The NYPD police officers who fired 50 times into a car, killing a man to be married that day, claimed he had a gun. He didn’t.
The officers have been stripped of their weapons, which is highly unusual, and it appears they violated police procedures by firing on a moving car.
One hopes there is a real investigation with real answers, rather than the usual whitewash and evasion.
Too often big city police seem like just another gang with guns. It doesn’t have to be this way, y’know. I can’t imagine many cops are happy with the current situation either, being mistrusted and feared by much of the populace.
In Great Britain, I’m told, the local cop often doesn’t even carry a gun and is viewed as a rather friendly figure. Sure would be nice if we could have that here too.
Lately here in L.A. there’s been a couple of hideous drive-by shootings where small children were killed. I’m equally stupefied and sickened by that violence too.
How did it ever get this crazy? And how do we get back to something approaching normalcy?
The police in Britain are unarmed except on special duties, there is an armed response unit that is called on when required, (too often) However the police here are no more trusted nor liked than anywhere else. Police always abuse the authority they have, armed or unarmed. We do have people being killed by the police, one recent case was a recovering cancer patient walking home with a paper bag with a leg from a coffee table he had just had repaired. He was shot dead as the police believed it was a gun and he turned too slow when asked by the police.
Armed response units are often twitchy and trigger-happy, because they wouldn’t have been given guns if their superiors hadn’t decided that it was really dangerous… so they over-react.
To be honest, the difference between US and UK cops is that the US cops are the ones doing the beatings, and the UK cops let civilians do the beatings and then turn a blind eye…