Before the video emerged, there was a standard story in the media about the shooting of Walter Scott.
Police in a matter of hours declared the occurrence at the corner of Remount and Craig roads a traffic stop gone wrong, alleging the dead man fought with an officer over his Taser before deadly force was employed.
How many “traffic stops gone wrong” have there been? It seems to me that every traffic stop for speeding, broken tail lights, or unfastened seat belt that ends in a hail of gunfire should be regarded as a crime by the person with the gun, even if it is a police officer. A badge shouldn’t be a license to kill.
The story does have some worthwhile information to add about the victim, though.
Friends and family members said they believed Scott was on Remount Road on Saturday morning to buy parts for the Mercedes he recently purchased.
They described him as an avid fan of the Dallas Cowboys. He loved to dance and sing, his loved ones said, and proposed last week to his longtime girlfriend.
They speculated about whether a set of rims he had installed on the car subjected him to profiling and struggled to find any explanation why he would have run from police.
“That doesn’t sound like Walter,” said family friend Nicole King. “I don’t understand. These police keep shooting people, but nobody’s got a gun. It just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care what anyone says. Walter was a good man. No one can take that away.”
There’s your explanation for the broken tail light. Imagine being stopped for running basic chores in your life. Imagine that the cop stopping you has already decided your life is worth less than the price of a possible ticket. Imagine realizing that your life is in the hands of an armed psychopath, and running away. Imagine being gunned down because a cop thinks it’s important to not let you get away with having a broken tail light.
I can’t imagine living like that.
Fuck me. People are raising money…for the cop who shot a man in the back.
An Atlanta-based group calling themselves "Culture Fight" quietly removed an online campaign they posted Tuesday that they called the "Michael T Slager Defense Fund," which they claimed in Twitter posts would "put Al and Jesse in their place." The campaign had been online for less than two hours before it was withdrawn. The group claimed in another tweet that it was shut down because of "too much hate from the black comm," insisting they only wised "fair and competent’ representation for Slager.
At least two other groups had posted GoFundMe pages soliciting funds for a legal defense for Slager by late Tuesday night.
America is a racist nation.
I can’t tell if my brain has been completely synched with PZ or not… and then this happens. I guess I’m one with the hivemind now.
Just posted this up. :P
I had a small taste of that in the 1990s, when I was driving a car that cops assumed might be that of a young black male. They’d pull me over for nothing, make up some excuse. One cop told me I was “going faster than she could follow” which is ridiculous, since my car was a beat up piece of barely functioning garbage, and I was on a truly crowded highway where traffic was moving at the huge speed of about 35 mph. I don’t quite have the total feel for it, though, because as soon as they saw I was a middle aged white female, they made some excuse and sent me on my way without even a ticket (since it would be hard to demonstrate I was actually doing anything wrong, I suppose).
I have never been pulled over since I changed cars.
It’s bad apples all the way to the bottom of the barrel.
Sounds to me like the cop got angry that a black guy was driving a nice car and decided to “teach him a lesson”.
The last four times I’ve been pulled over–each time for a 100% legit moving violation I was 100% guilty of–I have been let off with a warning. (That’s in the span of 15 years. I’m not auditioning for a Fast and Furious movie.)
Middle-aged and white is a “get out of speeding ticket free” card.
Press conference right now. Black lives matter.
yet another example of the failure to train police how NOT to use guns. Yes, they need to carry, to be prepared for extreme, and unlikely, situations; but just cuz they got it, they should try, very hard, not to use it. Maybe if we charged cops $100 (or, $1k, …) for every bullet fired, they’d try to be more conservative of their bullets. I know, hypotheticals are useless drivel. I just can’t think about the reality of this “event”.
The bad side of this (for ME), is that it reinforces all the scarestories my parents and others tried to instill in children, “Do what the cop says, whatever, or he’ll shoot you.” “When stopped for a traffic vio, keep your hands on the wheel, in plain sight. Stay in the car, answer the cop, whatever he asks, don’t tell him your speed (even if you’re slightly over), he will know anyway, that’s why he stopped you… behave, be calm, or you’ll get shot”.
