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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36911 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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On Sunday I speculated that the Dems will use a George Floyd-like psychological operation to increase Democrat turnout in the election. Today, Kamala issued a statement about Sonya Massey, a black woman killed by police whose body cam footage was released recently:

Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve. Doug and I send strength and prayers to Sonya’s family and friends, and we join them in grieving her senseless death.

I join President Biden in commending the swift action of the State’s Attorney’s Office and in calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I coauthored in the Senate. In this moment, in honor of Sonya’s memory and the memory of so many more whose names we may never know, we must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.

The body cam footage shows two police officers answering a call from Massey about a prowler in her yard. Massey acts mentally unwell throughout the encounter, answers that she is on medication when asked about her mental health, and has a difficult time telling the officers what her last name is or retrieving her photo ID. The officers are somewhat friendly if impatient, but the vibe changes when Massey grabs a pot of boiling water after the officers requested she turn off the stove. The officers say they are stepping back while she grabs the boiling water (crazy people may use boiling water as a weapon, something that has lead Starbucks to ban giving patrons boiling water), and Massey says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”. Either because of this statement or because of a physical sign we don’t pick up on the body cam, an officer points his gun and demands that she drop the boiling water. She does not drop the boiling water but instead continues to hold on to it. Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers, with the water landing on the ground and steaming where it landed. I want to thank Twitter user Fartblaster4000 for turning that moment into a helpful gif.

Massey’s death is certainly not the preferred outcome of the encounter. Once the officers picked up on Massey being crazy, they should have mentally decided to leave her house if she did something like equip a plausible weapon. The three seconds that the officer gives for Massey to drop the pot of boiling water was insufficient — of course, the pot was in her hand and thrown toward the officer before the officer shot. Springfield is the third most criminal city in America, so perhaps the officers did not believe they had the resources to call mental health professionals in their place. In any case I do not think that the officers should have moved toward her but instead left the premises until they felt she did not pose a threat. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for crazy people to attack police officers with whatever is around, and it’s rational to be afraid of a crazy person who has a pot of scalding water in their hands, able to disfigure you for life.

According to a UPenn study, BLM may have been the political ingredient that shifted the election toward Joe Biden:

Mutz also notes that roughly 90% of voters reliably vote with their party, and only about 10% of voters are likely to shift their vote from one party to another. It was that group that she focused on, finding that as their awareness of discrimination against Black people rose, so too did their likelihood of voting for Biden. Interestingly, many voters who had voted for third parties in 2016 also shifted to major party candidates in 2020, and disproportionately moved toward Biden.

Concern surrounding COVID-19 caused voters on both sides of the aisle to favor their own candidate more, but it did not cause any significant vote change from Trump to Biden or vice versa. Nor, Mutz says, did factors relating to the economic effects of COVID. As levels of concern about COVID became increasingly partisan, the issue lost its ability to change vote choice so much as to reinforce it. Does that mean BLM decided the election? That question remains unanswered

If the relevant voters are swayed more by victimhood narratives than Covid, this explains why Republicans are bringing up the topic of migrant rapes. I predict we are going to see more victimhood narratives in the coming months!

Seems like a delicate balancing act, because if things boil over, and we get race riots, I could see backlash against BLM that we didn’t see in 2020

This video makes the shooting cop look pretty bad. Not just because he shot her, since she really could have done some major damage with the water. But because the cops did not just leave the room and/or the house as soon as one of them first became worried about the possibility of her using the water, at which point the distance between the cops and her was great enough that there was no way she could have reached them. After all, she was no threat to any bystanders, so leaving the house and then trying to re-engage her in a different way a bit later would not have caused any problems. The decision by the cop is kind of understandable how quickly everything happened, but it is pretty obviously sub-optimal given other options they could have taken. Instead of withdrawing, the cop actually moved closer to her, which is what put in him in range of her possibly using the water against them. The cop saying "you better not, I swear to god I'll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face" is also a bad look.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what physically happened. This video seems fairly clear to me, I have attempted to write out what I am seeing in this video with as little editorializing as possible.

The Pivotal Action: Watch 0.25 speed starting at 10:35

She is told to "drop the fucking pot" a couple of times, at gun point.

She puts the pot down (the things in her hands are pot holders).

She crouches on the ground.

The cops approach.

She rises suddenly, re-grabbing the pot and holding it over her head with her right arm.

The officer gets out the word 'drop' before shots are fired.

I’ve seen a lot of people hang the justification to kill this woman on the phrase “rebuke”.

What does “rebuke” mean to you?

If you know someone is crazy, you shouldn't be parsing their insane ramblings for subtleties of meaning. Treated as incoherent word salad, it means "I express negative emotions at you in a Biblical kind of way." In someone sane but unhinged (which is not this case), it could mean "I think you are a demon or possessed by one".

If you went into somebody’s house and they told you that they had negative emotions about you, would you leave, or threaten to kill them?

This is a somewhat unfair description.

Sure, "threaten" might only imply some future condition. Pulling a gun on someone and screaming that you will shoot them in the fucking face goes considerably beyond a mere threat.

Does it change anyone's opinion on the competency of the police to know that the officer who shot the woman had been employed by six different police departments in a span of 4 years?

https://apnews.com/article/sonya-massey-illinois-police-shooting-911-d311a177ceac567cac58f68be810df79

What is her background? Was she employed?

Don't know. I think she acted dangerously, and I also think the officer could have responded in a different way that avoided any deaths. I vote Everyone's An Asshole Here.

Looks like a bunch of these were part time. The article doesn't say if he got kicked out or what his disciplinary record was like. But if this is a problem cop, you'd think he'd get the cold shoulder before ending up with murder charges.

The downstream impact of BLM has been that it's hard to find cops. Despite pay and benefits nobody wants a job where you might get murdered or charged with murder.

Responsible non-criminal Blue collar workers have better opportunities than ever, young college grads have been inculcated with a hatred of police.

Recruiting is at crisis levels.

How much of this is literally just pot and debt?

Cops usually have to be squeaky clean and those things have been getting more prominent. It would seem like even as the pool of applicants narrows, departments are likely having to reject a higher percentage of them.

I suppose pot isn't covered by the qualifier non-criminal anymore is it?

Probably has a large impact! As would tattoo policies. Synergistic with Blue collar demand: CDL drivers and other jobs also need to be clean, and as that field narrows the pay improves.

Police departments also routinely have financial responsibility policies intended to prevent bribery- my suspicion is that they tend to eliminate candidates who like recreational gambling more than they actually work. But I know you can’t be a cop if you have outstanding title loans, a second mortgage, or too much credit card debt. AIUI sports gambling mostly works by getting people in debt, and with its rising popularity I suspect that police departments are kicking candidates out over debt restrictions.

That and obesity- the police may not be great at maintaining fitness standards, but they do have minimal rules to get in.

It would if there was a full context added to that, and if news media was trustworthy enough that we’d know they’re not lying by omission. As it is, it changes nothing for me.

This is quite the thread. I won't watch the video since I really don't want to see a video where someone dies. Depending on how it's shown that sort of thing can be horribly haunting, and I wouldn't expect real police bodycam video to be pulling any punches.
So all I have to go on are people's descriptions from this thread, and I keep going back and forth. People can't seem to come to consensus on whether it's extremely obvious that she was just joking and thus did not deserve to be shot or whether it's obvious she was acting weird and threatening. Same for the timing of the water being thrown vs the shots fired. Then, on top of all of that, there's more philosophical disagreements about whether it's more or less okay to endanger officers, or the degree to which officers should defend themselves.

If the mostly reasonable people here are this split on the interpretation of events, then I'm afraid it'll be 100x worse in the general public.

I am surprised how obnoxious I'm finding this topic. Maybe selective, or maybe I no longer have patience, with war and AI looming, for endless, careful dissection of such a mundane event obviously pulled into attention for political aims. More assassinations, please.

Me too. Why are a bunch of supposedly intelligent rational people spending dozens of hours watching a video of a random tragedy and trying to dissect the relative value of blame of each individual involved? Pointless. Should I post some dashcam vids so we can argue about who had right of way?

Because it has the possibility of taking a narrative like Floyd did. This is a culture war thread. This is what we do here. What’s the confusing part?

I can’t imagine being a cop right now in the US.

Because I expect better from us. It's true that humans have a common flaw where they respond more strongly to one death than they do to thousands. If you want someone to give money to a nature conservancy, you don't say "1 million ducks were killed", you say "look at this one duck who was killed".

In theory, rationalists are supposed to be better and different. We don't overupdate on a single event. At least in theory. But then we have lots of people on this very thread saying, "at exactly 2:14 you can see where she throws the water", etc... I don't care. You shouldn't care. None of us should care.

The only interesting thing about this shooting is the meta-topic of why we care and how human brains are so easily hijacked by this garbage.

I can’t imagine being a cop right now in the US.

I agree there. Kamala is willing to throw a whole profession under the bus to win an election, damn the consequences. As a former prosecutor, it can't be just ignorance either. She knows exactly what she's doing.

We have some pretty good threads going of people analyzing the bodycam video, and a number of people arguing about how justified the shoot is. What I'm curious about is, which previous examples of famous police incidents do you think are more or less justifiable than this one?

From the bit of the video I watched, it looks considerably more justifiable than Arbery, and somewhat more justifiable than Floyd or McGlockton. Significantly less justifiable than the shooting of Jacob Blake, Quite a bit less justifiable than Lil Homicide, and Ma’Khia Bryant is pretty much the gold standard of justifiable.

I'd say the cops screwed up, but were maybe technically within the law. They were dealing with a crazy lady, reacted poorly to weird behavior, and escalated things off the rails. I'd definitely be happy with the shooter losing their job, and can certainly live with murder charges, though I am curious about the contribution to the lingering unintended consequences of our last attempt at "police accountability".

Go into somebody’s house.

Tell them to go get a pot of water

They go get the pot

Hey I feel threatened

Don’t worry I’m not threatening you, lol, I a devout pacifist. I disagree strongly with your reaction in the name of Jesus, a famous pacifist you are likely familiar with

Don’t use this opportunity to leave.

Use this opportunity to take out a loaded gun and point it at a woman and tell her you’re going to shoot her in the fucking face.

She cowers on the ground

Don’t use this opportunity to leave

Continue not leaving or retreating from the woman who’s house you are currently in pointing a gun at her head while she cowers on the floor in front of you after you said you’d shoot her in the fucking face but instead walk towards her while your friend, also in possession of a loaded gun, watches.

She throws the pot of water you told her to go get at you.

You shoot her in the face

This seems like such a clear cut case of aggressive anti social cops looking for reasons to kill somebody.

This is a perfect example of bad cops.

  • -10

This is a bad summary, and I’m not sure who you think you’ll convince by it. This:

Don’t worry I’m not threatening you, lol, I a devout pacifist. I disagree strongly with your reaction in the name of Jesus, a famous pacifist you are likely familiar with

is reading a lot into her words that isn’t there.

What do you think she meant when she said this? “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”?

As others pointed out, that phrase is used quite a lot in evangelical/Pentecostal circles, and not to convey “I’m a pacifist.” I don’t know if she was trying to make a joke or whether she was serious, but I can understand why the cops might be nervous either way. I still think the cops’ reaction (or at least one of the cop’s reactions) was extremely poor, though the second video is starting to make me think it might not rise to the level of first degree murder.

I saw an interesting claim down some Reddit cesspool that in certain Black churches it's commonly used as sort of a mild epithet when things are getting frustrating -- not sure the veracity of that, the Reddit conversation was truly horrendous CW, but it would explain quite a lot if she was saying "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY" and he heard "YOUR ARE LITERALLY A DEMON, GET BEHIND ME SATAN".

It's a well-known, specific exorcism and warding against evil spirits phrase in certain religious community. And these exorcisms would often include holy water. Even assuming it was meant jokingly - which I don't, it sounds to me more like crazy person rambling - , the "joke" here is something like "I'm gonna throw this scalding water in your face like a demon lol".

I don't know much about biblical stuff, but to me, that sounds like the sort of thing someone would say before going on a holy war, or before trying to kill a demon. It reminds me of the Exorcist:

I cast you out! Unclean spirit! In the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ! It is he who commands you! It is he who flung you from the gates of Heaven to the depths of Hell!

It sounds pretty threatening to me, but I haven't watched the video, so I don't know her tone.

Dramatically less justifiable than Michael Brown, very slightly more justifiable than Daniel Shaver (but only just).

If she was dead serious about rebuking them in the name of Jesus so what? I watched the video and it's damning (cough) of the officers. Just outrageous. I would imagine regardless of political outcome a large number of people will think twice before calling the cops for any reason whatsoever now (which is the only reason these guys were at her house.) In the footage I watched there is a break where it seems they're all done, couldn't find anyone prowling around, and then suddenly an officer is asking for her ID. In her own home. Then break again and they're inside. These break/cuts may turn out to be significant. For the sake of the police I certainly hope so.

American police manuals usually instruct them to check ID at a house call.

Yes I remember that from the Cornel West Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brouhaha several years back, and I sided with those officers. Of course they didn't shoot him.

Likewise when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested after getting belligerent when cops asked him to show his ID during a burglary investigation. That was the incident that led Obama to state that he didn’t know the details, but that it was obvious that the police “acted stupidly.” He also strongly implied that the arrest was due to racism from the police.

Apparently I'm an idiot. You're right, that's the event I was referring to.

It always feels like there are so many offramps to tragedies like this that by the time the actual incident occurs there is nothing useful left to learn. Whatever happened in those last ten to twenty seconds is basically inconsequential.

This whole thing could have not happened if:

  1. A lady didn't call the police for something she could have checked herself with a powerful enough flashlight.
  2. The police checked the backyard and then left.
  3. The police did not enter her home.
  4. One police officer remained outside with the lady while the other entered to check (if anything really needed to be checked).

And none of these necessarily need to be policy changes for the police department (aside from maybe the second one, no need to stay around after you've resolved a call). But they were all reasonable offramps where the tragedy might not have occurred. These many offramps mean that the likelihood of this happening in the first place must have been really low, but also the likelihood of it happening again is now even smaller.

@ulyssessword linked a fuller video, here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HFun2GydGyU

There are no breaks in that video.

For what it’s worth the video is not at all graphic, in fact she’s basically totally obscured at the critical moment (a major source of argument/confusion)

That's good to know. I still may not risk it, though, I have pretty low threshold for stuff like this getting to me.

understandable, I had the bad fortune of crossing paths on X with a video of the murders of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland, the two tourist women raped/killed on Morocco in 2018. My bad luck I had autoplay enabled on the app at the moment.

The body cam footage shows...

Link's down for me. Here is the canonical source.

Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers,

EDIT: I didn't realize there were two perspectives posted. This is the first bodycam only, and I haven't edited the following paragraph.

The first gunshot is at 14:19 and 16 frames. The water splash becomes visible beside the counter at 14:19 and 28 frames. Half a second of lag doesn't require that she was in the middle of throwing it as she was shot (but that's still possible), and it definitely wasn't before they fired.

EDIT: and the second...

Dammit. From 28:21-28:22 she's throwing the pot. She left it on the counter (with potholders on her hands), then reached up and grabbed it and threw it. There's no sound, but amateur synchronization puts 14:19.28 at 28:22.15, which puts the first shot in the middle of her throw.

