Shooting in Philadelphia

[MPMalloy]

From NPR: Fatal Police Shooting In Philadelphia Sparks Protests, Clashes Overnight

Several hundred troops from the Pennsylvania National Guard will be deployed to the city at the request of Philadelphia County, the governor's office told NPR, stating that the Guard will "protect the right to peacefully assemble and protest while keeping people safe."

There are two video clips at the webpage.

I understand why the man was shot. Still don't understand why people see this as unjustified & a cause for such destruction.

[boskone]

I saw people asking why the police didn't shoot him in the legs. Also, they don't understand how close 20 feet really is.

IOW, ignorance.

[PistolPete]

I understand why the man was shot. Still don't understand why people see this as unjustified & a cause for such destruction.

Because people are weary of people dead or abused at the hands of police being a constant in the news cycle so every time a new one comes up they assume it's the police at fault.

I can see both sides, police certainly do use violence in justified ways and this seems to be an example of that but the US also leads the world when it comes to documented police shootings. Obviously we're doing policing in a way other countries are not. Whether that way is legitimate and reasonable or not is certainly a discussion people can have, although often people just line up on sides of "Back the blue" and "FTP", based on their political affiliation. Can we discuss police violence without going into politics here? Maybe. But probably not.

[M813]

Because people are weary of people dead or abused at the hands of police being a constant in the news cycle so every time a new one comes up they assume it's the police at fault.

I can see both sides, police certainly do use violence in justified ways and this seems to be an example of that but the US also leads the world when it comes to documented police shootings. Obviously we're doing policing in a way other countries are not. Whether that way is legitimate and reasonable or not is certainly a discussion people can have, although often people just line up on sides of "Back the blue" and "FTP", based on their political affiliation. Can we discuss police violence without going into politics here? Maybe. But probably not.

We need to create a new breed of mental health professional and social worker. No longer can occupants of these professions sit behind desks with their patients on layed out on leather couches droning on about their childhood.

We need field agents trained in these disciplines to ride along with traditional law enforcement officers as a team and they need to work together when they encounter domestic disputes, bridge jumpers and generally mentally disturbed people. These field agents need to be properly trained and equipped to handle violent attacks against their person. Non-lethal tools for subduing the mentally ill should continue to be developed.

I think it's grossly unrealistic to ask police officers to be experts in law, law enforcement, mental health, marriage counseling and more.

Outside of policing, we'd better get a handle on how we treat and warehouse deeply, permanently mentally ill people. Leaving them to live with their families who may not be equipped to handle them is setting these people up for failure.

[PistolPete]

I think it's grossly unrealistic to ask police officers to be experts in law, law enforcement, mental health, marriage counseling and more.

Man, ain't that the truth.

[raptor2]

I think it's grossly unrealistic to ask police officers to be experts in law, law enforcement, mental health, marriage counseling and more.

Man, ain't that the truth.

The part that rankles me is that LEOs are expected to be perfect 100% of the time...everyone else can be a scumbag, thug or otherwise imperfect and that is OK to many people.

Perhaps...just maybe ... if everyone else worked on their own issues a little bit,(maybe stole fewer things, restrained from beating their spouses, murdered/carjacked less often...you know just a bit of self improvement) the LEOs would have fewer opportunities to exhibit the fact that they are human also.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our (law enforcment) stars, But in ourselves...

[PistolPete]

[The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our (law enforcment) stars, But in ourselves...

Eh, people sucking is omnipresent in all cultures. Sure, some cultures suck more than others depending on how you are grading, but people who suck are everywhere. Cops just shoot way more of them here than in Germany or the UK or Japan or Russia or Canada or every other country in the world. Maybe culture in the US sucks the most and that's why the disparity exists, but I haven't seen data that supports that. Unless we shoot people for being fat, if so then the data totally correlates.

[lurkshere]

This is a link to a summary of evidence given to a White House task force in 2015.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/pol ... rn-from-uk

The author is from the US but based at Cambridge University.

