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Comments
Additionally, what are the limits of defensive technology such as handguns in protecting those that use them (i.e. they often don't stop a determined attacker, or not soon enough to protect the person using it from being injured or killed)? What are the limits of human performance, even with the best training, when neuroscientists tell us that involuntary amygdal responses drive our perception of threat faster than our rational, logical, frontal parts of our brain? How much do you allow for that in the law? How much do you allow for human error that will inevitably occur, even with the best training. Nobody does their job, with the best of training, and the best of intentions, error free 100% of the time. If you make allowance for that fact, how do you stop those that act with less then good faith from abusing that allowance?
The answers aren't as easy as we would all desire or want them to be.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything this brazen since WWI and Vietnam war footage.
KILL
I
I am more inclined to your take on the LA video, but I also recognize that another conclusion is also reasonable. I also recognize that the one-size fits all law to be applied in this case allows for more than one reasonable conclusion from the facts and for the officer to rely on a conclusion that is different (but still reasonable, even less reasonable) than the conclusion you or I draw from the safety of a video consumed, possibly with a better view of the suspect's hands) when we are not under threat with all that involuntary fight or flight stimuli going off in our bodies.
If you can't handle the stress of your job without knowing when it's appropriate to shoot people it's time to find employment that better suits your stress tolerance.
Thank you!
Training and instruction appeal to the rational part of the brain. Also there is some evidence from the Scientific American piece and the study it references, that the more we are aware of sub-consciously profiling, the more likely we are to engage in the very behavior we have been trained to avoid. Very depressing in my view. So the question is, if that is the case, and we can't change it, how do we reflect that in laws surrounding the use of deadly force, by cop or civilian?
The police need to accept that the hazards of their work means they might face consequences if they kill someone. People in other fields where life and safety are at risk (like health care) do that; the police should be no different. By allowing these things to happen without any accountability we remove any incentive for police to do their jobs better because it's easier for them to kill someone.
When you make the argument that there is nothing that can be done about it because everyone has biases, even though it's sooo depressing to you, you are complicit in sustaining a system that is failing the people it is designed to protect, and that's pretty much the only reason you ever comment here.
Accountable is fine. But we hold people criminally accountable ONLY when we can show they willfully violated a law or were willfully negligent (eg choosing to drink or drug and drive). In self-defense cases that means that the prosecutor must show the person claiming self-defense had NO reasonable basis for perceiving they were at risk of great personal injury. Not that other explanations were more probable or that they had other options, but that the threat perception was without reason or basis. Nobody here talks about options for amending the standard and what the unintended consequences and harms would be.and whether they are more or fewer than the harms we have now.
And I repeat: you cannot have true accountability for people in the criminal justice field when you leave it up to the criminal justice field to determine for itself when its own should be held accountable.
Just to clarify, I like having Prime so it made no difference to me in that respect. Watching Twitter flip out was an added bonus.
Doctors and EMTs and much more time to make decisions than police do, even under the most threatening medical situations. Even a few nanonseconds is a long time, when you consider that a police officer doing his or her duty simply does not have time for evaluation - so that's where the training comes in.
Medical field decisions are for the life of the patient. A police officer has not only the life of the suspect or person in distress, but his or her life, and the lives of others as they are affected by such daily situations they encounter, or could encounter, every working day.
So the LA video shows, in my opinion, a training problem first and foremost - then dig down from there.