Texas police officer grabbing a high school student by the throat

The kid was a dick and he caused the whole thing to go south. Since you can't see what happens between the kid being tased and the shots it's impossible to say if the shooting was justified or not. Either way, it's hard to have sympathy for someone that causes their own misfortune.

Also, given that the cop looked like this after the kid attacked him

Spoiler

It's pretty hard to say that there wasn't cause with no evidence to the contrary.

 

Whose blood is that?

 

His own. Apparently the kid beat the crap out of him ground and pound style which is what led to the shooting.

 

As far as I can see it's the same for this kid as it was for Micheal Brown, attack a cop, get shot.

 

So now the kid attacked a cop?

HAHAHA!

 

Do you think the cop punched himself in order to bloody up his face?

 

cops can't handle kids nowadays.

maybe he slammed his head after shooting the kid to justify it...

 

I do find interesting that his body cam was shattered and all over the place during the incident.

 

The "kid" was 17, which is old enough to join the military......hell if you are all that much older than 17 the Marine Corps doesn't even want you.

Also, it seems he handled the kid pretty well and effectively stopped the attack.

 

I'm really tired of having to watching recordings of young people dying.

Given his situation (dealing with a cop) and the fact that cops kill around a thousand people per year, the young man made poor decisions that, if he would not have made them, he would not have died.

That said, cops stop people too often. Stopping someone for flashing their brights at you? That's unnecessary.

The cop then allowed himself to turn a stupid flippant situation into a deadly serious situation, just because his pride about being a cop was insulted by the non-compliance of the deceased kid.

Both of the people in this video are personally responsible for this situation going out of hand -- but we need to stop looking at the issue of police brutality as a series of isolated cases. There are systemic issues in our society's entire approach to criminal justice that need to be addressed and changed.

Cops have too much power. They stop and meddle with people too often. There are too many laws (e.g. pot laws for instance). Police departments have a negative authoritarian culture that is reflected with how they deal with the public. They are not held accountable enough for their misdeeds.

You can explain away incidents, but around 1000 people are killed by cops each year -- and all the excuses people make for cops is never going to make that fact okay.

 

RE: video posted by BamBam:
"I was trying to walk away and de-escalate the situation but he just kept engaging me."

LOLs

So if an officer asks you to cooperate and doesn't dismiss you... you don't leave, young man. You leave until you're dismissed. You don't "try to walk away."

 

this kid deserved to get choked, not by 7 gun shots.

 

I think that's right. In the high beams case, it seems like most of the escalation is not the cop's fault. Once you have someone who won't show their driver's license or step out of the car, cops pretty much have to escalate. But, a cop going around pulling people over for flashing their headlights as a courtesy is make-work. He's essentially fishing, using the high beam excuse (I didn't even know there was a law against this) so he can check random citizens for outstanding warrants and/or raise funds for the local PD. This meddling doesn't bring value for society and increases risks to citizen and policeman. Unless cops are seeing actual threats to public safety, they needn't be stopping people.

 

Some of the memes I put up for my students...

 

Yeah but flashing your high beams at people IS illegal though and can cause accidents. If you are dumb enough to flash your high beams at a cop, you deserve the inconvenience of being pulled over. The whole thing would have probably been a 10 minute thing with a warning telling the kid that flashing your high beams is illegal if the kid had just cooperated instead of being a dick and breaking even more laws right in front of the cop leading to escalation of the situation.

It's just another scenario where someone does a series of stupid things that ends up costing them their life. Let's give the kid his Darwin award and move on.

 

A well respected social scientist was hired by North Carolina to do a research project regarding traffic stops. The minute unflattering findings got out in terms of minorities getting stopped and searched more, they denied the findings and canceled the project. The researcher was hired by the police in the first place. It's just fake self-policing.

What really bummed him out about the whole thing wasn't the potentially racial findings, but it was that the data was really good. It showed such a huge variance in police behavior that could have been used to identify the overzealous cops that pulled over everyone, or the lazy cops that pulled over nobody, or the cops that only pulled over certain groups of people. It was such good data and it gets killed because it's all about the politics, and not about trying to improve police practices.

 

Texas police do lot of stuff to teens:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...child-sex-charges-article-1.2397803?cid=bitly

http://www.click2houston.com/news/s...accused-of-sexually-assaulting-child/35840546

 

Not really. Maybe it's illegal, and you can probably do it in ways or circumstances that do impact public safety (such as tailgaters flashing to get someone to move aside, or intentionally flashing at oncoming traffic on a dark road), but I'll be hard-pressed to believe a courtesy flash endangers anyone. And courtesy flashes are intended to increase safety by telling other drivers that their high beams are hurting driving conditions. I would have thought you'd be aware, but flashing your lights to let someone know they have their high beams on is a common custom. Are you saying that those many, many drivers all over the country for decades now acting out of courtesy to fellow drivers actually deserve to be pulled over by the cops?

 

If they are flashing their high beams at cops, yeah. I know the custom, but it's still against the law. I don't think many people would get ticketed for it, but if you flash your bright lights at a cop, why wouldn't you expect to get pulled over....especially if the cop didn't have his bright lights on?

I just don't think pulling someone over in that scenario is in any way wrong and if the person that gets pulled over acts like an idiot and leads to the simple stop being more than that, well, it's their fault.

 

The level of bureaucracy in our society is a problem -- not just when it comes to law enforcement, but definitely including law enforcement. If people all over the country flash their lights out of a courtesy then it shouldn't be something cops are pulling people over for. When the law doesn't match the way people live, especially when the way in question is not hurting people, then the law should stay the heck out of the way.

I think it is unfortunate that we can't agree that we need bureaucrats with guns less involved in our lives, and that lowering the level of policing that we as citizens are subjected to would be a positive step in the right direction.