St. Louis Vs. The Police IV: Now It Gets Real!

St. Louis police kills armed African American teen after chase in a stolen car


Cue round 2 3 4 of riots "peaceful" protests demanding to convict the officers who protected their lives murdered poor innocent thug teenager who stole a car was doing nothing more than walking down a street.

Incoming Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson inciting racially charged riots conducting peaceful protests.

Rules of engagement usually dictate you don't fire UNLESS FIRED UPON OR IN THE MOTION OF. I don't believe that there was any of that since the suspect fled. Why are you going to shoot a fleeing man as a cop? This isn't war. The enemy isn't retreating and you need to shoot them so that they might not turn around and shoot you.
Especially when dealing with some stupid 19 year old kid.
Shooting after just 1 command, hmmm. Maybe they couldn't be bothered to chase him.
So yeah it will hit the fan.

Rules of engagement doesn't apply. This isn't war, as you said.

Officers ordered him to drop the weapon. If an officer tells you to do something while they are pointing a gun at you, you better *** do it, unless you want to get shot.

It won't matter to people if the kid was armed, shooting at officer, or attacking an officer, they will riot protest just because a black kid was shot by a white officer.

Then you will have morons who will murder cops in cold blood for this.

Maybe he simply wanted the Tec 9.

The difference between an USP and a Tec 9 easily justify shooting first and asking questions later.

So enemies of war carrying much more powerful weapons deserve more leniency than citizens of your own country? (Including idiot teens)

Are you going to say "Excuse me, are you an enemy combatant or a legal citizen of this country?" when trying to arrest a kid who is holding a gun and fleeing?

Notice how this story doesn't say if the gun was pointed at the officers or not. That is a key factor in justified self-defense for the officers. I'm sure the rioters protesters will capitalize on that and riot protest based on it.

No reason to shoot a fleeing individual, even an armed one. Numerous court decisions have shown the same thing.

This guy obviously wasn't an upstanding citizen, but shooting him to death was excessive, barring any more detailed information or some kind of tape.

So, to Jassik, it is perfectly ok to run away from the police, armed or not.

So your argument is based on speculated information that wasn't given in the article?
Don't you think they would've mentioned that?

St. Louis is going through hard times. East St. Louis looks a lot like parts northern and eastern Detroit in many respects. Seems like stories like these serve to distract from the real situation.

Lack of opportunity with people stuck where they are and growing desperate. Creating a disproportionate dichotomy of people angry with the status quo vs those trying to hold on maintain.

If you are talking about my second part of my post, that was speculation.

But my direct response to you was the first part. Try again to create a scarecrow argument for me.

So you're good with cops shooting people in the back?

Seems pretty obvious he's saying they could have shot his leg or weapon wielding arm which essentially impairs equilibrium keeping the suspect from fleeing vs shooting to death.

But hey nobody really expects you to see it as anything other than all or nothing.

Just trying to increase your post count?

Is that what I said?

Is it ok to run from police? no
Is it worthy of being shot dead in the street for no other reason? hell no.

At what point do we stop making excuses for what's essentially a police imposed death penalty? "He didn't use his blinker, open fire!"

It must be nice to never have had police treat you like crap for no reason. I'm sure you'll get knicked for something sooner or later and you might just get a view from the other side.

Here's the Shooting from New Jersey

The Supremes have already held that running from police, armed or not, is a capital offense and on the spot execution is perfectly acceptable.

Not going to look that one up at this hour.

You sound like someone who has never fired a handgun in his entire life.

The average cop on the street does not have the marksmanship skills of the Lone Ranger.

You don't need to be an expert marksman to hit the quad or buttock of a fleeing suspect. Let alone possessing the skill of a fictional character. But then again maybe having 27yrs of experience with firearms skews my perspective.

Calling *** on this.

This reminds me of an issue that does underlie the Ferguson problem but which no one really wants to look at too closely...

Last week my university won the first national college football championship. As I live near campus still, I heard most of the emergency vehicles in the city screaming by to get to the riot taking place. Couches and dumpsters set on fire, shots fired into the air (the better to kill a random innocent three neighborhoods away), and streets completely blocked. This has happened multiple times before, such that I can say, "At least they didn't flip any cars this time," but plenty had their windows smashed in.

