this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
444 points (98.3% liked)

News

23376 readers
2164 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Destinee Thompson was supposed to be on her way to lunch with her stepmother in August 2021 when Colorado police, mistaking her for a robbery suspect, fatally shot the pregnant mother as she fled in her minivan.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Most of your response indicates that either I'm failing to adequately convey my viewpoint or you are failing to fully comprehend it. The fault might very well be mine, but I'm not really enthusiastic about trying to rephrase it again, especially with the likelihood that you'll reject it out of hand again.

I'll just pluck at these two points.

Your argument seems to be that all the responsibility lies with police, simply because they’re police.

My argument is that the vast, vast majority of the responsibility lies with police because their training and behavior are the controllable variables in the interaction, and they are the ones empowered to end lives and deploy violence based on their assessment of the situation, and who should be trained to do so with the utmost care.

The issue at the core is mistaken identity, but the suspect refused to identify themselves, so how can the legal system or police fix that?

The very clear answer is that they do so by treating people as innocent until they have more to go on than a failure to comply and a partial description match (christ, "you match the description" is the most commonly cited example of racial profiling I can remember hearing) to decide otherwise. Had they done so, something less escalating than smashing out a window would have been done, regardless of whether you and I agree on the details of what that something could have been.

Frankly, with no snark intended, I think there's little chance that further discussion is going to cause either of us to change our minds.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But she wasn't innocent. She had warrants out for her arrest, and while the police did not know about that, she did refuse to identify herself which is also an offense. Then, when she drove the car into the officers she presented a very real threat to them. This isn't an example of racial profiling, either, and one way or another they would have had to get her out of the car, which was probably going to involve smashing a window at some stage.

While ordinarily and in general I agree with your points, they really don't apply well enough here. The police were far from perfect, but she was further.

But she wasn’t innocent.

She was innocent of the crime you have used to justify their escalation throughout this entire discussion. Had they treated her with the presumption of such, given their extremely shaky evidence to the contrary, different decisions could have (and should have) been made, as I've expressed a number of times already.

Thank you, and have a good day.