All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tami]

While not common, officers have mistaken pistols for Tasers, sometimes with deadly outcomes.

While not common, instances of police officers accidentally firing a pistol when they meant to draw their Tasers, as the police in a Minneapolis suburb said happened on Sunday when an officer shot and killed Daunte Wright, are not entirely unusual, either.

In 2018, a rookie Kansas police officer mistakenly shot a man who was fighting with a fellow officer. In 2019, a police officer in Pennsylvania shouted “Taser!” before shooting an unarmed man in the torso. And in 2015, a former Oklahoma reserve deputy killed an unarmed man when he accidentally grabbed his handgun.

Ed Obayashi, a California based expert on the use of force by law enforcement, said that with appropriate training, it should be difficult for officers to confuse a gun with a Taser. “But unfortunately it does happen — this is not the first time and it won’t be the last,” he said, referring to the fatal shooting of Mr. Wright.

In a 2012 article published in the law journal Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, Capt. Greg Meyer, a retired Los Angeles Police Academy instructor, documented nine similar instances between 2001 and 2009.

One of the most famous cases happened in 2009 in Oakland, Calif., when a white Bay Area transit officer shot and killed a Black man on New Year’s Day. The man, Oscar Grant III, was unarmed and lying facedown when the officer shot him. The officer was acquitted on charges of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter but was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in prison.

Scott A. DeFoe, a retired sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department, said most police departments require officers to wear their Taser on their nondominant side, to prevent the officer from confusing it with their pistol. Tasers are often also marked with bright colors to distinguish them from pistols, and the grips are typically different from those of firearms.

“If you train enough, you should be able to tell,” he said.

[CaptainEurope]

What if that traffic stop becomes something that needed SWAT in the first place?

.

Here in Germany, I don't think that kind of thing ever happened. How many innocent people killed during traffic stops, how many traumatized is it worth that one in a million chance? I would rather have one policeman put in danger every few decades than everybody living in fear forever.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

While not common, officers have mistaken pistols for Tasers, sometimes with deadly outcomes.

Obviously, more training is needed. Something like that just shouldn't happen.

[Tami]

Obviously, more training is needed. Something like that just shouldn't happen.

Someone new to the job, yeah I guess it can happen. Someone with years of experience should know better.

[Tami]

‘I Felt Hate More Than Anything’: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War

It was 2:20 p.m. on June 6, 2020, and Steven Carrillo, a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant who belonged to the anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement, was on the run in the tiny mountain town of Ben Lomond, California.

In fact, Steven Carrillo had a different objective, a goal he had written about on Facebook, discussed with other Boogaloo Bois and even scrawled out in his own blood as he hid from police that day. He wanted to incite a second Civil War in the United States by killing police officers he viewed as enforcers of a corrupt and tyrannical political order — officers he described as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution he professed to revere.

Now, as he texted with his brother and watched deputies assemble so close to him that he could hear their conversations, Carrillo sent an urgent appeal to his fellow Boogaloo Bois. “Kit up and get here,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message that prosecutors say he sent to members of a heavily armed Boogaloo militia faction he had recently joined. The police, he texted, were after him.

“Take them out when theyre coming in,” the text read, according to court documents.

Minutes later, prosecutors allege, Carrillo ambushed three deputy sheriffs, opening fire with a silenced automatic rifle and hurling a homemade pipe bomb from a concealed position on a steep embankment some 40 feet from the deputies. One deputy was shot dead, and a second was badly wounded by bomb shrapnel to his face and neck. When two California Highway Patrol officers arrived, Carrillo opened fire on them, too, police say, wounding one.

“The police are the guard dogs, ready to attack whenever the owner says, ‘Hey, sic ’em boy,’” Carrillo said in an interview, the first time he has spoken publicly since he was charged with murdering both the deputy sheriff in Ben Lomond and, a week earlier, a federal protective security officer at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland.

When Carrillo was finally subdued on June 6, cellphone footage captured him shouting at deputies as they led him away, “This is what I came to fight — I’m sick of these goddamn police.”

It's, I'm not even sure what the right word is. The 'infection' of violence runs through the military and the police. There are people like Carrillo and the Boogaloo Boys who are targeting Police, and Police who are targeting Black and Hispanic people, and the cycle or freight train just keeps going.

It is like a virus, spreading and turning people against each other.

[Zauriel]

Obviously, more training is needed. Something like that just shouldn't happen.

It would be nice for cops to have a multi-purpose weapon that includes both tasers and handguns, like the Judges' weapons in Dredd film

[Amadeus Arkham]

CDC and FDA recommend US pause use of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine over blood clot concerns

[BeastieRunner]

Was the officer in any real danger?

[GOLGO 13]

Obviously, more training is needed. Something like that just shouldn't happen.

