this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
446 points (98.5% liked)

News

23610 readers
4439 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 2 years 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
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

She wasn't just a random pregnant woman. She partially matched the description they'd been given (female, white tank top, part hispanic) and while she didn't have a chest tattoo and was pregnant these might not have been immediately obvious - we don't know how far along she was and they probably didn't have a chance to look for a tattoo before she jumped in the car. Her refusal to identify herself (which she is legally obligated to do) further makes her seem like their suspect. The police had every reason to think she was the knife robber.

Assume for a moment: what if she was the knife robber? The police are then faced with the urgency of preventing further crime - if they allow her to escape, there's a high likelihood that she will a) cause harm to someone with reckless driving while trying to escape, or b) go on to rob someone else, which could easily lead to harm if they don't comply. The police have to stop her.

The police definitely deserve criticism and should be looking to modify their behaviours, in general. Here though, the criticism doesn't have much weight behind it, because the suspect holds a significant amount of responsibility for what happened. She did not identify herself to the police. She inadvertently led them to believe she was their violent suspect. She tried to escape and drive through police officers. We can certainly discuss whether or when it was necessary to smash the window (in particular, I think smashing the passenger window was stupid - if they'd smashed the driver's window she might not have reacted so quickly) however the police had every right to detain her and use force due to her non-compliance.

These are peoples' lives. And police have to balance the suspect's life against those of the suspect's potential victims. Again, the police had every reason to think she was their knife suspect, who could go on to harm someone. If she was, and the police didn't stop her, and she did go on to kill someone, then the police would be blamed for their inaction.

My dismissal is because you're assuming perfect knowledge of the situation. That isn't practicable, and is downright unlikely in these circumstances - and a big part of that is because of the actions of the suspect.

It's within the legal framework for police to use reasonable force to stop a violent criminal. They had every reason to think she was their violent criminal.

How would you suggest the legal framework be changed, such that it could both protect a non-compliant but non-violent criminal while simulatenously allowing necessary force to be used to stop violent criminals? 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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.