There is a link to a pdf transcript of the actual evidence (which I found a bit unreliable, but eventually worked) and video on C-SPAN which I couldn't get to work on my phone.

In 2013, at least 461 people were killed by US police in ‘justifiable’ homicides according to official FBI reports, although Sherman said that estimates from news media reports would suggest that number was over 1,000. In the same year, the number of people in England and Wales killed by police was zero.

Sherman says that the vast national differences in use of deadly force is not due to a lack of confrontations in which police had legal powers to kill. In London alone in 2012, police sent authorised firearms officers to 2,451 incidents, including 634 direct threats to life, and seized 416 firearms.

“The reason London’s police killed no one in these events is the result of an infrastructure of institutions and policies that is completely lacking in US policing,” Sherman told the White House Task Force. “My recommendations are based on 45 years of working with US police agencies and 15 years of helping to redesign the English policing infrastructure,” he said.

Basically he's saying the US lacks the institutions to ensure uniform standards and most of its police forces are far too small.

[PistolPete]

There are several organizations that track police misconduct, including CATO. If you search "police misconduct database" you'll see several sources, each which is sourced pretty well. CATO took over PoliceMisconduct.net somewhere around 2014 maybe and they have data going back to the mid 2000's at least.

But overall these source agree the US has more than a thousand people killed by police each year and some percentage is certainly defensible. What percentage that is is of course a matter for great debate, but I'm positive it's not 100% or 0%.

I think the reason people hold police to a higher standard is due to the power they are granted over individuals. If the dude at Subway is bad at his job I'm going to get way too much mayo. If a Walmart employee is sloppy I'm going to get a product that's damaged from a fork lift. If my vendor at work screws up and lies about it I get to spend 3 hours collecting data to prove him wrong. (actually what I had to do today, lol) But if an officer is having an off day, a sloppy day or is malicious then I could end up dead. Their potential effect over a person's life is much greater than most people we deal with and we can't voluntarily not use their services. I can pick another vendor, not shop at Walmart or Subway if they have bad employees, but a bad officer can inject himself into my life at any time. So we hold them to higher standards.

[TacAir]

My dad (now RIP) once gave me some great advice.

#1 "Don't get in a pissing contest with someone carrying a loaded machine gun"

Both brilliant in the wisdom displayed and on point for this thread. Oddly, I'm bright enough to stretch that to don't argue with a cop. Period.

Do what you are told and if you have a beef - take it to the courts. You are far less likely to be shot out of hand by a bailiff than by a cop who thinks you might be the next John Dillinger (or drug dealer or child molester)

If they ask questions - use that whole "Right to remain silent" thing until you get a lawyer on board. You are not going to talk your way out of anything serious - even if you had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Yes, I'll get out of the car. Yes, I'll show my drivers license. Yes, I'll blow in your little machine. All while keeping my mouth shut.

Again, take it to the judge. You may be poorer, but at least you will be alive to bitch about it.

My sister was a patrol officer in Tucson for over a decade. II leaned nothing else from her many war stories, I learned this -- most cops don't want to listen to you bitch about "your rights". Mostly, because most folks are in the wrong here.

Don't like the way you wee treated - your rights were violated? File a complaint. Rule #1 is #1 for a reason.

There is an entire industry that goes after cops - often pro bono. Ask around. You may even get an education on the whole "your rights" thing.

[woodsghost]

[The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our (law enforcment) stars, But in ourselves...

Eh, people sucking is omnipresent in all cultures. Sure, some cultures suck more than others depending on how you are grading, but people who suck are everywhere. Cops just shoot way more of them here than in Germany or the UK or Japan or Russia or Canada or every other country in the world. Maybe culture in the US sucks the most and that's why the disparity exists, but I haven't seen data that supports that. Unless we shoot people for being fat, if so then the data totally correlates.