Either that or something on the grip that differentiates the taser from a firearm. Perhaps taser placement should not be on the duty belt but instead elsewhere? More needs to be done on this.

Was the officer in any real danger?

Not seeing this as he was already handcuffed. Sounds like she panicked & reacted incorrectly.

[Tami]

Either that or something on the grip that differentiates the taser from a firearm. Perhaps taser placement should not be on the duty belt but instead elsewhere? More needs to be done on this.



Not seeing this as he was already handcuffed. Sounds like she panicked & reacted incorrectly.

An experienced police officer should not be prone to panic under these circumstances. I'm leaning towards incompetence over any kind of intentional action, but the setup as a whole was questionable.

They didn't need that many officers and they didn't need to overreact when he tried to get back in his car. There are likely better ways they could have handled it.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

‘I Felt Hate More Than Anything’: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War









It's, I'm not even sure what the right word is. The 'infection' of violence runs through the military and the police. There are people like Carrillo and the Boogaloo Boys who are targeting Police, and Police who are targeting Black and Hispanic people, and the cycle or freight train just keeps going.

It is like a virus, spreading and turning people against each other.

Well, at least that shitstain will live long enough to plead insanity when he goes on trial for murder to avoid ending up on death row. If Carrillo had been black, he'd be on a slab in the morgue after having shot full of holes.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Brenda Barton, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives from 2010-2018 who during the 2013 Government Shutdown, compared President Obama to Hitler, and then when she was widely criticized for it, defended the move because she had seen pictures of President Bush compared to Hitler online (mind you, elected officials weren't the ones doing it, so there's that). Barton also made a road trip up to the Bundy Ranch to get to know Cliven Bundy and the Oath Keepers to support those militia goons during their standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in 2014. fter a high-speed chase near the Oregon Malheur Refuge back in May of 2016, Barton wanted the federal agents who shot an armed Lee Roy Finicum while he went for his gun charged with manslaughter, because she feels a kinship towards paranoid militias. Factor that in to the reason why she might have sponsored legislation to try and create statewide militias out of all able-bodied citizens in 2017.Her voting record is full of legislative votes that were even too extreme for former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to have signed, including a "religious freedom" law to allow for discrimination of LGBTQ citizens, and a bill to make gold and silver legal tender in Arizona. Barton also is terrible on votes regarding women's issues, supporting legislation to allow warrantless surprise inspections of abortion clinics at any time, to nullify the Affordable Care Act, and to allow business owners the right to opt out of contraceptive coverage in female employees' health insurance plans. But the bigger kerfluffle Barton was involved in was regarding a bill she sponsored, HB 2150 that was supposedly written as a measure to prevent animal hoarding, or from people running illegal puppy mills out of their home, but because she decided to throw a little hidden provision into the bill to change the definition of "livestock" so they are no longer considered "animals", it would have allowed Arizona ranchers to ignore previous legislation to prevent the abuse of livestock from 2006, through the loophole of just renaming and reclassifying whole species of creatures, easy-peasy. After dumbfounded animal rights groups caught on to Barton's attempt at turning Arizona into a butcher shop horror show, by the time the bill hit the desk of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey he chickened out and vetoed it. Brenda Barton capped off her career in 2018 by introducing legislation to honor one of her ancestors, John D. Lee, with a memorial plaque at the state capitol in March of 2018. This would be the same John D. Lee who was a bigamist mass murderer back who back in 1857, carried out the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where he led 50 Mormon militiamen and a group of Native Americans to slaughter 120 settlers from Arkansas travelling in a caravan through Utah to reach California. Lee wasn’t tried for this crime for twenty years, had some children (thus how Barton is his living descendant) before being executed by firing squad. Because, hey, there’s nobody who needs a monument to their memory like someone executed for mass murder, right? We are relieved to report, though, that in 2018, Brenda Barton was term-limited in the Arizona state legislature and headed off into retirement.

