An officer in upstate New York shot and killed a teen fleeing while pointing a replica gun, police said Saturday.
Hey I’ll give them some credit with that headline.
Not “13-year-old killed in police shooting” or “a 13-year old died during a police interaction” etc. Nope, they fully went with “Police in New York shoot and kill 13-year-old.” Thank you, PBS.
Also -
The shooting happened Friday night after officers in Utica stopped two youths at around 10:18 p.m.
One of them fled and pointed what appeared to be a handgun at the officers, according to a statement by the Utica Police Department.
I’ll be interested to see when that footage is released and what it contains.
Watch it actually be 3 kids with Arizona Iced Teas and Skittles.
In a trench coat
“I’d rather kill 100 innocent kids than retreat from one dangerous criminal.” /s
You misspelled “then”.
Fuck if it doesn’t seem true.
“¿Por qué no los dos?” - Uvalde cops.
Yeah, like what are the stats on 13 year olds actually shooting cops vs. just having toy guns? Like at some point you gotta realize it’s probably not actually a threat and proceed more cautiously.
Shame he didn’t have a school to hide in
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Yeah it stung me too lol
One of them fled and pointed what appeared to be a handgun at the officers, according to a statement by the Utica Police Department.
If the footage confirms this, it makes sense that the officer shot him. Don’t point guns or gun replicas at people.
But they were fleeing and pointed a gun at him? Either the reporting is shitty or it did not happen like the police say it happened.
You can run and point a gun backwards/shoot in their general direction.
Patsy Parisi over here.
And unless you’re some sort of trick shot marksman, you won’t be any danger to the cops.
I mean shooting randomly is always dangerous to someone. People get hit by stray bullets literally every day in america.
Dumb luck happens, plus could hit an innocent bystander. It’s honestly a shit situation all around.
This isn’t entirely accurate.
First, just because they’re only slightly less accurate than most cops… doesn’t mean they’re not able to get lucky.
Secondly, I’m reminded of an incident I saw security recordings of, from a guy running across a light rail platform (warehouse district in Minneapolis,) dude was spraying behind him. While running.
Missed all of the people he was aiming at, killed 4 people all the same.
ACAB, so I’m not saying the cops didn’t fuck up. (Or even plant the damn pellet gun…) but yeah. There’s a reason that’s the narrative.
Fleeing, and pointing a pellet gun? Not sure I buy the story, based on that alone.
The bystander video is shown here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1188314849017274
Video shows three cops chasing a suspect. The first cop tackles the kid and proceeds to punch him. The second cop run up with gun drawn and shots the kid in less than a second while the first cop is still busy wrestling.
IMHO, the 2nd cop’s shooting was incredibly unsafe since he was shooting a suspect wrestling another cop from less than 1 foot away. As far as I can tell, the cop basically ran up to the kid, put his gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. You can not tell from THIS video if there was a gun in the kids hand, but I can’t believe the first cop would not have tackled him if there was! There is no way this is a good shooting.
Your link is broken BTW.
Thank you. It should be fixed now.
If the police were also armed with pellet guns, this never would have happened.
The only way to stop a bad guy with pellets is a good guy with pellets.
I should point out that pellet guns do not have a ‘Day-Glo Safety Orange/Red’ tip.
As they do eject actually harmful projectiles; they look much like other guns until you get close to them. Reasonable parenting would have included making sure the child understood that under no circumstances do you point that at people.
That doesn’t make this less of a tragedy, but it does provide some context to the situation. Cops are, sadly, trained out of necessity not to try to discern when on the receiving end of any gun barrel. While it’s difficult to expect a child to know not to point weapons at police; doing so is in fact dangerous.
You can’t really trust the orange tip anyway, since criminals have been known to paint that on real guns to trick cops, with mixed success.
Regardless, from a police officer’s perspective, you only have half a second to tell whether an object that someone is getting out of their pocket is a gun or something less harmful, like a cell phone. So it’s understandable why they chose to shoot in this situation.
Of course, if it were harder for the general public to get guns, then police wouldn’t be put in these situations where they have to make life-and-death decisions in under a second, but we have to live with the consequences of which rights we chose to value.
Right with ya, until…
if it were harder for the general public to get guns
Is there anywhere harder to get a gun? Even pellet guns are illegal in NYC. You can be legal in one state, passing through to another state where you’re legal, and NY can take your ass to jail for a gun in the trunk.
So. More laws might help?
Laws aren’t, by themselves, an effective way to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of criminals, because it is really easy to (illegally) import guns from a place with lax gun laws into a place with strict gun laws. There’s also a problem with existing gun laws encountering enforcement problems from law enforcement agencies who refuse to enforce them or who don’t care enough about it.
On top of that, there is a cultural problem where guns are associated with masculinity and being “cool”. That leads to way more people acquiring them than there really should be, and many of those people really shouldn’t be having them. That’s not something the law can fix.
