one bullet in the wrong place, and EVERYBODY dies.

This was just fucking stupid on stupid. I hope they fucking ICE this cop.

Give the fucking cop a break ffs. You weren't there, you don't know the full story. Let's wait until AFTER the trial before we start pointing fingers and ruining the career of an upstanding officer. The criminal that was served justice here had it coming, have you even seen his record? It's literally a mile long, I've measured it myself.

How about we all THINK with our heads and use our HEADS before we open our MOUTHS and talk SHIT, you SHITHEADS!

hahaha

I have no idea how possible a gas station explosion is, but a bullet certainly has the capacity to start a fire.

I leave questions about bullets causing explosions to the Mythbusters.

They had an awesome episode regarding grenades being shot out of the air.

Also, because I have anger issues, I would have told the cop that he's a pussy since he only hit me once at point blank range.

I am a brave hero.

when you stop posting suddenly we will know why.

Twitchy Cop really wasn't doing himself any favors aiming below the belt; now the filthy safety-dodger's still alive to testify against him. If he had just killed the perp and scrubbed the dashcam footage, he could've let his PD circle the wagons while he took a paid vacation.

I was reading something about how cops in Ferguson are getting body cameras now, which was something I suggested almost immediately. But I think it's just in Ferguson. Because something happened that was horrible. The cause-and-effect bullshit is real, but so's the he said/she said bullshit. I've mentioned it before, but a friend of mine was tazed and beaten to death in Portland, for probably pissing in public at bartime. Do you know how many times I've found a place to piss at bartime or on a walk of shame? He was scared by multiple cops and reacted the opposite of this man. I'm glad this person wasn't killed like my friend was, obviously, but I don't know. You're a cop. Let's say there was a zombie party and someone scared me on an otherwise unoccupied street and I had a gun and shot the person in the foot. Assuming I was scared of zombies, that's still a form of self-defense, but I'd still get plenty of time. Years for the shooting but probably life if I shot to kill. "BUT I WAS SCARED!" I would say. That's no better than defending a rape because you had an erection at the time. This guy's job is, if I remember, to "SERVE AND PROTECT" and as a cop, you automatically have that authoritarian status. It's why people drive slower, don't jaywalk, don't steal, and all of that's fine. Because the cops are looking right at you. I don't know; I just think that a harsher sentence should be passed for someone who shot a man for a maximum (in S. Carolina anyway) penalty.

They're getting them here, in my city in Canada, too. They'd been in the process of introducing them when the whole Ferguson thing hit the news, and I read a newspaper article explaining that the top brass laid it flat out, explaining that every good cop on the force (which meant every cop, of course, of course) would embrace wearing body cameras, because it would back them up when they followed procedure, treated suspects properly, and, basically, did their jobs, as well as providing useful documentation during confusing situations, while the police might witness accidents or rapidly retreating liscence plates, etc etc.

Not a single word about 'because we don't trust you', but rather, 'because we do trust you, and since we know you're not abusing that trust, the cameras will only prove it, right?'

Now, there hasn't been any noticible incidents around here of the police harrassing or murdering minorities (though I'm sure it does happen to some degree, particularly with first nations), the cameras weren't introduced in response to a scandal. They're just 'a thing that makes sense'.

Every police force should be using them, and they should be operating at all times while the police are on duty, with possible exceptions for interviews with sexual assault victims or other such delicate situations, and only at the victims' request, not the cops' discretion.

There's simply no good argument against it. Including the 'cops need to blow off steam, and the cameras might catch them saying incredibly racist and sexist and homophobic things amongst themselves, which they only do because they're blowing off steam, and it doesn't affect how they do their job or view the people they're supposed to be protecting at all!' one.

Cameras on all pigs.

Cameras are a nice intermediate step towards the exploding collar.

Is this the new instant-gratificaton punishment scale for crimes committed?Because it would be nice if banking fraud was worth a few bunker-busters on someone's corporate offices.

We all know he was guilty, why even waste time and money on a trial?

You're missing that a cop stopping a black driver on a "seatbelt violation" means "oh man oh man I bet he has some guns or drugs! Making arrests tonight!"

