Biden's Press Conference!

[CJD]

(09-02-2020, 12:58 PM)bfine32 Wrote: George Floyd failed to follow numerous instructions
Elijah McCain resisted arrest
Philando Castille failed to follow LEO's instructions to not reach for his gun

Hell, you cannot remember the shooting that started the BLM movement?

Taylor was killed because of a flawed law that had just been changed. If the lawe said only "no knock" on black folks door you might have a problem.

But let me ask you a question and I respect your candor enough to take it for your true answer.

Do you think Leo's are more apt to shoot someone because they are black or because they fail to follow instructions. 

Like I said, George Floyd and Elijah McClain likely fall into the camp of "not obeying commands" because they were both panicking.

For Philando Castile, as far as I know we only have dash cam and audio. We don't have video of the inside of the car. So when he tells the officer that he has a gun  the police officer told him not to pull it out. Philando said he isn't. And then the cop killed him. 

Was he reaching for something as he was saying that? In the video, you can see Philando's head shape through the back window and it didn't angle down or even turn away from the cop. You can note the difference between that occurrence and when he asked for Philando's license and insurance, where you can clearly see Philando's head arch down as he was fishing out his documents. So I find it highly unlikely he was doing anything other than looking at and talking to the cop. 

Besides that, the idea that a person would tell the cop they have a gun before taking it out, presumably to kill the police officer, is so absurd that I don't think we need to explore whether or not that was actually what he was doing. If he intended to shoot anyone, he definitely would not have told them that. What's vastly more likely is that the cop simply panicked when he heard that he had a gun and killed him out of fear.

I guess you could say he "missed a 3 foot putt."

But I digress. 

To answer your question, I think LEOs shoot people when they perceive there to be a threat to their lives. This is often in the form of failing to follow instructions, but I think race has a hand in it as well. There is undeniably a cognitive bias that black men are "more dangerous" than white men and I think LEOs approach them with more caution instinctively. You can see it with the George Floyd body cam where the cop pulls his gun within seconds of George opening his car door, when the only reason the police were called seemed to be a counterfeit bill. This inherent fear/caution/apprehension to dealing with black people seems to be a major contributor to the black men being killed during their interaction with police.

I don't think this is a LEO only problem either. There is the often cited occurrence of people crossing the street when they see a black man at night or clutching their purse as they pass etc. It's so ingrained in our culture I find it hard to believe anyone hasn't heard or experienced it directly, regardless of race.

If not following LEOs commands resulted in people being shot, there'd be so many dead people. So I don't think it is in your or my interest to set that standard that we should always obey LEOs in every single circumstance or else risk being shot. Police should be able to assess situations for their actual level of danger and act accordingly. The stories that reach the national news fail that test in almost every regard.