US police shootings thread

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US police shootings thread

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US police shootings: Philando Castile complied with orders and was still shot live on Facebook

It's a seriously sick society when a four-year- old is heard supporting her mother in the minutes after a white policeman has killed the mother's African-American boyfriend – seemingly for doing precisely as the officer had ordered.

The president has weighed in, the FBI and the Justice Department, the Minnesota's governor and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension too.

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But it was the words of the dead man's mother that cut most powerfully through the incessant din that routinely follows such killing – which, despite the pleas by black Americans, are on the rise.

"The key thing, in order to try to survive being stopped by the police is to comply," Valerie Castile told CNN. "Whatever they ask you to do, do it. Don't say nothing. Just do whatever they want you to do. So what's the difference in complying and you get killed anyway?

"I made sure my kids understood the difference in being law-abiding, and that the police were there to help," she added. "I never once in my life have thought that my son would actually be killed by the persons that are supposed to protect and serve him."

As best can be told at this stage, this is how it happened – and as black communities across the country become cauldrons of anger and anguish, bear in mind that this it the second such killing to go viral on social media in less than 48 hours and Castile is at least the 506th victim of a police killing in the US since the start of this year, according to a tally kept by The Washington Post – more than a quarter of whom were African-Americans.

Philando Castile, a 32-year- old school cafeteria manager, had been out on Tuesday evening with his girlfriend Diamond 'Lavish' Reynolds and her daughter, who has not been named. They shopped together for groceries; he had a hair cut ahead of his upcoming birthday.

Transiting Falcon Heights, a quiet, middle-class suburb of St Paul city, they are pulled over for a faulty tail-light. In coming to the driver-side window, the officer orders them to put their hands in the air – but at the same time he demands Castile's his licence and registration papers, which were in a wallet in his trousers pocket.

Seemingly following the advise of his mother, Castile proceeded to produce his papers and in what appears to have been a gesture of co-operation, he informed the officer that he like so many other in this gun-crazed country, he was carrying a gun – for which he had a licence.

On Thursday, Reynolds told reporters: "As he's reaching for his back pocket wallet, he lets the officer know: 'Officer, I have a firearm on me.' I begin to yell, 'But he's licensed to carry,' [but] after that, [the officer] began to take off shots: ba ba ba ba. 'Don't move, don't move!'

"But how can you not move when you're reaching for license and registration? It's either you want my hands in the air or you want my identification."

With remarkable presence of mind, Reynolds starts live broadcasting from the car, streaming video through her Facebook page, as blood is seeping through Castile's shirt – "he's killed my boyfriend," she tells an audience that eventually would count in the millions.

Castile is moaning and seemingly losing consciousness as the unnamed officer, reportedly with about five years experience in the service, can be heard swearing, before he yells at Reynolds: "Ma'am, keep your hands where they are…I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up."

"You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver's license. Oh my God. Please don't tell me he's dead. Please don't tell me my boyfriend just went like that."

Addressing Castile, she says: "Stay with me." Then she speaks to the camera as the cop keeps his gun trained on Castile: "We got pulled over for a busted tail-light in the back."

Another cop arrives. As he orders Reynolds from the car, she asks: "Where's my daughter? You got my daughter?"

"Face away from me, and walk backwards," the second cop instructs her – and in the background a third cop can be seen holding a child. The second cop now orders Reynolds to kneel – and as handcuffs can be heard locking her wrists, the daughter cries in the background.

Reynolds: "Why am I being arrested?"

Second cop: "Ma'am, you're just being detained right now until we get this all sorted out, okay?"

Reynolds, to the camera as it then tilts away and towards the sky: "Wow - they threw my phone, Facebook."

"Please don't tell me he's gone," Reynolds screams as an ambulance pulls up, siren blaring. "Please Jesus, no. Please no. Please no, don't let him be gone, Lord."

As a voice that is presumed to be that of the first cop continues to swear in the background, Reynolds repeats herself: "He was reaching for his license and registration. You told him to get it sir! You told him!

"He tried to tell you he was licensed to carry and he was going to take it off. Please don't tell me boyfriend is gone. He don't deserve this."

