sundin13 said:
While it is unknown at this time what role racism had in this incident (as far as I am aware, we do not know how it got to the point where the fight took place), we have to seriously ask "Should police be deploying lethal force when no lives are in danger?". The man was running away. Yes, he tried to shoot a taser as he was running away, however he was running away. Possession of a taser does not require lethal force, especially when the man is running away. I was reading a story out of Camden, NJ the other day and they were talking about the changes made after the disbanding of the police force. They brought up one instance in particular where there was a man with a knife who was fleeing from a robbery when he encountered police. Eventually he was arrested and despite swinging the knife at officers, not a single shot was fired. After the incident, the Chief said that if they had approached the situation as they had in the past, they would have had an officer involved shooting. I see a similar pattern here. It seems like poor policing led to the escalating of the conflict, and the officer deployed lethal force as a response to a non-lethal act of a fleeing man. I don't know if it is about racism, but frankly, I don't think it matters. BLM isn't arguing that cops killing people is cool as long as they do so equally. That isn't justice. Any time an officer wrongfully or excessively uses force, that is a problem which deserves protests and demands for change. This is often the result of a system which needs reform on its use of force and that is what I see here. I don't believe this man needed to die. Let him escape and apprehend him later if necessary, but don't murder him... |
Tasers are not non-lethal weapons. They are "less lethal" weapons. A taser can be lethal. Does that justify lethal force? I don't know. But this is certainly a far different situation from kneeling on a man's neck for 8 minutes.
There's no footage of the incident before the man was running with a taser, so I don't know how we can conclude poor policing led to escalation. Again, the man was in possession of a potentially lethal weapon, and had fired it at police. As for whether or not they should have let him escape, I'm not sure how I feel as a policy of allowing severely intoxicated people and likely violent people to run around with tasers.
Do you think this would lead to protests if it weren't so close to the George Floyd murder? I don't. Nor do I think protests are the appropriate response every time. There is a difference between this case and the George Floyd case. In the George Floyd case, it was a cop who had a history of complaints of excessive force, kneeling on a man's neck for 8 minutes, with no possible threat of force against him while several other officers just watched. That kind of thing simply can't happen without deep systematic flaws. This is a case of an officer who was fired at by a potentially lethal weapon. I think something like this could happen without deep systematic flaws. Which isn't to say such flaws don't exist.
I didn't mention BLM, but their platform is simply not about excessive police force in general. You can read about it here https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ .
