Don’t you love how a cop who drunkenly threatened his girlfriend with his pistol and has multiple discipline actions on record for excessive violence is still allowed to be a cop?
ACAB
Tamir Rice! The police will claim everything and will never admit they were wrong. 10 years and they have learned nothing but black kid = bad guy.
Fuck all cops. If a Kid scares you that much ,then fucking quit. Once again, FUCK ALL COPS!
but when you quit you don’t get to shoot people any more.
When my sister in law isn’t a firefighter or ambulance attendant - really really - she’s a cop. Hero or bastard? How’s that fit in your wheel of judgement?
Why are the same people doing 3 high pressure jobs? That’s not going to help with the individual’s stress. No wonder your cops make poor choices
First responder jobs in the U.S. are often very low pay, sometimes no-pay (volunteer). It’s very common for first responders to have multiple jobs here, unfortunately.
Is she also the governor and librarian too?
Ah, yes. This thing is horrible, maybe, but what about this other thing?
What a great argument. If only there were some kind of term for it.
Cop? Bastard.
NEXT!
Please promptly fuck off to Corsica with your whataboutism.
You appear to have issues Mr. Fuck all cops. And you amuse me.
My issue is cops killing innocent people everyday with no consequences. Shot an unarmed person, it’s ok. You can quit and move to a new department to do it again. Rape women in your custody, it’s ok, we will just make a law saying you can’t do that. Fuck all cops.
nah, be like the Mississippi sheriff and execute your mistress because she got pregnant, then be upset that the FBI arrests half the fucking department on counts of assisting the sheriff in his coverup, considering the people who hate the FBI and why, one has to assume they are genuinely competent police
Do you have no issues with this?
The fuck all cops? Heck ya. The same people who say this run screaming for help to cops as soon as shit goes sideways. Makes me laugh.
Rightwingers aren’t people, so it’s okay for police to shoot them :)
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When I was little it was completely normal for kids to fuck around the neighborhood with toy guns. Cap guns, water guns, whatever. And we “shot” each other and random people with them. This was even before they started putting bright orange barrels on everything.
And you know what happened? Nothing. Nobody freaked out. Nobody called the police. Nobody died. Kids being kids. Times sure have changed.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem that skews this thought is you didn’t have 24/7 news coverage shoved in your face from tv and social media. You wouldn’t know if it were happening unless it was local to your town or it gained national coverage.
Fair point. I’m also white so… yeah
news coverage? you think that’s the reason for cops being trigger happy? no, it’s worse, way, way, worse.
go look up “killology” a fucked ideology that is mandatory teaching is most of america’s police departments, whose focus is that everyone is an existential threat, and the police “sheepdogs” wage an unending war against the evil “wolves” hiding in the innocent and stupid populace “sheep”, and that you should in pursuit of purging the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” not be afraid to kill, in fact it’s encouraged
A fucking CAB.
Parents, teach your kids gun safety, even with toy guns. Just because it’s a toy doesn’t mean it can be waved around as such. If the kids learn to respect what it means to carry at a young age, maybe these kind of incidents would be less common.
Blaming the victims much?
How about cops learn not to shoot kids…
This is a tough call… yes, it is needed that cops not be a cowboy and quick draw in every situation. However, in some areas, that won’t work, because the kids will be pulling, and firing, actual guns. It’s a two way street with these kinds of things.
And I stand by what I said about parents teaching kids gun safety early on, especially with toy guns. I am not victim blaming. This is just good parenting sense.
Tavion Koonce-Williams was shot in the wrist on April 1 in Akron by Officer Ryan Westlake, a nine-year department veteran, who was responding to a call about a person pointing a gun at houses. Akron police said the gun Tavion had been carrying was a “facsimile.”
“Tavion is heard multiple times saying: ‘It’s a fake … I just wanted to be safe,’” Okolo said in a statement Monday, adding that “at no point was that toy gun pointed at anyone’s home, at any individual, and certainly not any member of the Akron Police Department.
…
In the video, Westlake is seen at 7:11 p.m. in his patrol vehicle slowing down upon seeing Tavion walking on a block.
“Hey, where are you coming from, can I see your hands real quick?” Westlake asks through the open window as he begins to get out of the vehicle.
Westlake then reaches toward his department-issued weapon and points it at Tavion, and a shot is fired seconds later.
Westlake then reaches toward his department-issued weapon and points it at Tavion, and a shot is fired seconds later.
That fucking exculpatory passive voice again. I am sick and tired of the media’s pro-authoritarian editorializing!
How did anyone know he had a (fake) gun if he wasn’t walking around with it in his hand?
How did the cop think he had a real gun when he didn’t?
Look, you can look through my post history if you don’t believe me, I’m no simp for cops or authoritarians, but this is kind of a bullshitty line of reasoning. Maybe it’s because I was raised around guns and was taught gun safety, or I have a friend who was a deputy (he quit under Trump for ethical and moral reasons), but what you’re proposing isn’t all that simple. It’s like asking someone to discern if a dollar bill is a counterfeit by showing it to them from out of arm’s reach for five seconds without warning them first; sure, some dollar bills, like the one my kid made, will very clearly be fake, but even a half decent fake would pass the sniff test under those conditions. For some folks, a subset of monopoly money might pass under those conditions. There’s a much greater personal risk involved in assuming a gun is fake than assuming it’s real; after all, enough people have been shot by “fake”, “unloaded” guns purely by accident.
