The pair of police shootings this week will make the upcoming DNC much more interesting, I don't doubt. By far the more disturbing case was that of Philando Castile, who had a concealed weapons permit and had informed the officer of that fact. The officer shot him while he reached for his wallet to produce it, as well as his driver's license. What makes the case most disturbing is that the officer then held him at gunpoint while he bled out, making no effort to render aid or assistance to the dying man, nor to verify his story by calling in his IDs, nor to do anything except wait for backup.
For me, this underlines the point I've made about these shootings in the past: they are about the way we train police officers, and teach incoming officers to think about their relationship to the public. The incident makes perfect sense if you follow the logic of the training. If the most important thing is to protect the officer's life, then you shoot as soon as hands go for something unseen. You don't render aid or assistance until you have full and complete control of the situation. That cannot happen until all the other parties are secured, i.e., handcuffed or locked in police cars. When there are multiple other parties (here there was a girlfriend and a 4 year old), the only thing you can do is maintain watch with your weapon covering the unsecured members of the public while you wait for backup to arrive.
Only then can you take steps to save the life of the man you shot.
If you watch the video, you can hear the upset and tension in the officer's voice. He's very highly strung on adrenaline and fear of what he's just done. He's not thinking straight under these circumstances. He's going to follow his training, and this is how he's been trained.
Which means that he, like other police in these cases, will walk. He will be found to have acted appropriately, because he will have done just what he was trained to do.
12 comments:
I get out my wallet and license and registration before the cop comes up to the car, so my hands are in plain view and there is no need to go wrestling around at my waist to get the wallet out. And put the seat belt, which usually has to be removed to access the wallet, back on. For this exact reason.
If I ever get shot, I want it to be for a damned good reason, not because some cop panicked.
My question about this- did the cop shoot him because he said he had a legal weapon? Did the very act of complying with the law put this man at a higher risk?
Are the police even aware that CCW holders have the lowest offense rate of all citizens? or are they programed "Gun = bad", regardless of the person?
I think that they are trained that 'gun = shoot' if there is any movement toward it by the hands. So once he knew of the gun, and the guy reached for his wallet, the training kicked in.
You've been taught like me: when the officer arrives, you should hand him your driver's license, insurance card and CCW at the same time. But the last time I got pulled over I was on the motorcycle. There's no way to get them out in preparation without alarming the officers. Those officers, as I mentioned when I told the story, immediately assumed bracketing fire positions and placed their hands on their sidearms after pulling me over. They were ready to kill me at the first sign of trouble.
It turned out as a pleasant interaction that didn't even result in a ticket (my tag was expired, but I'd already paid for the new one -- I just had forgotten to put the sticker on the tag because the bike was in the shop when I paid the taxes, so the sticker was in a drawer on my desk at home). But they were ready to kill me.
You have to realize they've been trained to kill you at the first sign you might be going for a weapon. You have to make absolutely certain that you are clear about your intentions, and that you move very slowly and in their full sight. And even then you're at risk -- of death! over a missing sticker and a possible $50 fine! -- because of the way they are taught to view their relationships with you.
If you watch the video, you can hear the upset and tension in the officer's voice. He's very highly strung on adrenaline and fear of what he's just done. He's not thinking straight under these circumstances. He's going to follow his training, and this is how he's been trained.
He Will Obey his orders, like any tool of the Gestapo would. Fear demands of him, and nothing he has in his spine is strong enough to resist. He has been programmed to Obey, and he believes Obedience to his orders is righteous and the only way to absolve him of his evil. After all, he didn't do anything wrong, it was his hierarchy and orders that were wrong. His job was only to obey his orders. He would be wrong if he disobeyed.
The police have executed hundreds if not thousands of people, per year, ever since I noticed via survivalist sources and copblock from around 2008-2010.
While incidents occurred during Bush II's admin, they got really spiky under the DHS trained SWAT teams and military armed local police.
People only know about it now because they've bothered to use video uploading to check. It was going on all the time, when they weren't paying attention.
or are they programed "Gun = bad", regardless of the person?
Operant conditioning allows keywords, concepts, commands, or context settings to trigger kill on sight conditioning.
It's similar to the often touted ability of some black ops or intel agencies to train assassins to kill on sight.