Thanks for this. I hadn’t realized there was a second body cam, from the first one I wasn’t seeing the throw at all and was wondering how this was even controversial. Very questionable tactics by the officers, but it seems very clear she was trying to throw the water at them.

Thanks for the timestamps.

I think she was trying to ambush them, which is why she had the pot boiling to begin with. Her motivation is likely “being crazy”. That said, the shoot could have been avoided by backing off behind the corner, but the cop may have had other considerations such as protecting his partner. It’s pretty hard to say from the videos.

The cops literally told her to go get the water, and then proceeded to shout at her for holding the water.

I'm normally against credentialism but wouldnt mind a 4 year degree requirement to become a cop, if only to filter out idiots like these from ever having any power over their fellow man.

That’s completely wrong and the opposite of what happened

I don’t hear the cop telling her that at all. There’s a boiling sound, I think, then Massey looks up from her purse. Then:

Massey: “One second, ” and she gets up.

Cop A: to cop B “Check on (her?)”

Massey: “… let me get this” she goes to the stove.

Cop A: “Oh(?), we don’t need a fire right over here”, which I interpret as him assenting to her moving to turn off the stove.

Massey: Turns off the stove, boiling sound subsides. “Let me see” as she picks up the pot. “Alright, OK(?)”, as she walks towards the cop with the pot in hand.

Cop A: laughs

Massey: “Where are you moving?”

Cop A: we don’t see him moving “huh?”

Massey: “Where are you going?”

Cop A: “Away from your hot steaming water!”, laughing tone of voice.

Cop B, simultaneously: “Nowhere.”

Massey: “Away from my hot steaming water?”

Cop A: “Yeah.” Not so laughing anymore.

Massey: “Ahh, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

Cop A: “huh?”

Massey: “… rebuke you in the name if Jesus”

Cop A: We see his hand on his weapon already, before Massey finishes her sentence. “You better fuckin’ not or I swear to God I’ll fuckin’ shoot you right in the fuckin’ face!”

Massey: says something, I don’t know what.

Cop A: Unholsters weapon, aims at Massey.

Massey: Ducks behind counter: “OK, I’m sorry!”, other angle shows she has no pot in her hand after ducking.

Cop A: “Drop the fuckin’ pot!”

Cop B: “Drop the fucking pot!”

Cop A: “Drop the fuckin’ pot!”

Then view is blocked, we hear shots etc.

At 13:50, the cop tells her to go check on the burner because they don’t want a fire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HFun2GydGyU

Check on the burner does not mean “pick up the boiling water and approach us with it”, it doesn’t even mean turn it off although that it implied

You guys are seriously reaching with this.

She walks to the stove, turns it off, then carries the pot to the sink and it sounds like she dumps out the water and starts rinsing out the pot. You can hear the water running. In fact, at 16:20 here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HFun2GydGyU you can even see that the sink is still running.

At 28:18 here in that video you can see that she has set the pot down in the sink, and when she cowers down after he starts pointing his gun at her, she only has the pot holders in her hands.

There’s no evidence she is rinsing out the pot. I have no clue where you’re getting that from.

More comments

As far as I can tell, she already got up to go to the stove before he said anything. He points towards the kitchen, the looks up, says “One second,” and goes to the stove. I don’t quite understand what the cop says after that, he seems to be talking to the other cop maybe, but the “we don’t need a fire” part is said when she’s almost there. And then why is she even picking up that pot and walking towards the cop with it?

?? Are you watching the video? He points to the stove and says “check on the burner”, she then gets up, and then when she’s halfway there says “we don’t need a fire while we’re here”.

When he points to the stove and says “check in the burner”, she’s sitting on the couch.

Prior to reading this comment, I had assumed that the Democrats’ attempt to make hay from this incident would fail miserably, as no one on the right would defend the shooting. Absent a scissor statement situation, I figured the controversy would die a quick and easy death. Now I’m not so sure.

If the Right is smart, they’ll publicly agree that it was a bad shot regardless of their inner feelings, as that is probably the easiest way to defuse the situation. No controversy, no news; no news, no BLM reboot; no BLM reboot, no electoral benefits to the Democrats.

If the Right is smart, they’ll publicly agree that it was a bad shot regardless of their inner feelings, as that is probably the easiest way to defuse the situation. No controversy, no news; no news, no BLM reboot; no BLM reboot, no electoral benefits to the Democrats.

"Yes, we need to hold bad cops accountable. But you know who else we need to hold accountable? Killer criminals preying on the weakest among us insert long list of sympathetic victims of crime They deserved to live, but the Democrats don't care about them, otherwise they'd close the border and stop raising money to bail killers out of jail to kill again. There's only one party that's going to keep you safe from the real threats out there; vote Republican."

Or something like that. I don't know, I'm not a campaign strategist or a PR guy.

If the GOP was smart they would do the opposite. Full scorched earth Womp Womp's.

I can't believe that GOP and friends don't have guys crafty enough to weave a narrative of law and order, back the blue and whatever else out of this.

Don't make the shooting an issue, make the media and Democrats the issue. They are attacking a sacred institution, these hallowed halls of law and order and blah blah blah. Show teeth. Don't be weak and limp wristed. Blame the Democrats and media for the shooting. Whatever you do, don't let the foot off the gas. Organize pro police protests, do whatever. Everyone is sick and tired of this play. No one respects it. People just go through the motions because it's the only game in town and they're forced to participate.

There is no way there are even close to enough normies, on either side of the center of the political aisle, that think this is a justifiable shoot to make womp womp a viable response.

There is a lot of untapped frustration after the Floyd riots. Just like there was with endless sob stories about immigration and refugees. People just need someone mainstream to channel their emotions.

This mindset seems like it could be labelled "cargo cult winning". You see someone beating your team at a ball game (elections/popularity/institutional control) and being obnoxious about it, hollering and making deliberately bad low-effort shots (that still hit) and singing little childish songs about how you are a loser (dragging institutions and values that you appreciate through the mud). You conclude that if you just do all the same obnoxious and self-handicapping moves that the opponent does and that seem to make them feel inordinately pleased, you too can win.

When the alternatives are race riots and 'prison reform' I have a hard time sympathizing with the "high road". Whatever that even is, aside from tut tut's.

This is a very common disease in underdog political movements. Look at the sea of people who want to organize "protests" and end up beat up with batons because they don't understand their opponents are merely holding triumphs.

And look yet again at all the people down thread that want to use civility and debate against political violence, not understanding that words backed by no force are empty.

People have a hard time considering how power works because it's dangerous knowledge that's not taught to them. So they look at what works and too rarely why it works.

Except with this footage those officers are wildly overreacting and escalating a benign incident to literal murder. As a general fan and supporter of cops I hope more footage with relevant information comes to light.

With supporters like these, who needs enemies. The point is that you don't cave in, instead you show you actually stand behind the thing in its moment of weakness. Precisely because it's being attacked by your enemy.

We're public citizens, not defense lawyers.

Is it constitutively part of policing to kill someone because they threaten you with being scalded?

If not, it's not defending the "sacred institution" of policing to defend these officers. I think it's the opposite: if police officers can't handle situations involving crazy old ladies, then this will encourage many people to avoid bringing them into situations, undermining policing and supporting crime. "Should we call the cops? Well, she's acting crazy, but I don't want them to gun her down and maybe us too."

All sources report her as being 36 (e.g. here). She does seem much older in the videos.

"threaten" doesn't really do it justice. She was mid-throw in an attempt to do so.

Is it constitutively part of policing to kill someone because they threaten you with being scalded?

Hard to tell if this is a rhetorical question, but in the interests of speaking plainly: Yea, of course. Police officers killing people who attempt to harm them is a shitty system, but it's better than all the alternatives.

You can argue that policing is better this way, but in the context of that discussion, my point was that you don't have to oppose the institution of policing to think that the officer should have acted differently.

Most people would prefer the police shooting someone than being scalded, yes. I don't know how or if that fits your 'constitutional' priors.

Policing is whatever it has become. Its sanctity lies in its foundations and principles, not individual events.

Policing in the US has degenerated a lot to face third world challenges. Sometimes old ladies get shot. The police are still sacred, though, for all the old ladies that don't get shot. Or so goes the tale of why we need police in the first place.

Constitutive, not constitutional.

Its sanctity lies in its foundations and principles, not individual events.

Exactly my point. It's not defending the foundations and principles of policing to defend each and every thing that police officers do. That's like, given an incompetent president, saying "I'm rallying round democracy."

Note I'm also not criticising US policing in general. I don't know the statistics well enough, and I suspect even they skirt over a lot of circumstances. For all I know, maybe more info. will come to light that exonerates this officer. What I can say is that, from the info provided, he acted incompetently (I see no evidence of racism, personal vendetta etc.) and unfortunately if you act incompetently when wielding a gun, you can end up going to prison. Maybe his hormones were wrong that day. Maybe he found out that morning that he was being cucked. That's tough on police officers, but it's the law, and it's that way for a reason.

You are defending the foundations and principles when you stand against politically motivated mass media attempts at smearing and weakening the institution. You do the opposite when you don't. Officers will make mistakes. You don't crucify those who make them in media.

If the institution itself is deteriorated and bad, you need to cast a light on that, but the fake news narrative of racist police and black victims is a lie, so this event is very clearly not it.

I disagree. Egregious violations of public trust should not be glossed over or hidden for political reasons. That's the essence of corruption. A "moment of weakness" is an understatement here.

I am not advocating some bizarre defunding or excoriation of law enforcement as a social institution. I am suggesting that to condone wanton abuse of life-and-death power and reckless escalation is irresponsibly dangerous, immoral, and corrupt. Thus my desire that there is more to the story.

How would you suggest "standing by" the officer(s) here if what we see is an accurate depiction of events? Would any behavior by a police officer cause you to question his/her judgment or censure/punish/fire/prosecute?

I disagree. Egregious violations of public trust should not be glossed over or hidden for political reasons.

No one said this should be done. No one said this should be 'condoned', no one said anything about what you advocate.

By the same token I can accuse you of a similar thing. Hyperbolizing an event like this in an effort to throw a bunch of gasoline on an ACAB fire and then say you back the boys in blue. Which seems counter intuitive to me, but you do you.

You can stand by officers in cases like these by letting due process run its course, or by recognizing these cases as statistical outliers, or by recognizing that policing a third world population with a first world police force simply doesn't work. Not by swirling around in a media fueled frenzy. If your takeaway from any of the previous media fueled ACAB frenzies was that policing got improved or things got better in some way I'm not sure what planet you are coming from.

You and I are talking (typing) at cross-purposes. And for my part I'm not "accusing" you of anything, except possible pointless hostility. Maybe not even that. You're looking at this as a political strategist. I'm simply making a comment in due process and justice (though again, I don't yet know what that should be as I just clicked in and still haven't watched the full video and do not necessarily think my armchair opinion should be the last word anyway. I've made that caveat.). I agree that releasing this footage was shittily political.

You and I are talking (typing) at cross-purposes. And for my part I'm not "accusing" you of anything, except possible pointless hostility.

You wrote: "I disagree. Egregious violations of public trust should not be glossed over or hidden for political reasons." Insinuating I believe or said something to the tune that glossing over violations of public trust is preferable or in some way good. I did not say anything of the sort. I would in fact argue that it's near impossible for the public to determine whether something was a violation or not in a media landscape as toxic as the one we have.

How do you want me to reply to such behavior on your part? You do this again here:

I agree that releasing this footage was shittily political.

I never said anything about releasing the footage or not. Like, what are you doing?

But enough of that. You replied to a comment of mine that was very expressly about the political angle of this. You take a personal stance. My point would be that your personal stance is counterproductive to your stated support of the police. Your personal feelings towards a specific incident are irrelevant. The broader context is shaped by a political media machine that is propping up specific cases at specific times for their own gain.

If you don't realize that political reality I don't know what to tell you. Why bother stating your political stance of generally favoring the police if you don't care enough to stand against a force that very recently dealt some very serious blows to policing in the US off the back of exactly this type of situation?

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But that we are spending this amount of time taking about it is a problem. Bad case of the Chinese robber fallacy.

Honestly that’s a bad question. I don’t think the court of public opinion is the place to try these kinds of issues. Most people don’t have the background to even begin to assess whether or not it’s a “good shoot” or not. So allowing the institution to be dragged before the court of public opinion to score political points is not going to do good, and in fact erodes the credibility and legitimacy of that institution. There’s no gain to be made for police to be judged by Monday Quarterbacks who have no understanding of the work involved and can sit around in air conditioned homes and offices playing the videos and debating what the officers who had mere seconds to decide on their actions and carry them out in a situation full of unknowns.

I think review boards are a better bet. They would know what the risks are, what the procedures are, and any other factors influencing the event. They could actually talk to the officers and dispatch and get a much firmer grasp of the entire situation. The best civilians can do is “they shouldn’t have done that” based on movies, tv shows, and political commentary.

Sure, and I didn't say public opinion was the proper forum Certainly the footage being released was a devious political maneuver. Transparently. I'm not suggesting otherwise.

But I think that’s exactly how to defend the institution. The issue isn’t the shooting and the debate about the shooting, the issue is an attempt to discredit the institution by dragging an incident to the public square completely without context and using it to heavily imply that cops make a sport of this kind of thing. I think defending the institution requires making exactly that point. We, as the general public, have no background for understanding this. Even the participants are unknown. This woman might have a long history of attacking people. This might be a neighborhood full of drug users and dealers. There might have been things happening before the recording started.

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My takeaway is that Kamala would love to see more 2020 riots if it helps her win the election. Republicans, instead of joining the anti-police bandwagon as they were so eager to do in 2020, should simply ignore and move on.

If pressed, they can talk about the innocent people that Kamala railroaded when she was a prosecutor: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html

There's no need to pretend to have a good faith conversation about topics that were clearly raised in bad faith. And you will never win elections if you play the game on the other side's turf.

Republicans, instead of joining the anti-police bandwagon as they were so eager to do in 2020, should simply ignore and move on.

Oh, I was thinking of responses along the line of “Yeah, looks like a bad shot. But the justice system is already on it,” followed by pretty much ignoring it. But I’m starting to reconsider the effectiveness of that approach given that “no controversy, no news” seems to have been dead wrong with regard to George Floyd. I still think quickly agreeing with the complaint and then ignoring it is smarter than defending the shot though.

I definitely agree there. Defending the shot is the worst possible play. Any time spent litigating and arguing these incidents just makes them grow stronger.

From the NY Times article, here are several of her convictions which violate ethics and may have sent innocent people to rot in prison for decades:

Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases. Consider George Gage, an electrician with no criminal record who was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who reported the allegations years later. The case largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony and Mr. Gage was convicted.

Afterward, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence, including medical reports indicating that the stepdaughter had been repeatedly untruthful with law enforcement. Her mother even described her as “a pathological liar” who “lives her lies.”

In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.

The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.

That case is not an outlier. Ms. Harris also fought to keep Daniel Larsen in prison on a 28-year-to-life sentence for possession of a concealed weapon even though his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence. Relying on a technicality again, Ms. Harris argued that Mr. Larsen failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion. (This time, she lost.)

She also defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial. She relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office.

And then there’s Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Times’s exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.)

Trump was pro-Floyd. Didn’t make a difference

The initial reaction to George Floyd was universal condemnation. I watched Sean Fuckin' Hannity talk about how terrible it was and how his MMA training (lol) would never have allowed him to do that kind of blood choke for that amount of time the night it happened. This did not succeed in preventing riots. The riots preceded the right coming up with reasons that it's actually fine for cops to kneel on necks for nine minutes.