Right now, it seems that those ‘words of advice’ were taken by then-future cops, as lessons of cop behavior, to emulate; rather than as lessons of submission to authority and obedience to the laws. I used to think they were deliberately exaggerated stories, to “make us behave”, but seem horrifically relevant, currently.
“Put Al and Jesse in their place”? Wow. Could they make their real agenda more clear, short of using explicit racial slurs?
“
Middle-aged andwhite is a “get out of speeding ticket free” card.”FIFY, in my experience. I too have been stopped, several times, for exceeding the limit (and I was), but given a WARNING, rather than a Ticket, for no acknowledged reason, “just to be lenient”, he said. I was once even stopped for turning on a red light and discovered to have an expired license (expired by a week only) but instead of confiscating the car (S.O.P.), he let me drive home, and PROMISE I would not drive until my license was renewed, while filling out the ticket that would send me a notification to mandatorily appear in Court. Why they let me get away with that oversight, so lightly, IDK, but the fact I am white and male is hard to discount as a factor.
It is, I suppose, to the credit of the Worcester, MA, police and Massachusetts state police that between the two of us my long-term car-pool buddy and I (both of us white men, both at the times in question still “middle-aged” by courtesy) were stopped at least half a dozen times (over 25 years or so), sometimes for legitimately driving over the speed limit on state highways, sometimes for alleged “rolling stops” at city stop signs (at least two of which were, in our separate opinions, undeserved), and got ticketed every time. Which plays hell with one’s insurance rates in MA.
It may or may not have been so that, had we been young and non-white, worse (even much worse) would have happened to us; but at least in our case, our privilege didn’t extend to a “get out of speeding ticket free”, and that’s as it should be.
Half a dozen in 25 years? Places like Ferguson have more warrants out for Black citizens than there are citizens. You cannot compare your experience to Driving While Black, except in the “compared to DWB, doing something illegal while white is the best doddle in the world!” sense.
Also,
Doesn’t sound like this part was much of an issue. At least, not worth jail-time or accumulated fines or additional warrants for not showing up at court.
Just saw the unedited version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccH99yTRApw
It’s sickening. I hope the officer is CONVICTED. The victim had his back turned to him. How could he have posed a danger?
How many people are still defending the officer even after seeing how he dropped a tazer next to the body then claimed how the victim grabbed it? Meanwhile his cop buddies did nothing and aren’t being charged (if I’m wrong on being charged please tell me).
twas brillig
Wrong. Look at all those heavily armed open carry white guys they manage absolutely not to murder.
Warning long
I tried explaining this to my father recently. I’ve been getting stopped since I got my license at 19. I’m now 48. He wanted proof – I’m not sure how you get proof of verbal warnings. O_o
Last time I was stopped was 2 years ago going 60 in a 35 on Mother’s Day in an area “known” to be tough on speeders. I got the usual verbal warning. Driving as a white women rarely leads to a ticket in my experience. I believe I’ve been ticketed less than 5-10% of times stopped, always for less than the number of things I should be ticketed for (driving to endanger, sometimes they lower the speed, driving after leaving court having my license revoked – the cops helped me get into my locked car so I could pay my fine & get home, list goes on). As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten less tickets more verbal warnings for identical stuff.
I used to attribute it to:
1. Hands on wheel
2. Always polite
3. Answering questions honestly
I think those still play a part but gender and skin color play a much bigger part. Those things play a part in my home town and towns around it where population is 98% white & they have a reputation for ticketing & I know family & friends (both genders but more males) get tickets for lower speeds than I go. When I was younger and dating my boyfriends used to get tickets while cops would just give me hand signals to slow down it would infuriate them.
I’ve only had guns pulled on me once (partly my fault & in the end I don’t remember if I got a ticket or if the cop was so embarrassed by missing my hand signals & insisting on pulling over in a safe spot that he called in a -5MPH car chase that he let me go with warning). It has certainly never been a fear among my family and friends in my home town area.
We really need to teach when/how to use a gun to those who carry one for law enforcement. We also need to teach them their biases and work on getting them to overcome those biases so they can do their jobs properly. I’ve been reading a book Blindspot related to tests implicit.harvard.edu which should be part of their training.
