The United Police States of America

[Econoline]

I'm just gonna leave this here, without comment, to wash the taste of the previous story out of your mouth...




OK, I lied; here's a comment: That cop is a better man than you or I would be under the circumstances.

Kudos to you, sir...they need some of your kind down in Texas.

[oldr_n_wsr]

The training is to include the recognition, supervision, documentation and handling of inmates who are mentally disabled and/or potentially suicidal," it says.

Almost a year ago no one, not even myself, would have believed I would try to take my own life. The suicidal are not always recognizable.

[Gob]

Well said sir.

[Sue U]

I'm just gonna leave this here, without comment, to wash the taste of the previous story out of your mouth...




OK, I lied; here's a comment: That cop is a better man than you or I would be under the circumstances.

Kudos to you, sir...they need some of your kind down in Texas.

Yeah, but that was a white guy.









(OK, the trooper did exactly the right thing and conducted himself as a professional despite having to deal with an asshole.)

[Gob]

[Long Run]

Gob, wasn't this statistic already blown up as bogus?

Elisabeth Parker, the author of the piece, explained to us where she got her information. She started with a post that made a similar but not identical claim on Daily Kos, a liberal website. The post’s count of American deaths in March tracked back to a website called Killed by Police.

Killed by Police has a singular task. Each time a television station or newspaper reports that a person has died at the hands of the police, the people behind Killed by Police (we don’t know who they are) add a link to the news story in a spreadsheet. When we saw the list for deaths in March, it had 115 entries.

We read each news report and found that just about every death, 98 of them, involved a police shooting. There were 16 cases when a person died from other causes, most frequently when police used a taser. One time an officer accidentally hit and killed a person with his car. In a category by itself, an officer in Hawaii got into an argument with a neighbor and killed him, thus becoming a common murderer completely apart from his role in law enforcement.

The warning here is the warning with all fact-checks and analysis of police-related deaths. There is no singular, verified U.S. database of police shootings. So all we have are estimates.

In this case, University of Missouri-St.Louis criminologist David Klinger said the Killed by Police numbers -- whether you settle on 98, 111 or some other figure -- "wouldn’t be unexpected."

Deaths in the United Kingdom

So, yes, the U.S. figure for March is plausible.

But this claim really hinges on the stat encompassing more than 100 years in the United Kingdom.

The fact is, that relies on a Wikipedia list of killings by law enforcement officers in the United Kingdom.

"I pored over the Wikipedia entry and realized that some incidents included multiple shootings and adjusted (the) figure to 69 police shootings," Parker said.

The problem with that is that Parker had to make two big assumptions: That the list was accurate, and more critically, that it was complete.

With Wikipedia, those are assumptions people should not make. In fact, the Wikipedia entry warns at the top that "This list is incomplete."

So what’s the real number? Over such a long time horizon -- and in a country whose borders changed (Ireland was part of the United Kingdom until the 1920s) -- it’s really impossible to say.

The British advocacy group Inquest has looked at police incidents in England and Wales going back to 1990. By its count, there were 55 police shooting deaths between 1990 and the present. The group reports another 1,453 deaths that had some connection to contact with police. However, the causes range from someone dying of a drug overdose while at a police station, to car thieves killing themselves in a wreck, to suicide while in custody, to excessive use of force by officers.

There simply is no way to tease out the details. Comparing police shootings to the American data is the only reliable approach.

The only other country in the United Kingdom for which we found hard numbers was Northern Ireland. Between April 2008 and September 2014, roughly a six-year period, members of the Police Force of Northern Ireland discharged their weapons nine times. However, there is no data on whether any deaths resulted.

During the times of "The Troubles" from 1968 to about 2000 when separatists, generally Catholics, and unionists, generally Protestants, battled over whether Northern Ireland should break away or remain part of the United Kingdom, there were over 3,000 deaths. Some of those were at the hands of the police.

Aogan Mulcahy, a researcher in the School of Sociology at the University College Dublin, walked us through the numbers. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was the police force in Northern Ireland until 2001. Based on an online database, Mulcahy told us that the RUC "was responsible for 55 deaths over the period 1969-2001."

We found no information for Scotland. We should note that only the Northern Ireland police regularly carry firearms. In Scotland, Wales and England, the typical officer relies on less lethal equipment such as nightsticks, pepper spray and tasers.

In sum, we know Wikipedia’s count is far low, but we don’t know how low.

When we alerted Parker to the information we were finding, she retracted her original article and wrote another. Parker wrote that "U.S. police killed more people in one month than the U.K.’s did in an entire year." While the underlying numbers this time are still incomplete, that’s more accurate.

Our ruling

Addicting Information said that "U.S. police killed more people in just one month than the U.K.’s did in over a century."

This comparison was based on an incomplete Wikipedia list. While hard figures for the number of police-related deaths in the United Kingdom over more than a century are impossible to come by, our research shows the comparison is inaccurate.

It’s certainly unproven.