Huh, looking back through old stories and discussion boards, it appears I misremembered the timeline. For example, /r/themotte’s initial thread was pretty unanimously condemnatory. One user’s comment actually makes my original response to @coffee_enjoyer look pretty hopelessly naive (bolding added):

The George Floyd incident is notable in that it appears to be far more uncontroversial than other police-killing-black-man incidents. The use of force depicted in the video seems clearly unwarranted, and the non-controversy appears to be reflected in widespread condemnation across the political spectrum. SSC readers (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) may recognize this as a situation where the story will not last very long in the collective consciousness because there is little controversy to fight over. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially if this particular incident is able to spur political reforms more effectively than previous ones over which there was more controversy due to lack of complete video documentation, lack of >99% proof that force was unreasonably used, etc. If that is the case, it may provide the lesson that consensus-building, rather than encouraging controversy and (sometimes seemingly intentionally) alienating others is the surer path to political reforms. I am reminded of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, where the events that seemed to have the greatest impact on public were those such as horrific lynching or police brutality against peaceful protestors which couldn’t possibly admit of any mitigating explanation and thus were not open to differential interpretation along partisan lines.

I remember it being the opposite in my spaces (admittedly very martial arts focused). Nobody could reliably recreate a strangulation from that position even if it is a highly uncomfortable position

Chapeau to you for the double check. Seriously, I appreciate the effort and lack of combativeness. The only reason I remembered it the way I do is because I was one of people that was initially on the total condemnation route and started to rationalize it after my town got jacked up by riots. Pretty hard to consider myself cleanly rational on the matter when I think about the reaction and then the rereaction.

My reaction was condemning until more information came out, such as the bodycam footage that painted a very different picture.

Unfortunate that the liberal court didn’t allow the bodycam footage be to used as evidence for no reason outside of that it would have been exculpatory, but letting Chauvin walk would’ve inflamed things quite a bit I guess

I had been a regular Reason reader since the early 2010s, so I had seen plenty of stories of police officers getting away with all manner of brutality, theft, murder, etc., directed at people of all races. Thanks to that background, I mostly remember being annoyed that Floyd’s death was instantly chalked up to racism, before being thoroughly pissed at TPTB for siding with the rioters while at the same time enforcing/defending onerous Covid restrictions. I didn’t care enough about the incident itself to bother forming any firm opinions, so my memory of the immediate reactions was apparently pretty hazy. In 2020, my anger about everything Covid-related took precedence over everything else.

Everyone is currently participating in a story by a maximally sensationalist, pulpy writer. The cop was possessed by a demon, intent on causing a toxoplasmic event, and it has at least partially achieved its ends before moving on. The shamanistic religions are onto something about mentally unstable people picking up on psycho-spiritual forces.

Yeah, I'm hinting at that here and I'm kind of joking... but this really is wild. The woman says, "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" and he immediately threatens to shoot her in the face and then does so. It's the kind of thing that makes a man wonder.

He literally has a demonic sigil etched into his forearm. I don’t buy any of that “Norse good luck navigation charm” stuff. I’ve seen actual people from Scandinavia freak out when they see that thing. It’s designed to summon an entity.

I don’t recognize the symbol. What is it?

The Aegishjalmur, sort of a neo-pagan symbol based on archeological evidence of similar symbols in pre-Christian Scandinavia.

My googling says it’s nothing about “summoning” but rather a ward of protection

I never said otherwise, I don't agree with the above guy about it "summoning". Its more that it might not really be historically accurate. I've also heard whispers that the vaunted Valknut doesn't really mean "fallen in battle" that interpretation was popularized by neo-pagans and passed off as historically meaningful in much the same way lots of druid/wiccan stuff is.

The honestly more interesting thing is how these symbols always seem to make it to the stage where they get tattooed onto military-esque people as sort of a mysticism/act of belonging/deeper symbolism. Must be a symptom of people's craving for deeper meaning.

I'm a believer and I would assume someone who shouted that unbidden was at the very least highly unstable, and probably about to do something rash.

Knowing nothing but the "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" quote, it reads to me as a threat (likely very dependent on tone). It comes across like trying to cast out a demon, and search results show no shortage of crazy (psychosis, often drug-involved) people who have engaged in violence to do so.

If someone yelled that at me randomly, I would at least be alert that violence might follow.

That said, leaving would have seemingly worked too.

I am once again reminded that I do not need to pick a good guy in any given engagement. I can think of quite a few off-ramps and alternatives that the police could have selected at any point, such as turning off the stove themselves rather than commanding the resident to do so. I can think of approaches after that mistake that likely would have worked. I can suggest that screaming that you'll shoot someone in the face is probably not a great approach regardless of the situation you're encountering. None of that actually moves me to be all that sympathetic to the victim, if I'm being honest. I look around that house, look at the interaction, and just feel some gross combination of pity and contempt for the deceased. I wish the police would do better and I generally don't like them very much, but that's pretty easy for me to say when I don't have to deal with this bullshit a dozen times a day.

There should be a lot of distance between "this is a bad shoot, the cop should be prosecuted" (maybe? but a pot of boiling water definitely counts as a threat of "great bodily harm"...) versus the hopefully less controversial "this is a bad shoot, the cop should never hold a gun again after being fired and his replacement should be trained much better". Screaming that you'll "shoot you right in your fucking face" is not how you deescalate the muttering person, screaming "drop the fucking pot" is not the order you give when you think that flying boiling water is a danger, and walking closer to the threat is not the way you keep everybody safe when you have a long range weapon and the threat is a heavy object held in the hands of a non-professional-shotputter.

EDIT: To give this post more substance, I'm going to add a breakdown that I wrote for a reply further down. This is a timeline of events as I see them, which seems to demonstrate that the woman threw the pot of boiling water at the officers prior to being shot:

Tmestamps are from this video if you want to check it yourself: https://youtube.com/watch?v=U2rMB2fYjuY&rco=1&ab_channel=PoliceActivity

10:37: She clearly takes both hands off the pot and raises them above her head.

10:38: She crouches behind the counter. The pot is visible on the stove. She is no longer holding the pot.

The bodycam is briefly blocked by the officer's arm.

10:40: She is now standing up again and she seems to have picked the pot back up and is now hoisting it over her head. To repeat, she put the pot down, crouched down, took cover, stood back up, and then picked the pot back up again, holding it above her head. I cannot imagine any reason she would have for hoisting a pot of boiling water over her head except to throw it.

also 10:40: The pot leaves her hands. Roughly simultaneously, the officer shoots her. It's hard to tell the exact timeline of events, except...

10:41: The pot lands on the chair in front of her. For this to happen, it must have had considerable forward momentum. It looks to me like she had at least begun to throw the pot when the bullet connected. If not then it should have landed on top of her, not on the chair in front of her.

It's possible (again, hard to break down this 1-second period from Youtube footage) that the cop interrupted her throw by shooting her, which means it quite possibly could have had more momentum if he hadn't shot her. If so, it's possible that if he hadn't shot her it would have hit him and inflicted life-ruining burns. It's also possible he didn't shoot until after she completed her throw, in which case it wouldn't have hit him regardless. Either way, it's clear that she had attempted to inflict life-ruining injuries on him at the time she was shot.

Original unedited post begins here.

Since there seems to be a lot of back-and-forth on this point I want to add my take to what I see as the correct side. I watched the video in slow motion, and this woman clearly tried to attack the cops with boiling water. Boiling water is extremely dangerous and is capable of inflicting permanent disfiguring injuries. The woman attacked the cops before any shots were fired, and that makes the shots justified. Her death was her own fault.

Once you attack someone in a manner that could plausibly inflict a serious injury, they are justified in immediately killing you. Yes even if they're a cop. Them that take the sword shall perish by the sword.

It bothers me a lot that some people seem to expect cops to de-escalate after they've already been attacked. That's ridiculous. Cops aren't Superman, they can't just stand there taking unlimited punishment until their attackers run out of steam and then execute a flawless nonlethal takedown. Cops are fragile human beings. Any attack could kill or cripple them. Every weapon is a deadly weapon.

I would rather see ten guilty people gunned down by cops than one innocent person injured. There should be zero tolerance for any aggression of any kind, ever, no exceptions, the end.

Was the gun pointed at her face before she made any actions that could be considered threatening by a reasonable person? They inarguably suggested she go to go to the fully loaded pot, which adds a wrinkle. However, I have heard that in revival churches saying "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" precedes throwing water. I have no idea how true this is.

AFAIKT, the cop said "I'll shoot you in the fucking face", then he points a gun at her face, only then does she start to panic/ duck cover, then grabs the pot, then the cop advances, then she throws boiling water, and finally she is shot.

The trial will be interesting. I think the defense can weave a narrative of a credible verbal threat of physical harm, then not obeying commands (perhaps for the second time), then the assailant is shot in the middle of an attack. The prosecution will tell a story about directing her towards the pot, then telling her to get away from it, she demurs, then cops threaten to kill her and dramatically escalate, and she is starts reasonably fearing for her life.

Why do American cops scream so much? He's already got a bead drawn on her, what's the point of shouting to the point where both of them get an adrenaline spike that impairs their judgement? That's how poor Daniel Shaver died, and it looks like that's how Sonya died as well.

Daniel Shaver

Without a doubt the most disturbing video I have ever seen. It's a sadist executing an incredibly scared young man.

They're trained to.

Terrible training, mostly.

The median European cop spends far more time training than the median American officer.

How did American police end up there? Funding misallocation? Workplace culture? Lack of traditions?

It's not like Euros have a lot more money or time to throw around.

I buy the idea that American cops are more twitchy because everyone is potentially packing, but you'd think that would make them want to train even harder.

A few main things -

1.) Lots and lots of smaller departments, where a combination of nepotism/corruption and just a need for bodies create lower standards. I think while there are some specific pretty terrible big city PD's, the worse police departments in medium and small towns and cities across America, where they truly are unaccountable and incesteous, while having immense power.

2.) A non-professional culture - From what I've seen, European's treat the job of police as yes, something admirable, but it's still a job and one you need the right qualifications and training for. In the US, as I think somebody said, it's basically a place where non-college educated men can make good wages and be respected in society, and not much else. Obvious, there's the matter of the number of guns, but looks at the difference between the median UK or European police officer's uniform and a US police officer's.

3.) Post 9/11 worship - People might forget/not know this, but there were police scandals in the 90's and some pushes for reform, and the median view of the police was something like NYPD Blue - there were good and bad cops, and so on. 9/11 meant it became basically impossible to question anything any cop did for a decade plus, and then another five years for said questioning to reach a critical mass, due to social media.

4.) People like having the thugs around - You sometimes see this in this place, and just in wider America - people who don't think they'll ever have to deal with cops don't mind the proles getting what they deserve, including at times, other proles.

You know, it would be interesting to at least entertain some of there structural differences as possible reforms to the American system. I know some towns love the local control of their police -- ticket revenue, quiet suburbs with fast response times, and so forth. What would folding them all under (partial?) state-level control look like? Or standardizing the training and professionalism? Intentionally shuffling officers around might improve uniformity and make corruption more difficult (although I suppose that didn't work for the Catholic clergy). Or enforcing weekly gun training -- not just firing and handling, also rapid decision-making.

But I also realize that I'm not knowledgeable enough to have confidence in any of these. Is there literature or trial studies for making these sorts of changes?

Somehow preventing cops with bad records from just transferring to the next town over would be a great start, but the details would need to be thought through carefully and the implementation would be tricky. Having a special state prosecutor investigate all incidents of suspected police misconduct would probably also help, since local police departments and local prosecutors’ offices usually have fairly incestuous relationships.

I think a reasonable assumption of the presence of firearms in every encounter, due to the US being the US, means there's inherently higher tension and more reasonable cops get deterred from the career.

the difference between the median UK or European police officer's uniform and a US police officer's.

Looks pretty similar, except for the high visibility vest, but do you have less superficial info than me?

Random US: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c4635ee41d8d1fb890d78a62d15268a7-lq

Random UK https://spf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/B_15674-scaled.jpg

Ben Crump, one of the most influential men in America, has picked up the case so expect the Democrats to continue to make noise about this.

That being said the policeman should have gone and turned off the stove himself given he had a partner there.

Although I agree with several commenters below that I think the cops dramatically overreacted to a perceived threat which was, in the scheme of things, rather minor, and won't be losing any sleep if they're indicted for murder, I will say one thing in criticism of Massey: even if intended in jest, saying something like "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ" while holding a pot of scalding water is a very foolish thing to say to two police officers who know essentially nothing about you.

Foolish in the sense that a motorcyclist who doesn't anticipate a car cutting him off is foolish, sure.

Foolish in the sense that anyone who doesn't treat an American cop with kid gloves on the possibility that they are a power-tripping halfwit with a nasty temper on a hair trigger is taking their lives in their hands, because the system seems incapable of weeding these people out.

If anyone ever finds themselves in a confrontation with cops, the best advice is: move as little as possible, speak when spoken to, use small words. Treat them like an easily spooked animal.

Foolish in the sense that a motorcyclist who doesn't anticipate a car cutting him off is foolish, sure.

Well, no. If I was walking down the street and a weird guy approached me and said "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ", that absolutely would be a red flag to me, and I would make moves to get away from him as soon as possible. It's a weird thing to say which absolutely could sound like a prelude to violence if you don't know the speaker. The difference in this case is that the cops were holding all the cards: they're armed, she's in a nightie; they're big and beefy, she's a tiny woman.

If anyone ever finds themselves in a confrontation with cops, the best advice is: move as little as possible, speak when spoken to, use small words. Treat them like an easily spooked animal.

This is very sensible advice in the US. I would greatly prefer if following this advice was unnecessary (and am very grateful to live in a country in which it is not), but that's the way it goes.

The difference in this case is that the cops were holding all the cards: they're armed, she's in a nightie; they're big and beefy, she's a tiny woman.

... and that in the scenario of you walking down the street, it's very unlikely that the person rebuking you had a pot of boiling water.

What does “rebuking” mean here?

Same thing it meant above.

I guess we just disagree. I don’t read “rebuking” as a threat, and certainly not one that warrants pointing a loaded gun at somebody.

Well, no. If I was walking down the street and a weird guy approached me and said "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ", that absolutely would be a red flag to me, and I would make moves to get away from him as soon as possible.

Oh yeah, absolutely. That person did a foolish thing by acting weird to you on the assumption that you would not flip out and shoot him dead. Massey did something similarly foolish - she said something weird (though not as weird as it would be if said to a random stranger unprompted) to the cops on the assumption that they would not murder her for it. And she paid for that assumption with her life. I think that's similar to not riding defensively - you may be in the right, but it'll be cold comfort to your family when they chisel 'had the right of way' on your gravestone.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you again. Saying something sufficiently ambiguous that it could reasonably be interpreted as a veiled threat or a prelude to immediate violence is an unforced error, which cannot be chalked up to mere carelessness (failing to drive defensively when not doing so has resulted in perfectly safe outcomes 99% of the time) or muscle memory (Daniel Shaver reflexively moving to pull up his trousers at exactly the wrong moment). The police officers shouldn't have shot Massey and I won't lose any sleep if they're indicted or go to prison for a long stretch, but I'm not going to pretend that Massey's bizarre decision to make a weird and ambiguous comment like that wasn't a contributing factor to her getting shot, albeit a minor one.

is an unforced error, which cannot be chalked up to mere carelessness

In this case, it is the ramblings of a crazy woman, and it looks like the cops knew this. On balance, that probably makes the shooting non-criminal (a crazy person with a potentially deadly object making threatening noises is a legitimate threat) but getting to this point was culpably bad policing.

