I want all you Tea Partiers and Bundy Gang supporters to join me in a thought experiment for a moment: Let's go back to that snowy highway in southeastern Oregon a couple of months ago. Four "occupiers" are in a moderately large pickup truck on their way to meet with an ostensibly friendly sheriff in the adjoining county, when they become aware that they are being pursued by federal and Oregon State law enforcement vehicles. The driver, Robert LaVoy Finicum, foolishly tries to outrun them, and not being a stunt driver nor having a vehicle that can outrun a police cruiser (there's no such thing), he skids into a snowbank instead and is quickly surrounded by the cops. Prudence and common sense indicates that the pickup truck's occupants stay in their vehicle, make no sudden moves, or do anything else to escalate what is already a tense, hair-trigger situation. Instead, Finicum bolts from the driver's side and starts waving his arms and daring the officers to shoot him.
And the officers oblige - with a taser that renders him unconscious but still very much alive.
Would that not have been a far better climax to the Second Battle of Bundy Hill? And would the same not hold true for Michael Brown or Eric Garner (well, he probably would have dropped dead from being tased for the same reason as getting choked out) or Freddie Gray? Is it not a good thing to provide police officers with non-lethal means of subduing suspects instead of forcing them to either let criminals go or shoot them?
In the real world, of course it is. In "Charm City," not so much:
Baltimore police officers exceeded widely accepted safety limits for tasers more than any other force in Maryland, and in nearly all cases fired the weapon at suspects who were not complying with police orders but did not pose a threat.
Assuming the police orders are lawful, why is there a need to wait for a threat to be posed? Law enforcement is by definition coercive. Cops try to do their job as peacefully as possible - hence the term "peace officers" - because a big part of their job is keeping the peace, or "insure domestic Tranquility". But if a suspect is resisting arrest but hasn't posed a threat - yet - how is a taser not a legitimate tool to use in that situation? I'll acknowledge that that's a gray area (no pun intended) and you'd prefer it not be necessary, but how many such situations can be prevented from escalating to exchange of gunfire by such a preventative measure? Isn't that the whole point?
Most of the suspects hit by Tasers in Baltimore were black, according to data obtained and analyzed by the Baltimore Sun, and more than two-thirds of the incidents from 2012 to 2014 took place in ZIP codes with the city’s lowest median incomes.
To which equal measures of "So what?" and "What did you expect?" are called for. Disproportionate black criminality and poverty is not an ethnic trait, it's a cultural inevitability of leftwingnut domestic, social, and economic policies. Devalue fatherhood, destroy the black family, enslave African-Americans to government dependency, target them for abortion extermination, and poverty and high crime are going to be the inevitable results. Police logically have to deal with crime where it is and by whom it is being committed. Skin color being a "stay out of jail free card" is no less racist than cops allegedly shooting "unarmed young black men" for the same reason.
Or at least, that's the way it should be.
The trends concern the city’s top cop.
“Who suffers the most when police departments have deficient policies and procedures? Minorities and poorer communities suffer,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said in response to the Sun’s findings.
"Minority and poorer communities suffer" when violent - and predominantly black-on-black - crime is left free to run wild and rampant, as none other than Bill Clinton pointed out the other day. To try and prevent that, police officers must patrol high-crime areas and put out those "fires" before they can erupt. That's a dangerous undertaking, and sometimes requires the judicious use of force. Far better that that force not have to be lethal if there is a means of doing so. Tasers are one of those means. Unless Commissioner Davis and Mayor Stephanie Blake would prefer nightstick beatdowns.
But let us remember what's really going on here. It's not that the Baltimore PD is overusing tasers, any more than they "murdered" Freddie Gray. Its unforgivable sin is the very attempt to colorblindly enforce the law in the first place - in essence, doing their jobs. Because African-Americans, just like their tribalist POTUS, are entitled to be entirely above the law, to steal and rape and pillage and plunder and destroy with impunity, because, slavery. And anybody who interferes with that paradigm or objects to it in any way is a "racist" who must be destroyed.
Exit question: Which is more likely to "insure domestic Tranquility" - this....
....or this?
Any questions?
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