America has a pretty unique culture. But if one wants to experience "50 shades of police brutality," I'd suggest braking some laws overseas in places like Russia. I feel I remember stories out of Singapore too. In a lot of places, they don't need to shoot you, they just beat the living daylights out of you and make you wish you were dead.

You mentioned Japan. In short, Japan is different from all other countries and doing international research has always, in my field, resulted in a "Japan is weird" verdict. They don't play nice with statistical attempts to compare them to other countries.

Of the countries listed above, Canada is the only one mostly comparable to the US based on my memory of culture and criminal justice systems. (One could argue Britian is similar, but given their gun laws, knife laws, and drug culture, I'd argue they are pretty different any more). The stories I have heard from Canadians dealing with their police have all involved situations where people were not actively violent at the time of police contact. And all those stories involve some form of "the police were cool and chill." I would be cool and chill too if nobody was actively being violent.

Then as I'm thinking about European police tactics, I'm remembering that "no-go zones" have existed in France for decades. Germany and Sweden have had to implement those too. Basically, if an area is too likely for police to come into violent contact with people, they just stop policing the area. It cuts down on conflict by a lot. You can look up the types of people who live in No-Go zones. It is pretty consistent and there is a lot of crossover with the populations US police have difficulty working with.

So, if you feel we should just declare No-Go zones and leave those communities to self-police, I bet we would cut down on police shootings.

...oh, and I've heard personal, experienced accounts of police in Latin American countries killing street kids with impunity. Orphans or children abandoned by parents 9r runaways. None of those killings will ever make it into an international data base for comparison of police killings, but please keep in mind many police forces are pretty violent and brutal. I'm pretty happy with what we have, as imperfect as it is.

[MPMalloy]

From NPR: Fatal Police Shooting In Philadelphia Sparks A 2nd Night Of Protests

From NPR: Philadelphia Issues Curfew As It Braces For More Protests In Walter Wallace Shooting

[PistolPete]

So, if you feel we should just declare No-Go zones and leave those communities to self-police, I bet we would cut down on police shootings.

It's not a binary choice of having more gun free zones or current levels of police shootings. Present circumstances don't really support less firearms used in crimes in areas with more gun laws, in fact the inverse seems to be true, so it's a pretty silly suggestion. But I'm not going to derail this thread by making suggestions of changing laws.

Now self policing inside communities does have merits. The smaller the community the less police brutality we see. You're less likely to beat a man down for a broken tail light if your kids play softball together. One of the reasons we see more brutal violence from both police and criminals in urban areas is the lack of community. You don't know many of the people you interact with so it's easy to see them as an "other". They aren't a neighbor, they're a perp. They aren't a guy you know from church, they're a pig. It's easy to dehumanize someone who you don't see as part of your community. It's easy to see them as an outsider.

That's the danger of the concept of the thin blue line. By definition it's the line that separates police from the community- they are on one side of that blue line and the people they police are on the other side. It creates a culture of thinking of people as an "other". It's way easier to commit violence against someone who you see as an outsider to your community.

It's why we see violent demonstrations and riots in big cities right now as well. They burn down a store because the people hurt by it are anonymous. They don't know the owner, they don't know the employees. It's not a community store where their sister's best friend works, it's a chain store owned by somebody who doesn't even live in town. It's way easier to destroy and hurt someone if you don't see them as part of your community.

[RoneKiln]

Something to remember when comparing stats between the US and other countries is that it may be more accurate to compare the US to other continents. We have our 3rd world regions and warzones the same as other continents. We just don't acknowledge it as readily. Other continents don't count their war zones in their crime stats.

[PistolPete]

Something to remember when comparing stats between the US and other countries is that it may be more accurate to compare the US to other continents. We have our 3rd world regions and warzones the same as other continents. We just don't acknowledge it as readily. Other continents don't count their war zones in their crime stats.

We have a greater makeup of 3rd world regions and warzones than China that has a million people in camps? Russia? India? France and other Euro countries with it's massive immigrant slums where police won't even go? UAE or Libya where they have actual slave populations?

