(06-14-2020, 08:46 AM)jj82284 Wrote:

(06-14-2020, 01:05 AM)TJBender Wrote: If you can't handle thinking about whether or not shooting someone is a good idea, you should probably hand in your badge before you ever have to make that call.

I respect where you're coming from, but at a certain point there has to be some sanity.  Now were getting into "yeh, he assaulted the police, stole a weapon, and threatened them with it but but but" territory.  This isn't a video game where you just start over.  The Chief shouldn't have resigned, the mayor shouldn't be posturing that this wasn't a justifiable use of force.  The officer should be on administrative leave (per protocol) until the investigation is concluded but again, the idea that this is being folded into the larger narrative of "police hunting black bodies" is asinine and dangerous.

There does have to be sanity, and that's why I think that this one probably wasn't worth the riots, and certainly wasn't worth burning down a perfectly good Wendy's over. And it's roughly 99% certain that it was rioters, not "agent provocateurs" who burned the Wendy's. I had the Snapmap pulled up to see if anything was starting up close enough to me to be worth staying up for and watched some Snapchats from down there. My initial hunch given news reports showing the area around the Wendy's mostly clear when the fire started was that someone else had gone back there to do it, but there were a couple of Snapchats showing a small handful of rioters running around behind the Wendy's as a fire was growing quickly in a drive-thru window. So anyone who's going to say cops or agent provocateurs or whoever did it...no. There was a gas station literally right next door.

I have a neighbor who, while a couple of layers removed from the Mayor, has been close enough to see the Chief's resignation playing out. It started the day that officers were fired for tasing college students and dragging them out of a car. She was unhappy about that but agreed to it's necessity under the situation, but was absolutely livid after those officers were charged with crimes related to the incident. It had been represented to her and to everyone else as purely a personnel decision, and the Chief ended up having to write a memo to the entire police department explaining as much, and that she never would have supported criminal action against them. I haven't talked to said neighbor yet, but my unfounded speculation would be that the Mayor wanted to fire the officer in question right away for what even I'm saying looks 50/50 in terms of whether or not it was justified, the Chief refused to support it, one thing led to another and the Chief stepped aside. 

What really sucks about it is that even though I'm just naturally inclined to not trust cops, Chief Shields was doing damn near everything right. Her cops were a little heavy-handed on use of force but nothing compared to other cities, and they're the only force I've seen that was telling the National Guard basically to sit back, shut up, and let them handle it. She's the only police chief I've seen from a major city who's gone out into the crowd herself, in uniform, without an armed escort, and has actually been talking to protesters one-on-one. I have a lot of respect for how Mayor Bottoms has been handling the situation here thus far from a political standpoint, but Chief Shields has done a tremendous job of managing the police response. I'm actually pretty broken up about her departure, and if this does up being a, "Fire that officer or quit," ultimatum, as I suspect it will, I'm going to lose a lot of that respect. Kneeling on someone's neck for 9 minutes should warrant immediate termination. Something like this where one camera implies excessive force and the other leaves open a lot of questions (your body cam video won't play for me) isn't, imo, something you immediately fire a cop over. The Mayor even said that it's not a protocol firing and it may not even be a violation of any policies. It's a judgment and morality call, and when someone's stolen a police taser and shot it back towards them while running away, yeah, it is shooting someone in the back, but if that taser could be used as a ranged weapon a second time that would have allowed the suspect to grab a sidearm while an officer was on the ground, it's probably justifiable to do so. That said, it's the officer's responsibility to know their weapons, and if they knew that taser was a single-shot weapon and had been rendered useless at a range of more than 0 inches, then shooting a fleeing suspect was 100% not justified. It's a blurry line, but I think that when deadly force is used, you have to look at all the circumstances of the event, and if even one of them says that deadly force should not have been used, you have to come down on the side of the deadly force being excessive. If you're going to take someone's life and you've been given extensive training and testing on how to make that decision, you have to be able to recognize all the circumstances of a situation before doing it. If the taser is empty, that person is not an immediate, credible threat warranting deadly force. If there's a second cartridge, they are, because a ranged taser becomes lethal in a hurry. And speaking as someone who's been hit with a taser before (in a controlled environment), that thing puts you on the floor and leaves you totally open to any kind of attack the person holding it wants to employ. If there was a second cartridge, I fully agree with the decision to use deadly force in this case.

These riots, the protests, all of it (except the looting) come back to the perception that police are unfairly targeting people of color, and there's no accountability when they do. A large part of fixing that is going to involve much faster decisions about discipline and criminal charges when someone dies by the hand, or knee, of a cop, and a much more transparent process in publicly explaining why actions were or were not taken. That's really what happened here, I think. Mayor Bottoms recognized an immediate threat of rioting based on this incident and wanted to do her best to shove the genie back into the bottle right away, protocol be damned. Chief Shields saw that there was more to the story and wanted some amount of time to review any other evidence that turned up before firing another officer, and after being told that she wouldn't get it, she agreed to step down with the promise of an "unspecified role within the city government" waiting for her. It's unfortunate and it's unnecessary in this case, because the right thing to do in an unclear set of circumstances like this one is to follow protocol. Protocol says administrative duty, not immediate termination because the Mayor wants to make a decision based on the concept of "can vs. should".

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