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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.
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.
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).
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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.
[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 taxespound 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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