And, as a reminder, we're the ones who won. I dread to think the reaction had we lost.

Yet most outlets, especially those from outside the metro area, described all of this with quiet aplomb. "Oh, those (white) sports fans, they do go a little far sometimes. Tut-tut!" The initially far more subdued protests in Ferguson, though, were riots from minute one.

This isn't a new phenomenon, either, neither on the count of mostly white sports fans causing massive damage and panic nor on the count of exaggerating the issue of dark-skinned people in the streets. Did anyone describe the Occupy movement, a deliberately political gathering but of a racially mixed nature, as rioting? Violence did occasionally occur in conjunction with it.

Anyhow, moving past the racial bias that will automatically get swept under the rug, the kid was armed. The media *** might try to say something, but common people know the difference.

Hyperbole at its finest.

You actually need to be proficient with firearms to be allowed to carry one in Law Enforcement (some places slack on what is considered "proficient", but that's another argument), so you don't 1. misfire, 2. hit pedestrians, 3. fire off stray bullets that end up becoming issue 2.

Moving targets are actually much harder to hit. Add in possible threat of return fire, a place anywhere outside of a firing range where multiple variables exist, and you may as well require that level of skill to hit anything outside of the main torso.

The variables are very important to consider. Read the report. Observe that what is missing are the details of the exact time of night and the distance between the officers and the suspect.

What we do know is the suspect hit a wall causing the engine to stop forcing them to attempt to flee on foot. We don't know if the suspect was facing the officers or was already in the process of fleeing. We don't know if the distance was 10', 50' or 100'. We don't know if the streets were empty or busy.

If the streets were empty and the distance between the suspect and officers was 10'. The suspect attempts to turn and flee it wouldn't be hard to hit the quad.

If the streets were busy and the distance was 50-100' and the suspect was fleeing. Then yes discretion and a high amount of proficiency would he required.

If the situation was the suspect was facing the police and the gun was visible and they were ordered to drop and did not comply then yes he is a dead man and bullets land where they may.

Variables...but let's not pretend that things aren't plausible simply because we visualize the scenario playing out differently in our minds.

A very good reason to not shoot at all. Pursue at a distance, attempt to talk them down, or good forbid catch them next time.

If you can not reliably hit the target as trained to do so, you wouldn't fire at a smaller portion of the target, such as the buttocks or the arm.

However, they were able to assert as much that he had a tech 9, or a weapon remarkably similar.

Additionally, given the time of year, night ends up being darker than in the summer, so there is the variable issue of visibility - which can be debunked by the fact they identified the weapon, a weapon that becomes deadly immediately, where officers are trained to shoot to kill, despite most training that would have them talk down or apprehend a suspect.

To simply assert to shoot the smaller, more mobile parts of a fleeing person, doesn't require skill, or much skill, when you have 27 years of practice under your belt, is foolhardy at best, and some people would believe it, which ends up causing a whole host of other problems. Anyone with that many years of practice should know better than that. Honestly, you're the first person to say as much, even among skilled sharpshooters.

The smaller the target, the more skill you need in order to be precise. Simple as that. Additionally... HE WAS ARMED WITH A TECH 9, ignoring the orders of an officer. While it is easy to say that one would rather no one had to die, a desperate person does desperate things. And could have easily lead to a hostage situation, where innocent people could have become involved.

Which is the real point being overlooked.

Except I never said it didn't require skill. Maybe you ought to reread everything I said.

pistols tend to loose a ton of accuracy at about 15-20 feet.

If I knew someone had an automatic weapon, & all I had was a glock, I would dump all 12 rounds center mass.

If dude was fleeing, idk, that gets pretty fuzzy, & I wouldn't want to be the one making that decision.

I read it clearly.

Notice that part where I said "doesn't require skill, or much skill"

Which is implied by the phrase "you don't need to be an expert marksman", despite the need to be heavily skilled (to the point of an expert marksman, many, if not all, would say you would *need* to be at that level, and then many would still doubt themselves able to make the shot under such circumstances)

But you know, logic and all that gets in the way of saying "NO U!" sometimes.