Just about all the countries outside of Japan and the Nordic countries have vast swaths of poverty and areas of violent strife. I'm not sure the US is unique in that way. We do have a criminal class that is better armed than most outside of warzones, which must certainly play a part.

[M813]

I have mixed feelings on the community self-policing thing. Anyone here live in an HOA?

Imagine a "Karen" with real policing powers. Have you seen that GEICO commercial?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryqv9REMpsg

Some people are married to the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and intent.

[NT2C]

Something to remember when comparing stats between the US and other countries is that it may be more accurate to compare the US to other continents. We have our 3rd world regions and warzones the same as other continents. We just don't acknowledge it as readily. Other continents don't count their war zones in their crime stats.

We have a greater makeup of 3rd world regions and warzones than China that has a million people in camps? Russia? India? France and other Euro countries with it's massive immigrant slums where police won't even go? UAE or Libya where they have actual slave populations?

Just about all the countries outside of Japan and the Nordic countries have vast swaths of poverty and areas of violent strife. I'm not sure the US is unique in that way. We do have a criminal class that is better armed than most outside of warzones, which must certainly play a part.

Ah, but just how accurate is the reporting of incidents in China/Russia/India/etc.? Does it compare directly with US reporting practices? When police won't even go into some areas, doesn't that skew things? How much? How many police shootings would Brazil have if the favelas were patrolled by the police and the police actually called to crimes there? That's but one example of many where direct comparisons are difficult if not impossible to make. Remember, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." You can "prove" any point you want to make if the stats get spun and picked enough.

[PistolPete]

Ah, but just how accurate is the reporting of incidents in China/Russia/India/etc.? Does it compare directly with US reporting practices? When police won't even go into some areas, doesn't that skew things? How much? How many police shootings would Brazil have if the favelas were patrolled by the police and the police actually called to crimes there? That's but one example of many where direct comparisons are difficult if not impossible to make. Remember, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." You can "prove" any point you want to make if the stats get spun and picked enough.

A good point, although it seems our modern news is much more aligned with 1970's Russian style propaganda than actual news reporting. That said, the closer you get to local news the more truthiness you seem to get. Brazil certainly seems to have a higher violent crime rate than the US based on my understanding of things.

Every country has unique problems and we can take two approaches- find a country that has a worse problem on a given statistic or focus on the root causes of our problems and try to solve them. We can always find a worse situation, but that doesn't seem to offer a lot of value. To me it's about taking personal responsibility, which starts with identify issues. My world is only going to get better if I take an active role in making it happen.

But you're right about "proving" any point. You can talk about secret killings by police in favelas and I counter with the police run black site in Chicago and you counter how nothing in North Korea is reported and I counter with all the lies spun by CNN and you counter with the terrible environment in Iran for Christians and I counter with all the children gone missing in ICE camps and we eventually tire out and move on. So I'm just gonna move on now.

[NT2C]

Ah, but just how accurate is the reporting of incidents in China/Russia/India/etc.? Does it compare directly with US reporting practices? When police won't even go into some areas, doesn't that skew things? How much? How many police shootings would Brazil have if the favelas were patrolled by the police and the police actually called to crimes there? That's but one example of many where direct comparisons are difficult if not impossible to make. Remember, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." You can "prove" any point you want to make if the stats get spun and picked enough.

A good point, although it seems our modern news is much more aligned with 1970's Russian style propaganda than actual news reporting. That said, the closer you get to local news the more truthiness you seem to get. Brazil certainly seems to have a higher violent crime rate than the US based on my understanding of things.

Every country has unique problems and we can take two approaches- find a country that has a worse problem on a given statistic or focus on the root causes of our problems and try to solve them. We can always find a worse situation, but that doesn't seem to offer a lot of value. To me it's about taking personal responsibility, which starts with identify issues. My world is only going to get better if I take an active role in making it happen.

