Escalation of stupid

[sabotabby]

So let's recap:

Toronto police shoot a probably-mentally-disturbed teenager on an empty street car, nine times, then Taser him to make sure he's good and dead.

It gets caught on video and posted. People, for once, actually lose their shit and demand an open discussion about police brutality and training, particularly in regards to people with mental illnesses (Sammy Yatim was far from the first mentally ill person killed by police).

Some morons ask moronic questions like "why didn't they shoot him in the leg?" and "why didn't they just Tase him?"

One, but only one, of the cops is charged.

The Liberals have a solution: Arm ALL the cops with Tasers.

I shouldn't have to explain why this is a terrible idea, but here goes:

• Tasers are not a substitute for guns. They are a substitute for discussion.

Confronted with a volatile situation, a cop will generally go for the maximum possible force, which is why you see them Tasing and pepper-spraying unarmed protesters all the time. If a cop actually believes he's in a lethal situation, he's not going to fuck around with "less-lethal" (a misnomer, see also Robert Dziekanski) force.

• One of the cops in the Yatim shooting did have a Taser, which he used only after the kid had been shot multiple times.

• Cops still aren't being instructed in de-escalation techniques or awareness of mental health issues. They're just being rewarded with yet another toy that they can use to brutalize the population.

• The ultimate problem here is not what kind of firepower the cops are packing, but the culture of thuggery and lawlessness that pervades the police as an institution. They're untouchable, above the law, they know it, and the only oversight body that exists is primarily composed of ex-cops who still stick to the code of their gang. Yatim's killing wouldn't have ruffled a feather if someone hadn't caught it on tape, and the sole reason why this one cop is being charged at all is because of the public outcry.

Basically, we have an out-of-control, racist gang that is more heavily armed than any other gang in the city, and the powers that be are slapping band-aids on the problem. Electric, weapon-shaped band-aids that are perfectly capable of killing someone. Way to go!

Comments

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

The ultimate problem here is not what kind of firepower the cops are packing, but the culture of thuggery and lawlessness that pervades the police as an institution. They're untouchable, above the law, they know it, and the only oversight body that exists is primarily composed of ex-cops who still stick to the code of their gang. Yatim's killing wouldn't have ruffled a feather if someone hadn't caught it on tape, and the sole reason why this one cop is being charged at all is because of the public outcry.

this. I know not all cops are this way, but a lot are, and it's a huge problem.

[sabotabby]

I have met exactly one cop that doesn't fit this description. Ever. And she was in a homogenous small town. Some of the others might have been reasonable human beings when I met them, but upon discussion were cops first and people second and one flat-out told me that he'd beat my skull in if ordered to.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is all "non-lethal" is doubly false, first because they still kill people, second because "non-lethal" is equated with not harmful. In Chicago, that sound cannon was presented as merely a crowd control device without mentioning permanent hearing loss.

[sabotabby]

Oh, there's tons of Taser-related deaths, and injuries caused by police brutality/toys seldom even make headlines.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

"less lethal" =/= "nonlethal." I understand what you're saying about even "less lethal," and how the public often (mis)understands that, but guns are designed to be lethal. That's what they do, not sometimes by accident, but (above .22 caliber) almost always. I know this is being picky, but I also know guns too well!

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I agree with the ultimate statement that cops need to be trained in how to handle people with mental illness because they are the ones who are sent to deal with the mentally ill most of the time.

I think in the case of the Somali man in Minneapolis (the one with the machete), the cops actually tried to taser him first but since it's MN, the guy was wearing a heavy coat so it didn't work.

I wouldn't say that all cops are like that, but the cops who are like that seem to drive a culture. Then again, cops have a job to maintain order and it makes for a very limited series of options when it comes to the mentally ill. Without training, the options are yell and shoot if the first option doesn't work.

I also agree that there's a thug culture, but it's not unlimited. I know that the cops in New York wanted to kill their fellow officer when he raped a woman (basically, the guy came off his shift, saw a woman at a bus stop, pulled his badge to intimidate her and then raped her - nobody wants to be associate with that creep) and there's also the sense of "you don't know what it's like" which has some truth.

Of course, my favorite story is my friend Eli who ended up in Greenpoint after he gave a city council woman a speeding ticket (or a citation for drunk driving - he never told that story but it was in the news) and he spent most of his time arresting drunk hipsters. He would blast NWA's "Fuck the Police" while driving them to the station.

[sabotabby]

Ah, drunk hipsters. They don't get arrested here. There's a real double standard between who is allowed to be publicly drunk and who is not.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

All I can think of is Amadou Diallo, a street vendor who was gunned down by police in the vestibule of his home for holding up a wallet to show he ewas unarmed.

At the rally in front of the police academy on 24th street, we chanted: "Police academy 101: It's a wallet, not a gun!"

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Cops still aren't being instructed in de-escalation techniques or awareness of mental health issues.

This is really the most astonishing thing. There's a case for Tasers as an intermediate option a step or so below shooting, but only as part of a culture and training whereby the goal is always to use the lowest possible level of force.

