• ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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    8 days ago

    a woman and her infant who were killed last week during an incident that led up to a shooting involving Independence, Missouri police.

    What the fuck kind of language is that? Is it even possible to further remove police culpability in this?

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      8 days ago

      the only thing i saw was that the coward cop ‘saw a knife’ and clearly had to kill everything in sight instead of, ya know, backing off.

      de-escalation is not in their vocabulary or police training.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Blue lives don’t matter.

        Seriously, that’s the entire point of police. Or at least, that’s the propaganda. Police exist to protect the citizens from criminals. They’re given authority in the form of a badge, and power in the form of a gun, and they are expected to enforce the law as defined by our elected leaders and judicial appointees.

        Cops are heroes. They risk their safety to enter situations without hesitation or concern for self preservation. They are trained to be as safe as possible, but there isn’t a police officer alive who wouldn’t claim to be willing to lay down their life for the life of a baby.

        Unfortunately, in practice, that’s not what we see. We do not see heroes protecting civilians. We see criminals protecting each other. We do not see selfless sacrifice and empathy. We see megalomaniacs protecting their power.

        Good cops, true police officers, would all agree and say proudly, their lives don’t matter. Not when it comes to being sure of your targets. Not when it comes to being sure of the threat. Not when it comes to being sure that lethal force is required to keep everyone safe. An officer who is so afraid of injury or death that they are willing to trade the life of a child to protect their own has no business being a cop. We should never tolerate the idea that blue lives matter.

        • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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          7 days ago

          I’m so disenchanted with policing that I’m not sure it can be rehabilitated without heavy heavy changes, but you remind me of how I felt signing up for police college as a young guy. I was pretty religious too at the time, and going into policing felt like the ultimate service to the community.

          Anyway, a few ride-alongs cured me of that notion.

          • A Phlaming Phoenix@lemm.ee
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            7 days ago

            I told my father, a Nazi and former cop (but I repeat myself), that body cams should be turned on from the moment a cop is on duty to the moment they are not, that this data should be live-streamed to servers where the footage can be reviewed by the public and become subject to feedback. He RAILED against this, crying about how cops would never have any privacy, etc. (completely missing the point and the detail of what I said because he’s completely reactionary, like cops tend to be).

            I’m an open source code developer. My code, including the often dumb and embarrassing errors I make from time to time, are available to the world for immediate scrutiny the instant I push a commit or open a pull request. My code isn’t really the kind of thing involved in life or death situations. So why should I be subject to more direct scrutiny than cops? Why should we allow cops this whiney attitude toward job evaluation?

            • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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              7 days ago

              Agreed re body cams, except maybe how “public” the footage is. Thinking here about the privacy of the subjects being recorded.

              Maybe sent to a watchdog org which can accept requests if people don’t want details of themselves or their lives freely available.

              Opens up the avenue for intimidation ofc, so kid gloves

              • A Phlaming Phoenix@lemm.ee
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                6 days ago

                Sure, I’ll take a citizen-led board of reviewers, as long as they have legal teeth and aren’t under the purview of those being evaluated.

        • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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          8 days ago

          Police exist to protect the citizens from criminals.

          But they don’t. They exist to protect the STATE from CITIZENS, in the same way the military exists to protect the state from foreign aggression. Police are the only people empowered to do violence to citizens of a state, and they do it on behalf if the interests of that state. That is their genuine and explicit reason for existing.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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            7 days ago

            Except you’d never hear a firefighter say that they would rather let a civilian die in a fire than risk going into a burning building.

            • LowtierComputer@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              I should have been more specific:

              They risk their safety to enter situations without hesitation or concern for self preservation. They are trained to be as safe as possible, but there isn’t a police officer alive who wouldn’t claim to be willing to lay down their life for the life of a baby.

      • Hubi@feddit.org
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        8 days ago

        A guy with not one, but two knives was just stopped today by German police. They shot him in the foot and he’s now in the hospital. In contrast, American cops always claim that hitting the legs is not a reliable way to stop an attacker. They always act like they are in a military occupation zone with suicide bombers at every corner.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        8 days ago

        De-escalation is when they go from two guys pointing guns at you to one guy pointing a gun and one guy hitting you with an asp. And I am not joking. It relates to the use of force continuum.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        8 days ago

        De-escalation doesn’t get them to do the shooty-shooty part, and thats the best part of their day, they aren’t trying to avoid it (especially once they confirmed there is no lethal weapon that would put them in any actual danger).

    • jonne
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      8 days ago

      She shouldn’t have been using her baby as a human shield!

        • jonne
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          6 days ago

          I was being sarcastic, as the human shields thing is apparently an acceptable excuse nowadays. But looks like I should’ve added an /s.

  • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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    8 days ago

    Interesting.

    Name of the victims but no names of the police officers who shot a fucking baby.

    Well, gonna expect the highest form of police punishment then: A video from the chief saying that they will do better. 😒

    • Skydancer@pawb.social
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      8 days ago

      I’m only surprised the cops aren’t pushing their usual line:

      Police Spokesman: The suspect in this police involved shooting was no angel. Confidential informants have talked about how often her mother was up at night, imagining what trouble her little baby might be in this time. How many times she cleaned up her messes, only to find her in the same trouble all over again. The absolute filth the suspect covered herself with under that diaper day after day …

      Reporter: But didn’t an officer shoot and kill the mother also?

      Police Spokesman: I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation

      /s

      In all seriousness, this isn’t a tragedy, it’s a travesty. It’s a predictable and recurring outcome our society has been engineered to accept because it’s easier and cheaper than changing a system that benefits those already wealthy and in power. I use this gallows humor to cope with it, with the casual brutality and racism that caused it. To live with what none of us should be able to live with. Fuck this shit.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Respectfully, fuck that. This was no ‘tragedy’ it was straight up murder. Murder of an infant child.