@twas Brillig #7
I respectfully disagree. Barring the notable exception of a couple of “trouble spots” in Northern Ireland, the police here in the UK do not carry guns; they have a specialist armed unit that they can call on in the event of “extreme, and unlikely, situations”. This unit is highly trained and closely monitored. As a result, we have far less people being shot by police, and those shootings that do happen are normally justified, barring a couple of recent high-profile exceptions.
Our regular police carry a baton and pepper-spray and wear stab-proof vests. In a country with sensible gun laws, this is more than adequate to deal with the sort of threat a police officer would normally encounter, and polls have revealed that the majority of serving police officers in the UK are not in favour of regular police being issued firearms.
Thumper @17: To respectfully disagree: to the best of my knowledge, the rate of gun ownership by the general public in the UK is far less than it is in the US. Thus the police in the UK are much less likely to encounter a person who is armed. (Not that this in any way shape or form justifies the outrageous frequency of cop killings in the US.)
One of my cousins was having trouble finding his way in life and someone suggested to his mom that maybe he should be a cop. My aunt said “Why on earth would it be a good idea to give someone with poor impulse control a gun?” And she’s right, why are so many police in the US the kind of people who should never be given a gun, or power over anyone? Because they’re the kind of people who want that power and position.
(My cousin is now a special-ed teacher.)
I’ve always thought that the position of police officer attracts, by its very nature, megalomaniacal, totalitarian arseholes who think if anyone should be enforcing any law by force, it should be them. Then, weirdly, it turns out so many of them seem to be terrible, terrible people….
I thought spanish police was bad…and it is….but this shit ^? Fuck me…
No. All the training in the world will not solve this problem, because it is a cultural issue.
I have never been a cop, but I have served in the military, and I see many parallels with how I was…conditioned… to what is going on:
* “The enemy” is always dehumanized (cops calling black folks “thugs” <=> military calling middle-eastern folks “hajis”)
* “The enemy” is everywhere. Anyone who looks like “the enemy” is “the enemy”.
* The operating mentality is always (or often) kill or be killed, except in this case “be killed” isn’t a reality
* Every action–innocuous or not–taken by “the enemy” is presumed to cause harm to the Good Guys. Lady walking down the street with a bag of groceries? Bomb. Guy standing on the corner with his arms to his sides? Concealing weapon. Kids playing in the street? Decoy/Obstacle.
So, how to fix it? If Slager is convicted, then every person who was in Slager’s chain of command when the shooting occurred* needs to be punished based upon how close they were in the chain to Slager. E.g., his Sergeant/Pct. Commander are terminated with cause; perhaps the higher ups will have a letter of discipline (severe censure?) placed in their file.
* This is to prevent them from resigning/retiring to escape punishment.
re Thumper@17:
got me. I agree with you. the UK practice of unarmed Bobbies was the inspiration for my comment of “…unlikely situations” and why the USanian police need training to NOT use firearms. The UK seems to ‘get away’ with unarmed police. Why must ours (US) carry? We so seem to be locked into the “Wild West Movie” model (even though few frontiersmen carried pistols, they used rifles to hunt, but not pistols). Our cops seem to hold onto that model while losing the model of “Upholders of the law must follow it more rigorously”. I also wonder about the DIA model in most cop-shows; where a single incident of a cop wounding a citizen results in desking the cop and sanctioning his entire career. They seem to have been just an illusion of the media to deceive the public that the police are tightly regulated rather than the “thugs” these incidents implicate them to be.
“America is a racist nation.”
No, Americans are racist – don’t blame the soil.
I was explicitly comparing my experience to that of Frog@5, whose post I quoted: “Middle-aged and white is a ‘get out of speeding ticket free’ card”; my “half a dozen in 25 years” is very comparable to Frog’s “four times … in the span of 15 years” (which I didn’t quote). I was presenting the comparison as (weak) evidence that my local jurisdictions are, as regards “middle-aged and white” drivers, at least minimally better than Frog’s local jurisdictions seem to be. I have no reason to believe, and some reason to doubt, that there’s any similar disparity in the way our two sets of local police (mis)treat drivers who are black.
nation =/= the soil
busterggi: “Racism” is an institutional, societal condition. Bigotry is a personal state of mind. “America” is not the soil, it’s the institutions of governance and social order.
