So, a guy with a towel wrapped around his arm, likely because it was injured, attempts to flag down police officers. They immediately jump out of their car and shoot him, yelling “drop the gun!” all the time, then justified it as “he wasn’t following orders”.
Meaning there wasn’t any orders the man could have followed. What was he supposed to drop? I can only imagine the confusion in his head as these men jump out at him yelling “drop the gun”. What gun? What were they asking him to do? He couldn’t have had any idea what to do in the second or two between hearing this, and the first bullets hitting his body.
So now the guy is in the hospital with the top of his head blown off. If he survives, he’ll be a vegetable. If you or I did this, we would go to jail at the very least for negligent use of a firearm. These police officers will likely get a commendation and eventual promotion.
Which brings to mind a sick joke:
Q: How many cops does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Trick question, cops don’t change anything. First they beat up the room for being black then they arrest the bulb for being broke.
Not fair to all the police officers who do their job right? Well, once so-called “good cops” start sending police officers to jail for murder when they kill unarmed people, just like we send “civilians” to jail for murder in those cases, I’ll admit it’s unfair. Until the so-called “good cops” are willing to arrest and send to jail the so-called “few bad apples”, they’re all going to be smelling like rotten apples. Just sayin’.
Not to mention that the “few bad apples” aren’t so few. As I already pointed out, at least 10% of a typical big city police force is so-called “bad apples”. So I’m not going to stop with the light bulb jokes until police officers stop killing unarmed people because they “fear for their life” in situations where nobody sane would have a fear in the world. Cops in other nations manage to do their job without killing hundreds of people a year. There’s no reason why we couldn’t accomplish that here in the United States, if we hired cops with balls that clang rather than scared ninnies who have to shoot up the entire frickin’ neighborhood ’cause somebody did not respect their authoritah. Would a few more cops get killed per year if they had balls instead of marshmallows? Sure. It might even make it less safe to be a police officer than it is to be an ordinary citizen of Oakland, California, rather than the current situation of a cop having less than 1/5th the probability of being murdered on the job than a typical citizen of Oakland. But that’s what the job is, and cowards who aren’t willing to do the job, who are going to shoot first and determine whether someone is armed later… well, they deserve the fate of any coward who shoots an unarmed person: A lengthy prison term followed by a scarlet letter “convict” on their public record. Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Not-packin’ Penguin
Hey, maybe they were afraid he was going to flick them w/ the towel, locker room-style.
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I worked a shift today doing suicide watch on the hospital floor where i worked from 2005-2009. Ran into several nurses I haven’t seen for half a decade. A couple of them recounted their trips to the U.S. I exclaimed “And you didn’t get shot!” They got the joke. That’s Amerika’s rep these days. I was snarking about massacres by madmen. I should have kept the cops in mind as potential killers too.
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I still have my modest proposal: Take away the cop’s guns for a month. Thirty days. And any of them who refuse to work without the backing of deadly force, fire them on the spot. Then publicly blacklist them so they don’t just show up in the police force of a different community. I have thought long and hard about how to undo the self-selection process that draws people out to abuse the power the position affords to police work and come up with nothing realistic, so this is all I’ve got for you.
PS I’ve lived in Oakland for 31 years…
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And you’re still alive. Something that cops, whose job is literally 1/4th as dangerous as living in Oakland, need to remember. But won’t.
I would say that there’s one modification I’d make to your modest proposal. That is: their guns are locked in the trunk of the car. That way if someone decides to shoot at a cop, the cops can zoom away, retrieve their guns from the trunk, and come back to take out whoever just shot at them. In my opinion it’s the instantaneous resort to guns that is the cause of so many unarmed people being shot to death by cops, not the fact that they have guns at all. Finally, bring back the good ole’ PR-24 tactical baton. There’s a lot of situations the PR-24 would have handled that cops are now resorting to their guns to handle because the ASP folding batons are about as effective as car antennas. All you’re going to do with an ASP is annoy someone. It’s certainly possible to kill someone with the PR-24, but it takes time, and in the course of doing so you can discover that the dude has a wound under that towel, not a gun.
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LAPD should now only be armed with towels wrapped around one wrist.
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