When Defending Cops Becomes Impossible

[rmgill]

The video that started this thread was from here in AZ. The swatting death we've been talking about was in KS. The Walter Scott killing was in SC. Basically the most egregious examples I can think of happened in very conservative states. Where are you getting the bolded bit from?

 

The LA riots were not because a police in a Red state got froggy.

 

See also cases like the Kathryn Johnston shooting - Wikipedia

 

Edited January 3, 2018 by rmgill

[Murph]

Well this sucks. http://www.kvue.com/news/crime/llano-police-chief-3-officers-indicted-for-may-arrest/513254452 Apparently 50% of the force is under indictment. But see, the bad apples get taken to the trash in Texas. Got this from my Sheriff, it is his reminder to all of us to do the right thing. I love my department because the Sheriff does not put up with any BS like this.

[Josh]

That would be one of the issues I see, the problem there lies in the SCOTUS decision that allowed it.

I didn't realize there was a decision that support it? I got the impression that any time asset forfeiture went to the courts the issue was conceded specifically to avoid having it explicitly ruled on by the SCOTUS.

[Cinaruco]

Cops abuse their power if the cirmcumstances allow, in a leftists city or a conservative town. Its about power not ideology.

[TTK Ciar]

Executives and legislators increase police power term after term, no matter which party controls the Presidency or Congress, to the people's detriment. There are no champions of liberty in DC.

 

[MiloMorai]

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/sheriff-s-disturbing-comments-caught-on-body-cam

[BansheeOne]

I saw that video earlier, but could understand next to no word that sheriff uttered ...

[CT96]

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/sheriff-s-disturbing-comments-caught-on-body-cam

Fucking Autoplay Videos!

[NickM]

Well sum'pin's up again: The chattering hags of the 'Pew' had the widow of Eric "I can't breath" Garner on the other day...I was wondering who put the law in place that forced the NYPD to be tax enforcement agents for tobacco sales.

[DougRichards]

I saw that video earlier, but could understand next to no word that sheriff uttered ...

He was speaking Georgian, not English

[Murph]

Sounds normal to me... Once the ol' boy was out of the truck, he did not need to get shot unless he pulled a weapon on the deputy if the video is accurate. From the onlu the video, bad shoot, real bad shoot. The Sheriff is going to lose that one, hope they have a check big enough to put a lot of 0's on.

I saw that video earlier, but could understand next to no word that sheriff uttered ...

[DKTanker]

 

Sounds normal to me... Once the ol' boy was out of the truck, he did not need to get shot unless he pulled a weapon on the deputy if the video is accurate. From the onlu the video, bad shoot, real bad shoot. The Sheriff is going to lose that one, hope they have a check big enough to put a lot of 0's on.

I saw that video earlier, but could understand next to no word that sheriff uttered ...

 

I'm having a hard time understanding why the DA ever thought the shoot was righteous.

[Josh]

DAs never pick fights with cops. They rely on their testimony too much to knock over that apple cart. That's part of the problem.

[rmgill]

I saw that video earlier, but could understand next to no word that sheriff uttered ...

 

Next time Banshee comes to the US for a shooting class. Lets fit him with a camera and drop him in the middle of no-where for a day!

[BansheeOne]

I could understand anybody in the Virginias just fine. The immigration officer at SeaTac in the 2010 I&I OTOH was all but unintelligible to me.

[Stuart Galbraith]

This fella is about the edge of my comprehension skills.

[rmgill]

Cousin dialects I think.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis

Edited February 9, 2018 by rmgill

[Skywalkre]

Some dumbasses in Phoenix PD left weapons and other gear in unlocked cars inside precinct substations. At least one rifle and pistol were stolen. The linked article isn't as thorough as the piece I saw on local news. One of the substations had a wall that couldn't have been more than 5 feet tall as a barrier. The fences around local schools are bigger than that.

Edited February 10, 2018 by Skywalkre

[Mr King]

This fella is about the edge of my comprehension skills.

 

Ha I understood all of that. His accent is not that bad for a hillbilly.

[Murph]

Not true, or at least not true where I work.