But you're right about "proving" any point. You can talk about secret killings by police in favelas and I counter with the police run black site in Chicago and you counter how nothing in North Korea is reported and I counter with all the lies spun by CNN and you counter with the terrible environment in Iran for Christians and I counter with all the children gone missing in ICE camps and we eventually tire out and move on. So I'm just gonna move on now.

You do that; I'm going for a nap.

[woodsghost]

Every country has unique problems and we can take two approaches- find a country that has a worse problem on a given statistic or focus on the root causes of our problems and try to solve them. We can always find a worse situation, but that doesn't seem to offer a lot of value. To me it's about taking personal responsibility, which starts with identify issues. My world is only going to get better if I take an active role in making it happen.

Well now we are getting somewhere.

In my experience swimming in the mental health field, the law enforcement field, and the crossroads where the two meet, and listening to community leaders talk about issues, there are two big causes put forth: "systemic racism" and "fatherlessness."

In short, the evidence I have seen for "systemic racism" in the US causing problems falls short.

The evidence I have seen for "fatherlessness" causing problems in the US is pretty solid.

In addition, there are cultural issues which play a role in Police Encounter outcomes. The evidence I have seen for "culture" impacting outcomes is pretty solid too.

Race is not a good predictor of outcomes. Family history, history of substance abuse, and attitudes towards authority are good predictors of outcomes. Gender is also a good predictor, but that is because our system is heavily biased in favor of women.

"Race" is a good proxy variable for "family history" and "cultural attitudes." But it is just that, a proxy which signals likely positions on the "family history" and "cultural attitudes" variables. Its like saying "if I know you are urban or rural, I have a better than 50/50 chance of guessing your 2A attitudes." Urban and rural does not cause 2A attitudes, but it predicts a set of experiences and cultural attitudes which you are likely to have.

Until we start talking about the real culprits and causes of problems, we won't see change. It doesn't matter what changes we make to the police, if they are social workers, or have some sort of bias training, or get new tools, or the community polices themselves, if we don't fix the lives of the people causing problems and stop the cycles of trauma which create more people who will cause problems, we won't have better outcomes, we will only have more of the same outcomes.

"Change fatherlessness rates and cultural attitudes" does not sound as sexy on a political campaign.

Also, "social worker approach" does not really work in my experience. Partly that is because of what I said above (it fails to get at the real roots of the problems). Partly it is because you need to have people capable of maintaining their own safety while dealing with difficult populations. At a previous job we poached a lot of social workers. The social worker experience could include rape, kidnapping, hostage taking, and at least 1 murder. They were incapable of protecting themselves and in fact were (still are, I suspect) mandated not to protect themselves because that might harm the relationships with the communities they serve. You might imagine what that does to agency morale. So you need people who can look after themselves if somebody decides to chase them down with a knife. But what happens when an agent of the State protects themselves from a knife weilder intent on harm? We have already seen the end of that story three times in 2020 (so far).

A massive percentage of the police encounters in the US end with nobody dying. A small percentage do end in a death. Moving towards a "social worker" model of policing is, in my opinion, not going to change that because we aren't going to change the population of people causing problems and grabbing knives, guns, cars, or other tools of death to visit mayhem on their fellow human beings.

And last I checked, the British police were very proud of the fact that they were able to police while unarmed. Until life got too dangerous and I think now 50% of Bobbies are armed. So something happened over the last 15 years in Britian to cause some of the best police in the world to decide it is too dangerous to do their jobs without guns. This, despite some very strict gun and knife laws. So I don't see "disarming the police" as an effective solution if others with (according to an article mentioned above) superior training can't manage without guns.

My answer is "change the criminals before you change the police." And my experience is criminals CAN change. That was the whole point behind the existence of the agency I used to work for. Some won't ever change, but some do after 2 or 4 or 6 or more encounters with the criminal justice system. But "decriminalization of offences" or Police ignoring certain offences means people then don't have access to State resources which can help them change (if they are ready to change).

