Race relations/police shootings/protests

[jcj]

That is why officers where the tazer on their non-dominate side opposite their fire arm. Why he had both sitting on the same side of his body is another question to ask.

Not necessarily the policy for all departments, and also not necessarily protective.. The defense expert witness in the trial of the officer in the New Year's Day, 2009 BART police shooting (where the intention was to use a TASER on the suspect but the suspect was shot) pointed out that in six prior cases where firearms were mistakenly drawn instead of TASER's, the TASERS were carried on the same side as the duty weapon. In the BART case, the officer indeed did have his TASER mounted on his (non-dominant) weak side - opposite of his firearm - but in that setting the TASER is still set up for use in cross-draw mode with the dominant hand - the same hand that would be used to deploy the duty weapon. Of course in this (2009 BART Police) case the mounting of the TASER on the opposite side of the duty weapon didn't prevent unintentional firing of the duty weapon with fatal results.

Another reported technique to reduce errors in which weapon is being deployed is strong (dominant) side mounting of the taser on the duty belt in a cross-carry configuration - to make it very difficult to deploy the taser with the strong side (dominant) hand as opposed to easy to deploy the service weapon with the strong side hand. I don't know offhand of any evidence of how well this works (although I'm sure it's out there).

I see this as a human factors issue. Compare to retractable gear aircraft (at least small ones, i don't know much about large aircraft) - the gear lever usually has a handle that feels like a small tire and the flap lever has a flat lever similar to a flap. That's a human factors countermeasure to help dissuade activating the unintended control.

On the other hand, the M-26 model police model TASER is shaped like and feels like a pistol - presumably to make quick deployment and use easier. It may be that this was a bad design decision, and I'm sure it will be discussed in the wake of this incident.

On the deal with a 73 year old reserve officer - coincidentally a high-value donor to the department - in an sting operation? I'm with KState_Poke22. WTF? That just looks bad.

References

https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/1772254-BART-shooting-raises-issue-of-TASER-confusion/

https://www.californiabeat.org/2010/06/28/mehserle-defenses-use-of-force-expert-falters-during-cross-examination

Edited April 19, 2015 by jcj

[Fuzz]

Great post JCJ, enlightening to say the least.

[Royal]

This happened a couple years ago, but a judge recently decided that the video could be made public.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Teqn_8tu5D4

[SurelySerious]

WSJ: The Racial Reality of Policing

Interesting and probably fairly realistic perspective.  While the way police work should be constantly examined, as with most processes, this is the stark reality:

It’s not up to me to decide what activists should protest, but after years of dealing with the realities of street violence, I don’t understand how a movement called “Black Lives Matter” can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 129 instances of black men killed by “legal intervention”—that is to say, by cops. The figure is incomplete because of a lack of national reporting requirements, and it says nothing about the circumstances of the killings or the race of the officers involved. But it gives a sense of the scope of the problem.

By contrast, in that same year, 6,739 black men were murdered, overwhelmingly by young men like themselves. Since 2001, even as rates of violent crime have dropped dramatically, more than 90,000 black men in the U.S. have been killed by other black men. With fatalities on this scale, the term epidemic is not a metaphor. Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11.

 

 

Also worth reading for perspective: WSJ: The March of Foolish Things with Thomas Sowell

Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”

Mr. Sowell, looking back, can count the lucky breaks that contributed to his own success. As a baby he was adopted into a household with four adults who talked to him constantly. When he was 9 years old, the family left the South, moving from North Carolina to Harlem in New York. A mentor there took him to a public library for the first time and told him how to transfer out of a bad school into a good one. Not everyone has that kind of luck.

“It is unjust—my God it’s unjust,” Mr. Sowell says. “And yet that doesn’t mean that you can locate somebody who has victimized somebody else.” In human affairs, happenstance reigns.

Favorite part:

Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”

[sky_king]

[sky_king]

Also, this.