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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 examine evidence fully before making a conclusion
No thanks. I have no interest in uncritically believing cops know better than me, especially when I have video evidence to the contrary.
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!
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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 is inferior to experience where intuition is concerned. The best chess players play the most games, as opposed to doing the most puzzles.
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Choice comment on the video you posted:
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.
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