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This is so terrible. It makes me think about comments I heard from John Gretton "Jocko" Willink, an ex-Navy Seal podcaster on YouTube. During the height of the defund the police movement he suggested that doing so would make things worse. As I recall, he said it would be better to increase the funding for police departments so that there could be more police. Increasing the police force by one third would allow patrol officers to be off the streets for one week out of every month. During that week they could decompress from the stress of being on patrol and could spend the time in training classes that could alternate through various subject including de-escalation, Spanish lessons, stress training, etc. (These are my recollections of what he said, take them with a grain of salt.)
I'm sure that a Navy Seal has very different training requirements than a police officer, so Mr. Willink's thoughts may not be relevant, but at least to me they make sense. I would be willing to pay more for police if it meant that they would be better trained, that the job paid well enough that marginal officers wouldn't be hired, and that there was enough time off from stressful work to keep the police officers lives more balanced. I don't know if this would have saved Raj Moonesinghe's life, but what we are doing now is not working.
The problem with this is, even the best funded police departments still suck for various reasons. A great example is the best funded city police departments in the USA: Baltimore PD and Wilmington PD
https://thedailyrecord.com/2022/08/11/bpd-faces-two-new-laws...
https://whyy.org/articles/wilmington-police-samuel-waters-in...
I think Willink definitely has a point though about undertrained and overworked officers. We should definitely have much stricter standards for officers and annual re-certification. Too many officers out there barely know their butt from the fourth amendment. Also, there should be work logging requirements similar to truckers. Some officers work insane hours and are probably barely able to drive, much less deal with a DV call. Police unions should be on top of that, but they seem to be more focused on political junk.
My wife's cousin is a police officer, who was involved in conflict caught on video that showed a great deal of restraint on the part of officers. None of the officers pulled the trigger until one of the people that they were trying to restrain grabbed one of the officer's gun and got into a tussling match on the ground. The officer was gut shot (non-fatally) first and then the assailant was shot (fatally) by the same gun a second later. The other officers didn't whip out their guns and starting shooting the other assailants, who were using diverse non-gun weapons. Only the shot officer pulled the trigger while wrestling on the ground over the weapon.
The cousin was supportive of mandatory instant retirement for any officer that kills someone, justified or not (with subsequent review BEFORE retirement pays out). His colleague, the shot officer, was in clear psychological distress after returning to the force both because he had been shot AND because he shot someone. If an officer doesn't experience psychological distress after shooting someone, I really want them off the force. I think knowing your work life is over (regardless of justification) might cause officers to hesitate a bit more.
Obviously, it will take careful implementation to make sure this policy didn't have unintended effects, though.
This is one of those messy issues that seems to have no clear cut answer that doesn't involve everyone being perfect or psychic.
How do you balance the lives of people? The lives of the guilty, the innocent, and the police themselves all have value.
How do you encourage someone who is sitting in the moment, being asked to weight those lives in an instant, to make the correct choice? The only thing I can think of is careful screening and training. Something many police lack greatly.
Only the rarity of these situations really makes the current situation vaguely tolerable.
In general, I think we should put a LOT more money into the "justice" system rather than trying to get by on the cheap.
Good luck getting a fair and speedy trial in this era of widespread plea deals that are extortionate (plead to X or I'll tack on Y & Z). And your life will be on hold in a lot of ways until trial. And, if you are found not guilty, you are still out a lot for legal bills.
Getting those things right don't depend on making split-second decisions, just society valuing justice over tax breaks (right) and welfare spending (left). How much would it take to require the prosecutors budget to pay the legal bills of anyone found not guilty?
In general, we need to find ways to make sure people have skin in the game. For example, add the option for juries to find prosecutors guilty of malicious or incompetent prosecution. Or, create the role of prosecutor of prosecutors at the state and federal levels and laws against extortionate plea deals (require all prosecution/defense communication to be in writing?).
