Criminals come last on the priority of people to protect

Cops in Vallejo shoot and kill dude who was sleeping in his car with a gun in his lap. He startled when they knocked on the window with a flashlight, reached for the gun, and they ventilated him.

Look. This is California, about 20 miles north of me. It’s illegal to openly display a pistol in the passenger compartment of a vehicle in the state of California, period. I mean, I own guns. I like guns. And I know damn well that the only legal way to carry a firearm in a vehicle in the state of California is in the cargo area in a locked container, with the ammunition locked up separately. That’s the law. Anybody sitting in his car with a pistol on his lap in the state of California is either a moron, or up to no good. And cops aren’t going to assume moron, because that could get them shot.

Cops have three priorities:

1. The safety of the general public, and of bystanders, is priority #1 above all else.
2. The safety of the police officer is priority #2. A dead police officer cannot protect the general public and bystanders from criminals.
3. The safety of criminals is last. Criminals who may pose a threat to the officer, bystanders, or the general public are maybe even lower than last. Their safety barely even nudges the needle off the ground floor on the list of a police officer’s priorities.

So why didn’t they try to wake him from far away with a loudspeaker? A multitude of reasons:

1. Loudspeakers attract bystanders. The last thing you want if an encounter turns into a gunfight is bystanders.
2. Cops are, frankly, bad aims. If things go sideways, cops are trained to be as close to the perp as possible without being close enough to be disarmed so that they have a greater chance of hitting the perp rather than a bystander. If you’re that close to the perp already, you might as well just knock on the window with a flashlight in one hand and your service weapon in the other, because if he startles awake and starts shooting, that’s where you want to be anyhow.
3. You want to be close also so you can see whether he’s reaching for the gun. The last thing you want is for the perp to jump out of the car and start shooting. You want to shoot and kill him *before* he starts shooting. Simply putting his hand on the gun is enough reason because at that point he becomes a threat to the safety of the officer and the safety of the public. See #1 and #2 on the priority list.

Frankly, unless something else comes out, this is a righteous shoot. A criminal was sitting in a car with an illegal gun on his lap, reached towards that gun when he was woken up by the cop tapping on the window, and was killed for his trouble. Good riddance to bad rubbish. If he didn’t want to be shot, he shouldn’t have been violating California law by openly carrying a weapon in the passenger compartment of his car. Call it suicide by cop if you want. Because that’s basically what it was, what he did.

This is reality. It’s not nice, but it is what it is. This was a righteous shoot under both policy and law. The moment he reached for that gun, any requirement that the cops consider his safety vaporized in the wind. I understand that this dude’s family doesn’t want to hear that their kid was a criminal and was shot while committing a crime, but that’s what happened here. It was illegal for that gun to be in that dude’s lap in that car in the state of California, he was committing a crime, and thus was a criminal. And when a criminal makes a move that poses a threat to the police or bystanders, the well-being of that criminal simply isn’t a consideration anymore — the only thing that becomes important then is to end the threat to the public and the officers. Period. Regardless of any nonsense that left-wing loons come up with about what the cops should have done in some bizarro world where unicorns poop rainbows and cotton candy grows on trees.

– Badtux the Law Penguin
Hmm, contrast this with the prior post if you think I knee-jerk defend cops!

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How to (almost) start a riot while breaking up a fight

Officer restrains a girl who had been fighting by slamming her face into a cafeteria table using her hair as a handle. The students had been just generally heckling the officers before then, but this almost started a riot.

The school district and police department whine, “but you didn’t see the whole incident”. Well. The students who were there and did see the entire incident appear to believe that the officer used excessive force to the point where some were ready to push the officer off the student. It takes a lot to get students to go that far. I’ve been in that situation of having to use force against a student before, and it’s a touchy situation, but I never — ever — had other students attempt to interfere with breaking up a fight. We moved in and restrained the students, turned them around so they couldn’t see each other anymore, and started walking them in opposite directions using the force required and no more while asking them what the heck they were trying to do, major verbal judo to daze ‘n’ confuse them and get them thinking about something other than fighting until we could get them out of the cafeteria and into (separate) offices. At most the other students heckled us about how the fight was just getting good when we broke it up, but they never tried to interfere with what we were doing. But then, none of us slammed a girl’s face into a table while using her hair as a handle either, because that’s not what our training told us to do. These officers almost incited a riot. I’ve never seen anything like that in any school I ever taught at, including the behavior center for “bad” kids where most of the kids had probation officers. None of them even got *close* to rioting when we broke up fights, they mostly seemed to view it as entertainment. This implies that whatever happened before this footage was *bad*.

