Police circulate picture of wrong man after Dallas shooting.

[Nuvendil]

Normchacho said:

Nuvendil said:
Sorry if I come off to you two as gruff, but I'm just sick of the outrage culture around...well this and everything else. Seeing every single action of the police, at least where a minorities are involved (sorry but it's the truth), be examined and analyzed to death and almost always judged based on hindsight. I'm sick of every single mistake, no matter how honest or how ultimately inconsequential it all turns out to be, is blown out of proportion to insinuate cops don't care, are out of control, or are incompetent.

Was this a mistake? Yes. Could it have been avoided? Maybe, though it's harder to coordinate information flow at this time, I mean do you even realize how many calls probably flooded the Police HQ at that time? But is the guy dead or even hurt? No. Did they arrest him and hold him all day? No. Did they use unnecessary force or brutality? No. It was a mistake, an honest mistake for which the whole Dallas PD does not deserve all this outrage. And I personally find it very frustrating when THIS becomes the focus after everything else that happened and all the OTHER actions of the Police in the last two days.

And if I sound like I come down largely on the side of cops at times, it's because I've watched as this has slowly devolved into a borderline witch hunt at times. I've seen protesting groups march chanting that they want dead cops and they want them now, chanting "pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon." And I've seen shootings that weren't cut and dry but you better freaking believe the victim of the shooting was white washed and the cop was preemptively declared the reincarnation of Hitler and you had better freaking agree or you are clearly a racist. Instead of taking everything and making outrage out of it, instead of stoking the flames of hate, we should all take a step back and breath and act like civilized human beings?

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Being a cop is very difficult, and very dangerous and for every bad cop out there, there's a million cops working hard to protect their communities.

I'm not saying it wasn't an honest mistake, or even that it wasn't an easy mistake to make. I'm simply saying that it was a dangerous mistake to make that could have realistically been avoided.

Luckily nothing happened, but it doesn't change the fact that they needlessly put that man in danger.

Also, there's nothing wrong with coming down on the side of cops. The vast majority of the time cops are doing the right thing. There is absolutely a middle ground betweenbeing a racist and hating cops. Cops need to be able to defend themselves, but also seem to need to be better prepared to handle certain situations. I honestly don't really get why that's so controversial.

My problem is the context surrounding this, imo, makes this less of an issue than it is being made out as.  And in the case of Dallas specifically as far as their department standards and conduct goes, this is a good read to see whyI honestly don't think they're a problem department like people seem to imply:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/07/08/what-dallas-pd-does-right-and-why-doing-those-things-could-now-be-more-difficult/

As for being prepared to handle this situation specifically, I would say almost no police department is prepared to handle something like this flawlessly.  I just think people need to take a step back and breath on this issue because it often times gets to the point where people look at cops as almost inhuman beings, like some other race that should be incapable of mistakes and thus anything that goes wrong they should be held as responsible as if they had intended such things to happen.  People need to accept that sometimes, it's just an honest mistake and move on with our lives.  And in this instance be patient, this all happened extremely fast and no doubt tied their resources down and kept their attentions quite divided. 

And all this isn't helped at all by peopel  promoting messages of violence, hatred, and open violence towards the police, an atmosphere that's only going to put more officers - the good and the bad - on edge and more prone to hasty decisions or mistakes.