There are a lot of great and not so great ideas out there about how to reform our justice system. A lot of organizations have put forward a lot of ideas. I would recommend researching an organization that matches your conclusions and donating. Currently I'm donating to Amnesty international as a favorite. However the EJI seems to be doing good work as well. However, judging from your comment, you may prefer to support the Brennan Center which is focused on prosecutions and prison system reform.
Sometimes "Best-funded" means pays lots of overtime. Many departments determine retirement benefits based on hours worked in your final year(s). Was not uncommon for officers to work 80hr weeks, doubling the amount they get in retirement.
There are many problems to fix.
> There are many problems to fix.
You are not kidding here. San Bernardino California is going bankrupt paying the pensions of LAPD officers who moved there specifically to retire. Not to mention all the tiny PDs that are stealing from innocent people using asset forfeiture. The racial profiling by small town PDs that will essentially run non-whites out of town on a rail.
Everyone has a story, like my brother who got pulled over for a "Suspicious right turn" when he drove through the wrong town with my black friend. Or my other brother who got a ticket for riding his motorcycle on the sidewalk without a helmet while running a left turn light... on his bicycle. He got more community service (110 hours) from the corrupt state commissioner than another guy who beat up an old lady.
Police quality is a huge issue in the US. Justice is a huge issue in the US. We have a LOT of work to do.
The whole "more" thing just seems like concern trolling. We don't have this problem because they don't have the resources, we have this problem because as an institution, the country has demanded that they have these sorts of problems. A better way to examine how the machinery views police misconduct is what does the machine do when it occurs? They don't willingly make changes, instead they suppress video, suppress disciplinary and complaint records of officers, and then continue to press charges against the citizen subject of the complaint. That's not indicative of a group that would do better if simply given more resources.
Police forces around the global have issues with institutional racisim[0][1][2]. This global systemic behaviour does nothing to convince me there should be more police.
> A study of police-involved deaths between 2012 and 2018 found that on average, police kill 2.8 men every day in the U.S. The risk of death at the hands of an officer was found to be between 3.2 and 3.5 times higher for black men compared to white men[3].
If you want to talk about something that's effective. Bodycams are shown to increase accountability and result in more disciplinary actions against police[4]. Another effective technique is not sending police at all[5], but rather sending mental health workers and paramedics (to some calls).
[0]: https://theconversation.com/stop-and-search-disproportionate... [1]: https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/07/15/police-brutality-... [2]: https://theconversation.com/new-jersey-state-polices-first-1... [3]: https://theconversation.com/militarization-has-fostered-a-po... [4]: https://theconversation.com/the-concrete-effects-of-body-cam... [5]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/mental-health-replace...
Bodycams are effective, though the USSC doctrine of qualified immunity needs to be revisited.
Agreed, police needs more officers, better training, and higher standards. Another factor is having enough officers to pair up at all times, this helps deescalate conflict up front, and has officers less likely to attempt lethal force than being by themselves.
Is there statistical proof that paired up promotes deescalation? Seems more like an arm-chair hunch.
I've heard from a retired police officer that pairing officers has the opposite effect.
A unioned police officer would happily use that week off decompression to do nothing at all.
OK. If the result of that decompression is fewer people killed because the police officers made poor decisions due to stress, I'm all for paying for more police officers.
I'd also like to do a lot of things to reduce the work loads of existing police officers, like not sending people with guns to situations that won't involve guns. Unfortunately, every situation in America potentially involves guns, so that may be an intractable problem. But it would be nice to start with "This situation calls for a counselor rather than a cop", and let the cops handle more cop-oriented situations.
I don't think they meant a week off of work. They meant a week off of the streets to decompress. That time should obviously be filled with activity that helps both from a training standpoint and a decompression standpoint.
Footage of the shooting: https://youtu.be/r0M6OfQLUGI (warning, graphic content).
This is crazy, the guy walked out with the gun but was pointing it down at the ground. You can hear the cops telling him to drop the gun but started shooting at the exact same time, they gave him no time to respond and likely the guy didn't even know they were there.