And BTW, yes, there was one incident I was involved in where students stepped in — but to *help*, not to lynch us. A kid came last day of school with a knife to stab a kid he blamed for getting him suspended earlier in the school year, and it took three teachers and two students piling on him to keep him from killing someone. And one of those students who helped us had a probation officer, I know because I’d met the probation officer earlier in the school year during my planning period when he came by to ask about the student’s behavior and academics. Students can be rude and disrespectful but they know right from wrong (even if they’re not always doing the right thing) and if you’re in the right, they’re not trying to attack you, they’re trying to help you if you need help, even the “bad” students. If you just wade in and start slamming people around using far more force than required, on the other hand… that’s a good way to start a riot. Just sayin’.

The sad thing is all the (white) people defending what happened by saying “but this video isn’t the whole story!” Well, the kids who were there have the whole story. They obviously think excessive force happened. Who should I believe — some random white people who weren’t there, or, like, the kids who were actually there? Hmm….

– Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin

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Uhm, there’s some cops who need to be fired.

Cops fired over 20 shots at a car filled with people where a possibly wanted man was driving. The other people in the car were guilty of nothing other than getting a ride to Walmart. But they were guilty of being black, so the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, one of the most brutal in California according to statistics, just poured bullets into the car. ‘Cause nobody was gonna get hurt except black people, right? And black lives, everybody knows they don’t matter, right?

Do you seriously think this would have happened if the other people in the car had been white people? Nope. The cops would have been leery of lawsuits and being fired if they shot at innocent white people. But they were pissed ’cause this here n-word didn’t stop for them when they bleeped their siren at him. so they was gonna pour bullets into his car until he stopped, regardless of the possibility of hitting innocent people.

Service and protect, my ass.

– Badtux the Law And Order Penguin
(Who dislikes gang bangers in blue just as much as he dislikes gang bangers in any other color).

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Here, watch a police officer in Huntington Beach, California, execute a man

Warning, do not watch the above video unless you want to watch a cop execute an unarmed 27-year-old Navy veteran by the name of Dillan Tabares.

Now, there’s another video basically showing the skinny dude chasing the cop as the cop is trying to taser him. So we’re definitely in a situation where the cop expects, once he has backed away from the man, that the man is going to come right back at him as soon as he gets his feet under him, and thus once he makes the decision to pull his service weapon he has to use his service weapon or else lose it to the street person, thereby causing a danger to the life of himself and others. On the other hand, I have this question: What kind of pussy cops are we hiring who can’t deal with a half-starved skinny street dude physically without shooting him to death? I mean, fuck. I could have probably managed the physical part of this encounter as well as this cop did, and I’m a fucking computer geek, it’s not my *job* to apply violence to evil-doers.

And hey, the skinny street dude was unarmed. He wasn’t a threat to the safety of anybody else in the vicinity. Why not call it in and call for backup, wait for backup, and *then* take the kid down? I mean, that was part of my training when I was being trained in how to restrain mentally ill people — “don’t try to do it by yourself, always do it in pairs.” First of all, a mentally ill person when faced with two people trying to subdue him is more likely to comply, realizing that he’s outnumbered. (Note that I said *more* likely, not that he *would* — we’re talking mentally ill people after all). Secondly, there’s less chance of injury both to yourself and to the person you’re trying to restrain if there’s two of you.

The biggest mistake this cop made was to remove his service weapon from its holster. Assuming the cop has a typical positive retention holster issued to officers today, the weapon was safe in the holster. The dude wasn’t going to wrestle it out, it requires a series of motions from an angle that an attacker can’t easily replicate in order to remove that pistol from its holster. But once the weapon was removed from its holster, the cop had two alternatives, given that the dude had already charged the cop. The first alternative was to use it. “Use it or lose it”, is the training cops receive. That is, if they’ve made the choice to deploy their service weapon and the person charges them, shoot to kill, immediately, because the alternative is that the person is going to grab the weapon and shoot someone with it.

