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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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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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"???
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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.
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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 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.
I think this is that thread :) The McDonald's case got brought up as a comparison, and because someone was wondering how opinions on it correlate to this shooting.
I'm camp "hot water is definitely dangerous, but that does not mean the cops acted correctly". I refuse to go beyond that, as it would require watching the videos, and as others, I have a firm policy of not watching snuff films.
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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.
It misrepresents the central point of the case. McDonalds coffee was hot coffee, not some sort of ultra-dangerous killer liquid. If you've ever made instant coffee or tea you've made a hotter beverage.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
You have a point. But there are many variables. Like @ControlsFreak says, I've never even considered pots of water as a weapon, or even throwing them. I have no clue what this particular woman could or could not do. And water can have a weird sloshing effect which fights you when you try to move it quickly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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