The officer in this shooting needs to be charged with Murder as I don't see how you could make the argument that the office thought he was in danger. In the video the officer arrives on the scene and literally five seconds later starts shooting, this is not a "DROP THE GUN", suspect lifts weapon and officers fire. This is "DROP THE GUN" while you're already unloading your mag.
This guy wasn't just holding a gun. This was an active shooter who may or may not be actively killing people. They don't have a crystal ball, or access to the Ring camera to know what we know. They don't know if anyone is in the house. They just hear this dude shooting and he comes out of the porch with his finger on the trigger and the gun at a low ready position. Charging them with murder would be insane.
One of the drills that police are taught is how quickly a person can move from a low ready like this to aim and shoot. It is literally faster than you can react and pull the trigger to stop him. Worse, a shooter usually can kill you before he even feels your first bullet.
To get a sense of this, watch Jerry Miculek do a V-Drill from a low ready. https://youtu.be/TuNSB9jkpyQ?t=66
Try to pause the video after the first beep and before he shoots. Keep in mind, the police have almost zero information about this person's level of training or state of mind other than that he is already firing his weapon.
> They just hear this dude shooting and he comes out of the porch with his finger on the trigger and the gun at a low ready position
So if there is some shooting going on, the police are somehow justified in shooting everyone that has a gun? If this is the case, why can't they just shoot each other first and save society from their incompetence?
> Charging them with murder would be insane.
Uh, second degree murder is exactly what they did.
In this country, the government is supposed to be subservient to the People - police officers should have more legal scrutiny of their behavior than the average citizen, not less. Reread this story, replacing "police officer" with "private citizen". A private citizen shows up to the home of someone and shoots them, then claims justification because the victim was merely holding a gun? That's second degree murder. Doubly so in Texas.
"Second-degree murder is typically murder with malicious intent but not premeditated."
This lacks malicious intent. They DID commit manslaughter. However, there are exceptions where manslaughter is permissible. Police are SUPPOSED to be held to these standards just as much as regular citizens. This is probably not the case, but many police officers have been hit with manslaughter charges in the past for bad shootings. The most recent notable one would be in San Antonio October 2022: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128306894/an-ex-police-offic...
In order for manslaughter to be permissible, there has to be an imminent threat or death or great bodily harm that a reasonable person with the knowledge at the time of the manslaughter would believe to be probable. The police officers in this case will be able to meet every single one of those standards and then some.
Edit Note: Yes, there is a problem where people use self-defense as a means to engage in murder without consequence. For instance: Kyle Rittenhouse. However, proving malicious intent is extremely difficult.
> This lacks malicious intent
How does this lack malicious intent? They deliberately pointed a gun at a person, put their finger on the trigger, and pulled. The intent was to kill, and killing is a malicious action.
The action was not otherwise justified because the victim holding a firearm was not illegal. Even if the victim had been pointing the gun at someone else, it would be unknown whether the victim was themselves only acting in self defense.
> In order for manslaughter to be permissible, there has to be an imminent threat or death or great bodily harm that a reasonable person with the knowledge at the time of the manslaughter would believe to be probable
This is obviously not the whole story. By your framing, someone who breaks into a house would be legally justified killing an occupant who appears to be defending themselves. For the original scenario, a reasonable person would not insert themselves into a situation and then shoot the first person they saw with a weapon.
The Rittenhouse verdict was a sham motivated by politics, and doesn't change the shape of what ought to be. And what ought to be is that if you create/escalate a situation by adding yourself with a firearm, you had better be absolutely sure that your use of it is justified. And that goes regardless of whether or not you're being paid to insert yourself into situations.
In light of Uvalde, we've seen police show incredible restraint whenever an active shooting is in progress. We can't use the idea of people being hurt as contributing to a sense of urgency.
In light of Uvalde, I'm betting a lot of Texas police departments are less likely to give armed active shooters the benefit of the doubt. Uvalde was a different kind of cowardice. Those were police who would rather keep themselves safe than children.