Saying something sufficiently ambiguous that it could reasonably be interpreted as a veiled threat or a prelude to immediate violence

I mean, in context it clearly wasn't either of those things, and I don't think it was reasonable to interpret it as such. It was a dumb joke about holy water or something. It's not like she said "I've got a suicide vest under my dressing gown haha"

This might just be one of those 'agree to disagree' things.

failing to drive defensively when not doing so has resulted in perfectly safe outcomes 99% of the time

Telling stupid mildly offensive jokes has perfectly safe outcomes 99% of the time

This might just be one of those 'agree to disagree' things.

Yeah I think so.

Interestingly to me (and you may already know what I'm about to thumb type) that phrase "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" is at least a decades-old set phrase (almost a spell) among evangelical-types (among whom one of these officers may have counted himself) and is presumably the most strict condemnation of evil, and ostensibly has the power to stop demons, etc. in their proverbial tracks. It always seemed odd to me to have such faith in the phrase while simultaneously knowing of the existence of historical martyrs who died for the faith, to whom this phrase would have also presumably been readily available in whatever equivalent language. My answer was that maybe it's more of a spiritual invocation.

Actually this was the first time I'd ever heard the phrase used before.

I grew up in the deep South. My grandmother attended a Nazarene church where they spoke in tongues.

If I were a religious man, I might suggest that responding to such an utterance with, "I'll shoot you in the face" and then doing so moments later suggests that she was aware that the man she was dealing with was possessed by demons. I am not a religious man though, so I think these are just two violent people meeting the ends of their free lives.

Here’s the general course of things as I see it:

  • The cops are there, and trying to get this woman’s ID

  • She can’t find it, and says she will get some documents for them.

  • They’re sort of mocking her about saying they’ll review the documents she wants to show them, and trying to get her ID.

  • One of the cops tells her to get the water that’s on the stove boiling because he doesn’t want to deal with a fire here.

  • She gets up to get it, and while she is getting it, he backs away from her.

  • She asks him why he’s backing away (I should note she sounds like she’s being extremely cordial and nice here)

  • He says he doesn’t want to be near her with a pot of boiling water.

  • She says something about “rebuking him in the name of Jesus” - again this sounds like she is trying to be friendly and build rapport with them. She sounds like she’s smiling, and almost flirting with the cop.

  • The cop pulls out his gun, points it at her, and says “you better not or I’ll shoot you in the fucking face”

  • She cowers down on the ground

  • She throws the pot at him, and he shoots her, either immediately before or immediately after this she throws the water which lands on the ground between them, and he shoots her.

As far as I’m concerned this is evil.

Maybe more comes out and my feelings change. My feelings now are that these people are pure evil.

Look I don’t care if this poor woman threw a pot of fucking water at these guys. They were POINTING A GUN AT HER. Pointing a gun at somebody is a major act of aggression and their lives are not more important than hers. Can she point a gun at them for her own safety just in case they reach for theirs, and then kill them if they do? No.

I’m sick of a lot of things and cops getting to act like thugs who can threaten your life at will, as if it doesn’t have value, is one of them. If I point a gun at someone it’s assault, if I even show off my gun when somebody is threatening me, it’s brandishing. These retarded sub 100 IQ assholes pull out their loaded guns and point them at people all the time as if that has no meaning.

To reiterate: I hope they are tried and convicted by a jury of their peers.

The cop shot her after she threw the boiling water at him. This is clear if you watch the video in slow motion. From my perspective, it also seems like she was trying to ambush him as he went around the counter.

Here's my timeline:

-She picks up the pot.

-The cop backs away.

-She asks why he's backing away.

-He says he's uncomfortable being near her while she's holding the boiling water.

-She threatens to rebuke him in the name of Jesus (i.e. fling the boiling water at him). That is to say she threatens to attack a police officer with the deadly weapon she is currently holding in her hands.

-He tells her that if she does he'll shoot her.

-She takes cover behind the counter.

-The cop advances, ordering her to drop the pot.

-She flings the boiling water at him. It does not connect.

-The cops shoots and kills her.

I do not find any part of this flirty or funny. You do not joke about attacking people with deadly weapons. You definitely do not joke about attacking on-duty cops with deadly weapons. If you "jokingly" say you're going to attack someone with a deadly weapon and then you actually do it then you clearly weren't joking.

If you "jokingly" say you're going to attack someone with a [pot of boiling water] and then you actually do it then you clearly weren't joking.

That's not true and I'm not sure why you think it would be? If I pretend to stab at someone with a fork (a deadly weapon) then they go crazy (like the police officer) pull a gun on me and in a panic I actually do stab at them, it doesn't indicate that I originally indicated to stab them with a fork, because the circumstances has changed.

Did she act rationally? No, but I don't think that acting rationally when threatened with a gun should be a requirement of not being shot by police officers, who could have left the situation without meaningful consequences. If police officers can't be trusted to handle situations like that in a rational way, maybe they shouldn't have guns?

I mean, I don't want to come off as needlessly pedantic but "he tells her that if she does he'll shoot her" seems like a phrase that doesn't quite capture it. He's screaming at her. He draws and points a gun. And even as communication goes I don't think it's effective at all. If you tell someone practically anything at the same time you point a gun at them, you know, chances are they aren't going to process it because they are busy processing a gun being pointed at them. <Okay, yes, he yells at her and then immediately draws the gun before she can respond, but it's still the same processing window> Clearly there's a disconnect -- in fact if you had paused the video at even the second "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" (pause right afterward that is) and asked me, assuming I had no context, "what do you think would happen next," her being literally dead in less than 10 seconds flat would not be on my bingo card, right? To me this doesn't come across as an "ambush" which implies premeditation, but rather an irrational stress reaction directly tied to the cop's aggressive response. Her behavior up to that point was less deranged and more simply someone possibly a little on the dumb side and clearly without their life together. Assuming maximum hostility just feels wrong here and I feel like cops often aren't fully aware how their actions appear on the receiving end. I mean for God's sake, the first words out of her mouth are "uh - okay - uh sorry" and crouching down. Surely that's not the language of someone angry enough to assault a cop, right?

This is a little flippant, but I do wonder if, similar to how if you're given a taser many police departments would require you to be tasered first just to know how it feels (or pepper sprayed for similar reasons), if cops were threatened with their lives at some point if it would affect their respect for their given power. Human psychology is just not well designed for instant compliance in a crisis.

If you tell someone practically anything at the same time you point a gun at them, you know, chances are they aren't going to process it because they are busy processing a gun being pointed at them.

My experience is that innocent people will freeze and back off. Non-innocent people… depends on what they were trying to do to begin with.

My experience is that innocent people will freeze and back off.

Not when a 200-pound man is angrily shouting obscenity-laden orders at you while brandishing a gun.

I’m less than 180 and don’t like obscenities, but like I said that’s my experience. Only cases I’ve seen that act differently were out to get someone - but even some of those would freeze. I’m open to hearing others’ experiences, of course.

So do you think he might have originally intended to kill her, since he threatened her and got closer to her when he perceived her as threatening him with hot water? (Apparently, in your model, if he was innocent, he would freeze and back off in such a situation.)

You might say that policemen are trained to not freeze and back off from threats, but they are also trained to defuse situations and to remove themselves from a situation when appropriate. If he felt so unsafe from a woman with boiling water, he could have left the room and called for backup, or at least left to wait for her to calm down.

I'm not convinced he intended to kill her, rather than just couldn't handle the mental responsibilities he had undertaken as a police officer.

What are you talking about? She doesn't have a gun.

Edit: To clarify, I wouldn't classify any kind of operative as "innocent" anyway, so the cops aren't "innocent" in that case. Maybe "civilian" or "non-combatant" would be more accurate?

I thought you were suggesting that, if people don't have guilty conscience, they will react to threats by backing off. She didn't do that and he didn't do that.

She did have a potentially lethal weapon. That was his reason for pulling his gun her, after all.

I was saying that every time I pointed a gun at a civilian, and most times I ever pointed a gun at a bad guy, they would immediately freeze and back off. I’m not suggesting threats can let you see into man’s heart.

Initially I only watched the first bodycam, and was trying to figure out how this could be anything other than an unambiguously bad shoot.

After seeing the second body cam, with the angle showing her tossing the pot, I still think it's a bad shoot, but maybe not quite so unambiguously.

My timeline:

She takes the pot off the stove and starts pouring the hot water into the sink. She and the cop are talking and sound like they are still laughing and joking. He says something about not wanting to be near hot water (but it appears that he backed away just as a default precaution, not because he really thought at this point that she was going to make a threatening move), and she says (twice) "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus."

This is clearly the moment when it starts to go south. I am not sure what she meant by that - her tone remains casual, and it sounds to me like she's joking. But it's a strange joke. I am familiar with evangelicals (and black evangelicals) and that's not usually the sort of thing they say "jokingly." The cop was clearly freaked out by it. Still not justification for drawing a gun on her, but I can see how his evaluation of this woman might have gone in a split second from "Old, dotty, and annoying" to "Possibly a dangerous nut who might throw hot water."

His words, though, were "You better fucking not," and then "I'll shoot you in the fucking face." She hasn't actually threatened him yet (other than talking about "rebuking him in the name of Jesus"). I don't think anyone would disagree that that's not how police should be trying to deescalate a situation even with an old dotty woman who might be crazy enough to throw hot water.

She continues to stand there. She seems confused. He draws his gun and points it at her. She immediately cringes and says "Okay, I'm sorry." She's obviously terrified at this point. She's still holding the hot water. He says "Drop the fucking pot!" She goes down on the floor.

She looks terrified and confused to me. She probably doesn't drop the water because, you know, she'd be dropping hot scalding water on her feet. Looks to me like she's holding the pot because she was afraid to set it down (while a gun is pointed at her) and she's afraid to drop it (because she'll burn herself).

They start going around the counter, and here is where the second body cam shows her throwing the pot. At this point the first cop shoots her.

There is one version here, where she crouched and prepared to launch the pot at the cops because she's deranged and thinks they're demons or something.

There is another where she crouched, terrified, as a cop pointed a gun at her and cursed her out, and when they came after her with their guns still pointed, she decided tossing the pot away from her was her best option.

Personally, I think the second version is more likely. She's clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, and now she's probably terrified and panicked. "I can't drop the pot because I will burn myself, but if I don't drop the pot he will shoot me, therefore I will throw the pot away" seems like a reasonable thing to be going through her mind (if, tragically, a very bad choice, especially since she threw it in the direction of the cops).

But to be honest, even if it turns out (from more footage or some other evidence) that she was deliberately throwing the pot at the cops, it was still a bad shoot. From the moment she's standing there holding a pot of water, they had a bunch of other options that didn't end in shooting her or getting hot water thrown at them.

It would be very hard to convince me that cop shouldn't be charged with murder.

The cop has been charged with murder. First-degree murder in fact.

The problem is even if she was throwing the water at them, a pot of water thrown across a room by a skinny crazy lady isn't a threat of great bodily harm. If she actually throws the pot basically nothing happens; they get splashed a little. If she tries to throw the water out of the pot, from that position, most of it probably ends up on her; she certainly can't hit them anywhere they'd be severely harmed.

I was curious so I took a pot of out into my back yard gently flung the water towards a tree. She could easily have doused the guy from that range. I wasn't even trying and threw it further than that.

I find "How far could she have thrown the pot?" questions kind of irrelevant. This is exactly the sort of thing we see after incidents like this where everyone suddenly becomes an expert on guns, knives, sprinting speeds, or the ability of old ladies to throw pots of hot water and how much damage hot water can do. It's all useless because there are too many variables and no one is actually making those calculations in the moment.

Like, let's stipulate that in theory she was physically capable of throwing the pot far enough to splash the cops. Still not buying that this was justification for them to react the way she did.

It's all useless because there are too many variables and no one is actually making those calculations in the moment.

The cops sure as hell should be. Whether one is in reasonable fear of grave bodily harm depends on that.

Like, let's stipulate that in theory she was physically capable of throwing the pot far enough to splash the cops.

If we accept that she was capable of and appeared to be about to throw the pot far enough to douse them (not just splash them) with the boiling (or just off-boil) water, they have a good case for self-defense.

A two-handled large pot, from above your head? I tried it (with a half-full pot, since she had dumped some out) and mostly the water landed about 2 feet from me. I can throw it further, sure, with a good backswing. But not from that position.

Oops, no watched the video again and realized it was a two handled pot, I'll have to try with that type. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard with both hands, but maybe I'm not picturing it right.

Quite so unambiguously perhaps is reasonable doubt, no? High standard to convict

-She flings the boiling water at him. It does not connect.

-The cops shoots and kills her.

I don't think that's correct. My timeline is that the first shot was at 14:19.16 and the water became visible at 14:19.28.

Did I miss an earlier indication that she was throwing it?

EDIT: nevermind. I was going off of the first camera only.

After rewatching a few times, it's hard to definitively nail down the exact order of events because the officer's arm is in the way. I wish the camera was on his hat or something.

However, here are some key facts:

  1. She put the pot back on the stove while taking cover, then picked it back up again and hoisted it over her head as the officer approached. I can't imagine any reason to do this except to throw it at the officer.

  2. The pot landed on the chair quite a good distance in front of her. That means it must have had some forward momentum, and I can't see how that would happen unless she threw it.

I can't think of any other coherent explanation for this series of events. She must have picked the pot up and thrown it at the officer as he came around the counter.

See my post here (https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/233125?context=8#context) for my full breakdown of what happened and why I think she threw the pot.

EDIT: nevermind. I was going off of the first camera only.

EDIT: I just want to say, kudos for updating based on new information. This is obviously a situation with a lot of ambiguity. We're all trying to reconstruct extremely rapid events from multiple incomplete bodycam recordings. Given that level of uncertainty, the most important thing in finding the truth is going to be our ability to reassess based on new information as we become aware of it.

-The cop advances, ordering her to drop the pot.

Seems like an odd choice if your interlocutor has a weapon with a maximum effective range of approximately six feet while you have a firearm.

I mean, yes, but also no, a person wielding a weapon can charge in and close distance before the bullets put them down.

If she was holding a kitchen knife it would still be dangerous at that range.

I mean, yes, but also no, a person wielding a weapon can charge in and close distance before the bullets put them down.

As seen on Surviving Edged Weapons (on Red Letter Media).

I’m not clear how that makes advancing seem tactically sensible.

If you're not going to run and escape the situation (which would be my advice for that scenario, shes not a danger to others) then you damn well better make sure you have the clearest shot possible.

If the opponent is behind a barrier like a kitchen counter, guess what you gotta move in to make sure you have a shot.

Being stuck in close quarters with a melee attacker is nightmarish, even if you have a pistol.

If escape isn't viable, then tactically speaking advancing on the opponent is a "sound" choice. Something about how meeting danger head on can nearly halve it, or whatever.

Again, I'm just pointing out how the presence of the weapon is a larger factor than people give credit for. Not praising the cop's reaction.