America is a racist nation.
***********
I’m waiting for the MRAs to lionize the victim in this case–after all, his family has suggested he ran because he didn’t want to get arrested for failure to pay child support. So the asshats will almost certainly insist that this was the fault of feminism, not racism.
@25 freemage
Haha, good one, surely nobody can be that fucking ridic…..oh shit…..
Well, usually on TV the cops are the protagonists, the heroes we know, the virtuous good guys we watch each week doing their best to solve the crime and catch the bad guys. We know that they only shoot someone when they absolutely have no choice (or, alternatively, the bad guys are shown to be so so bad that killing them is portrayed to be the only option available to the inherently just supercop: Horatio Caine, I’m looking at you). Any internal investigator or external oversight is thus rendered unnecessary and obstructive at best, a tool of the enemy at worst (from the audience point of view).
I wonder if it would help the real world situation at all to have a cop show where the protagonists are Serious Incident investigators/Internal Affairs officers ferreting out corrupt or abusive police, that is, one in which the audience is continuously primed to empathise with the overseers and see bad cops as the enemy.
My impression of the police in the USA is that even the ones that aren’t power-tripping egomaniacs are far too militarised, and have lost sight of the simple fact that the people they interact with every day are not an enemy to be killed and eradicated, but the people they are supposed to ‘serve and protect’ – and that even includes the people who have definitely committed a crime. I think that’s the underlying problem – there is far too much ‘otherising’ of criminals, and trying to make them some kind of external enemy waging war on society, which the police are soldiers fighting against, instead of recognising the simple fact that criminals are actually members of that society who, for whatever reason, commit crimes. When you then add racism, and especially racist cops, into that mix, you get what we’re seeing – cops killing black people for little or no reason because, in their mind, black skin = criminal = enemy to be killed in order to protect society.
Most likely, including a replacement tail light.
Although I’m white, I would like to note that I’ve had only 3 experiences with police officers while visiting the US, and every single one of them was an inappropriate interaction on the part of that police officer. It would seem that in this case ‘white privilege’ means ‘your experience with the police will not end in death and violence. Unfortunately, it does not mean ‘the police will treat you correctly’ and maybe that’s a point worth looking at. For those who care, the experiences included:
– being stalked by a police car for several minutes while walking through a public park.
– being ordered not to take photographs in a public street in Las Vegas of all places or we would be arrested.
– being asked by a police officer what we’d said to a passerby he’d just seen us talking to (we were, quite literally, exchanging comments on the weather, not that it matters).
48-year-old white woman here. I just had my first incident of police stalking, which Anne’s #30 reminded me of. My daily commute is 20 miles down country roads from the county seat to my town. Last month I was passing the city’s parking garage in the county seat, and noticed a police car from a nearby town waiting to pull out of it. The car pulled in behind me, and followed me the whole 20 miles back to my town, which put him at least 10 miles outside his own jurisdiction. He passed up a turnoff 5 miles into the trip onto a state highway that runs directly back to the center of his own town, and that’s when I figured out he was following me explicitly. When I got to my home town, I headed for the grocery store on the theory that I’d rather have any interaction take place in public. Sure enough, he went on past when I turned off.
This has never happened to me before, and I found it disturbing and alarming. I didn’t want my consciousness raised, but I got it anyway.
5k..
Usernames! (ᵔᴥᵔ) brings up something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve never been in the military (or law enforcement), but know quite a few iraq and afghanistan vets, and many of them do seem to have the attitudes and conditioning described. My thought is that conditioning and those attitudes seem diametrically opposed to how a police officer should think. Those are not the attitudes and thought processes that a civilian officer of the peace should revert to in a crisis. While some of the physical training and techniques are the same, getting to my point: It’ll never happen in our veteran-lionizing culture, but military service (or even simply training) should be an automatic disqualification from employment as a police officer. The police are there to protect, and reversion to combat zone attitudes of viewing everyone not in the same uniform as an enemy is absolutely not how they should react to a crisis situation.
Some people reflexively defend cops or look for any excuse.
I was arguing this morning with someone on Crooks and Liars who, while saying they felt the cop was guilty, kept arguing that he was not moving the taser to cover his ass and create a false story…
No… he moved the taser to “secure the scene” – to prevent some bystander from coming along and stealing it. Because he would “get dinged” if he “lost his taser” that way.
