The Police are supposed to be held to a higher standard than your average folk. Therefore if they profile, then as a standard that is maintained by folks higher than the average guy, should we emulate them and profile also? if one cop is bad then they all are?
Also if black folk are so threatening why don't they fight our wars, hell they apparently would'nt even need a gun to put the enemy into fits of fear, easily defeated.
yes and if you are shooting a guy to stop a threat, why didn't you continue shooting the guy? did the threat stop? What evidence did you observe that gave you a change of heart overwhelming enough to overwhelm the original reason to start shooting?
Why handcuff the guy you were "protecting". Especially after shooting him.
Police around the country are taking precautions in light of Baton Rouge killings
Louisiana State Police superintendent: Gunman Gavin Long "ambushed" the officers
(CNN)Baton
Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr. said Monday that the attack that
killed three law enforcement officers and wounded three others showed
why militarized police tactics are needed.
In
the last two weeks, police have been ambushed by skilled gunmen in
Dallas and Baton Rouge and have taken multiple casualties.
On
Sunday, the Baton Rouge SWAT team's training kicked in and the team
performed flawlessly in responding to an ambush on officers, an
emotional Dabadie said in the Louisiana city.
East
Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said he was "convinced" that
if the SWAT team had not arrived when it did, the two wounded deputies
would be dead and the gunman would have escaped to attack more officers.
A SWAT team rifleman took out the gunman from more than 100 yards without a clear line of sight, Dabadie said.
"That
shot our SWAT team made was a helluva shot," Dabadie said. "We've been
questioned for the last (two) weeks about our militarized tactics and
our militarized law enforcement. This is why. We are up against a force
that is not playing by the rules. They didn't play by the rules in
Dallas and they didn't play by the rules here."
"This
guy was going to another location. He was not going to stop here,"
Dabadie told reporters. "He was going to take more lives."
Col.
Michael D. Edmonson, superintendent of Louisiana State Police, said the
gunman, Gavin Long, a former Marine from Kansas City, Missouri, was
skilled in his handling of the assault rifle and moved skillfully to
repeatedly ambush officers. Surveillance video captured the calculated
attack and showed a scene that was "chilling in the sheer brutality,"
Edmonson said.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were targeted and assassinated," he said.
Long
appears to have been in Baton Rouge several days planning his attack,
and investigators are now tracking his movements before the 8:40 a.m.
Sunday ambush to determine with whom he had contact and who may have
known about his plans, Edmonson said.
"We want to know what brought him here, what kept him here" and why he killed police, the superintendent said.
The attack took place near a convenience store favored by officers because it was near police headquarters.
Long
used a IWI Tavor SAR 5.56 rifle with a strap on it to keep the rifle in
place as he engaged the officers, helping him maintain accuracy. He
also was armed with a 9mm pistol and a Stag Arms M4 variant 5.56 rifle.
The rifle was staged inside his Chevrolet Malibu rental car so he could
get to it during the shooting, Edmonson said.
On Sunday morning,
three police officers were shot dead in Baton Rouge. This attack came
just 10 days after five police officers were killed in Dallas. Both
events were revenge attacks for the killing of young black men by
police.
The bloodshed has shocked the US, leading President Barack
Obama to call for calm. But how many police officers are killed in the
US in a normal year? And how many people are killed by police?
Police killed
"There's
a widespread perception in the American public, and particularly within
law enforcement, that officers are more threatened, more endangered,
more often assaulted, and more often killed than they have been
historically," says Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of
Southern Carolina and former policeman.
"I think it's a very
strong perception. People truly believe it. But factually, looking at
the numbers, it's not accurate," he says.
FBI data on police
officers "feloniously killed" - killed as a result of a criminal act -
indicates that the numbers have been falling, he says.
Looking at
the 10 years from 2006 to 2015 the annual average number of police
deaths was 49.6, Stoughton says, which he notes is "down significantly
from the high".
"The high was the 10-year period prior to 1980, when we had an
average of 115 - actually 114.8 officers feloniously killed… in the line
of duty every year."
At the same time the number of police officers has increased dramatically in the US.