One thing about the George Floyd case, the guy was unarmed and completely restrained when he died. That's what really made it stand out.

This... ain't quite that.

The cops had a standoff weapon. She had a pot of boiling water. Not a knife. An awkward-as-hell, single-use pot of boiling water. Make it so she has to turn a corner to get to you and the weapon is neutralized. She comes running towards that corner with the water, THEN you can shoot her.

My dude if you want to get in a fight with someone that has a pot of boiling water, and then wait until the person is actually closing on you swinging the pot before acting, be my guest.

I'll just say, if somebody I don't know shows up at my house holding a pot of obviously boiling liquid, I ain't opening the door. If they attempt to throw the liquid at me, I'm assuming hostile intent. If they are still wielding the pot and try to come into my house, I AM shooting them at that point. And living in a Castle Doctrine state, the law will likely absolve me of guilt.

The situations aren't directly analogous, but that's how I'm interpreting the presence/use of the weapon in this case.

If I'm faced with the situation in the video, I will have tried to extricate from the scenario as soon as the pot comes into play, in hopes of not being forced into a split-second decision with someone's life, even if its not mine, hanging in the balance.

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My guess would be that once you've concluded that the subject is armed and dangerous, your job becomes securing them and ending the confrontation. If they're willing to threaten you with a pot of boiling water, how do you know they don't have a gun on them or nearby, and will escalate as soon as you turn your back? Once they've initiated a confrontation, it seems that police policy is to end that confrontation as decisively as possible, not to back off and give the suspect space to maneuver, escape, or arm themselves better.

I guess there's a question of reasonableness. Could you assume they have a cache of grenades in the cabinet? Are they hiding trained attack tigers in the attic?

Whole problem for me is that most of the danger was avoidable if they don't let the lady get off the couch. If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.

Once she does, maybe exit the house and see if she escalates further.

I don't buy that they feared for their safety up until a second or two before she threw that water.

If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.

Did they, though? I haven't watched the video, mostly just skimmed some of the comments here. But I could imagine them not even thinking about her possibly threatening them with a pot of water; who does that?! Instead, just give her a moment to turn the stove off, then she's not worried about it or whatever, and they can continue doing whatever they need to do. It's only after she grabs the pot and appears threatening with it that they might think, "Oh shit, that can be a weapon; what did we get ourselves into?"

What I'm really thinking is that this is something I could totally see myself doing (the not thinking about a pot of boiling water being a potential weapon bit, not various other things). I'm not sure if it would cross my mind until some sort of threatening action was taken with the pot in hand. It's too ingrained in my classification circuits as "just cooking".

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I mean, yes, but also no, a person wielding a weapon can charge in and close distance before the bullets put them down.

You are correct, and the phrase you're looking for is "Tueller Drill".

Except she wasn’t charging, she was cowering in the ground in her own home while somebody pointed a gun at her after theatening to shoot her in the fucking face.

I wouldn't get into the mechanics of it all, but a person "cowering" with a weapon can very quickly turn into a person "charging" with a weapon. They are not neutralized/incapacitated merely by laying on the floor.

The greater context of the situation very much weighs against shooting her, but I really think people don't get how the presence of a weapon, ANY weapon, escalates the nature of the threat.

Here's a 2020 incident where the perp surprises and slashes one officer, who doesn't immediately shoot her, perp drops the knife and appears to comply for a moment, then suddenly swoops down to pick it up again and charges another officer.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/bodycam-footage-florida-woman-stabs-cop-ahead-of-fatal-shooting/

Until the person is either fully restrained or, unfortunately, poked full of holes, they are posing a danger.

The weapon in the current case being boiling water is a really unique twist, but the principle is the same.

These cops are also posing a danger to her.

Well yeah they came into her house and started making demands and bossing her around. I wouldn't blame her for feeling threatened.

It is unclear how her actions improved on the situation though.

To be clear, my presumption whenever a standard police encounter results in a death is to assume the cops fucked up royally. That seems to be the case here. It is a rebuttable presumption, though.

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She threatens to rebuke him in the name of Jesus (i.e. fling the boiling water at him).

No, she DOES rebuke him in the name of Jesus. This is in no way, shape, or form, threatening to fling boiling water at him. Unless it's perhaps a reference to a ceremony which does involve flinging water, like an exorcism; perhaps the cops were thinking that, in which case they probably should not use horror movies as training films.

The cop advances, ordering her to drop the pot.

And this was a dumb move. Why advance?

She flings the boiling water at him. It does not connect.

I don't see any flinging. I see shooting, and then the boiling water is on the ground. The steam from the boiling water isn't visible until after the shooting begins.

Here, let me break it down for you. Timestamps are from this video if you want to check it yourself: https://youtube.com/watch?v=U2rMB2fYjuY&rco=1&ab_channel=PoliceActivity

10:37: She clearly takes both hands off the pot and raises them above her head.

10:38: She crouches behind the counter. The pot is visible on the stove. She is no longer holding the pot.

The bodycam is briefly blocked by the officer's arm.

10:40: She is now standing up again and she seems to have picked the pot back up and is now hoisting it over her head. To repeat, she put the pot down and then picked it back up again. I cannot imagine any reason she would have for hoisting a pot of boiling water over her head except to throw it.

also 10:40: The pot leaves her hands. Roughly simultaneously, the officer shoots her. It's hard to tell the exact timeline of events, except...

10:41: The pot lands on the chair in front of her. For this to happen, it must have had considerable forward momentum. It looks to me like she had at least begun to throw the pot when the bullet connected. If not then it should have landed on top of her, not on the chair in front of her.

It's possible (again, hard to break down this 1-second period from Youtube footage) that the cop interrupted her throw by shooting her, which means it quite possibly could have had more momentum if he hadn't shot her. If so, it's possible that if he hadn't shot her it would have hit him and inflicted life-ruining burns. It's also possible he didn't shoot until after she completed her throw, in which case it wouldn't have hit him regardless. Either way, it's clear that she had attempted to inflict life-ruining injuries on him at the time she was shot.

I'm interpreting the vision differently to you. Up until 10:38 we're in agreement: The pot is on the counter, she's crouched down on the floor, the cops have their guns on her, and they're screaming at her to "drop the fucking pot" which she doesn't have.

Then she half-stands up again and appears to be reaching for the pot, and at that point the cop shoots her. I don't see anything that looks like her hoisting the pot over her head.

The pot spills and steam comes up from the water on the floor. I can't see where the pot ends up but I don't see it on the chair.

My interpretation of the video is that these guys with guns repeatedly screaming at her to "drop the fucking pot" when she didn't have it made her reach for it so she could do what they said? Or something?

Edit: Never mind, other camera angle with slow mo does show her throwing the pot and it ending up on the chair.

I still put the blame on the cop in this scenario. I can understand why her throwing the pot would make him pull the trigger, but ultimately this was not a tense or dangerous situation at all until he started threatening to shoot her in the face out of nowhere, and she did not act with lethal force.

There's no way she's going to throw the water at the cop effectively from the position she's in at 10:40. My read is she was lifting it over her head (possibly to try to place it on the stove), he shot her, and she tipped the pot forward as she died.

If so, it's possible that if he hadn't shot her it would have hit him and inflicted life-ruining burns.

It's water, not acid. There's now way she could throw it into his face, which is the only way he was going to get life-ruining burns.

Also, water is heavy. The pot appears to be a least medium size, but probably large, it's a proper pot and she's using two hands. You can't actually throw pots like that very far, especially since the water tends to slosh around making them pretty unwieldy.

My read is she was lifting it over her head (possibly to try to place it on the stove), he shot her, and she tipped the pot forward as she died.

She had already put it down once. You're suggesting that:

She picked the pot up.

She put the pot down.

She took cover behind the counter.

She picked the pot up again and lifted it over her head - while still taking cover - with no intention to do anything with it except put it back on the stove for a second time.

Why? If she didn't intend to throw the pot then why would she bother picking it up again? Remember, at this point in the timeline she's already taken cover behind the counter because the cop threatened to shoot her. What possible reason would she have for picking up the pot after taking cover, except to use it as a weapon?

I could imagine being confused and flustered and having a confused thought like "if they're afraid of the pot of water I'll just take it off the heat and put it away".

Maybe, but the whole - lifting it over her head in a throwing posture makes it less likely that she was planning on putting it away and more likely about to attack the officers with it.

Why?

She's nuts. Also she's being shouted and cursed at by large men with guns, which will fluster anyone, believe me.

Though I'm hardly a general ally or defender of black people (no insult to any blacks reading who I'm sure are fine people, just being transparent), though she did throw the pot of boiling water (which is no joke) at them as so many (presumably) left-wingers initially tried to deny in the immediate aftermath of the video's release, and though the chance is not remote that I will regret saying anything that could be interpreted as defending her once her past comes to light... There are probably many ways two armed men could have handled this situation without shooting her. The shooter's professionalism and demeanor could also use some work. Unlike George Floyd, who mostly caused his own demise with drugs, this woman does seem to be at least 80-90% a victim of police misconduct (assuming that a bunch of extra context beyond the initial video doesn't rear its head like it did in Floyd's case).

With that being said, if buildings start burning, I will, as she put it, rebuke her in the name of Jesus. I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."? Or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, she's obviously mentally ill, but she still shouldn't have thrown the pot for the sake of all of us. Of course the cops should have also just turned off the burner and handled the pot themselves if they were going to immediately be so afraid of it after she grabbed it.

This seems to be another demonstration of the phenomenon of "cop/black mutual paranoid hysteria" (actually there's a better catchy rhyming term for it that I thought of that involves two syllables each with three letters, one starting with a p and one with an n, but I can't say it here, even though I only bring it up because I just think it's funny, not some serious insult) that I've observed. Cops and blacks try to act cool, almost extra friendly with each other, at the beginning of any interaction (to try to assuage their fear of the other), but because both groups have become so concerned, rightfully or not, by incidents like this that the other is going to suddenly snap and try to kill them, their automatic paranoia about the situation often inevitably causes some minor incident to seemingly out of nowhere escalate omnipresent tensions into hysteria on one end or the other, leading to a fatal result. I don't know the solution to this syndrome, but I don't see this death making it any better, that's for sure.

I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."?

They shouldn't, really. Riots don't follow deaths, but media coverage. Media coverage doesn't follow deaths, but political expediency.

US police killed 245 black people in 2023, near enough to one per workday, at least according to the Washington Post's data. The vast majority, we never hear anything about. The media does not need 4-5 such stories a week. A couple a year is more than enough.

Now, cops are always going to be people, so no matter how good the hiring and training are, some of them will fuck up every once in a while. Even if, by magic, we would lower police violence by 9/10ths without screwing up anything else in the process — at which point the US would have by far the nicest police in the world — still two black people would be killed per month. And the media does not need two stories a month. There aren't two a month now. If this 9/10ths reduction were achieved somehow, nothing would change.

This is not the fault of the woman who got shot, and it isn't really the fault of the cop either. Though the individual cop is at best as dangerously incompetent as the Secret Service, and should be tried for manslaughter, you can't blame him, let alone cops in general, for the fallout. That is, dare I say it, systemic.

Even if, by magic, we would lower police violence by 9/10ths without screwing up anything else in the process — at which point the US would have by far the nicest police in the world

No, it wouldn't. 33.1 / 10 = 3.31, which is still nearly twice that of Finland. And in case you're going to say "but firearms", Finland is #10 in number or firearms per capita.

Yeah, that ranking is deceptive. Finland has 32.4 guns per 100 civilians. The U.S. has 120.

The US has double the number of guns as the #2 most heavily armed country in the world. It's an extreme outlier on guns per person.

Of course, guns per person isn't the right measure here- that would be percentage of households who own a gun(on which the US is the clear leader but not an outlier- it's ahead of places like Canada and Serbia, but not by double or triple).

With that being said, if buildings start burning, I will, as she put it, rebuke her in the name of Jesus. I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."? Or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, she's obviously mentally ill, but she still shouldn't have thrown the pot for the sake of all of us. Of course the cops should have also just turned off the burner and handled the pot themselves if they were going to immediately be so afraid of it after she grabbed it.

Surely this (tortured, in my opinion) line of argument can be applied to both sides. Do cops ever think "if I act paranoid and kill the weird person here, (...)", or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, they obviously think they have a +2SD spidey sense and are very valuable individuals, but they still shouldn't have shot for the sake of all of us.

If anything, the cop version strikes me as rather more justifiable, because cops signed up voluntarily for a job whose description involves something about keeping the peace and protecting society, and random weirdos did not.

because cops signed up voluntarily for a job whose description involves something about keeping the peace and protecting society, and random weirdos did not.

[puts on libertarian fedposting hat]

Now, I was told we live in a society. Us random weirdos have obligations to each other: if I refuse to give my money to the Feds and hole up in a cabin in the woods bothering nobody (and maybe sawing off shotgun barrels, it's not quite clear), they'll happily show up with guns to shoot my family to make sure that I pay my income taxes pound of flesh. I didn't sign up for that! I didn't sign up for the violence inherent in the system!

[takes off hat]

It is at least interesting to me that many of the same folks that have very strong opinions on what the very wealthy (most consistently defined as "wealthier than the speaker") owe to the rest of us also seem to think that everyone other than the very wealthy owe basically nothing to each other. You know, like not initiating physical violence.

On the gripping hand, I haven't watched the full video, but I don't understand why police have, in several instances like this, seemingly avoided just extracting themselves from the situation: as far as I can tell, nobody (else) was thought to be in danger, and just leaving (maybe coming back in the daylight) would have de-escalated.

With the anti-libertarian hat on, the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on). Playing with metaphors aside, even, it always struck me as very self-serving how libertarians question every piece of conventional wisdom about society and morality except the one that there is an objective, non-socially-constructed notion of "property" or "someone's" money. No, you see, the right to levy tariffs and taxes is just an instance of theft that humans have gaslit you into accepting; the right to not have me use a thing that you consider yours, though, is part of the moral fabric of the universe.

It is at least interesting to me that many of the same folks that have very strong opinions on what the very wealthy (most consistently defined as "wealthier than the speaker") owe to the rest of us also seem to think that everyone other than the very wealthy owe basically nothing to each other. You know, like not initiating physical violence.

Leaving aside the circumstance that even the pro-police claims here only seem to assert that the person who was shot would counterfactually have initiated violence if she hadn't been shot, I really think that police are a special case here. What do we get from them in return for all the money, status and authority we pay them, if not some degree of surrendering the right to avoid danger and violence that we accord to normal people? If the present police force aren't willing to take a deal that looks like "you get a salary, uniform and the right to order your fellow men around, but in return you have to accept the risk of taking the occasional pot of boiling water if the person throwing it hasn't been accused of a crime yet", maybe they should be laid off and replaced with people who are. I have few doubts that after an initial stage of kvetching we would find plenty of takers, considering how even the US military (<2x the active duty personnel relative to active LEOs, ~5x the annual deaths?) has little trouble finding recruits.

the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on).

TheMotte truly has a Leviathan-shaped hole. I suppose one could say that the only solution to the state of nature is a particular conception of a governmental authority with particular properties. I don't know if that conception and those properties are things you'd be "willing to trade" for or not.

You have a point. I'm not going to go too far out of my way to defend American cops, who in my opinion do often tend to be lawless yahoos. Even I got threatened with a shooting by them once being a boring White man doing nothing.