But the root causes of criminal behavior for the majority of offenders have nothing to do with race and everything to do with cultural and personal experiences and choices. The more we can do to change lives, the fewer police we will even need.

Just my experiences.

[raptor2]

The evidence I have seen for "fatherlessness" causing problems in the US is pretty solid.

Just my experiences.

Well written! Good points.

My experience on this subject comes from a slightly different perspective. My wife and I were foster parents for a decade (until we burned out).
The experience was very draining, awkward and difficult due to limitations imposed by the role. This is not exactly like WG's experience and is clearly from a different perspective.

That said the rarest thing encountered in the LA foster family world was a biological father trying to get or regain custody. It is not that that custody would not be granted, it was because of a basic lack of effort on their part. More often it was due to active shirking of the role by these people.

The second rarest thing was a foster child whose parents were not involved in some form of substance abuse.

I am by no means saying a single parent cannot raise a child or children. I am however saying the population of foster children in the decade of my activity was 99% single parents. I am also not saying that a husband and wife combo is a panacea for success. I am however saying raising kids is an uphill fight and having 2 people aligned AND NOT using drugs is generally a better path to success with kids than the alternative.

Why you may ask?
We live in a disposable world. Kids are a PITA and it is so much easier to be without them.
Children are deemed disposable except when their cause is productive to a self serving pol and even then some of those deem their destruction as a cause to promote for the same reason.

Disposable items have no value. The disposable things without value are ignored and discarded.

This can be blamed on "systemic racism", sexism, police brutality for putting the parents in jail and breaking up the family (which was a very common reason for entering foster care) or any one of another "isms". However, the root cause still lies with the individuals making bad choices. Call it what you will but actions have consequences and when that reality is denied the only result is failure.

[Phil]

Being a Phildelphia resident and a mental health clinician who also has two hitches in the Navy, which included urban combat and two years of LEO experience on top of my rating, I feel like I'd like to chime in, if I may.
The problem really is systemic racism, deal with it. The entire USA is only a generation away from the institutionalized racial policies of Jim Crow, which were put in place during the Civil War reconstruction. It is built into the architecture, the city planning, the former
zoning, the divisions of neighborhoods, and those effects continue to ripple through a very hurt and disenfranchised population. We don't have too many displays of the confederate battle flag flying from poles on lifted pickups here, but we do a lot of overt racism when you hear it on the street, and even more covert racism in language. It is the racism which led to the policies of the failed "war on drugs" which created mandatory minimums and incarcerated persons of color at a rate 9 times higher than persons who are white. The ratio of incarcerated persons of color to their representative population in the US is highly disparate. Persons of color make up the majority of the incarcerated population in this country but are a numerical minority in the country. That gross mis-representation is not because they are bad people or are biologically predisposed to commit crime, but instead due to the treatment these populations receive overall in society. If one looks at the diagnoses of persons of color, you'll find PTSD in almost every single case. There is multi-generational poverty and trauma, which continues to be inherited and then reinforced by the society that actually created it through this disefranchisement.
The folks who say that systemic covert racism does not exist and point to the exceptions to the rule of persons of color attaining high positions in government, academia, medicine, et al., fail to rememberr that Horatio Alger picked himself up by his bootstraps, but he was also white. Everyone can point to an exception to the "rule," either personally or on a national level (ie: President Obama) but fail to look at the systematic disenfranchisement through things like employment demographics, comparative pay scales, and education opportunities. Just looking at the numbers alone, compared to the racial demographic makeup of the population of the United States would show that there is great disparity. If we lived in a post-racial society, there would be no disparity.
We come to how to fix this problem and we get to a "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" question.
Phil Forrest

[Phil]

Several hours ago, Philadelphia PD and the office of the Mayor released the full audio and video footage of the shooting of Walter Wallace.
There are reports of a few scattered incidents of protesting but it is not the widespread protesting and rioting we saw a week ago.

Phil Forrest