DAs never pick fights with cops. They rely on their testimony too much to knock over that apple cart. That's part of the problem.

[Murph]

I need to get you down here to Texas for a visit, some of the real old timers speak German still and have a very heavy German-American accent. Which sounds more like a Hessian accent to my ear (I was stationed in Hesse).

I could understand anybody in the Virginias just fine. The immigration officer at SeaTac in the 2010 I&I OTOH was all but unintelligible to me.

[rmgill]

Yeah I dated a Weidenbach from central Texas, Granbury iirc. Apparently the family left Germany because poetry one of the family wrote was rather critical of the Kaiser. The Kaiser apparently took a dislike of the family.

[CT96]

There is a great deal of German ancestry and lingering language influences throughout the Mississippi basin. The Amanas in Iowa are practically a German town transplanted to Iowa in the 1800s. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Missouri all have deep pockets of it as well. Weston Missouri has the full German street names (the inscriptions on the old church on Welt St. are in fraktur and aid deutsch).

 

Most of these pockets were still speaking German as first language or language in the home right up until WW2 (though a few dropped that in the Great War, the US involvement was short enough the push to change didn't get most of them to finish).

 

I remember several of the older members of my family in the US speaking with heavy German accents (thoguh the OTHER side spoke Italian, and many of them still do - that's more of a NY/NJ thing).

[Mike Steele]

There is a great deal of German ancestry and lingering language influences throughout the Mississippi basin. The Amanas in Iowa are practically a German town transplanted to Iowa in the 1800s. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Missouri all have deep pockets of it as well. Weston Missouri has the full German street names (the inscriptions on the old church on Welt St. are in fraktur and aid deutsch).

 

Most of these pockets were still speaking German as first language or language in the home right up until WW2 (though a few dropped that in the Great War, the US involvement was short enough the push to change didn't get most of them to finish).

 

I remember several of the older members of my family in the US speaking with heavy German accents (thoguh the OTHER side spoke Italian, and many of them still do - that's more of a NY/NJ thing).

you can understand NY/NJ accents? I have a new found respect for you.....

[BansheeOne]

Now I don't blame the arriving officers for shooting a guy who points a gun at them, and there seems to have been some miscommunication, and it is a lawsuit where both sides will claim anything after all - but firing the first officer on the scene for refusing the guy's demand for suicide by cop? Come on.

 

‘Just shoot me,’ an armed man told a cop. The officer didn’t — and was fired, his lawsuit claimed.

by Amy B Wang and Kristine Phillips February 12 at 2:18 PM

 

On this much, at least, everyone agreed: A brief standoff on May 6, 2016 — which left one police officer without a job and another man dead — unfolded with mere seconds to make the most crucial decisions.

 

That night, Stephen Mader, then an officer with the Weirton Police Department in West Virginia, responded to a domestic-dispute call. Once at the scene, he encountered a “visibly distraught” man named Ronald J. Williams, court documents said.

 

As Mader ordered the man to show his hands, Williams did, revealing a handgun. Mader ordered him to drop the weapon.

 

“I can’t do that,” Williams responded, according to court documents. “Just shoot me.”

 

Even as Mader attempted to de-escalate the situation, Williams pleaded repeatedly: “Just shoot me.”

 

Mader, who is white, didn’t shoot, thinking deadly force wasn’t necessary. In those tense moments, he reasoned that Williams, who was black, was a threat to himself but not to others.

 

But as Mader was attempting to talk Williams down, two more Weirton police officers arrived on the scene. As they did, Williams raised his gun — and was shot and killed by another officer.

 

A month after the incident, Mader would be fired from the department for “failing to meet probationary standards of an officer” and “apparent difficulties in critical incident reasoning.” He would also be publicly accused of having frozen and privately called a “coward” by a colleague, court documents revealed.

 

In the months of public scrutiny that would ensue, Weirton officials maintained that Mader was fired for other reasons in addition to his encounter with Williams.

 

Mader, now 27, fought back. In a federal lawsuit filed against his former employer last May, Mader said Williams wanted to commit “suicide by cop” — and the handgun he was carrying was not loaded.

