The United States' plague of murder-prone police — an example from the "wrong" Dallas apartment

© 2018 Peter Free

 

11 September 2018

 

 

Think about the following circumstances long enough — to recognize their absurdity

 

Cop goes home. Enters the wrong apartment. Sees someone inside. Shoots him dead. All without thinking:

 

 

Amber Guyger said she inserted her key into the door, and it opened because it had been slightly ajar. Guyger said the apartment was completely dark and she thought a burglar was inside her home when she noticed a large silhouette across the room, he wrote.

 

Guyger drew her handgun, gave verbal commands that were ignored and fired her weapon twice, striking 26-year-old Botham Jean once in the torso.

 

She entered the apartment and called 911, requesting an ambulance and police. When 911 asked for her location, she checked outside the apartment and realized she was at the wrong apartment, Armstrong wrote in the affidavit.

 

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc, Dallas officer who killed neighbor in wrong apartment said he ignored her verbal commands, CBS News (10 September 2018)

 

 

Yeah, he ignored me . . . and I thought he was a burglar

 

So naturally, I just had to kill him.

 

Rather than, say, step back outside the door. And wait in a position where I could see and avoid mistakes.

 

Mistakes like, for example, thinking that someone being a maybe-burglar gives us the right to kill them.

 

Or not recognizing that someone not obeying me is a near-daily part of policing in most jurisdictions. And that I should be able to cope with that. Without erasing them from existence.

 

 

The moral? — Are we intentionally hiring the stupidest, most professionally inept examples of humanity to become police?

 

As an ex-cop, I wonder. The overwhelming proportion of these police-on-citizen murders are examples of lousy training, non-existent judgment, appalling cowardice and absent brain.

 

Toss in kill-prone racism and you have the United States in a nutshell.

 

If US cops were less obtusely clannish, they might recognize that they would get more respect and have less trouble — if they cleaned their ranks of the human dregs that do not belong there. But that seems to be a step too far. Which says something about the gang mentality of too much of American policing.