Man, am I seeing some godawful stuff in the spam queue. I’m going to post some of it here so you can see the endemic racism.
This is from a banned slymepitter, bovarchist:
And this is from a guy calling himself AntiRacist is AntiWhite. The name kind of says it all, but here you go:
There’s a reason I ban people. There it is.
Holy crap, PZ.
There are no words.
Numenaster @31
Your consciousness should be raised whether this shit happens to you or not – it happens to other people, people just as deserving of acknowledgement, and the fact that you need to experience it to realize that, holy shit, this isn’t good? You need to think about that.
You know, allayouse white folk complaining about having had a few inappropriate and uncomfortable and probably slightly scary interactions with the police recently? Like, 3 of them? I’m sorry, but I’m not really feeling the sympathy or pity on your behalf. You’ve been made to feel a small fraction of what black people go through regularly, and while yeah, the police may be getting worse, if it takes you, as a white person, to be somehow made uncomfortable by this, you need to think some deep thoughts about how you see the people around you, who have been suffering worse for years and years.
You’re perfectly valid to be scared at the police reactions you’ve experienced. But to come here, on this thread, and complain about it like it’s somehow a thing just because it happened to you, that it is somehow comparable to the fear black people live with on a daily basis? Question your own privilege.
I may be reading a bit too harshly into your comments (and you know who you are), and you may not be intending to sound like particularly overly privileged people – probably trying for empathy – but again, if it takes your own fear for you to finally empathize with fellow human beings, ask yourself why.
PZ
Your spamqueue is awfully brave and I commend your filters for holding up so well. :/
rq @37:
Well said.
Black Lives Matter. Even if white lives aren’t affected by the same shit black people deal with.
@ Justatech #18
You are exactly right, which is why I mentioned sensible gun laws. The problem in the US is a vicious circle. A large proportion of the public have guns. Since criminals are indistinguishable from the general public, mostly because they are the general public until they do something wrong, the cops need guns. Because the cops and general public have guns, criminals need guns (if I made my livelihood nicking tellys in a country where the likelihood of a homeowner charging down the stairs waving a glock around was high, then I would probably want a gun). No one is willing to give up their guns first because they would perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage, never mind the actual statistics. Thus the perpetuation of the problem.
Sensible gun laws limit the number of people owning guns, which limits the need for criminals to own guns, and these two factors together limit the need for cops to have guns. Cops with no guns can’t shoot people, unjustifiably or otherwise.
This is simplified, of course. there are complex cultural issues at play. But those cultural issues have come about as a result of this vicious circle being the status quo for so long. Break the circle, change the status quo, change the culture, sort the problem.
Twas Brillig #21
I typed it before reading your comment, but I believe my #39 actually answers why, in my opinion, the situation in the US is as it is.
I can’t see a solution other than sensible gun laws and a campaign of education to remove the cultural perception that, without a gun, you are at risk.
aaarrrggghhhhh,…
note that it is not only ‘the South’, that has racist cops:
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/story/28726120/minneapolis-cop-makes-threats-group-says-they-were-racially-profiled
Even sacred Minneapolis has some. At least they didn’t shoot them (but were brazenly armed), but verbally abused these kids for D_W_B.
[sorry for the attempted derail, just seemed most relevant place to put this link.]
–
re 40:
Thumper, I agree. sorry I did not initially make clear that my “questions”, about guns, was mostly rhetorical. It is all TOO clear why cops in the US need guns to confront the citizens who also fetishize gun ownership and proudly, brazenly, display it. While UK citizens are quite different and so can be policed quite differently. I appreciate you saying all the stuff I just ASSUMED everyone knew. my bad.
Thumper wrote:
QFT!!!
Twas Brillig
Apologies, I did not get that at all! My bad.
This is a glaring flaw in most NRA arguments that doesn’t get noted enough. When you hear them talk about “innocent citizens” and “criminals”, they do so as if “criminals” are criminal from dusk to dawn, a different being from the rest of us, instead, as you note, people just like everyone else except for that <1% of the time they are breaking the law.