 

He claimed his decision not to shoot Williams cost him his job as a police officer in Weirton, a city near the Pennsylvania border, about 35 miles west of Pittsburgh.

 

After months of legal proceedings, Mader and the city of Weirton reached a settlement for $175,000 to dismiss the lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia announced Monday.

 

[...]

 

The incident was prompted by a call from Williams’s girlfriend, who said Williams was threatening to kill himself with a knife. After finding out that an officer was on the way, Williams got his unloaded handgun from his car, saying he would get the officer to shoot him, according to the complaint.

 

The woman called 911 again and told the dispatcher that Williams had a gun but it was not loaded. But Mader did not know that when he arrived at the scene because that information was not radioed to him or to the two other officers who arrived later, said Timothy O’Brien, Mader’s attorney.

 

Mader tried to persuade Williams to drop the gun, believing he was “not aggressive or violent,” the complaint said. But Williams, his hands to his side, pleaded with Mader over and over to just shoot him.

 

The two other officers arrived. At that point, Williams waved the unloaded gun, and one of the two officers fatally shot him.

 

Hancock County Prosecutor James W. Davis Jr. believed that the shooting was justified. In court proceedings, Ryan Kuzma, the officer who shot and killed Williams, defended his decision to use deadly force with “mere seconds” to evaluate the situation.

 

“If he felt so strongly that Mr. Williams was attempting suicide by cop, he could have tackled him,” Kuzma said, according to court documents. “He could have stood in between. He could have moved.… I was faced with a situation where a guy has a gun, and he is waving it back and forth pointing it at me, that I had to react. And there was no reaction out of Mr. Mader.”

 

City officials held a news conference shortly after the Post-Gazette story was published, saying the Williams shooting was not the only reason they fired Mader. A news release from the city described two other incidents that officials say led to Mader’s termination. One involved allegedly mishandling a death investigation by failing to determine that it was a homicide. The other involved allegedly searching a man’s vehicle without probable cause or a search warrant and cursing at the man’s wife. In the Williams shooting, officials said, Mader “froze” and did not communicate with the other officers at the scene.

 

“We had done different avenues in terms of retraining, placing him with a different training officer,” City Manager Travis Blosser told reporters. “None of those seemed to work.”

 

But O’Brien said neither of the two other incidents resulted in disciplinary action against Mader. In the one about the mishandled death investigation, other officers more senior than Mader were at the crime scene, he said.

 

O’Brien added that he had talked to the woman who was cursed at and that she said she complained about the conduct of another officer, not Mader.

 

O’Brien said officials fired Mader “to give themselves cover for the use of force on the part of the other officer” and that they painted him as a bad officer in retaliation for speaking publicly about the termination.

 

According to court documents, Kuzma, the officer who shot Williams, texted Mader after the news conference, calling him a “coward” who “didn’t have the balls to save [his] own life” and accusing Mader and his mother of being “loud mouth pieces of s—” for talking to reporters.

 

Mader’s attorney said they were “pleased” by the settlement but disappointed that Mader’s decision not to shoot was questioned. Mader was hired as a probationary officer for the Weirton Police Department in June 2015 and completed training at the West Virginia State Police Academy later that year. He also is a Marine and an Afghanistan war veteran, O’Brien added.

 

“No police officer should ever lose their job — or have their name dragged through the mud — for choosing to talk to, rather than shoot, a fellow citizen,” O’Brien said. “His decision to attempt to de-escalate the situation should have been praised, not punished. Simply put, no police officer should ever feel forced to take a life unnecessarily to save his career.”

 

Jack Dolance, an attorney for the Williams family, said last May that the family believes Mader did the right thing.

 

“He took his time and looked at R.J. as a person and not a dangerous subject,” Dolance told CNN.

 

Mader no longer works as a police officer but as a truck driver, and he continues living in Weirton with his family, the ACLU said.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/12/an-officer-who-was-fired-after-refusing-to-shoot-an-armed-man-just-won-175000-in-a-settlement/?utm_term=.6a665bec73d6