Sure, this is how their zealous defenders should frame everything, but I think the prosecutors and video evidence will provide a much more convincing case. In BWC #1 you hear the report of the first shot before water is seen. In BWC#2 (no audio), you see the officer point the gun at her face well before she raises the pot (which they had just advised her to attend to). The cop then advances on her. So it went, unambiguously: "I'll shoot you in the fucking face" --> officer points gun at her face --> only then does she pick up the pot and cower --> cop advances on her --> she either throws water because she was just shot, or throws water, then gets shot, perhaps reasonably fearing for her life.

They cops seem unfriendly and somewhat rude from the outset. In an absolute sense, it's incredibly rare for a cop to get attacked for any reason, and I'm willing to bet money that the K:D ratio for 2 cops vs 1 woman is greater than 100:1. If grievous bodily harm could be measured, I'd bet on that too. I loath safetyism, and cops hide behind the lingo as much as SJW's. Okay, that is perhaps an exaggeration, but I constantly see cops going to the well of safetyism to justify any and all actions they might take. Any two armed men that felt threatened in that situation probably don't have what it takes to do jobs with even a modicum of risk.

I fully expect people to go wild with screen grabs of the pot being emptied at the officer and act if that makes the whole case. Dems will hopefully just be quiet, but will probably wildly exaggerate and overinterpret this incident until the end of time.

I find the "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" to be menacing, not jokey as some others are saying. There's not a hint of sarcasm in her voice. And as the GIF shows, she was throwing the boiling water.

When I started watching I was reminded me of Charleena Lyles, who by all available evidence called in a fake theft with the intent of harming the police who arrived. Her case was much more clear cut, she pulled a knife on them. Even so local activists held her up as a case of police being murderers.

I wonder if we'll find out that the prowler was made up.

She may have been off her rocker, but she didn't "throw" the boiling water until the shots were fired. And there was basically no way she was going to be able to harm them with it from where she was. Bad shoot.

I guess my question to you (and anyone else who is in the "bad shoot" camp): if she had unambiguously thrown the water before being fired upon, and this could be proven, would that make you update to something like, "it was an unfortunate situation but the officers were acting in self-defense," or would you still maintain that the officers were in the wrong/should be charged with murder?

There are quite a few hypotheticals that would move it to "regrettable (but not punishable) mistake" territory, but I'm having a hard time getting to "good shoot" without completely disregarding the agreed-upon facts.

If she was closer, faster, and aggressively flung the water at an officer, then I could forgive him for acting rashly in the heat of the moment. The best option would have been to manage the social interaction better, and the fallback would have been to manage the tactical situation better so that the limited range and one-shot nature of the pot mitigates the threat. Failing both of those, boiling water is dangerous enough to merit deadly force.

I think there's enough there to drive some debate if you're just reading commentary, but I'm firmly in team "bad shoot" after watching the video.

EDIT: found the second camera angle. With a bit better aim, the officer would have been hospitalized. The situation is close enough to my "hypothetical" (lol) that I'm applying that judgment.

I would still be in the bad shoot camp. Throwing boiling water at someone is a terrible thing to do and I wouldn't begrudge them being pretty rough with her in response, but it's a one-shot deal. She's not going to be reloading the pot to continue her assault on the officers. I can imagine extenuating circumstances, but they'd have to be pretty weird. I'm not likely to get on board with shooting someone dead in their own home on the basis of an attack that can mostly be stopped by taking two steps backwards.

Still in the wrong, because there was no reasonable fear of injury, let alone the grievous injury you would need to justify lethal force. There was no way she was going to be able to get any significant amount of scalding water on the cop's unprotected face or upper body from the position and distance she was in.

If a paraplegic octogenarian with a knife is crawling towards me to try and stab me that doesn't justify a shooting. There has to be genuine danger.

Clothes do not protect you from boiling water; they actually aggravate scalding injuries by holding the water next to skin.

A pot of boiling water is a one-shot item. Once she threw the water and missed, what was she going to do, refill it, wait 5 minutes for it to reboil, and then throw it again? Throw the pot itself? Okay, that's not fun, but not an imminent lethal threat. This wasn't a situation where someone was going to be harmed without officer involvement; there wasn't even a concern about passing fake money a la Floyd. There was nothing stopping the officers from just turning around and leaving the domicile of the crazy lady who thought she saw a non-existing prowler.

There's still no way she was going to harm them with it from where she was. If they were really worried they could have stepped back behind the counter as they initially did; they were tall enough to still keep an eye on here from there.

If she wanted to even hit them significantly, she'd have needed to get a good backswing and hurl the water. If you could show she was doing that, maybe they'd have a case. But she wasn't.

The details of this case notwithstanding, in the light of the comments it's probably worth contemplating that there may be a fundamental value difference between auths and libs in terms of their views of police - in coarse terms, I think the former may think that it is better that ten hapless civilians get shot by police than that one police officer dies on the job, while for the latter the ratio is opposite. So assuming this case was misunderstandings all around, the liberal (in the compass sense) sees a greater evil committed to forestall the possibility of a lesser evil (and would like to change the system so that in this case nobody is shot, even if this means hypothetical police officers actually getting scalded), whereas to the authoritarian a lesser evil was committed to forestall the possibility of a greater one, and so the only relevant discussion (which is in fact the angle being taken up by posters who reflexively side with the police) is whether the probability of the greater evil is high enough such that p*(greater evil) is still greater than the lesser evil of the shot civilian.

This ain't it chief. That was a very bad decision to shoot based on the full video and I hope the cops are punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Stuff like this makes me give serious consideration to whether black people in the US have a point when they say the police is systematically biased against them.

Stuff like this makes me give serious consideration to whether black people in the US have a point when they say the police is systematically biased against them.

?? This is terrible chinese robber epistemic hygiene. You see one news story about one police interaction in a country where cops have 10k encounters a day and it changes your priors??

I see one news story about a police interaction and the entire environment around it suggests that this is exactly how cops are trained to behave, that even the idea it was a bad shoot is hardly acknowledged, and instead of "your outrage is understandable, this was unbecoming of a police officer and will serve as an example for others to not act like that", people tell me "just try being a cop bro"? Yes, it changes my priors.

I see one news story about a police interaction and the entire environment around it suggests that this is exactly how cops are trained to behave, that even the idea it was a bad shoot is hardly acknowledged,

Except by the firing of the cop involved, and his being charged with first degree murder?

The usual claim is that police violence is directed against black men, which this was not.

A bad shoot against this lady doesn't reflect a systemic issue against black women any more than Daniel Shaver getting shot for complying with police orders reflects a systemic issue against white men.

Off-topic, but as someone who tries to never have a take on something without seeing the full context and who also hates viewing photos or videos that involve (real) violence, these are rough for me. (I'm indeed a lib, if it wasn't obvious.) I've never seen any of the George Floyd or Rittenhouse footage, for example.

This'll be an easy and rightful murder conviction. Hopefully the shooter will get the max sentence due to their betrayal of public trust. Here's the video with sound. and here is the official unedited version

Massey’s death is certainly not the preferred outcome of the encounter.

Understatement of the century. I suppose it's true, in the same way that me getting stabbed in the eye with a pencil is 'not the preferred outcome of the encounter' when I pass my neighbour in the street.

but the vibe changes when Massey grabs a pot of boiling water

Actually the vibe changes when she says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” in what I read to be a jokey tone and at least one of the cops takes mortal offense, and responds "you'd better fucking not or I'll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face"

She does not drop the boiling water but instead continues to hold on to it.

It's really quite difficult to see what she does from the cam footage because the cop's arm (and gun) is in the way. But it looks to me like after apologizing for the (literally) mortal insult she flinches and cowers until she is shot dead.

they should have mentally decided to leave her house if she did something like equip a plausible weapon.

One of a thousand choices that would have been better than spraying her brains all over her kitchen backsplash. two well muscled physically fit men can't handle a tiny woman in her nightie any other way than by shooting her in the head? I doubt she weighed more than 120 lbs.

Oh no, wait. She had a pot of hot water. How terrifying.

and it’s rational to be afraid of a crazy person who has a pot of scalding water in their hands, able to disfigure you for life.

Oh fucking please

This is super simple, just go be a cop yourself. Everywhere is hiring because nobody wants to be a cop. So you can be the cop that gets the 'pot of hot water' thrown on them - everybody wins

Sincerely, wouldn't this be the best thing to do? If you disagree with the practice of not getting a pot of hot water thrown on you as a cop, be the change you wish to see?

What do I do if I disagree with the President? Run a campaign?

Kind of, yes? Unlike in Europe, UK, or ANZAC nothing in America is stopping any of us from incorporating "Party with Exactly my Views" except for the fact we're 99.9% sure it'd go exactly nowhere against the brick wall of Duverger's Law

Running a campaign is likely to fail for factors unrelated to whether my views are either better than or popular than the president's.

And if I disagree with both a cop and the president, should I try to become both at the same time?

If you're already familiar with this quote and find it overused - please try not to hold it against me for sharing -

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

-Teddy Roosevelt-

Somehow I doubt that Roosevelt would have endorsed that if you don't like a retail service worker, a cop, the president, and restaurant food, you should endeavor to become a service worker, a cop, and a president all at the same time, while cooking food. That's just absurd. It's completely sensible to disagree with how someone does a specific facet of their job, and expect to be taken seriously, even if you aren't willing to do their job yourself.

Telling people that they shouldn't criticize the president unless they've been in a presidential campaign just amounts to "pretty much nobody's allowed to criticize the president".

Leaps and bounds my man

two well muscled physically fit men can't handle a tiny woman in her nightie

I'm baffled why anyone thought there was a need to handle her at all! She had called the cops to report a prowler; they were there, they had presumably seen that there was no prowler. What on earth was stopping them from going "right, lady, you're acting weird and we're not comfortable here. We don't see any one around your house and we're going to leave now. Have a good night"???

Oh no, wait. She had a pot of hot water. How terrifying.

This was in fact very dangerous.

Based on the distance between Massey and the cops, I'm sceptical. Sure, in principle she could have closed the distance between them in a matter of seconds, but without splashing the contents of the pot all over herself? I very much doubt it.

I wonder how people's thoughts on this case correlate with their thoughts about the McDonald's Hot Coffee lawsuit.

The McDonalds Hot Coffee lawsuit continues to be a travesty and the "fact sheet" from the American Trial Lawyers Association which all the contrarians swallowed whole to say otherwise was nonsense from the start.

Could you elaborate in specific detail on why it's nonsense?

Critics of the McDonalds judgment usually point to the fact that the lady spilled the coffee on herself. Which I understand, it’s like suing Black and Decker for someone bonking themselves on the head with a hammer. People who agree with the McDonalds judgment point to the fact that the coffee served at McDonalds back then was extremely hot: McD’s used to keep their coffee a few degrees short of boiling at time of service. This is far too hot to drink for an extended period of time. In fact if you tried to drink it at the time of service you would probably injure yourself. People generally expect hot coffee to be hot, and that you should be careful with it. But I don’t think they expect it to be so hot that it literally melts your genitals off your body (which is what happened in the case), and that you should exercise the same extreme caution you would use for handling molten iron slag at an industrial plant.

But I don’t think they expect it to be so hot that it literally melts your genitals off your body

But they should. That's what boiling water does, any adult should know how to handle boiling water, and you should expect any hot beverage you ordered to be just a few degrees short of boiling.

...We just had a thread where a lot of people seemed flatly dismissive that a pot of boiling water could be a seriously threatening weapon. Inspired by this comment, I did a quick google search and confirmed that boiling water attacks are routinely charged under "attempted murder" without controversy.

I think "is boiling water dangerous" is a pretty good example of an opinion that is observably functionally meaningless, due to specific emotional valiances swamping all factual considerations.

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Iron melts at 2800 degrees Fahrenheit. The McDonalds coffee temperature was somewhere between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit. They were not the same.

I think that's an unnecessary nitpick, and we should encourage colorful metaphors because they're fun to read.

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If people doing kitchen admin puts you in fear of your life, then perhaps you don't have what it takes to be a cop.

I mean, if that really was such a dangerous situation - which is an absurd premise but let's run with it - then they fucked up in the first place by letting her get anywhere near that pot. Neither of them seemed particularly concerned when she walked right past both of them them into the kitchen, having discussed her intention to operate the very dangerous weapon that is a hot pot. Nor did they seem concerned when picked up the pot, or moved around with the pot.

But of course, they weren't really scared of the pot. Why should they be? A tiny woman holding a pot of boiling water ten feet away isn't scary. They're just chatting away, one of them even having a little chuckle with her. Right up until she accidentally offended them.

flinches and cowers until she is shot dead

is an inaccurate interpretation of the event. See my other comment here. She reached up from the ground and flung the water. Were she cowering, she would still be alive! Really if she chose any other option than lifting up the pot and throwing the boiling water toward the officers.

[snarky voice] pot of hot water, how terrifying

I think an experiment is in order. You may find the results interesting, but you also seem very confident, so maybe there’s something you know that we don’t. Just record it if so, and I’ll try to find an alternative to liveleak.

Really if she chose any other option than lifting up the pot and throwing the boiling water toward the officers.

Do cops really have such shitty hand-eye coordination that they can't tell whether a mass of boiling water flung from a pot is going to hit them or not? It's a one-shot item; once she flung the water she was unarmed! What was the justification for not just leaving?

He would have to know the strength of the woman, the weight of the pot, how much water was in the pot, and when the woman was planned on releasing it in the throw. I imagine once he realized the woman was reaching for the boiling water and in the process of throwing it, he was intent on shooting her.

IMO this is all a game of “which world would you rather live in” —

  • Possibly schizophrenic woman throwing boiling water at “guy doing his job” is extolled as an innocent victim by the president and president elect, with “guy doing his job” being painted as a demon and going through a lengthy criminal trial

  • “Guy doing his job” is fired from his job because he is bad at it, but we don’t destroy his life, and we don’t valorize a crazy violent woman, we must move on and possibly implement nation-wide training for what to do in such an encounter

He would have to know the strength of the woman, the weight of the pot, how much water was in the pot, and when the woman was planned on releasing it in the throw.

And he knew the first three things to reasonable certainty, especially number 2 and number 3, because he was an adult human presumably with some experience around a kitchen. And what those should have added up to is there's no way she could have thrown enough water across the room to do him serious harm.

I'm an adult human with tons of experience around a kitchen. I have no bloody clue how far anyone can throw various quantities of water out of variously-designed pots. To use the ML lingo, it's not a thing in my training set.

Good point. I worry that this incident is going to end up like the Harambee incident, where everyone and their mother suddenly claimed to be experts on gorilla behavior and have very clear understanding of the precise limits of a gorilla's strength within a day of the event happening.

You don't have experience with pots of water? Gorillas are a bit more out of the average person's experience.

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Indeed, being scalded sucks. Not quite so badly as having a hollow point punch into your skull and explode through your brains, but yeah.

Still, ignoring the fact that they were the ones that escalated the situation, those cops had plenty of other options. Such as:

• Do nothing (she was clearly not in a position to imminently threaten them when the shooting happened)

• Take a step backward

Having read your other comment, I will say that I do not share your faith that those cops were hyper-competent hyper-professional operators that noticed the situation turning ugly in a way we civvies can't comprehend. Especially given that it is crystal clear that it was the police that escalated the situation. They come across to me more like petulant bullies.