The screen goes black as Reynolds prays: "Please Lord, you know our rights Lord. You know we are innocent people, Lord. We are innocent people."

A cop is heard addressing Reynolds' daughter "Can you stand right here, sweetie?" But the four-year old, with amazing composure, tells him: "I'm gonna get my mommy's purse."

The child's face appears on the screen as she picks up Reynolds' phone – which continues to record.

"Is that your phone?" the male officer asks.

Reynolds is then seen sitting in the rear of a police vehicle, telling her daughter: "Don't be scared."

She then addresses the camera: "My daughter just witnessed this. The police just shot him for no apparent reason, no reason at all."

The child interrupts her: "It's okay, Mommy…It's okay. I'm right here with you."

"Y'all please pray for us," Reynolds says. "I ask everybody on Facebook, everybody that's watching, everybody that's tuned in, please pray for us."

Source: The Age

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Re: US police shootings thread

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Miami police shoot black man with his hands up trying to help autistic patient

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Maybe the US government should worry a little less about closing down torrent sites and spend some money on training some of these fuckwits a bit better.

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Re: US police shootings thread

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Give more IQ tests than physical fitness tests. I'll take a smart fat cop over a moron hired because he looks intimidating.

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The cop said he was actually aiming for the patient, not the caregiver.

So this means:

1) This asshole is a terrible shot.

2) He thinks shooting a retarded guy playing with toy cars in the street is a better story.

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Maybe they need to spend some money on eye tests as well as proper training.

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TAKE IT TO THE SUBURBS! BURN THAT SHIT DOWN! WE NEED OUR WEAVES! :rofl2:


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Re: US police shootings thread

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West Virginia cop fired for not killing a man with an unloaded gun

We’ve tracked countless cases here where cops were able to keep their jobs after killing unarmed people, killing people after responding to the wrong house, killing people and then lying about it . . . the list goes on.

Give the Weirton, W.Va., police chief some credit. He’s come up with a new spin on the the same problem. He just fired a cop for not killing someone.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”

“I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it.

“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.

Mader was responding to a 911 call from Williams’s girlfriend. In that call, she told police that Williams was threatening to kill himself, not anyone else.

What Mader did upon arriving at the scene is a hell of a lot braver course of action than simply opening fire when the suspect doesn’t immediately disarm. What Mader did is in fact exactly what we want cops to do when someone is in crisis. It’s also precisely what law enforcement officers say they do on a daily basis — put themselves at risk in order to save lives. Mader should have been given a medal. Unfortunately, two more cops then showed up, and quickly shot Williams dead.

As it turns out, Williams’s gun wasn’t loaded. There’s no way any of the police officers could have known that. But it does show that Mader had read Williams correctly — he wasn’t actually a threat to anyone but himself. His life could have been saved.

The Weirton police department then refused to name Williams for three days and assigned an investigator to look into the shooting . . . who then promptly left for a weeklong vacation. Then came the punchline.

Mr. Mader — speaking publicly about this case for the first time — said that when he tried to return to work on May 17, following normal protocol for taking time off after an officer-involved shooting, he was told to go see Weirton Police Chief Rob Alexander.

In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”

Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”

On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”

The city mentioned two other incidents in firing Mader, but it seems clear that his failure to kill Williams was the motivation for his termination. Even the rare cop who gets fired often gets to keep his pension. Mader won’t be getting one.

After he received his termination notice, Mr. Mader sought attorneys to help him fight the city. He was told because he was still a probationary employee in an “at-will” state, he could be fired for any reason and there was no point in fighting the city.

One attorney told him the best he could hope for was to ask to resign instead of being terminated.

“But I told [the attorney] ‘Look, I don’t want to admit guilt. I’ll take the termination instead of the resignation because I didn’t do anything wrong,’ ” Mr. Mader said. “To resign and admit I did something wrong here would have ate at me. I think I’m right in what I did. I’ll take it to the grave.”