        The bullets didn’t just happen to end up striking the child or the mother. Call them what they are, murderers

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        I mean a predictable, recurring outcome engineered by a flaw in a system of power is the classical definition of a tragedy

  • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    I mean the officer was clearly scared for his life. I know to you and me that seems absurd, but police officers are hand-picked and trained to be the biggest cowards imaginable. Several people are killed by babies (with guns) each year in the US and that makes them logically scarier than half the shit police officers are scared of.

    I can’t believe he even entered a home that had a known baby in it, it’s almost as scary as entering a school with an active shooter!

    ACAB

    • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      When I went through MEPS, they make you piss in a cup and get a blood draw during the whole duck walk day. One guy started crying and vomited when the medic went to put a blood draw needle in.

      I bet you’ll never guess which guys in that group have Silver Stars and which one has a highway patrol cruiser with multiple complaints of excessive force.

      E) ACAB

    • Dragonstaff@leminal.space
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      7 days ago

      I’m watching Peaky Blinders, and in one scene a lady pushes a carriage in between two rival gangs. Both back down rather than potentially killing a woman and child.

      Nice to see police practice less restraint than warring mobsters.

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    Independence Police Chief Adam Dustman said Friday the officer who opened fire followed training because Pike had a knife.

    And therein lies the problem. The training for the officer was to shoot anyone with a knife.

      • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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        8 days ago

        Good luck getting any of this changed.

        Iraqi war veterans they had better training during their “counter insurgency raids” due to officers being worried about pissing off local population.

        Clearly, police chiefs are not worried about this issue within the US?

        I wonder why

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          To be fair we had a company piss off the locals. The town was green for everyone but them. We rolled through and it was falafel wraps and soccer balls. They rolled through and it was RPGs and IEDs. So we got an object lesson in not pissing off the locals. If America treated the police like that then the police might learn too. You can’t occupy 336 million people without their cooperation.

    • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      Amongst all the complaints, this isn’t one. I’m not certain how long it would take to drain a baby of a lethal amount of blood, but it would likely be only minutes in this case. If they arrived at the hospital close to the time that the ambulance would have arrived at the scene, their chauffeuring would have been a net positive.

      Gold star for the attempt, but gold star confiscated for obliterating a baby in the first place. In fact, -2 gold stars. Closest thing to a punishment they’ll get

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      It can take quite a while for it to get there though. Sometimes the best case scenario is to meet the ambulance en route. A baby hit in the head would certainly be in that category. They’re dumb fucking assholes for shooting the baby but this part was probably the right move.

  • nomad
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    8 days ago

    Geoblocked in the EU. But i would bet on the skin color of these victims any day. Empathy just switches off for some people and then psychopath mode flips on.

    • BarrelAgedBoredom@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      Here’s the text:

      Authorities have released the identity of a woman and her infant who were killed last week during an incident that led up to a shooting involving Independence, Missouri police.

      Blue Springs Police Department Capt. Kyle Flowers confirmed Maria Pike, 34, and Destinii Hope, 2 months, were both killed in the incident at Oval Spring Apartments.

      Flowers is heading up the eastern Jackson County Police Incident Investigation Team (PIIT), which is investigating the incident that involved multiple Independence police officers.

      Flowers also provided an update on the investigation Tuesday, saying the PIIT has now reviewed the footage from body-worn cameras that captured the incident, and investigators will be interviewing people involved in the incident again Tuesday.

      The goal, currently, is to turn over information on the investigation to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office next week. However, there is no specific deadline for the case.

      Independence Police Chief Adam Dustman said Friday the officer who opened fire followed training because Pike had a knife.

      Several people have said they saw an Independence police officer running with the injured Destinii in his arms to his police cruiser to take her to the hospital because he didn’t want to wait for an ambulance.

      Assistant Property Manager Gavin Delaney helped the two police officers get inside the apartment.

      After he was told to leave the apartment, Delaney heard gunshots and then saw the officer with the baby.

      He’s already spoken to a counselor.

      “It’s obviously very tragic and traumatic and everybody has their different ways of processing. But, you know, my intention is not to make it seem like I’m the only person that was involved in this. I want to be able to push the resources to the family or to the people who really need them,” Delaney said.

      To that end, Property Manager Carrie Lufkin reached out to nearby Comprehensive Mental Health Services to provide free counseling at the Oval Spring clubhouse Monday and Tuesday.

      “It was a horrific, tragic event that ended awful. And I want to do everything that I can do to help our community move forward,” Lufkin said.

      “Our staff are available to check in with everyone, see how they’re doing, help, talk them through whatever they experienced, whatever they’re feeling now,” said Julie Pratt, Kansas City Region president, Comprehensive Mental Health Services. "I know we try to talk to people about trying to keep a normal routine.

      Keep your daily day-to-day routine as you normally would. Pay attention to your sleeping patterns, your eating patterns. But just trying to be available for the community here in this apartment complex," she said.

      Destinii’s grandparents, Brian and Talisa Coombs, said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker called them and told them she’d pay for their counseling if they want it.

      They also said Baker told them her office is conducting its own investigation.

      Destinii’s aunt, Felisha Holder, has put together a GoFundMe page with a goal of $7,000 for the infant’s funeral.

      There are also plans for a candlelight vigil outside the apartment building where the incident took place, scheduled for Friday at 7 p.m.

      A purple and white balloon release will be held as part of the vigil.

    • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      They do, but they train constantly on using their firearm, and rarely on the other two.

      Teach monkey every day how use gun, monkey use gun every day.

      Training is a big problem. It’s just one of the problems, but it’s an important one.