Mayberry Machiavelli
Mayberry Machiavelli's JournalNo one see "Unfriended". It's absolutely awful.
There's potentially a great and scary horror movie in the premise of someone haunting people from beyond the grave via their Facebook and social media accounts, sending creepy messages, posting photos and video clips etc. This is not that movie.
This is an incredibly cheaply made and cheap looking shabby "found footage" style movie that takes place entirely as one extended Skype video chat conference call where a bunch of dumb teenagers stay online with each other even as they are getting knocked off.
You have been warned.
What do you think the odds this story would have played out this way if the suspect were black?
Pretty low, I suspect, although this particular police officer seems very courageous and willing to endure some increased personal risk to himself to decrease the chance of him having to kill the other man, in contrast to what we've seen from most of these other recent stories of killings by police.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/officer-refuses-resort-deadly-force-i-wanted-be-absolutely-sure-n344011
From NBCnews.com (video is at the link):
The suspect rushes toward him shouting, "Shoot me, shoot me!"
"Back up!" screams Kidder, holding his gun out. The man finally crumples to the ground just feet away from the officer in the video taken in the Cincinnati suburb of Elsmere, Kentucky.
Investigators say Michael Wilcox, 27, killed his fiancee in their Brown County, Ohio, home, then killed his best friend in Elsmere, reported NBC affiliate WLWT in Cincinnati, which first obtained the body-camera video. A Brown County investigator spotted Wilcox Thursday night at about 8 p.m. and attempted to stop him, but Wilcox claimed he had a gun and drove away, officials said.
...
The suspect in the confrontation with Officer Jesse Kidder surrendered peacefully with no shots fired.
In the Kentucky case, the suspect was believed to be armed and is heard threatening the officer on the video.
...
"I was trying to open a dialogue with him. 'I don't want to shoot you, get on the ground,' but he wasn't having it. He kept repeating, 'Shoot me.' At one point, he said 'Shoot me or I'll shoot you,'" Kidder told WLWT.
...
E-filing taxes: How can I tell if an e-file site/service is legitimate?
The IRS.gov site doesn't list any sites as being okay or not okay.
It's after hours for the IRS phone line people and googling specific information about this is surprisingly difficult.
The problem of police easily resorting to deadly force should be approached systemically.
There are no doubt multiple factors, but some of the key ones are probably:
1. All the police are carrying firearms when the majority of law enforcement activities may not require this
2. Training and doctrine leading too readily to the use of the power of arrest and physical restraining and subduing citizens when less "escalatory" means might well suffice and not incur the risk of a physical confrontation
3. In many instances the police shooter may not have much or any empathy with the citizen, particularly if they view the population being policed as a hostile occupied territory or if racism is at play, i.e. they simply don't care about or value the citizen's life and are therefore more cavalier about snuffing it out
4. The police may, in general, feel that they are almost certain to get away with a "bad shoot" because they and their partners will be the only surviving witness and their account will have the benefit of the doubt over any other civilian witness in the absence of other objective evidence. This makes them less reluctant to use deadly force.
Some of these factors, like racism, are deeply endemic in our society and very difficult to eradicate. However causes like 1, 2 and 4 can be readily addressed either by policy or technology, e.g. only a subset of police units are equipped with firearms and called upon in specific circumstances, change policy to severely narrow the circumstances in which physical restraint and arrest are used (eliminating Eric Garner type confrontations), and equip all police with bodycams recording every interaction with civilians with severe penalties for the equipment being nonoperational or disabled.
It may take a generation or more to successfully address issues like racism or the class and warfare of populations like Ferguson's being treated like an occupied territory (and being fleeced for revenue to boot). But by tackling some of the systemic issues that can be directly and immediately addressed we should hopefully significantly reduce the incidence of this type of killing in a relatively short time.
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Member since: Sat Jan 17, 2004, 01:32 PMNumber of posts: 21,096