That makes it deeply flawed, which means it’s False.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st ... ne-month-/

[Lord Jim]

Gob, wasn't this statistic already blown up as bogus?

Yes.

[Gob]

Gob, wasn't this statistic already blown up as bogus?

No, some doubt was cast on it by cherry picking information, and by not offering an alternative view.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Bullshit - wherever it was I gave full statistics showing that 55 killed by British police was a bunch of undercounted bollocks.

[Lord Jim]

cherry picking information

That's a little difficult to do when no actual "information" is presented to "cherry pick" from...

Source material on the British stats? How were they compiled, who compiled them, and what are they drawn from?

Those are the sorts of things that would constitute actual "information"....

Haven't seen any of them...

"Cherry picking" is precisely how one arrives at the number in that claim...

[rubato]

Whinging over details does not change the fact that the number of police killings in the US is orders of magnitude higher.

The comparison is more apt than not.


Yrs,
Rubato

[Crackpot]

The. Why bother fudging data?

[wesw]

long run again confuses the issue with depth of thought.....

[Econoline]

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you, too
Another one bites the dust

A white University of Cincinnati police officer has been indicted for murder and voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man in the head during a routine traffic stop on July 19.

"This is the most asinine act I've ever seen a police officer make," Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said. "It's an absolute tragedy in 2015 that anyone would behave in this manner. It was senseless."

UC police officer Ray Tensing, who is white, fatally shot Samuel DuBose, a 43-year-old black man, after DuBose refused to get out of the car during the traffic stop.

The shooting has once again highlighted racial disparities in police use of force — an issue that's become a matter of national protests and debates since the police shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August.

Tensing, who was wearing a body camera that captured the entire traffic stop and shooting, stopped DuBose around 6:30 pm when he noticed DuBose's car didn't have a front license plate. Tensing asked for a driver's license, but DuBose didn't appear to have a license on him. Tensing then asked DuBose to take off his seat belt.

The vehicle began slowly moving forward. Tensing quickly fired a single shot into the driver's window, hitting DuBose in the head and killing him.

After firing his gun, Tensing fell to the ground. He initially claimed that he was dragged by the car. But Deters, the prosecutor, said his office didn't believe that was the case, and the body camera footage shows it's not true.

Deters called the shooting "unwarranted" and "senseless." He said DuBose did nothing to provoke Tensing's actions, and the officer seemed to act out of anger because DuBose wouldn't get out of the car. "This office has probably reviewed upward of 100 police shootings," Deters said, "and this is the first time where we thought this is without question a murder."

More here: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/23/9020963/sa ... ting-video





ETA: Here's the bodycam footage. I have not watched it; not sure if I have the stomach for it...

[MajGenl.Meade]

Huh. That makes one wonder how much use these body-cams are. There's no gory or clear or understandable sense of the shooting. Obviously it shouldn't have happened at all. The officer patiently asks over and again if the driver has his driver's license "on you" - the driver will not say "no" (he doesn't have it on him). Instead he keeps saying "Yeah I gotta license". He doesn't try the old "I left my wallet at home, officer". So he makes himself suspicious and technically in violation of the law - having the license with you is mandatory when driving.

So perhaps the officer (unlike that other recent case) does have the legal right to ask him to step out of his car. The man resists and then.... it's not clear but obviously the cop must have pulled his gun either now (stupid move) or a moment later when the man apparently drives off. At any rate, you can't identify the shot as a shot (aurally) but there's a noise which must have been it as the car drives away. The poor driver is dead and the car runs off the road as the officer gives chase on foot. There is already another officer up close to the stopped car, pointing his pistol.

Ah, it's senseless. The guy doesn't deserve to be shot like that. OTOH why the heck did he try to drive off?

The bodycam may or may not be as useful as I thought it would

[Crackpot]

It is as the officer claimed he was being dragged when he wasn't

[MajGenl.Meade]

So you say. I saw the officer holding the door handle and then a confused jumble of movement. "Dragged" depends on how you interpret things - if he held on to the door handle, he was dragged. Could/should he have let go so he wasn't dragged any more than a foot or a few inches - of course.

Fact is, the motorist took off with the cop now sure that he was a naughty bad man with something big to hide. (STFU Gob - that's not funny!). This is not to excuse the shooting - I don't care if the guy had cocaine in his pocket - the cop's life wasn't in danger and nor was anyone else's. Shooting was wrong.

[rubato]

The victim is black, the officer is white.

W/o the body cam the officer would make up a story and get away with murder.

Yrs,
Rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

And if my aunt had testicles he'd be my uncle

[RayThom]

The suicidal are not always recognizable.

Suicidal ideation is fairly well known by those with a better understanding of the human condition. However, whether a person diagnosed with these tendencies actually follows through with a serious attempt to end their life is largely unknown.

If someone ever figures out -- with absolute recognition -- who is going forward with the act, well, that person would achieve status equal to Sigmund Freud.

Hindsight is always 100%. Unfortunately it does nothing for a victim who not only attempted but succeeded to end their life.