The second alternative, of course, was to put all the high tech toys away, pull out a nightstick, and do like the big bruiser Irish cops of my youth woulda done: Grin, and say “You want some of this, I see,” then beat the crap out of the dude. Dude woulda still ended up in the hospital of course, cracked ribs, maybe a broken arm or leg bone, bruised kidneys, the works. But he would have been alive.

But of course this cop, like most pussy cops today, doesn’t carry a nightstick. And unlike the big bruiser Irish cops of my youth, he doesn’t know how to handle himself in a brawl. So here we are, a dead person who shouldn’t be dead, because our cops today are pussies.

At which point I have one question: If all they’re good for is executing people, if they can’t handle issues in any other way, why do we have them? I mean, we used to have cops who could handle situations like this without shooting people. What the fuck has gone wrong with our police forces today that they can’t handle simple situations like this without killing people, when they used to be able to do so? And even have the police chief stand up for the pussy cop?

We need real cops, not these… wimps. I’m not anti-cop. I’m anti-wimp cop. I’m all for cops — real cops, cops who know how to handle themselves on the street, cops who don’t need to pull out their service weapon and execute a scrawny half-starved street dude just because they’re fucking pussies who don’t know how to handle themselves on the streets. But then, given that we have turned into a nation of fucking cowards that cowers in fear of a buncha stupid goat-fuckers in the Middle East who’d have to walk on water to actually get over here and kill people, well. What can we expect, I guess?

– Badtux the Annoyed Penguin

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Pussy cops shoot and kill a deaf man for not complying with orders that he could not hear

This story is disgusting. In Oklahoma City, police officers approached a house where a deaf developmentally disabled man was on the front porch. The man got up, grabbed a steel pipe that he used as a walking stick, and walked out to meet the cops. The cops yelled at him “Drop the steel pipe! Drop the steel pipe!” while people around were yelling at the cops, “He’s deaf, he can’t hear you, he’s deaf, he can’t hear you!” and then the cops, with hands shaking in terror no doubt, shot and killed the man.

What a bunch of cowardly cops. The big Irish bruisers of my youth, seeing a dude come at them with a steel pipe, would have pulled out their billy clubs and grinned and said “You want some of this, I see.” And then beat the crap out of the guy, deaf or not. But he would have lived, because they knew what they were doing when it came to meting out violence. They were bruisers and brawlers and knew how to handle themselves in a fight. Today’s whiny pussy cops… not so much. You sneeze in their direction, they shoot you and whine “I was scaaaaaaared!” So scared, apparently, that they forgot to turn on their body cams. How convenient…

Well, if they’re that scared, maybe they need to choose a new profession? I suggest preschool teacher. Although now that I think about it, maybe not. Those toddlers can be tiny terrors, after all. They’d probably have nervous breakdowns after finding out that they weren’t being issued a service weapon to use to shoot an evil 3 year old who’s terrorizing them….

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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United States getting reputation as 3rd world nation with corrupt police

Canada’s CBC News warns Canadians not to carry much money south of the border because the police will steal it.

Used to be, only corrupt 3rd world nations had police that would just blatantly steal your money. Guess that means we’re one of those, now. The problem is, corruption on that scale is bad for business. Tourists decide to take their money elsewhere, somewhere where it won’t get stolen. Businessmen whose businesses churn a lot of cash decide to invest their money elsewhere, not in the United States. And so forth.

The modest reforms that Congress is proposing will not end the corruption, but will at least reduce some of the incentives behind it. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to rule that the 4th Amendment is, in fact, the 4th Amendment, and prohibits seizing things without a warrant and probable cause. Until then, police departments will continue to steal more money than thieves.

Yeah, well, I’m not holding my breath on that one, not with this Supreme Court…

– Badtux the 3rd World Penguin

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Ooops! Didn’t mean to suggest murdering people! Signed, Chelan County Sheriff’s Department.

The above graphic was posted to the web site of the Chelan County Sheriff’s Department.

They sound nice, bless their hearts.

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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