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That video was actually an excellent example of this; I even saw someone point out that they never should have let her hold the kettle in the first place; one of the officers should have recognized that she was in crisis and offered to get the kettle FOR her. She should never have been allowed the opportunity to pick up the improvised weapon in the first place because it should have been obvious to them that she could not control herself in that moment.

Just wanted to jump in - I 100% agree with this. The cop should have had the sense just not to tell her to fool with the pot, since it was fine for a couple minutes and they were on their way out anyway. But he did, and then they flipped out and pointed guns at her because they are unsuited to stressful situations, and she lost her fuckin mind with fear (as is understandable) and didn’t react with anything coherent and sensible, still tried to do what they were asking her to do anyway (somehow), and then they shot her anyway because they were in a total twitchy panic.

(She was actually controlling herself fine until they pointed guns and started shouting, for literally no reason at all, and then she started to react with irrational movements and statements as anyone under life threatening stress may be prone to do. And somehow they weren’t prepared for that and interpreted it as this terrifying level of hostility on her part.)

I’m not trying to excuse the cop. Bottom line, however it happened, he’s guilty. Res ipsa loquitur.

Maybe he’s a POS in addition to being a panicky person who doesn’t think ahead, and either one should have disqualified him from being a cop long before it got to this point. But it genuinely didn’t seem to me like he was looking to shoot anybody; he just was fearful and irrational under pressure and this was that one time where when you equip someone like that with deadly force and send them into random situations, something really bad with permanent consequences is gonna happen because of that combination.

I certainly can't argue with your lived experience, but I hope you'll appreciate that from my point of view it's an anecdote, even though I don't doubt your sincerity, nor the accuracy of your statement.

Few people just snap and kill somebody in under a few seconds, its the fact that they’re ever letting shit get that far in the first place is the actual core issue here. It’s incredibly easy to look at a single video and say “I would never” but part of my talent for handling these situations is understanding what causes a person to get to that point. I’m the person who notices my coworkers getting frustrated and taps them out because I’ve noticed that it’s always the martyrs who say “I would never” that fail to monitor and intervene with their own frustration levels that wind up doing the most fucked up shit.

I agree with all of this, but combined with the information in the OP, what we can do, rather than blame that cop for their own mental health struggles (although I do blame a person with those kinds of anger control issues for choosing a career where they need to decide whether to kill people or not), I think there must be, should be, and should always have been actual consequences not only for the cop who pulled the trigger, but for the folks who hired and retained him.

And if the answer is "for this reason or that they didn't have knowledge of all those details" - then THAT problem can be the first one that supposed well meaning police solve if they want to start building some faith that they actually want to solve these problems as badly as us potential targets do.

they’ll see these videos of cops killing black people and SAY ACAB or defund the police,

The post you originally replied to is the closest I've ever come to actually saying it, but although I usually refuse to even get that close, I will distill down a somewhat famous Chris Rock skit to only its punchline. I may not walk around saying ACAB, but I understand.

There's no fixing the system it must be destroyed and replaced.

For some reason, the solution to this (again, very genuine) problem “bad cops tend to get fired and travel to some other agency” is not “let’s fix the holes that make that pattern possible” but “See? Police agencies always protect bad cops! Let’s starve them for money and make them desperate for more people!

We had decades of uncritical support of police from most of the population until cameras started showing up everywhere to let us see what we were supporting. It turns out those decades of mostly uncritical support does not seem to have resulted in the sorts of police we want. So maybe try being upset about the shitty police instead of being upset about people being upset about the shitty police.