A personal story: I’m a paramedic. Once we got called to someone having altered mental status. When we get there, it’s an older guy who’s clearly acutely confused; he came out to the ambulance, pointed at a component on our door, and asked if it was a camera (it very clearly was not) and then went inside without waiting for an answer. He was agitated, talking nonsensically, confused, and not following commands. As I’m trying to calm him down enough to get him to come with us, he wanders into the kitchen, and I follow. He stands next to what is very clearly the grip of a pistol sticking out from under some paper; only the barrel and slide are hidden. I wedged myself in between him and the pistol and blocked his access to it. My partner later came back to check and found it was an airsoft pistol. Mind you, I’ve played airsoft, I’ve used airsoft pistols, but for all I could tell in the moment, it was a real gun. Now, do you think it would have been smarter for me to stop and closely examine the pistol first? Doesn’t it make more sense to assume the more dangerous possibility until it’s ruled out?
My point is that the cop (who shouldn’t even be on the force anyway with his history) didn’t do any investigation, didn’t see him brandishing, didn’t even talk to the kid before he assumed he was a threat.
If we have a right to carry guns in this country (which SCOTUS says we do, right or wrong), then shooting someone for suspected possession of a gun is using violence against a person who is exercising their rights. However, for some reason I just can’t put my finger on, conservatives rush to defend the police in cases like this.
I understand your point, and it’s well made, but I was saying something different in my post.
Hmmm… Alright. That’s not what I got out of it, sorry for the miscommunication. Yeah, cops harassing, arresting, and murdering people for exercising their constitutional rights is whack.
You do have a point. What would happen if someone with a real gun shot up a school, and during the investigation it showed the killer interacting with a security guard at the front of the building, who would later say, “they said it was fake so I let them through”
It’s good to be skeptical but I’ll never understand being skeptical in service of bootlicking. Why are you doing mental gymnastics to absolve this scumbag cop of any responsibility? You’re going out of your way to defend a piece of shit cop while simultaneously trying to find a reason to justify shooting this kid.
Maybe you need to ask yourself why you’re doing that.
I think what they’re trying to get at is that if you see a gun, you assume it’s real until proven otherwise.
Should police be shooting people just for having a gun in a country where we have a legal right to bear arms? No, of course not. But saying that the cop should have immediately known it was fake is a BS argument. They have no way to know that and when in doubt, it is always a real loaded firearm. Firearm safety 101 is literally to always assume every gun is loaded and live until proven otherwise.
If you’re going to argue at least use reasonable arguments that don’t make all of us in the ACAB crowd look dumb. Like the fact that this cop was known to have a drinking problem and a history of domestic violence which should have disqualified him from being a cop. Plus police shouldn’t be shooting people for meerly posessing a weapon in a country where that is a legally protected right. Plus the kid was nowhere near the gun when the cop shot him.
What unreasonable arguments are you referring to? I didn’t make any arguments, I just asserted that the cop is a scumbag (for reasons you highlight) and said that the other user should not be bending over backwards to defend the cop.
Like you say, he acted stupidly and was not justified in firing on the kid. Trying to put blame on the kid is an attempt to defend the cop. We would not be tolerant of the same user pointing to a woman’s outfit in a thread about rape.
I’m not actually trying to defend the cop or the teenager. I’m certainly not “going out of my way.”
Cops shouldn’t have guns.
What school allows even fake guns in?
The lengths conservatives will go to to excuse police shooting a black kid who wasn’t breaking any law is astonishing.
Do we let cops just shoot anyone they suspect was brandishing?
Im not a conservative.
Cops shouldn’t even have guns. Guns shouldn’t even exist.
Sure, but they do have guns and guns do exist.
Apologies for assuming you were a conservative, I’ve seen you around and you do seem to have mostly reasonable takes; but defending cops shooting a kid for having a toy is an objectively bad one.
Agreed that the only real solution is fewer guns though.
Is your suggestion that the security guard immediately kill this person?
Dude had a fake gun, walking around pointing it at people.
You mean the child had a toy gun? What was he even doing outside acting like a kid, anyway?
Open and shut case, shoot the mofo.
It’s kinda crazy to think about, as a kid twenty some years ago I used to run around with friends up and down the street with you guns in our hands and we never got the cops called on us. We were white, of course.
Same.
I had a toy uzi that looked just like the real thing.
I wouldn’t buy my kids a similar toy these days for a number of reasons, but I don’t think I deserved to be shot on sight.
We had bb guns. They launched actual projectiles and looked almost exactly like small caliber lever action rifles. I don’t think you could kill much (maybe mice?) with them but they’d send varmints running. When I got a little older, airsoft became a big thing. Some of those were super realistic and they were definitely more powerful than the old Daisy at the time. We never had the cops called, but we were white in a very rural white place.
Now I feel like Grandpa Simpson rambling with a story that isn’t going anywhere.
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But apparently you want to give the cop the death penalty for shooting someone in the hand, which I think most people wouldn’t support.
I’d love for you to point to where I (as a person very open about my opposition to the death penalty) said this. I’d like to edit my post so that other people don’t have the same misunderstanding.
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But apparently you want to give the cop the death penalty for shooting someone in the hand
Yo I’m gonna need a citation on this one fam
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Oh so that means you should be shot immediately, got it.
Only if not white. Have you seen how patient they are with white people compared to people of color.
White mass shooters get handcuffed and treated with baby gloves but a brown kid with a toy gets shot within seconds.
