Police shoot and kill another guy in his own home ...

This doesnt explain how you 'disarm' criminals, I mean they dont let you have guns in jail or prison already, so I think that part is already taken care of. We have more people in jail and prison than anywhere else per capita or in raw numbers, so its hard to argue that we arent effectively putting people away. El Salvador is giving us a run per capita, so maybe we could try detaining indefinitely anyone with a tattoo that looks like a criminal or gang member and/or has a gun and suspending habeas corpus like they do. That would certainly disarm a lot of people and probably reduce shootings overall, but how would that go over with the 2nd Amendment folks who dont like gun grabbing and stuff? Unless you address access to guns in this country, its going to be a fools errand.

 

So it is your perspective that we are just letting people who commit gun crimes go and this is causing the problem?

 

police kill less than 100 unarmed each year and around 20 are black. Yes that is too many, but it pales in comparison to 10,000 murders each year.

 

That's not an answer to how you define bad, though. Unless the only bad cops are the ones that kill unarmed people...

IMO, bad spans from cops who engage in retaliatory practices, falsifying reports, failure to intervene when other cops are clearly in the wrong, violating civil rights, and engaging in excessive force all the way up to misuses of deadly force. Cops who observe these things and do not report them are also bad cops.

It's sad that the bar set for "bad cop" is whether or not they killed someone who didn't have a weapon on them. That's a pretty low bar.

 

The thread was about a guy who was unjustly killed by cops.

 

And my comment was to a specific poster about his definition of what bad is with regards to the police within the context of how he used it, the "legitimate concerns of policing."

 

Bad is obviously subjective. The issue I see is there are “bad” accountants, bad engineers, bad doctors. I see estimates of medical error deaths that range from 40,000 per year to 400,000 per year. Yet we spend most of the time discussing the 20 or so unarmed deaths by cops.

So how do we define bad? Everybody makes errors and exercises bad judgement from time to time. Some more than others. We could pay them more, and perhaps we would get bigger quality. But the cost would be massive. We could get rid of the bottom quarter of cops, however we define that, but likely crime goes up. We certainly could train cops more and better. IMO that one is a no brainer.

Was the cop in the OP bad? He certainly was awful in that one instance. I don’t know what his history was.

Many of us have been in at fault accidents. Are we bad drivers? I almost ran into 2 pedestrians the other day who walked in front of my car on the sidewalk on my driveway. Thank God I looked up just as I started to move. I was stopped on my driveway doing something on my phone and then started to move and looked up at the same time. I obviously should have looked up first. Does that particular incident make me a bad driver?

 

We’re not counting the rousting and beating of suspects and innocent people and the shootings that injure them. Some of these are not “bad” cops just people who can’t handle a gun (I’m reminded of that case in Miami where a cop was shouting instructions to a mentally handicapped guy prostrate on the ground and ended up shooting him). Then there’s the corrupt cops who are protected by the union.

Again, too many cops have guns..

 

Those are some good points, and like you mentioned, bad is obviously subjective. My definition of bad are things I mention previously. Of course, you can't equate arresting someone for having a sign on the sidewalk with someone that shows a pattern of kneeling on people's neck until he eventually kills someone, but how many lower level offenses can compile until that threshold into bad is crossed? How many times must a cop mess up before they can't be a cop anymore? Apparently, it's a ton, if not infinite.. Most everyone is going to have a different opinion of what a bad cop is, which is why I asked Ora about theirs.

As far as bad doctors and drivers, many doctors carry malpractice insurance, and drivers are required by law to carry auto insurance. Maybe we make cops carry insurance. Make it super affordable at first, and with each sustained complaint or deviation from policy, the rate increases. That rate sticks with them even if they move departments, cutting down on gypsy cops. Maybe these habitual offenders will act accordingly once it starts affecting every paycheck to the point that they have to find a different career.

As far as you almost hitting two pedestrians, do you think you would have been charged with something, anything, if you would have struck and killed them?

I agree that the killing of unarmed people by police is very low and infrequent given the number of officers and interactions. I don't really concern myself with that too much because although just 1 is tragic, it's not an everyday occurrence across the country. The things I mentioned are, though. There's a difference between having to make a split-second decision, and consciously beating the crap out of someone or pulling someone over because they gave you the finder and trying anything and everything to either put them in a cage or fine them for every bs infraction you can find because you have a fragile ego that must be respected, or else.

 

Not statistically in a country with hundreds of millions of people.

 

Nope, the other side does not want that... they want the criminals to be the only ones carrying guns like in France a few years ago. or name a European country and city that still has gun violence and death. That's want the Dems want American citizens to suffer through here.

 

That's an outrageously offensive accusation to make of "the other side." Dare I say a lie. I ask this as I recall you once posting you would lie if it helped further your party's political agenda or the election of your candidate.

As has been posted on this site a few times by those familiar with psychological projection - Every accusation is a confession. Do you have a response for that? What evidence do you have to base this slanderous fabrication?

 

So you think gun deaths are irrelevant because you deem them statistically insignificant?

 

Yes but killing them would have been unlikely. I was stopped and they were within 3 feet in front of my car. I could have injured them but not likely killed them.

 

Well you could start by defining it ss those having citizen complaints against them sustained. It’s about one in every 200 officers in the only survey I remember seeing.

 

Defunding or defending? I am not doing or supporting neither, I am simply saying the attention paid to something that impacts one out of every almost four million annually is completely disproportionate to reality. There are literally hundreds of things that are more important to “solve” than this, even if every case is tragic.
And worse, the skewed view causes problems for communities everywhere. This is how badly the disproportionate coverage has skewed the issue, half of liberals think 1000 unarmed black men were shot in 2019. And 30 percent think it’s 10k.
https://www.policemag.com/patrol/ne...re-unarmed-black-men-killed-by-police-in-2019

Police being vilified makes it harder to get people to fill open roles which means cities either have to live with under staffed departments, or taxes have to go up to support higher salaries to fill them, police/citizen interactions become harder because people are more likely to be belligerent or simply run if they think the cop is going to shoot them. Cops have been murdered randomly by people trying to “get even”. Cities take anectodal data to make broad decisions on policing which have largely backfired, among other things.

All I’m advocating for is a fact based discussion and not a continuously YouTube or one off based one.

 

Surely you see the problem with using sustained complaints as a way to define what constitutes a bad officer. Who decides whether a complaint is sustained?

 

Depends where you are, many places have citizen committees now. And someone can still sue or seek criminal prosecution if a complaint isn’t taken seriously. But if someone has a better more objective fulsome metric I’m all ears.

 

Florida is trying to pass legislation that dissolves citizen review boards.

 

The poor French are suffering about 1/3 the rate of gun deaths in the U.S.