I will agree with you that she does reach up to grab the pot in the ~half second before she is shot. I don't think your analysis holds up beyond that. It's possible she reached up to grab the pot to put it on the ground because the cops were screaming about it. Silly thing to do, sure, but people do silly things when high on Adrenalin because people are yelling at them with guns leveled. anyone with a "top 0.1% intuition" would understand that. The awkward 'tossing' motion could be explained by the fact that she was just shot in the head.

But even if we accept - for the sake of argument - that she was fixing to throw the water at the cops with malicious intent, and we ignore the fact that they escalated, it's still a bad shooting. She was kneeling with her headline below the pot. she was a slight woman, it's a big pot. She was not physically in a position to throw the pot or the water with any kind of heft at the cops standing ten feet away. There was an entire kitchen counter in between her and them. Those cops were never in any real, or reasonably imagined, danger of any injury. Let alone a grievous one.

The police are almost always justified in these cases. Best to wait, like in the case of George Floyd, it usually is not as it appears

The Floyd case was exactly as it appeared once the video was made public. The key thing that came out later (that Floyd had ODed) might get Chauvin off the hook for homicide based on reasonable doubt as to the cause of death (under correctly applied Minnesota law, it doesn't and didn't) but it doesn't change the fact that Chauvin culpably used dangerously excessive force while making an otherwise-lawful arrest, thereby contributing to an avoidable death.

Chauvin was following a police-department-approved procedure for subduing Floyd.

The police are almost always justified in these cases.

In such cases, the bodycam footage is usually the most dispositive evidence. Here we have the bodycam, and it looks pretty damning. Bad shoots happen. Asshole cops happen.

The police are almost always justified in these cases

It's not a bad heuristic, but it shouldn't replace the evidence of your eyes. We have two unedited video recordings of the event. I'm having a hard time conceptualizing what exculpatory evidence would even look like. Perhaps she pulled a gun from her drawers at the last second?

Maybe there's earlier video of her acting erratically which would allow the cops to argue that they feared just that except with a weapon.

I still think this is going to rate at least Murder 3 (if they have that), seems very hard to conceive of this not being reckless disregard for human life even if you can frame the video as her throwing the water and everyone gets their story straight.

Scalding hot and boiling hot water are no joke. https://www.google.com/search?q=scalded+to+death+water

Certainly they made bad decisions in the moment, but deadly weapons should never be underestimated, such as a knife, a spear, a club, a thrown stone, a clenched fist, or boiling water.

Your google search proves that it's impossible to kill a man with a pot of boiling water. You have to immerse him in boiling water.

It's possible to disfigure a man with boiling water without immersing him in it.

As someone who was given 3rd degree burns by boiling water as a child , it's not like flinging boiling water will turn your victim into Elephant Man. Especially if the water is dispersed into the air. A pot of boiling water is a weapon yes, but it isn't lethal force.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. How does anyone watch the first linked video and conclude this was a good shoot? Like, she gets up to take the boiling water off the stove. The cops seem cool with it, even commenting that they don't want a fire. She takes the water over to the sink (presumably to drain it). One of the cops backs away. She asks (in what seems to me a humorous manner) why he's backing away, he mentions getting away from the water. She makes what seems to me a joke (the "rebuke you in the name of Jesus" line, like it's holy water they are afraid of) and the cop flips the fuck out. They draw their guns, she immediately apologizes and ducks behind the counter. They approach and then the forward officer shoots her.

Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers, with the water landing on the ground and steaming where it landed. I want to thank Twitter user Fartblaster4000 for turning that moment into a helpful gif.

It's important this is in the form of a gif (without sound) because if you watch the version with sound you can plainly hear the gunshots before any steam is visible on the ground. Even in this gif you can see the recoil from the first shot go off before any steam is visible. How about "she dropped the pot of boiling water because the cop shot her in the head."

You may biased from previous media spectacles. Let’s consider everything with the right priors first: two professional police officers are dealing with a woman who is acting crazy. These two officers are trained professionals in recognizing when a crazy person is about to turn violent, because they deal with that every day. Their intuition for recognizing that is going to be top 0.1% in the country. When we hear “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” and see a vague outline of a person, the higher fidelity vision of the police officers is zooming in at the signs of whether this mentally ill African American woman is planning the destroy their lives with boiling water. In order to prevent their life’s happiness being taken away from them they tell her to step away from the pot of water.

In this video, at about 10:40 we clearly see that she ducks first at the request, without the pot. She is on the ground. Gun pointed at her. Officer saying “drop the pot”. At exactly 10:41.50, she grabs the pot from above her and throws it at the officers. If you watch 10:40-10:45 at .25 speed this is obvious. I recommend downloading the video and zooming as slow as you can actually. She lifts her hands up, grabs the pot, throws the contents toward the officer with a right arm which increasingly stretched outward, and the steaming water splashes feet in front of her, soaking the chair with boiling water. If you do an experiment in your kitchen with a pot of water, you’d note that merely holding the pot and turning it over will not launch the water like a projectile feet in front of you. Therefore, the evidence (arm begins to stretch out toward officer + the splash) indicates a throwing movement, as well as intent of throwing (from the position on the ground, reaching up and grabbing the pot of water in your sink). The shot rings immediately after she picked up the pot and completely extended her right arm, eg a normal reaction time by an officer in good physical fitness.

How about "she dropped the pot of boiling water because the cop shot her in the head."

How about examine evidence fully before making a conclusion

You may biased from previous media spectacles. Let’s consider everything with the right priors first: two professional police officers are dealing with a woman who is acting crazy. These two officers are trained professionals in recognizing when a crazy person is about to turn violent, because they deal with that every day. Their intuition for recognizing that is going to be top 0.1% in the country.

No thanks. I have no interest in uncritically believing cops know better than me, especially when I have video evidence to the contrary.

In this video, at about 10:40 we clearly see that she ducks first at the request, without the pot. She is on the ground. Gun pointed at her. Officer saying “drop the pot”.

So, the officers are screaming at her and advancing with guns drawn after she has already complied with their orders? Not beating the allegations they manufactured the situation!

Their intuition for recognizing that is going to be top 0.1% in the country.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Factually speaking, US cops receive far less training, with less g loaded selection, than peer nations. There exists no validated training for detecting when a "crazy" person is about to turn violent, so I doubt they receive any. The shooter bounced around as many as 5 departments in the last 5 years. By the data we have, he's possibly top 0.1% at creating lethal interactions from nothing.

It just requires common reasoning: cops in cities deal with crazy people every day; cops in cities deal with crazy people who turn violent every day; a good intuition is the result of many varied experiences with a given phenomenon over a long period of time especially where those experiences supply feedback. The feedback is whether your colleague is tackled or whether an innocent person is stabbed — add in the high tension release of cortisol which increases memory formation and… yeah. I think my assumption is safe.

training

Training is inferior to experience where intuition is concerned. The best chess players play the most games, as opposed to doing the most puzzles.

Choice comment on the video you posted:

Notice how the Devil didn't like being rebuked.

Even if she was going to throw the pot of water at them the correct decision for the officers was to move away from her, not towards her like they did.

Regardless she did do something wrong, namely letting cops into her house without a warrant.

This was absolutely a bad cop response. Like sure, she's acting a bit weird and they're annoyed at what's maybe a nuisance call, she's got a smashed window on her car so they are maybe trying to probe for some more information (they almost walked away from the call), and she's doing some random shit on her phone the whole team which would drive me mental, but overall she's just having a hard time finding her ID because the officer insisted on it rather than just have her spell it out. But the vibe isn't confrontational or anything. And honestly, even taking a long time to find where your wallet is, I will say, is a gender gap kind of thing -- a lot of women have multiple purses, and don't keep things in consistent spots.

Anyways, they are totally just chilling even if the cop who would later do the shooting is clearly a bit annoyed, she even says "one second" and goes to check the boiling water. She says "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" and he's like huh? and she repeats it. Definitely weird but it's not like she's screaming at them and again, there's no escalation going on. Rather than try to figure out what she's saying or whatever, remember the cops are a little ways away and across in the other room (also, have you lifted a pot of water? shit's HEAVY)... the cop literally turns the dial all the way to 11 and says in a very loud voice that he'll shoot her in the fucking head and puts his hand on his gun. Shots are going to be fired seconds later. She doesn't even get anything coherent out after he says that. She's clearly panicking, and you know? I maybe would too? Someone just threatened to shoot me in the head, kind of out of nowhere? I don't really know what she was trying to communicate with the Jesus thing but it doesn't really come across as threatening, if anything, the fact she was willing to repeat it for the cop who was confused seems to indicate that it wasn't a big deal to her? Like virtually 100% of the escalation was done by the one cop.

Seriously, the post you're replying to is about the most charitable someone could get while describing a horrible shoot like this.

Apparently we're not the only ones who saw it like that:

Massey was later pronounced deceased at an area hospital. On July 17, former Sheriff Deputy Sean Grayson was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct in connection with the death of Massey. Sean Grayson will be held in jail until his trial after a Sangamon County judge agreed with prosecutors that he’s a risk to the community. If convicted, Grayson faces prison sentences of 45 years to life for murder, six to 30 years for battery and two to five years for misconduct.

Yeah, this isn't 'cop was stood down pending the outcome of an internal investigation'. He was straight up fired and hit with 3 counts of first degree murder.

The district attorney could have gone with that for optics/political reasons, but I think its more likely that the police executive would have also used their '0.1% top ability to read the situation' from the footage and come to the correct decision.

What immediately jumps out at me is that "drop the boiling water" is not the kind of an order that is easy to comply to. Seeing as, you know, dropping a pot of boiling water at your feet will predictably scald your legs.

That's what makes these moments such an obvious win for demagogues.

People spend lots of time debating the minutiae of the encounter which just makes it more visible and talked about.

Instead, as a society, we need to say, "I don't care". The overwhelming evidence from body cams is that almost all police shootings are justified. But there are more than 330 million people in the U.S. There are more than 20,000 homicides. The police are dealing with violent, unstable, and drug-addicted people. There will always be mistakes.

Instead of arguing about this detail or that detail, we should simply frown, ignore, and move on. Whining about police should be considered low status behavior.

This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.

I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.

The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.

And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.

So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.

I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.

Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.

I personally disagree with ACAB and think that police misconduct is vastly overstated, but I understand and sympathise with the reasoning behind it. I expressed this a year ago on this forum:

While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.

I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.

For jobs that require the public's trust, even a hint of in-group loyalty or preference is poison. Sure, it's human to feel a kinship with other people doing the same job, but it's an instinct that has to be fought back, not leaned into. And cops as a profession reek of in-group loyalty, and an attitude like "you can't understand what our job is like" only makes it worse.

the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation

It being your first use of the acronym in your post, I genuinely did get confused as to why military contractors who are often hired for just such jobs would be unfamiliar with them.

Now I'm picturing Karen from HR having to hobble around in full plates and kit while J. J. Rambo makes Excel templates on a comically undersized laptop.

Hahaha. Crazy how those two worlds collided in a single acronym. Good catch.

Although, actual former PMCs would be some of the people I would want last as Cops. If you take away the Blackwaters and Triple Canopies of the world (who all recruit high end SpecialOps types) you get orgs like Armor Group .... who often collect dudes who are leaving the military for a whole host of what-the-acutal-fuck reasons. Your median PMC (private military contractor) in the Horn of Africa is always running off safe.

Well said. At a minimum I am simply not interested in hearing from anyone who doesn't know any cops or hasn't at least done a ride-along. The moral panic about policing is mostly just ignorance, a symptom of our class-segregated society.

When bad actors (like Kamala in this case) weaponize that ignorance, they damage the fabric of society for their own personal benefit.

The “moral panic” isn’t just about ignorance, though for many people ignorance of policing conditions no doubt plays a role. It’s also about a severe lack of accountability for the police who do abuse their positions of authority. When police who steal money are awarded immunity from both government prosecution and private lawsuits, or when police officers who shoot unarmed suspects, charge them with resisting arrest, and publicly lie about the whole thing are told “no biggie,” people reasonably get pretty upset. It’s one thing when a cop abuses his position—that’s bad, but you’ll never get a force that’s made up of 100% moral, upstanding officers. It’s quite another thing when a cop abuses his position—and his department, the local prosecutor, and the courts all protect him from punishment. That’s the sort of thing that reduces public support of cops, no different than how the Catholic sex abuse coverup led to greatly reduced trust in bishops and priests. Every time a cop abuses his position and gets a nice paid vacation out of it, protected from any legal or personal financial harm, while the taxpayer pays to settle lawsuits on his behalf, people look at it and say, “The system is broken.” They don’t need to have ever ridden in a squad car to know that.

But what about all of the times when a Cop abuses his power and is absolutely punished for it?

What about all of the times a case falls apart at trial for what are really, really minor technical errors usually in evidentiary handling? If I see the killer of my husband go free because there was "reasonable doubt" about how the pistol recovered from the trunk was found, do I get the same level of sympathy as these "taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits."?

More importantly - what if the truly heinous abuses of police power represent <1% of all cops while the other 99% are just trying to get home safe and not fuck up their cases.

(Side note: You cited Catholic clergy sex abuses and the up-the-chain indictment of Bishops and Cardinals. Do you feel the same way about public school teachers and administrators where the sexual abuse rate is multiple times of the general public (which, itself, was multiple times of that in the Catholic church)?)

You're making kind of a wild argument - Cops should be incredibly close to perfection and, if they fail, we should feel justified in indicting the entire system of policing for multiple years at a time. How do you expect positive changes to be made?

If I'm a police Commissioner and I discover real malfeasance, hold a press conference and say "Yeah, I'm totally going after these crooked cops" but then you stand up and say "It happened on your watch. You should resign, maybe be prosecuted. This whole department is suspect" .... when does corrective change actually occur? Everyone seems to be too busy indicting the entire system into oblivion .... despite it's working so incredibly well most of the time.

But I suppose you have history and precedent on your side. This all ends with "defund the police" which has resulted in a murder rate among the most vulnerable demographics skyrocketing.

I’m on board with this. It’s a problem for all kinds of reform projects— you don’t know what that job is like and want to reform it based on silly ideas from academia that only work on people who behave in statistically correct ways.

a symptom of our class-segregated society.

It's a little unusual for a wealthier family in my filter bubble to have a son enlist or go to the police academy, but not that weird.

You’re a red triber from Texas, where the police and military are presumably still considered respectable, medium-to-high-status career paths. Of course it doesn’t seem that weird to you. To see the class divisions, you need only look at how many well-off blue tribe sons join the military or police.

Wealthy red tribe families aren’t exactly unusual, though, and I’m not sure that red/blue segregation towards the top of the ladder is that comprehensive- presumably the PMC still likes country clubs.

Could be wrong though, I’ve only been at country clubs to fix things. Servants entrances still exist.

This is an area where I think the typical American approach to class distinctions—defining class solely by income—falls short. (Scott also talked about some of the shortcomings of our usual definitions several years ago.)

I don’t admittedly have as much experience with wealthy blue tribers as I do wealthy red tribers, but based on what experience I do have, I’d say the blue tribers would find it acceptable though perhaps mildly disappointing if one of their children became a schoolteacher, musician, or humanities professor, but they’d be confused and upset if one wanted to become a cop, soldier, or clergyman. Vice versa for the red tribers.