@41 It’s getting worse in Minnesota. The Somali population has way too many people going off the deep end. It’s tribalism and othering to its core.
@ scienceavenger
Yes. Both the NRA and the US Police (generally speaking) like to talk about criminals as if they are a defined group of people who are born bad and spend their entire lives bouncing from one armed robbery to another home invasion, with nary a chance of ever changing or being saved. It is transparent fear-mongering simplistic bullshit.
Tangentially related: The NRA holds its annual convention in Nashville this weekend. There might be some related news coming out of it.
Here’s one advance story.
rq@37:
I won’t speak for my fellow whitefolk whose posts you are (in my opinion, very inadequately) describing. But I for one (like Frog, as I understood h/h, for another) was very explicitly not “complaining about having had a few inappropriate and uncomfortable and probably slightly scary interactions with the police recently”: I was owning my privilege (as was Frog, in h/h sentence “Middle-aged and white is a ‘get out of speeding ticket free’ card”). Really, I (and I’m pretty confident other avowedly white posters like Frog, Stevem, ikenklasht, Tasha Turner, et al.) are entirely aware that our “interactions with the police” are much likelier to be, at worst, merely “inappropriate and uncomfortable and probably slightly scary” than they would be if we weren’t visibly “white”; and that that is an intolerably bad situation for apparently non-white persons, which we should all be working to correct. Some of us may even be doing so in one way or another.
You don’t suppose “criminal” could be code for something else? Nawwwwwww.
I’ve reread my comment. I talk about gender and race and trying to explain to my father how it plays a part in who gets stopped and how they are treated. As a white somn I get warnings if stopped. My brothers and father get tickets.
None of us worry about being shot when stopped when driving. I know it can be deadly to DWB or WWB.
I try to educate those around me. I’m often asked to provide proof. The proof I can provide they won’t believe.
Even when the cops pulled guns on me 15-20 years ago I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was unlikely to be shot as a white woman dressed as a professional, driving a middle class car, who speaks well. I knew what to do to diffuse the situation because of my privilege.
Today I’d be more afraid but it’s still nothing like WWB or DWB. I vote to change that. I work one-on-one to change that. I support groups which are trying to change it. I’m sure there is more I could do.
@Ibis3 #27
I’ve wanted someone to make an Internal Affairs police procedural for a long time now. With the way things have been going lately, I think it’s long past due.
@37 – rq
Assuming you meant me, this is a surprising reaction, presumably based on some assumptions about the default position of most white people. I don’t know if those assumptions are applicable to most white Americans. Personally, I don’t know what to do with your refusal of the sympathy or pity which I hadn’t thought of asking for in the first place and don’t need. Really, the mind boggles. And I find it astonishing that you would assume the complaint was ‘about my treatment’ rather than ‘about the breath-taking breadth and depth of the incompetence of the US police’.
My point was more, wow, if they can manage 3/3 inappropriate interactions with a mere tourist, what are they pulling on American citizens of colour? (And that’s a rhetorical question, btw, I know what they’re pulling, because I’ve seen the statistics and the news.) A better complaint against me would be that I have nothing to offer by way of a solution. That’s true, I don’t. Not for want to trying to think of something, mind you.
@cassandraoftroy, #50:
Maybe it’s overdue, maybe it’s not. But for certain it’s not going to be made because of your comment. No one is going to listen to you. :-P
I read this to my girlfriend, her first reaction was that this must satire, making fun of these sad puppies, because no one could be this foolish. I wish that was true. This seems to be another person that watched Star Trek and thought it was about cool doors that opened automatically. It is simply amazing that anyone into science fiction could think that these complex themes beyond adventure and rousing battles, are new to the genre. It requires a person to be ignorant of a large body of classic science fiction, or to be illiterate in some sense, unable to read for comprehension.
Oh dang, I posted that in the wrong thread. Sorry about that, I had multiple tabs open and was not thinking.
@ Scienceavenger #48
I’m not sure. If I had to sum up the US Police attitude in a soundbite, I would guess: “Not all criminals are Black. Not all Blacks are criminals. But most of them are, so the correct approach is ‘guilty until proven innocent’.”
Nah, Thumper. The correct military phrase is “kill em all, let gawd sort it out.”