Police pull up to sounds of a rifle shot; active shooter. They hear another loud shot. 4 seconds later, someone is peeking around the corner, their hands on the trigger and grip, 30 degrees pointed up. That's 1/4 second away from returning fire, with the firepower to kill every police that showed up, and if they let that happen, any number of civilians thereafter.
'with the firepower to kill every police that showed up'
This claim is dubious. Police officers in Austin wear Level 3A plates which can stop 5.56 which is likely the round that AR-15 is chambered in. Landing 5 headshots in quick succession without getting taken down is something you only see in movies.
Aren’t officers also trained to seek cover first?
I didn't want to go into that. I just wanted to point out that it is absurd to claim that this random civilian could gun down five police officers in the matter of half a second and not get taken down.
Except in this case, the person they murdered was holding that gun in self-defense from the actual criminal.
Millions of Americans have some sort of weapon for self-defense. That might be a gun in their home. That might be pepper-spray in their purse. That might be picking up a knife or golf club when they hear a window break in the night.
The police shouldn't shoot first and ask questions later. They should always, always, always establish what is going on and who is a threat before killing an innocent person who was trying to defend themselves against an attacker.
The way the deceased goes around that corner, he's not even thinking that he's going to take any fire from that direction.
“ Taking cover behind a fence down the street, Officer Daniel Sanchez yelled “drop the gun.” He began firing before he finished the sentence, body camera video shows, hitting Mr. Moonesinghe four times, according to a preliminary autopsy ordered by his family. The Travis County Medical Examiner’s report hasn’t been released.”
This one paragraph is an incredibly succinct encapsulation of what’s wrong with our police in the U.S. these days. Either this officer already knew he was going to shoot before he opened his mouth, and the order he shouted was entirely pro forma, or he had so little control over himself that he accidentally pulled the trigger before he finished the order.
At the target range I have noticed that police often drill with this anti pattern:
1. un-holster, aim 2. yell "Stop or I'll shoot" or similar line 3. fire a few rounds
They train like this over and over, they never do a step 3 where they re-holster or stay aimed but do not fire.
Thus they train themselves to automatically fire regardless of the actions of the person they are aiming at.
You play like you practice.
An officer in Texas out of _any_ place in the world ought to recognize there's firearm ownership is a constitutionally protected right. There's a stigma of American Police that are trained to shoot upon seeing any firearm. Unfortunately, members of minority races seem to be at the frequent short end of this.
Without reviewing the footage personally, I have a feeling there were plenty of ways to de-escalate the situation, but none were taken.
I live in Austin, swear I hear about SWAT being called for the most trivial of things nearly daily
Hopefully something comes of this awful situation, things aren't trending well. Overworked/misused special teams - almost surely to build a narrative
In Austin you will never meet a friendly cop; just angry, bitter, spiteful cops who are always packing an attitude and practically at war with the city itself. Arguably the city council gets a lot of blame for their own persistent & longstanding antagonism towards those police; the persistent screaming over identity politics doesn't help either. But at this point the situation is so toxic that outside help is needed. The city is incapable of running a decent police force that even cares about the citizens it was meant to protect.
I've only met one cop as you have described, and he was mostly just frustrated because I wouldn't give him my surveillance footage without a subpoena.
What context are you meeting police officers in where they act that way? Maybe I get treated different because my ID says 'veteran'?
For the most part, it’s the same way in Portland except that instead of anger and hostility it’s utter apathy.
From the article:
"The brothers, originally from California, moved to Austin five years ago, after starting InKind. It had planned to increase its 50 Austin employees to 180 by the end of next year, but Johann Moonesinghe now says he is reluctant to have people move to Austin to work for InKind because of his safety concerns."
I want to know what this man was shooting at. Maybe he fired into his home as a warning shot? Was there even an intruder in the first place?
> “He almost seems to be scared of something inside his house,” the guard told the dispatcher in a recording released of the 911 call. “He’s pointing the rifle at the interior of his home.”
> Police were on the scene within five minutes, arriving just after he fired two shots into his living room.
Calling the cops and then walking outside pointing a rifle while firing a few rounds sounds like a really bad plan.