On this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled former Idaho State Senator Dan Foreman, who served in office from 2017-2018 after winning the right to represent that state’s Senate District 5 in 2016 with all of 50.8% of the vote. We can’t say there was a lot of crazy legislation tied to Foreman, but when he brought the wacky, he brought it. It wasn’t just his support of “Stand Your Ground” gun legislation, it was the fact that he sponsored a bill that would straight up charge any doctor performing an abortion with murder, as well as the woman seeking it out. But no, where we started to take notice of Dan Foreman was his hair-trigger temper, and the way he taunted his own constituents as a spiteful partisan, always trying to play the threatened and oppressed victim in every encounter. Whether he was sending them letters to proclaim that “climate change is a liberal scam”, or when he declared that “a separation of church and state is a figment of someone’s imagination”. This pattern quickly escalated until March 2017, a whole whopping third month into his tenure, when he absolutely flipped out at the Idaho State Fair, calling someone with an opposing opinion a “liberal nuttard”, and crying to police about how that constituent was “lecturing me about the Constitution”. After all was said and done, Foreman had the chutzpah to demand the Idaho State Fair issue HIM an apology for his tirade. A year goes by, and most of Dan Foreman’s district became very aware of his antics, but he made headlines yet again after a group of college students from the far end of his district drove 300 miles to visit him at the state capitol to discuss his votes on bills regarding birth control. Foreman showed them all the hospitality of a rabid badger, shouting out, “ABORTION IS MURDER!” at them again and again (and they weren’t there to discuss abortion). The confrontation ended when the elected penis-with-ears impersonator threatening to have his own constituents arrested. Only a few weeks later, Foreman spoke in front of his church, and told those present that Latah County, the heart of his own district was “a cesspool of liberalism”. Alas, Dan Foreman is enough of an ***hole that his constituents that he barely even survived the 2018 GOP Primary for his seat, winning with 51%, and then voted by a 56-44% margin to replace him with Democrat Dan Nelson. It was the only Idaho State Senate seat that was flipped that year, because Foreman is quite specifically that easy to loathe.

[worstblogever]

On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” had its original profile of Mark Finchem, who has served as a member of the Arizona House of Representatives from District 11 since first winning office in the 2014 elections. Our dismay that this man serves in government has something to do with the fact that he is simultaneously a member of the anti-government militia group known as the Oath Keepers.

Now, as one might expect, that means that Mark Finchem might be into some far-right conspiracy theories, and you’d be right, as he was convinced that the domestic terrorism carried out in Charlottesville was in fact a “deep state conspiracy” carried out by two separate groups of Democrats as a “PSYOP”. In the same blog post where he claimed that, he went on to claim that the Ku Klux Klan is, to this day, an organization run by Democrats.

Perhaps it should come as little surprise that Mark Finchem spent the Obama administration ranting online about the 44th President becoming a dictator, and during political unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, he lauded members of the Oath Keepers who turned up to point guns at civil protesters as additional “security” in the town.

Looking at Finchem’s voting record, and well… he’s just as awful as a legislator as he is a human being:

• February 18th, 2015: Finchem sponsors and votes for HB 2173, a particularly insane bill to allow gold and silver to be used as legal tender in Arizona.
• March 11th, 2015: Mark Finchem votes for HB 2643, a bill to prohibit the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act. In 2015. Because let’s nullify what was already being implemented and working, right?
• March 28th, 2017: Finchem votes for SB 1122, a bill to allow the sale of firearms without a background check.
• March 29th, 2017: Mark Finchem votes for SB 1367, an insane anti-choice bill that would require doctors performing an abortion to attempt to resuscitate fetuses after performing the procedure (that can’t survive outside the womb, anyway).
• February 25th, 2019: Finchem votes for HCR 2009, to declare pornography a public health crisis.
• April 10th, 2019: Mark Finchem is one of only 5 members of the Arizona House to vote against SB 1346, to include HIV prevention in sex education to school children.
• February 6th, 2020: Finchem co-sponsors and votes for HB 2804, to allow private citizens to build their own border walls without permits from cities and municipalities.
• March 3rd, 2020: Mark Finchem co-sponsored HB 2706, legislation to ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports in school.

Now, we had all of the above listed as reasons to be concerned about Mark Finchem this time last year, and boy oh boy, did he spend the past calendar year solidifying our argument for why he would deserve a CSGOPOTD profile. You see, among the many elected Republican state legislators who went to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 to participate in the “Stop the Steal” rally that was a cover for an attempted coup against Congress was none other than Mark Finchem. Because he was a seditious mother****er on January 6th, an effort to recall Mark Finchem was started by voters in his district over his continued and unabashed election fraud claims, and Finchem responded as one does when you’re a bats*** Republican… he’s running for Arizona Secretary of State. That’s right, the man who spent the past several months attacking the integrity of Arizona’s elections as fraudulent would like to instead be the one in charge of them.

We can only hope that recall effort succeeds and that his efforts to sabotage democracy in Arizona are thwarted.

[Malvolio]

It would be nice for cops to have a multi-purpose weapon that includes both tasers and handguns, like the Judges' weapons in Dredd film

Seriously? Wouldn't that invite a lot of incidents where police accidentally use the wrong setting? "Oh, I didn't mean to kill him. I thought it was set to stun."

[BeastieRunner]

Seriously? Wouldn't that invite a lot of incidents where police accidentally use the wrong setting? "Oh, I didn't mean to kill him. I thought it was set to stun."

"OOOOOOOPS!!!"