At
the same time the number of police officers has increased in the US.
There are a quarter of a million more police officers working today than
there were three decades ago.
So when you consider the number of
officers killed per 100,000, there has been a dramatic decrease. The
annual per capita number of officers killed has dropped from 24 per
100,000 in the 10 years to 1980 to 7.3 per 100,000 in the 10 years to
2013 (the last year for which there is good data).
This chimes with a bigger trend, which is a steady reduction in crime, including homicides.
Killed by police
Official data on the number of people killed by the police turns out to be remarkably unreliable.
"We
can't have an informed discussion, because we don't have data," FBI
Director James Comey said in the House of Representatives in October.
"People
have data about who went to a movie last weekend, or how many books
were sold, or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room.
And I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the United
States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics. And
that's a very bad place to be."
He had previously said it was
"unacceptable" that the leading sources of this information were
newspapers, the Washington Post and the Guardian.
Find out more
More or Less is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service
Although the FBI does gather some
data on fatal shootings, police forces are not obliged to provide it,
and only some of them do. This led the Washington Post to start tracking civilian deaths itself after the shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson in August 2014, by monitoring reports in the media.
"We
looked at the FBI database, since that was the official government
accounting for things. And saw that over the past decade, the average
number of shootings that they counted was about 400. By the end of last
year, we had almost 1,000 fatal shootings that we had captured," says
Kimberly Kindy, an investigative reporter at the newspaper.
"What we didn't know though, of course, as we went into
this year and did it a second year was - was last year a normal year?
Is 990 people being killed by police in a single year about what you
would expect year in and year out?"
So far, 2016 appears to be roughly on track with 2015, Kindy says.
"In
fact there's been an increase, a 6% increase in fatal shootings when we
compare the first six months of last year to the first six months of
this year… So that's about three people are dying a day, who are being
fatally shot by officers."
The Guardian has recorded even more
deaths in 2015 and 2016, including deaths as a result of tasering,
collisions with police vehicles and altercations in police custody.
The
Washington Post journalists also collect information about the race of
those shot by police. According to Kindy, about half are white, and
about half are from minorities, but adjusting for the size of the
populations, Kindy says, "minorities are definitely being shot at a
higher rate than whites".
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Alton Sterling, a black man, was shot by a white police officer in Baton Rouge on 5 July
This is particularly noticeable in the case of the black population.
"Blacks are being shot at a rate that's 2.5 times higher than whites," Kindy says.
The
big question is whether that is evidence that the police are
discriminating against African Americans. There's an obvious argument
that it is: African Americans are just 13% of the US population, and yet
26% of the people killed by the police.
But there's another way to look at these numbers.
Nearly 50% of convicted murderers in the US are African Americans. Why
that number is so high is a difficult question to answer. So is the
question why African Americans are also far more likely than whites to
be murder victims.
The point is that if African Americans are more
likely to be involved in violent crime - both as perpetrators and
victims - then the higher rate of police shootings may not be
surprising.
The truth is that the raw statistics can't tell us
whether the police are treating African Americans differently from white
people. To understand that, we'd need to look at more details about
what happened in each incident. There's a big difference between a case
where someone was shooting at the police, and a case where someone was
passive and unarmed.
One person who has tried to do that is an
economist from Harvard University called Roland Fryer, the first ever
African American to win the prestigious John Bates Clark medal in
economics. This month Fryer released a preliminary study examining
records from 10 cities and counties, with the best data coming from
Houston - it's not yet peer-reviewed, but it has received a lot of
attention in the press.
Fryer's research suggests that African
Americans and Hispanics are substantially more likely to experience
force in their interactions with the police - such as having a gun
pointed at them, being handcuffed without arrest, or being
pepper-sprayed or hit with a baton. This racial difference is reduced,
but doesn't completely disappear, when Fryer adds all sorts of
statistical controls such as whether the incident was indoors or
outdoors, in a high-crime area, took place at night, and so on.
However, Fryer doesn't find any racial difference in the cases where police offers actually shoot someone.
The debate over this continues, both on the streets and in academia. Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
