burying the lede

[cellio]

Since this is national news -- I just saw an LA Times story that omits this very important fact entirely,¹ though most just bury it -- let me add an important detail from here in Pittsburgh:

Antwon Rose was fleeing the scene of a shooting when he was shot by a police officer. While we have major problems with racism in this country, including disgusting, senseless violence without remedy from white police officers against everybody who's not white, in this case there was a clear and present danger to the community.

I'm sad that the man died and I feel bad for his family. I wish the officer been able to stop the fleeing man without it being fatal (which is hard). But convicting the police officer would have been a triumph of revenge over justice. We're better than that. We've all seen videos of police officers beating, tasing, and shooting people who were doing nothing to resist, who were cooperating, and yet they were attacked anyway. Those are the police officers we need to convict and remove from our streets. Those are the cases we need to focus on when seeking reform. Counting Antwon Rose's case among them weakens that cause. Don't do it. Sometimes the police officer is actually right; let's focus on the many cases where they're wrong as we pursue justice in our broken country.

[1] The article I just saw said that police shot him at a traffic stop, making it sound like the guy was sitting in the car when it happened.

Comments

[siderea]

This suspect had just gotten out of the car used in a drive-by shooting (one dead, one wounded). In PA, if the police believe the suspect poses imminent harm to the community they're supposed to act to stop the person.

I know that "just gotten out of the car used in a drive-by shooting" sounds like a reasonable "imminent harm" situation. It isn't. One of the contentions here is that police are more likely to decide "imminent harm" where they believe a black person is a perp than in the same situation where a white person does the same thing.

My point, though, was that this case is very different from the (too many!) cases we have seen where people who were unambiguously not threats were nonetheless brutalized and sometimes killed by police officers

Plenty of those cases had imminency excuses, too. That's the problem. Cops claim that there was some imminent threat - when the person involved is Black.

The job of cops is to manage situations in which there is possibly an imminent threat to the public. Crucial to their doing their jobs right is correctly discriminating between degrees of imminency. Shooting someone who is running away from you, even if you think they may have just committed a violent crime, doesn't usually rise to the level of imminency that warrants opening fire. Except when the person fleeing is the wrong race.