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I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of BLM-type people cop critics? We have a house call with slightly weird vibes that gets escalated -- BY the cops -- and someone ends up dead in their own home literally 10 seconds after what was previously a peaceful discussion. That kind of background impression, as a Black person especially, would be legitimately terrifying, right? That you could be having a rough night, maybe jumping at shadows, feeling a little off, you call people whose job is to protect and help communities feel and be safe, but you say or do the wrong thing in a moment of panic and you could end up literally dead?

It's sadly a bit self-reinforcing too of course. Nervousness around cops leads to irrational behavior around cops, so you could probably make the argument that demonizing the police is self-defeating behavior. But saying "almost all police shootings are justified" in a non-justified shooting moment is a weird take.

With that said I don't want to be too uncharitable. You're right that if we think about it in a false positive/false negative/etc. kind of sense, the false positives are usually very obvious and often overshadowed by the large amounts of true positives, so to speak.

And there are actually useful takeaways from the body cam video beyond "cops bad" or "cops racist" or something like that. I clearly see gaps in cop training here:

  1. Was it a good idea or not for them to continue investigating after "resolving" the complaint?

  2. Why didn't the cop in the first half of the bodycam video speak up more and act as a counterbalance to his clearly annoyed and apparently on a hair-trigger partner?

  3. Why was the cop so 0 to 100 aggressive in escalating things off of her strange Jesus comment?

  4. Was the cop's warning/threat to the lady effective in its actual purpose?

1 might have a larger discussion, but 2-4 show some clear missteps by the police - the partner was ineffective at his job, the cop escalated needlessly, and in a bad and ineffective manner even if he was going to escalate.

Edit: changed vocab to more accurately convey my point

The anti-BLM position has never been that every police shooting is justified. I see anti-BLM as making two claims:

  1. Unjustified police killings are rare.
  2. That blacks are killed by police disproportinate to their population is a function of their being disproportionately likely to present themselves as a deadly threat, not police racism.

None of points 2-4 are incompatible with this at all. They are all imply at least one takeaway that indicates the cops have work to do and improvements to be made. I never at any point made any claim that unjustified killings were anything other than rare!

The attitude that we should ignore these improvements and instead circle the wagons around police who we should portray as doing no wrong almost always is a problematic one, and doesn't logically follow!

Speaking as somebody who used to appeal to BLM'ers to include Tony Timpa in their press materials, I did so because I also don't like dickhead cops and argued that BLM's best path forward was to deracialize the issue and get broad buy-in with a patchwork of murder-by-cop horror stories. This was rejected near-totally. And in the years since, I think the ethos they represent is a larger threat to the country across multiple levels than what hotheads with badges occasionally do to people in the lower class.

I've also had a drop in sympathy for many (though not all) of these victims due to their sheer inability to 'act right' with law enforcement, based on some personal experiences. Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in (a power I did not realize I had until that moment!), then I have less and less patience for the kind of low-level disdain and noncompliance I see in these stories that always increases the risk of LEO escalation.*

*This particular comment is not directly relevant to Massey's story. Just further explanation as to why any common cause with your stereotypical anti-cop activist was left to wither and die.

If they didn't want to hold onto the racial angle so tightly, they could also use Justine Damond.

Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in

I feel like this is an anecdote worth sharing in full.

This is the exact type of microscrutiny of a single incident that I don't wish to engage in. Were cops in the wrong here? I don't know since I didn't watch the video. Also, I don't care. Worse things happen every day.

Instead of focusing on a single incident, we should aggregate the statistics and present those. When we do, we see that the problem is vanishingly small. But we will never get to zero in a country of over 330 million with 20,000 homicides per year. And yet that is what Kamala Harris is demanding.

I'm just done with caring. My only opinion now is that people who bring up police violence are either bad thinkers or have bad motives.

Instead of focusing on a single incident, we should aggregate the statistics and present those. When we do, we see that the problem is vanishingly small. But we will never get to zero in a country of over 330 million with 20,000 homicides per year. And yet that is what Kamala Harris is demanding.

And yet police violence could almost certainly be reduced dramatically by levelling up competence. Peter Moksos (who did 2 years as a beat cop in the rough bits of Baltimore as participant-observation research for his PhD) has collated statistics on the massive unjustified differences in police shooting rates between jurisdictions. Why are cops on the west coast more trigger-happy than on the east coast? If all big-city American police had the trigger discipline of the NYPD, then killer cops wouldn't be a political issue.

Reminds me of similar "Vision Zero" initiatives for traffic deaths to be reduced to exactly zero. Those weren't successful, either.

Some are surely inevitable for baseline physics / kinetics reasons, but near-enough zero is possible with self-driving cars tied to ubiquitous traffic monitoring systems.

We don't actually know that. We're far from cracking meaningful autonomy, and we have no idea what would be the impact of widespread adoption.

Zero is just a dumb target for almost anything. Instead of taking interventions that improve QALY's the most, we do stupid shit because "even one person dying of X is too many".

That's assuming that interventions are even positive at all. Post 2020 interventions to reduce police shootings very quickly and obviously made the world a much worse place for almost everyone.

The only way we get to zero is by eliminating the police entirely and just letting gangs run society.

While Kamala has bad motives probably, I'm not convinced that the aggregate statistics show what you say they do. Like, biased source, but here we see that we're getting 1 million people on the receiving end of force per year, 250,000 injuries including 85,000 of those requiring hospitalization. I'm not including deaths here because I agree those are inherently tricky to generalize from, though the source does emphasize that in some areas. More interesting to me is the second chart here which showed (caution y-axis) a very significant upswing from the early 2000s to ~2012 after which we see a decline back to middling levels. Still, those numbers I don't consider "vanishingly small". I think they are large enough to merit examination -- especially in the context of other countries not having quite the same issue with police as we do, speaking broadly. You could argue part of it lies in media attention, but I think most observers agree there are some actual differences, such as if we compare it to let's say the UK.

Also from a philosophical standpoint, high responsibility roles require high trust and high scrutiny. As the only force allowed a virtual monopoly on mostly-legal violence in the country, I think it's weird to just instantly give cops a pass. Personally, I really think that police departments should be given both increased funding as well as increased accountability in a structural way, which sadly most BLM-aligned "reform" groups seem to miss despite being probably the best and most moral solution. Because if you look carefully, it's pretty obvious that the accountability structure is broken. From an economic/incentives perspective, that's something important to fix.

Some police shootings are unjustified != all claims of BLM are true

Sorry, I've edited my comment to acknowledge the 'false positive' aspect. I perceive this kind of exercise as at least somewhat one of those tests where two people can see two different things in the same picture. So I think you really should be viewing both sides on some level.

I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of BLM-type people?

No? "Some cops are trigger-happy" does not, in any way, validate the BLM's claim about systemic racism.

I don't think you even need to squint to see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment going on here (such as their decision to keep investigating, and how they treated her which was not really very compassionate), though I'd attribute more of it to, like, I guess classism rather than racism, so I don't think it's really a great fit for BLM claims beyond the surface level. Just to be clear.

Sure, you can see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment, but the potential for such things is basically ever present in every circumstance ever. To actually say that this vindicates or even provides any support for the kind of systemic oppression narrative espoused by BLM, one would have to, at a minimum, have 2 different events that are very similar except for the race of the person interacting with the cops. This would be anecdotal but at least provide some minimal support. A single incident like this just fundamentally can't provide support for - much less vindicate - such a narrative, at least from an empirical perspective.

I think specific incidents can provide useful frameworks and relatable examples for talking about broader issues, though I agree there's often a methodological kind of issue if we make a habit of starting conversations from individual incidents, rather than bring up an incident as an illustration of a larger problem as I mentioned. Bayes' rule type considerations are absolutely something that should be front of mind.

I mean maybe the location of my replies in this thread might imply otherwise, but fundamentally I'm not one who thinks racial inequity is the biggest problem in policing. I think far bigger problems are principally ones that have to do with the general accountability structure, which is straight up broken. No organization can ever do well indefinitely without these checks and balances. And smaller problems with police mindset and training. For example, cops seem to generally lack some de-escalation skills, though my vague impression is that they've gotten slightly better. Recruiting from the military has always struck me as a problem too, because the fundamental mindset and paradigm are IMO mostly incompatible. I'm also moderately concerned about privacy type issues, though this is rarely a popular concern.

BLM claimed that the intensity of the racism justified burning down police precincts, and rioting throughout the country. "Potentials grounds for profiling" that are "not a great fit beyond the surface level" strikes me as a qualitatively different claim than the ones being made during the last round of BLM.

No, you're right, I probably should have been more specific. To the extent that racial justice people and cop critics are separate groups, I suppose I was really talking about the second group, and the related arguments there.

The body cams are for scrutinizing them collectively, as a society, to be sure that the mistakes are rare, rather than "ignore and move on".

And it worked! We've confirmed that they are indeed rare. We will never get to zero. It's time to move on.

Trust is a continuous thing and is updated continuously.

Scrutiny of this kind is probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy.

I agree, but it's also true that a lot of local attempts at change have been stonewalled. Does that mean going national is the logical thing to do? I don't really think so, but I somewhat empathize. It happens with things like housing too, right?

Does charging the cop with first-degree murder count as "stonewalling" and justify going national?

I’m referring more to things like how NYC set up a whole board to review use of force cases and then the police refused to give them the actual footage or even allow them to interview cops thus making their job almost impossible. That went on for several years IIRC. So things like that, and union resistance, and systemic opposition. I don’t like relying on high profile lawsuits to regulate behavior when there are better more long-term accountability schemes.

So literally nothing to do with a choice of whether scrutiny in this specific case is "probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy" or otherwise. Got it.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

However, exploiting such a case for national politics is unleashing a Pandora's Box, as we saw with the George Floyd hysteria. So it's not generally a justified strategy.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

This is a fully-general argument for taking literally any case national, no matter how local and how inconsequential to national issues. So long as you "want". Why would you want? For what purpose? What problem are you actually solving by taking it national? You're preemptively getting in front of some hypothetical injustice? Again, there can be hypothetical injustice that you could conceivably be getting in front of in literally any case ever. The system, in general, tolerates some non-zero percentage of actual, not hypothetical, injustice. It is not hard to have exposure either to the day-to-day workings of the system or even just exposure to those who have exposure to the day-to-day workings of the system and know that there is routine actual injustice (though 'routine' in a nation of almost 400M people is still a tiny percentage). Why even bother with hypothetical when you could spend your time on actual?

Yeah this becoming a Big Issue in the summer of election year is right on time. Very hard to even want to talk about it. Are we gonna actually fix this at the national level or not? What's the specific policy proposal? Why hasn't it been implemented or at least proposed in Congress in 4 years of Democrat rule? Etc etc.

My contempt toward the use of this event as a political strategy threatens to overshadow my raw spontaneous personal feelings about the event itself, which is a shame.

I have a half baked idea. Nationalise and centralise the training of state police under a 'National Police Bureau' (a joint exercise between say the FBI and US Marshal Service) similar to how the National Guard operates.

Then once trained, the police are deployed to their home state to operate under local command and control (eg police chief under the mayor/governor) to allay fears of federal control of the police forces. It could also be an avenue for internal investigation so local cops can't cover up bad shootings/dirty cops. Certain incidents automatically escalate to a review from out of the state investigators.

This standardisation of best practice vetting and training will eliminate some low hanging fruit leading to bad shootings and other incidents. Much less hiring of people that should never have become cops. Much less crazy bad training methods (like training your cops that kneeling on people's necks is a legitimate restraint technique).

You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.

According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.

Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.

US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)

The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.

For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths.

Ironically, in our rush to deem police as morally bad in 2020, traffic deaths rose from 10.99/100k in 2019 to 12.89 in 2021, around 8000 additional deaths, with no appreciable change in total miles traveled. It's pretty clear to me (and anecdotally, comes up in conversation occasionally as generally accepted) that they basically stopped enforcing traffic laws at the time, which has lead to more deaths than if police killings dropped to zero. And the number of murders went up quite a bit too. I'm fairly confident that, overall, Black Lives Matter has a negative count of (Black) lives saved, but I'm glad (/s) they feel good about their advocacy.

IMO one of these cases where systems are more complicated than they seem. Something about Chesterton and fences, even though I think there's substantial room for improvement in how we do policing and criminal justice overall.

On Sunday I speculated that the Dems will use a George Floyd-like psychological operation to increase Democrat turnout in the election. Today, Kamala issued a statement about Sonya Massey, a black woman killed by police whose body cam footage was released recently:

It might be what she's trying to do, but I'm throwing my hat in into it by saying: it's not going to work. I've seen them whipping themselves into a frenzy for BLM2, and it looked very different. There was something hypnotizing about it. They simply do not have the mana for that anymore.

They simply do not have the mana for that anymore.

Hence why they are tapping more lands of color, so to speak.

Dems have plenty Black mana but not enough White mana. Unfortunately for them Trump has "indestructible" and all the exile effects available that can handle him require W instead of B.

Agreed, in fact I don't know that the summer of love would even have been possible without covid as a preamble. The psychological effects of lockdown were crucial to set the stage, to an extent that I don't think anyone actually expected the outcome we saw.

I don't think we're going to see anything even close to that this time around.

The psychological effects of lockdown were crucial to set the stage

That's not it. Don't ask me to define it, but it really is just "mana". There was no shortage of pre-covid insanity - MeToo, Kavanaugh hearings, The Smirkening, various cancellations of people big and small for the high crime of not thinking Trump is Hitler... Back then progressives were all charged up, and ready to go off over the slightest transgression. Now they're spent. They simply will not be able to whip up enough enthusiasm, even going by pre-COVID standards.

It will come down to TikTok and instagram. Dems lost the Twitter stronghold but if they can shill their narrative on TikTok and insta then they can get a momentum going. I think Gaza also reduces the potency of a Floyd-like defining moment. The problem with TikTok is that it’s difficult to gauge how popular a narrative is because everything is feed-specific. There’s not really a hashtag feature that is universally used and the search function is mediocre. There could be a trending narrative among influential voters and we could have no idea!

Dems lost the Twitter stronghold but if they can shill their narrative on TikTok and insta then they can get a momentum going.

Dems tried to shut TikTok down because of all the Gaza footage that was spreading on there, and Gaza is a toxic issue for the dems - their base hates what is going on but their donors and organisational leadership support everything that's happening. They're not going to have a good time on TikTok and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to go after it again.

It will come down to TikTok and instagram. Dems lost the Twitter stronghold but if they can shill their narrative on TikTok and insta then they can get a momentum going.

We'll see, but as far as I can tell, progressives seem pretty burned out at the moment. I don't see them throwing themselves into another riot, especially since the last one - and it's consequences - is still fresh in people's memories. They'll at least need to come up with a new topic to whip up a new frenzy about, but I doubt even that would work.

I think an underrated ingredient is the Floyd video just looking unusually bad, meanwhile this is clearly a case of suicide by cop- tragic, but not indicative of nationwide systemic problems.

I'm not seeing it. You can go back to the old CW threads and see the process unfold - the Arbery Shooting, Central Park Karen... and Floyd (there might have been something in between that I forgot). You can see it wasn't anything about that case in particular. If it wasn't Floyd, they'd just keep looking for cases until they had the momentum. The Riots in Kenosha were over arguably the most unsympathetic "victim" you could find, but people rioted over him anyway.

The Riots in Kenosha were over arguably the most unsympathetic "victim" you could find, but people rioted over him anyway.

The Wendy's guy in Atlanta was possibly worse.

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