Of course if the whole purpose is to create fear and maintain authority rather than to deal with violent situations in the least violent way possible, then that would kind of explain it.

[sabotabby]

Which, obviously, is the case.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Back when I was working for the wheat pool in Vancouver, I took a company-sponsored Level-II Advanced first aid course (just about the same as Level 3, but assuming you're within forty minutes of a hospital, which the wheat pool was) and our course books discussed what to do if someone was having a violent psychotic episode or something like it at work, and you needed to physically restrain them without hurting them.

What you do is, if possible, you take a couple of guys with a mattress, and use it to back them into a corner and restrain them (without too much risk of anyone getting badly hurt) until the ambulance arrived. Alternatively, you get together your four biggest guys, assign them each a limb, and all leap in at once. The goal is for each guy to grab his assigned limb (and make sure each knows which limb they are aiming for beforehand) and hold on.

Pretty straightforward, eh? And nothing requiring extra equipment.

Obviously the police manual doesn't have this section. And I KNOW police don't have even basic first aid training (which is absurd) because one day when we were the first on the scene of a single-vehicle accident, when a cop finally happened by (there is kind of a story to how long the ambulance took to get to us but the TL;DR version is OVER A FUCKING HOUR, in ABBOTSFORD, on the fucking FREEWAY) I wanted to pass off to the professional, but she wouldn't let me because they don't get any first aid training. Also, they don't even have a tank of oxygen in their trunks.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

I remember when TASERs first came out. The idea was that here was something that, while dangerous and carrying an inherent risk for being deadly, were not necessarily always deadly, as opposed to their guns, which pretty much are. And the idea was that, in situations where the police must use guns, the TASERs provided a potentially less-deadly alternative.

And that was when they were supposed to be used; as an alternative to deadly force, and only to deadly force. They were never intended to be used as a more-convenient way of subduing someone. They certainly weren't meant to be used repeatedly, or on, say, fourteen-year-old girls who already were on the ground with three full-grown cops restraining her (as happened in Prince George, BC, a few years ago but I'm willing to bet that didn't go national, especially as the girl--luckily--survived), or people who were already shot and dying. And then we wouldn't have to have TASER and reporters looking into if the devices were faulty, because they are only supposed to be used when the alternative is pretty much 100% fatal.



And do you know, when I was a kid, we had a cop (this would have been RCMP) come into our school, probably around Grade One or Two, and one of the questions someone asked him (and the only one I still remember) was, "How many times have you fired your gun?" And the answer was, almost forty years ago, "Never."

He'd been a cop for years, and he'd only even drawn it once or twice. He said real life wasn't like the shoot-outs you saw on TV, and that pulling a gun was a serious thing to do, and if he even ever took it out of his holster he had to fill out a lot of paperwork to explain why.

Pity no one seems to have told this generation of police.

#Sabotabby

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the analysis, well-said.

[sabotabby]

<3 my hashtag.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, because giving all the cops tasers here worked great. It just lets them leave the nightstick home if they feel like it, which they usually don't,.

[sabotabby]

Nightsticks! How quaint!

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

My British grandmother had a bobby's truncheon; when my mum, as a kid, was scared a burglar would break into her (third-floor) bedroom, Gran let her keep the truncheon under her pillow.

Neither Mum nor I had any idea where she got it (I never even saw it, and neither of us knew what happened to it, either) but I bet there was a story, lol.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I do think there are more good cops than most people think, but the overall cop culture is that bad. My older sister was a Chicago cop who was pretty exemplary: she didn't take bribes (although she did enjoy tearing up the money and then running in the person anyway), and she got a concussion interposing herself between her partner and a suspect he wanted to pistol whip. Definitely no paragon of anti-racism, she probably did enforce the law equally, didn't use racial epithets either at home or on the job, etc. But it's sad that her approach was even noteworthy, and it was. Like the military, cops have a real us/them mentality. And in a way it's true that "civilians" don't understand what-all they go through, and that they can't immediately tell if someone wants to kill them or not. But every city does end up with some or most of the officers who are macho thugs with guns.

In Chicago, at least, there is (or was as of the 1990s) enough oversight to somewhat deter at least fatal police brutality; much less so for beatings etc. I don't know that much about any other police department from the inside. Actually, I think overall cops are probably more willing to report and discipline other cops than physicians are to report and discipline other physicians, but that's a low, low bar!

[sabotabby]

The thing that gets me is that teachers, social workers, etc. do a lot of the same things that cops do (at least in Toronto, which our mayor aside is usually quite a peaceful city!), unarmed, and for less pay and appreciation. So the whole "civilians don't understand" thing doesn't really ring true for me.

Glad your sister was one of the good ones, though.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Note: I am not at all excusing the "us vs. them" mentality, just saying I think I do understand it.

It seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between a being committed to a different job that also involves you in violence and taking on a job the purpose of which is to involve you in violence. A qualitative difference between the violence coming to you & it being your job to go to it. A lot of police work is very boring, but the times that aren't are something that only people in the military experience: in a violent situation in which everyone else runs the other way, you have to make yourself confront it. I do think that's a big difference.

