Brooklyn Man Fatally Shot by Police Was Unarmed, Bratton Says
Source: New York Times
A rookie New York City police officer shot and killed an unarmed 28-year-old man in a darkened stairwell in Brooklyn late Thursday night, according to the police.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the shooting appeared to be unprovoked.
We dont know enough yet, but it does appear to be an accident, the mayor said at a news conference on Friday. This is a tragedy.
Read more: www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/new-york-police-officer-fatally-shoots-brooklyn-man.html
If you read the whole story, it sounds like the police were patrolling in one of the projects, the Louis H. Pink Houses, and the stairwells they were in had no lights, were dark. So the first thing they did was pull out their flashlights... and the one cop had his gun drawn. Why a gun? No reports of anything wrong, just on patrol. But bad neighborhood, so gun drawn. Dark hall, scared policeman, innocent person walking down the stairs, now a dead innocent person walking down the stairs. Accident.
I say no accident, but a victim of the current system of our police departments all across this country, that has cops afraid of the population they are supposedly protecting, looking at them as the enemy, shooting first and asking questions later.
Is there really any way we can get control of this insanity???
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Not excusing any killer cops, just noting the reality.
It's part of the reason they execute drug warrants like military raids, too.
Our pervasive gun culture gets people killed in many ways.
valerief
(53,235 posts)Iggo
(47,591 posts)ReRe
(10,597 posts)Accident, my arse! Is de Blasio afraid of his PD? How can he say it was an "accident?" Why could he have not said it was a tragedy and been done with it? And that the police officer was a rookie should tell us that this is exactly the way they are training police recruits today: shoot and ask questions later.
Police training across this land must change: from military policing to civilian policing.
dhill926
(16,387 posts)or perhaps, murder. Will he be prosecuted? Not holding my breath...
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)handle actual armed assailants, including the mentally ill, with a fraction of the fatalities that U.S. law enforcement does?
RufusTFirefly
(8,812 posts)Many Americans are utterly consumed by fear. Fear short-circuits rational thinking, turning control over to more primitive parts of your brain. In truly dangerous situations, there's a good evolutionary reason for this. It ensures your survival and the survival of your DNA. But when you are constantly bombarded by stimuli that trigger the threat response, the amygdala, a region of the brain that plays a principal role in orchestrating this response, becomes over-reactive. Suddenly, things that didn't use to bother you before are more likely to make you jump and react as though confronting a threat. This is colloquially known as an amygdala attack. Needless to say, this is extremely dangerous when it occurs in someone who is armed.
There's another alarming aspect to this growing over-reaction to perceived threats. It not only makes your amygdala hypersensitive, but it also physically shrinks another region of your brain, the hippocampus, which handles key aspects of learning and memory.
So if you were wondering why the country seems to be awash with fearful, stupid people, with very little sense of context and proportion, now you know.
One_Life_To_Give
(6,036 posts)That is a job where you are going to have to go into many more scarier situations. If you can't control your fear in a dark stairwell within a bad neighborhood. Maybe you should find a different line of work.
lexington filly
(239 posts)is if any law enforcement or security officer kills an unarmed person, he/she is automatically let go from that job and given a lifetime ban from carrying any weapon on any job, anywhere. When your role is to serve and protect the public, one fatal strike---and you're out. "Fearing for my life" has become a mantra for too many irresponsible cavalier shooters. If you cause an unarmed person and that family such a devastating loss, loosing your armed career isn't too high a price to pay and knowing that price would make officers a whole lot more thoughtful in their policing actions. They're assuming Everyone's armed.
So now black or poor people are endangered if they encounter burned out light bulbs plus cops in stairwells in buildings with broken elevators?