most murderers should ask themselves.
This is heavy, heavy shit, and nobody has any right to begrudge an honest cop the time to sort through it.
He's a dishonest cop, he didn't make a use of force report and so concealed his crimes as is required for all cops after any use of force, and he's part of a dishonest department that repeatedly lied to slander the victims.
This brings me to my other point. This man, even though he is a cop (Fuck the Police, amen.) is still an American citizen. He has the right to the due process of law that his alleged victim did not receive.
He's being given exceptional protection by the police department, he's rather above the law and the normal requirements of the police.
Whatever Jonny Cochran might have taught you, our legal system does not allow people to be tried in the court of public opinion and then lynched by a mob. Even if that man is a white cop, and the mob is black. No lynchings. Ever.
There are systematic injustices in the legal system that lead to frequently harassment and violence against black people and non punishment of murderers that reasonably lead people to distrust the justice of our legal system.
While the idea that this man might receive anything resembling a fair trial is frankly laughable, the fact remains that any competent investigator would do everything in their power to contain any accurate portrayal of these event. That's how you know who is lying, when you find the one story that doesn't fit with the others. It doesn't work if the liar has the privilege of tailoring his lies to fit the other stories he knows you heard.
Something the police made impossible by not questioning witnesses or generating a use of force report on the day, violating normal policies.
The fact that the federal investigation has chosen to keep playing their cards so close to their chest implies that there are sides of the story we have not yet heard, and are unlikely to hear until this mess finds it's way into a courtroom. BTW, those records will probably be sealed, so get ready to listen to your stoner friends' crackpot conspiracy theories about "what really went on in that courtroom" until you die of old age. Unless you are very close to the case, you will NEVER hear the whole story. You have to fill in the blanks from your own biases. How you choose to do that is your own affair, but don't fall into the delusion that the completed picture you fill into the blanks represents some sort of objectively logical construct.
There will be a lot of leaks.
Lastly, can we all agree that the real villains are the assorted muckrakers, agitators and politicians trying to capitalize on this tragedy?
Of course, murdering a person isn't villainous at all, we can all agree on that. The real villains are those trying to bring murderers to justice, capitalizing on this tragedy.
From the media circus the the swarm of race warriors flooding in from across the nation hoping these riots will spawn some kind of nationwide race war (No chance. These are pretty weak-ass riots for all the hype the media has been giving them.) these parasites are adding fuel to a fire they have no stake in, just to take advantage of the public's need for spectacle.
It is indeed likely little will happen, and low grade harassment of black people will continue with the odd unjust murder.
Most distressingly, I can't help but feel that even fairly cool-headed threads are part of the rubbernecking that makes their job so easy.
Plus the way the police keep arresting and killing black males.