The only other job I can think of on the same level is firefighter. They do seem to have a "no one else can understand" feeling, but it doesn't seem to turn ugly. I suspect largely because the enemy is fire, not the violence of other human beings.

I don't think it's a coincidence, either, that police, fire, and military jobs can tend to run in families. You have to look at life a special way to be willing to make endangering yourself the primary definition of your career. And I don't think it's a coincidence that all three fields are traditionally male, either.

Overall, I'm totally divided between admiration and even awe for what the police are willing to do & condemnation, even disgust at the way in which many of them do it.

I have a different kind of admiration and even awe for social workers and teachers in violent neighborhoods. It seems to me that even the best police have generally given up on the idea of doing good & settle for just keeping others from doing harm. Those social workers and teachers won't have to force themselves to go into a factory with a chemical spill to save others, as police and firefighters do, but they have to keep an optimistic outlook while they do what they do, which in some ways is even more unnatural.

[the_axel]

Police culture, everywhere I've lived, strongly encourages cops to only socialize with other police so they get into the mindset that 'no one else can understand'. New cops come in, and they either adapt or quit.
It's good cultist strategy.

Police and military are traditionally male because men get to be in charge of violence. That's just straightforward sexism.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

In my experience, though, cop culture also encourages strong family values, which is completely the opposite of what a cult needs to do, separating the cultist from the family. Sometimes the family is also full of cops, as I said, but far from always. I think it's hard to tell how much it's cult-like and how much it's like emergency-room people hanging out together because most other kinds of people are disgusted by their shop talk.

Men both get to and have to be in charge of violence. And yes, of course it's just straightforward sexism. My sister was one of the first female cops in her precinct, and it was a hard row to hoe.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

"To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

Robert D---, when they were called in, was an obviously upset older man who didn't speak English. Honestly, how hard would it have been to make soothing gestures, make oneself look like someone who was there to help (maybe say "Mayday?" which is the freaking international request for help), get his passport, check what his country of origin was, and call that country's embassy or cultural centre and ask them to translate? It was Vancouver, one of the most multi-cultural cities in North America. What was he, Polish? It just took me literally (I counted) about five seconds to type "Polish cultural centre, vancouver" into Google (which, yes, was around at the time) and get a number; seven seconds to get the embassy's number. I know they're in the phone book.

I think what stuns me the most of all about that case was how nobody at any point (except for one baggage handler, who told someone that it sounded like Polish, and that one of the other handlers who was on shift spoke Polish--but of course the Someone--who was also low-level-- didn't do anything about it) --no one thought, "Hmm, I wonder if I can find someone to translate for us?"

At no time, over what, like three days? did anyone stop and think, hey, I bet I can help this guy out if I try. Not one person took the time to try and establish communication with him, find out what was up, and help him out. Not one, except for that one baggage handler, and even he didn't go and get his coworker.

And then the police show up and don't even try and solve the problem. When faced with a man who was obviously tired and desperate and just trying to get someone to fucking help and "armed" with a stapler, fer chrissakes, their first response is to kill him.

Perhaps we need a special group of officers whose job it is to help in these situations? Like the S.W.A.T. team, except trained for deescalation and problem-resolving via non-violent methods? Although I can't help but think that some kind of system-wide alternate response training would be a great and necessary start. When you have a person on an empty trolley armed with just a knife who shows no inclination of leaving said trolley, what's wrong with just keeping everyone else out of the way and calling in an ambulance?

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

This has been bugging me for a while, and you articulated it very clearly, but I have no idea how to do anything about it. Do you?

[sabotabby]

I think really it's a matter of keeping public pressure up, and not settling for the crumbs that they're tossing out. There's genuine righteous anger out there, but Toronto activism has a tendency to lose momentum.

[the_axel]

I thought the cop with the taser only showed up after Yatim had been murdered.

Oh - How Toronto police decide when they need to shoot a suspect.

Seeing as he had a knife, it does look like the 'correct' thing to do would be to shoot him...

[sabotabby]

Yeah. Tasers are going to be used on drunk indigenous homeless dudes, and activists, not on knife-wielders.

[agatharuncible.livejournal.com]

You're spot on. I don't get the point of giving them tasers, unless they took away their guns completely, which also wouldn't work for obvious reasons. What needs to happen is more discussion and more awareness, better training in how to handle situations in a way that isn't "vaguely threatening person! shoot now, ask questions later!", and police being held accountable in a way that isn't just "see? we totally put this guy in court, nothing to see here!".

Over here, I'm sure that stuff like that happens all the time. A few cases of racially-motivated police shootings have been on the news a couple of times over the past few years, but it's not that common, and judging by the fact that there was almost no coverage in mainstream media of the murder of a black kid a few months ago, it wouldn't surprise me if it happened a lot but just didn't get talked about anywhere. It's really creepy. /csb

[sabotabby]

I think it only ever makes headlines anywhere if there are either a lot of witnesses or it's caught on video. Otherwise, it's business as usual.