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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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US police kill citizens semi-randomly all the time, yet the US still has police. In practice people are fine with false positives and trade-offs. There are those who died of COVID vaccine injuries, yet that didn't stop the rollout.

US police kill citizens semi-randomly all the time

No they don’t, unjustified homicides by police are extremely rare.

I don't know how often American police shoot an unarmed person who wasn't resisting arrest or anything like that - plausibly, an event meeting that description could happen once a week or once a month. In a nation of 330 million people, that's completely meaningless, of course. But if something happens once a week, it's true in the colloquial sense that it happens "all the time".

I was thinking of Justine Diamond, or police breaking into this weirdo's car and shooting him: https://www.cpr.org/2022/09/13/clear-creek-county-deputies-shooting/

They also get the wrong house from time to time in these no-knock raids as mentioned below. I don't know how one defines 'all the time' vs 'extremely rare' in these national-level statistics but it's definitely a 'non-zero chance' and either way supports my broader point.

My head hurts after reading that link. And I frankly almost want to side with the cops, that dude sounds incredibly irritating, and the best solution seems to be to walk away and ignore him, but they're not allowed to do that.

If cops have discretion to shoot him dead, surely they have the discretion to walk away.

“Can you ask Clear Creek what their plan is? If there is no crime and he’s not suicidal or homicidal or a great danger, then there’s no reason to contact him,” a CSP sergeant says over the radio. “Is there a medical issue we’re not aware of?”

“No,” a patrol trooper responded back.

But the increasing number of officers on the scene remained there, engaged for almost an hour and 20 minutes, attempting to get Glass to come out of the car. At one point, a deputy climbed on to the hood of the car and shined a flashlight into his eyes and remained there, eventually drawing his gun and pointing down into the car at Glass.

Extremely rare but SWAT teams do occasionally raid the wrong house.

As the saying goes, the optimal amount of a bad outcome is not zero.

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