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an article about the longstanding problem in which even the rare bad cops who do get fired are often able to quickly find work at another policy agency. Mader, who served a tour in Afghanistan and has two sons under five-years-old, told the Post-Gazette that he’s now studying for a commercial truck driving license, but he’d consider another job in law enforcement if he were offered one. I hope that happens. I hope he’s given the same second chance that corrupt, trigger-happy cops are given. My hunch is that he’ll be driving trucks.

Source: Washington Post

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Well, it is West Virginia, America's incest capital.

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Charlotte protests: North Carolina governor declares state of emergency

Second night of unrest rocks the city following the fatal police shooting of Keith Scott, a black man

Violence and confusion has spread across Charlotte after a second night of protests was interrupted by gunfire when one protester shot another.

North Carolina governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, and called for help from the National Guard and the Highway Patrol.

The demonstrations started on Tuesday after police shot and killed a black man.

Late on Wednesday night crowds gathered at the site of the protester’s shooting, and pulled clay planters from city flowerbeds to throw at police. Dirt from the pots mixed with the wounded protester’s blood on the sidewalk, trampled by the opposing ranks of police and protesters.

Initially city officials said the man had died from the gunfire, but later reversed to say he was alive but critically wounded.

Protesters held signs that read “release the tape”, referring to police video of the shooting that started the protests on Tuesday.

Police shot and killed Keith Scott, a black man, in the parking lot of an apartment complex where he lived on the east side of the city. Mayor Jennifer Roberts’s spokesman said she would review the video footage on Thursday, but has no plans to release it.

The new shooting on Wednesday night took place in an upscale section of Charlotte’s business district called Uptown, and a few protesters looted stores as crowds paced the streets.

Robert Noble, 48, and his wife were finishing dinner at a restaurant called City Smoke when they saw a wave of protesters surge past the building’s glass front. “Then a brick came flying through the window,” he said. Staff and patrons evacuated through a back corridor, he said.

Police mustered at the intersection where the night’s shooting had happened, divided it into quadrants and marched outward, slowly pressing back protesters. They fired tear gas canisters as they moved.

Protesters lost and regained and then lost territory again into the night, and eventually started flinging wine bottles and at least one Moltov cocktail at the lines of police. Once protesters threw bottles police started firing orange plastic bullets filled with white powder. The shots – which made the sound of automatic gunfire – scattered crowds before they gradually reformed.

Police wore the now-familiar riot gear that has led some to criticize the militarization of law enforcement. But in North Carolina, home to numerous military bases and veterans, police found themselves squaring off more often against former soldiers who had their own tactics and gear.

“They’re treating us like we’re in a war zone,” said protester Sage Lawson, 24, of Reidsville, North Carolina. Wednesday was his one year anniversary of leaving the military, he said. “We couldn’t do this to people in Afghanistan. They can snatch people out of a crowd and just throw them in a van. We couldn’t do that in war.”

A man in a gas mask who gave his first name as John, but declined to give his last name, said he spent four years in the Marines, stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. “I’m still serving my country,” he said, sounding distant and muffled through the mask. He stood just a foot or so from a line of police, who wore their own masks. “It feels strange to be on this side, it does,” he said. “But this is the right thing.”

Amid the flying bottles and canisters and plastic bullets, 51-year-old Henry Lee sat silent on a law chair at the center of the confrontation. He didn’t speak to anyone, but listened to music. As police advanced he moved his chair back incrementally. “I will not run,” he said.

The only thing that moved him from his position was a thrown glass bottle. He stood and turned to face a wall of protesters, almost all younger than him. “Cut that out!” he thundered. “Stop throwing shit. There’s a right way to do this.”

And then he sat down again.

Source: The Guardian

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Not a shooting but the same result.


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Re: US police shootings thread

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He wasn't Lovin' It©

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They're killing white Australian women now.


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Three people “with knowledge of the incident” told the Star Tribune that the responding officers pulled into the alley behind Damond’s home. The woman, wearing pajamas, approached the driver’s side door and was talking to the driver, reported the Star Tribune. The officer in the passenger seat shot Damond through the driver’s side door, the three people told the newspaper.
That doesn't make any sense. There's got to be more to it.

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