The Derek Chauvin Trial

What I want to know is why the police seem to shoot first as a matter of course in most cases?

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What I want to know is why the police seem to shoot first as a matter of course in most cases?

I believe it's a complex interaction between several factors. One thing is USAmerican culture — f***ing cop shows, for instance. How many cop shows have kids, especially boys, watched as they were growing up? The cops are handsome and strong, they're always right, the suspects are always guilty, and there's a gunfight in every show. And there are aspects of police culture which grow out of this indoctrination. Watch the movie Serpico to get an idea how this works. Another factor is the kind of person who's attracted to the job — for every man or woman who truly wants to serve and
protect there must be three or four times as many who just like the idea of being a legal kick-ass bully with a club and a gun. And, of course, having one political party which will defend anything you do must be very encouraging.

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What do you think about making it legal to run over political protestors?

that one is so absurd that it might as well have come from The Onion...

Maybe you don’t think it is?

The question was about the use of guns in general. Of course, in the USA, racism is implied if we're discussing specific interactions but my response wasn't supposed to be an exhaustive encyclopedic treatment of every aspect of the topic. I didn't mention economic factors either.

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Maybe you don’t think it is?

Why would you would jump to that conclusion? Obviously racism underlies this whole discussion.

During the summer of 1967, police and military resources were deployed on a large scale to quell civil disturbances in scores of American cities. In Newark and Detroit alone, more than 50 civilians were killed in less than a week. Many of the officers and guardsmen involved were young, inexperienced and unfamiliar with local conditions. They especially were afraid of sniper attacks, and this fear led to indiscriminate firing and multiple fatalities. According to the Kerner Commission report on the protests, “most reported sniping incidents were demonstrated to be gunfire by either police or National Guardsmen… The climate of fear and expectation of violence created by such exaggerated, sometimes totally erroneous, reports demonstrates the serious risks of overreaction and excessive use of force.”

In contrast with the jittery police and guardsmen, one section of Detroit was policed by professional soldiers, one-fifth of them black, under the command of General John L. Throckmorton. Recognizing that the city was “saturated with fear,” Throckmorton “felt that the major task of the troops was to… restore an air of normalcy.” Within hours of their arrival, “the area occupied by them was the quietest in the city,” the Kerner Commission found. The troops “had strict orders not to fire unless they could see the specific person at whom they were aiming,” and mass fire was forbidden. Over five days, Throckmorton’s troops expended about 200 rounds of ammunition, almost none of it after the first few hours. Meanwhile, in Newark, guardsmen and state police expended more than 3,000 rounds in three days.

They're trained that way, told that their job is extremely dangerous, that every traffic stop could be your last.

Implicit bias toward black men by police is nothing new, and it is not limited to white officers. Black officers can also have implicit bias toward black men because in the case of police forces, that implicit bias is institutional.

A tweet I just read:
Breaking: Derek Chauvin is facing more charges for a 2017 attack on a black teenager where he was holding the boy down with his knee for nearly 17 minutes, and allegedly ignoring complaints from the boy that he couldn't breathe."

Found it:

This guy has been doing dirt a long time

Seems there is video of Chauvin hitting a black teenager in the head so hard it required stitches, then holding him down in much the same way as he did Floyd as the boy pleads for mercy - for 17 minutes
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Who wants to make it a crime to insult a policeman?

This is intolerable, ignorant, and unconstitutional. The only limitation on speech I could accept would be against an invocation to imminent violence like "Kill him."