No, but tell that to the USADA and a jury. Case closed.

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.

The problem was ever expecting them to prevent crime in the first place. That has never been their purpose.

If firefighters in this country went around starting more fires than they put out, the rational response wouldn’t be more training/rules.

You know the situation is bad when even the Washington Post is having a hard time justifying the actions of a police officer.

We should hire more of them! People need to know if a crime happens, a cop will show up and shoot an unrelated person! That's how consequences work /s

> Presumably if this wrongfully shot man was "reaching" for something, it would've been a pipe

There's absolutely no reason to assume that. You assume that the officer was still looking for the original suspect, when it is entirely possible that he arrived at the scene and found a completely different incident.

> But we don't even know if he was reaching for anything or what the cop said, because cops lie all the time

This might shock you but criminals lie too! Except cops wear bodycams, so we'll see.

you know, that's a much fairer critique than others have offered. like i said in another post though, my priors are to disbelieve the police. so if they use soft language to say they might've made a mistake, i'm gonna assume they really did make a mistake.

Oh sorry, I responded to the wrong comment. My bad.

I'd recommend you read the MPD general order around the use of force. Again, once we see the body cam footage we will be able to determine if the victim was actively threatening the officer, the driver of the car, or someone else. Probably best to just withhold judgement until we do.

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.

Read the room, self reflect, repeat

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> 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.

This is just bad statistics. The majority of lethal force incidents happen in cases where the suspect was armed with a gun. The second most common situation is where the suspect is armed with a knife. The third is where the suspect was using a vehicle as a weapon.

That doesn’t excuse incidents where lethal force is incorrectly used, but if you actually care about that problem, then you shouldn’t be painting with such a broad brush. When you use phrases like “it’s amazing to me” and use bad stats, it leads me to believe you’re just engaging in performative outrage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

Look, the Supreme Court straight up said it's not their job to prevent crime and somehow we as Americans just collectives said "oh, okay" instead of pushing our leaders to change the rules/training and maybe make it their job.

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.

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.

Police kill about 1000 americans per year. Thats before you count unarmed/unjustified killings.

You could save more lives by reducing national sodium intake by 1 percent.

Theyre unrelated but its important to have perspective.

> Presumably if this wrongfully shot man was "reaching" for something, it would've been a pipe.

Apparently it's a well known fact that people can only carry one weapon at a time. TIL.

>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.

Couldn't care less about what amazes you or not. I'm countering your narrative, not saying the police are infallible or that this was guaranteed a justified shooting. You haven't seen the video either.

However, given that the chief of police knows in this day and age the bodycam footage will be released, I doubt he is making up the fact that the person was reaching for things, refused to stop reaching for something, and probably made some movement to his pockets/under the seat after being repeatedly told to stop. There are many such videos of this happening.

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.

it's amazing that you think this is sufficient for a person to be shot.

do you think you deserve to be shot when you go over the speed limit in your car? that's more dangerous and criminal than what this man did.

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.

You’re right it was probably a bottle of aspirin.

how do you know the drugs were illicit?

how do you know the person committed any crime?

Pretty much sums up policing. They fail to prevent a violent crime and then respond by committing a violent crime against an unrelated individual.

I agree with you, the reality is the police said "stop reaching" case closed