Few white people do; it's a big part of the victim-blaming that pervades these incidents. We're so used to cops that pull us over without asking us to also step out of the car as a matter of course, or even let us off with just a warning if we're polite. Hell, I've got a cop living at the end of the street and I can't imagine him filling my guts with hollowpoints just because I was tipsy and didn't clearly announce I was reaching for an ID. So when these incidents happen, the first thought to cross most white folks' minds is "good lord, he must've done something horrible to get shot like that!" To us, the police are our friends, our public servants.

It turns out, they just don't serve the entire public.

O yeah? How come there are more people of colour in jail than non-coloured, huh? Never heard of a white terrorist, have you? Why is it that the vast majority of run-away slaves were black? Speaking of which, you never hear of decent folk committing black-on-black crimes do you? Pretty darn damning, wouldn't you agree?

Obviously you are full of shit, produce numbers to prove me wrong or get fucked.

The police do not give all white people a pass in every situation. Some cops are equal opportunity oinkers and will be just as severely militaristic anyone they stop. Racism doesn't help matters any, but the fact is cops aren't here to protect the innocent, they are there to enforce laws. And cover each others asses.

It's no longer two sides, with cops on one side and criminals on the other, with us being in the middle as a neutral party - now it's Us vs Them. We are all potential criminals. It's a nationally funded gang.

Protect and serve is a motto, like "Maxwell: Good to the last drop". Not legally enforceable. A cop can stand there and allow you to get robbed, but the only thing he's doing wrong is not arresting the criminal - he has absolutely no obligation to protect you whatsoever.

That's not true, there are plenty of cases of bad cops going down to the pound for negligence in regards to the safety of whites.

What both sides of the cops/racism fiasco are largely failing to realize is that we have two problems here:

1) The racism problem
2) The police brutality problem

(1) is deep-rooted in all of society, and it explains why blacks and Latinos are disproportionately victims of police harassment of all kinds, from petty, to economic, to brutal and potentially deadly. However, blaming the problem entirely on racism actually exculpates the cops. If this is the only problem, then cops are just innocent victims of larger social forces.

(2) is a problem specific to the police -- police departments can be some combination of frathouse, posse, gang, and maybe even a fine upstanding force of law. To what degree these different archetypes surface depends on the individual department. The latitude to act in these ways is tied to economic interests encouraging over-incarceration via the intermediaries of police impunity and prosecutorial misconduct.



So much of the chatter around this problem is focused on bemoaning the disproportionate impact of policing on black people, which is a tragedy, but ignores the reality that in prison-happy America, even whites are locked up at higher rates than in comparable affluent Western nations. There seems to be the unstated assumption that if cops would just gun down and harass white people with the same frequency that they do blacks, then the problem would be solved. And that's precisely what would happen if we only succeeding in solving the "racism" part, by some half-assed measure like sensitivity training or just hiring more blacks on the force, because cops are already happy to gun down unarmed whites in dubious circumstances, they just tend to pay more attention to blacks most of the time. You haven't heard of the stories because they don't go as viral, and they don't fit a compelling narrative.

On the other hand, if we solved the police brutality half of the problem only, we'd have a world where blacks were unfairly targeted for the economic harassment of a bunch of squeak-clean Dudley-Do-Right types. This is pretty shitty too, but arguably better for everyone of every race than just turning the police force into equal opportunity violent psychopaths.

I also think the indignant, self-righteous focus on the eternal problem of racism just serves to make the issue seem unsolvable, which helps the cops. While we are working on ending racism forever, there are simpler, radical steps that could and should be taken right away--namely, neutering the fucking police.

Fund a massive investigation of every police department, expecting and assuming that anywhere from maybe a third to all of the police in that department are going to need to be shitcanned. (You can easily fund it by diverting money from the military, which is indirect funding for arming the police anyway, so it's a win-win.) Interrogate them all like the suspects they are, give them a chance to rat on their cop brethren, and compare notes to sift out the dirty cops from the clean ones. Hire on some new cops, and sure, favor the non-whiteys if you like, it couldn't hurt, just be aware that douchebags of all races seem equally inclined to forming violent gangs, be it the Crips, the Kings, or the LAPD.

Oh, and while we're at it, forcibly disband and sieze the assets of private prison and private parole firms and other bottom-feeding for-profit entities feeding off of the justice system.