The point is that normal humans have a difficult time pulling the trigger if they are thinking of the consequences. But if they are told "kill him, and you'll live", that is useful. But even still, without operant conditioning, people have frozen in wars and still been killed, even if they tried to tell themselves they had to kill to live.
Operant conditioning is a military R/D thing they obtained from WWII and Vietnam, due to useful combat experience and interviews with veterans. Once the military began training local police in this, interesting side effects began to be produced.
It's similar to the rumors of people training children to shoot Aks, using drugs and programming. There's always a safe word that prevents the kids from shooting their trainers, otherwise bad stuff can happen. Civilians just don't realize they have to trigger the safe words in the police now a days. Because well, they really don't think like FBI hostage negotiators.
The military has a "don't shoot friendlies" code block for safety. That's why women, armed with guns and rifles loaded on war bases, refused to shoot their rapists. The conditioning held, even under that duress. There is no military or civilian conditioning for police undergoing military indoctrination, to preserve civilian life. Because civilians are considered the "enemy".
That "Gestapo" bit is unhinged even for you, Ymar.
This should be easy to understand for someone who claims to have a martial arts background. Why do you train a certain way? So you will do it that way when you can't think about it -- when you don't have time to think, or when your adrenaline is so high that you can't think, or when you're hurt and at the edge of shock and can't think. That's the whole point of training as hard as we do.
Unfortunately, what he was trained to do was just exactly this.
That "Gestapo" bit is unhinged even for you, Ymar.
You're confusing your personal feelings and relations with the police in Georgia, as being the same for your non existent connections to other police departments.
New Orleans, Chicago, you ever seen how they work?
You may be capable of imagining it now a days though.
So you will do it that way when you can't think about it -- when you don't have time to think, or when your adrenaline is so high that you can't think, or when you're hurt and at the edge of shock and can't think.
People in the military call civilian warriors like that "loose cannons" or some other term that means the same. Basically, civilians who are trained outside the military brotherhood, have no safety limits. The safety limits under military training are designed to make people obey orders, but not make them into killing machines, like Muslims rolling grenades into their superior officer's tent because they "disagreed about Iraq". Soldiers need to be capable of shooting on command, and then STOP when they are told to, even when they aren't told to.
So the point is, people who train in the civilian world have their own triggers for action. They can create their own. And sometimes they make the wrong and they die or make bad mistakes cause of it.
That is why it is more dangerous for a person facing a police officer, newly trained, in certain contexts than they would be against armed and loaded National Guard or US Army/Military units in 2007.
The Gestapo had a specific culture which reinforced the programming. They may not even have had the military programming to trigger shoot on sight abilities. They had to find other ways to get people to obey orders instinctively, which is what a military hierarchy is good at.
Going back to the main point, just as the police and military have ROE, Rules of Engagement where they give themselves context and rules for escalating from non lethal force to lethal force (or other stuff in between), so do I and other civilians have the same ROE. Except we construct our ROE based on our own will, and they're usually not broadcast to other people before hand.
The story's shooter in this context, was given his rules by his training, you say, which means his hierarchy had orders for him. They authorized his usage of force, in his eyes at least. And he will not be punished, in order to continue and affirm the programming and conditioning.
Civilians have higher standards, both from society's pov, and from an individual conscience pov. For an "officer" to have pulled the trigger, and then panicked over the fact that he pulled the trigger, how would he be capable of resisting an order from the Gestapo? He can't even override his body's conditioning, because he wasn't the one who conditioned himself. He isn't even consciously aware of what was done to him or what he can do to others. How is that person capable of resisting evil? Of refusing to obey the Gestapo? It is a very realistic scenario, not unhinged at all.
There is a higher combat state than "operant conditioning" however. If an LEO is trained to execute civilians without even realizing it, consistent with your claims, Grim, what you should be worrying about being unhinged isn't me.
What is funny to me Grim, is that you use words like "unhinged" about me, but then talk about an LEO executing a civilian without hesitation, to be normal training.
My justifications for lethal and non lethal force are personally derived, not from some "Authority". If that makes me unhinged but your LEOs are "trained", I wonder what kind of society you will get in the future. By my prediction, it will be a Gestapo society. In some US cities, it already is.
I'm the "unhinged" one, because I have automatic controls on my level of force, but the executioner is okay because he was just doing what he was trained to do. See a problem with that kind of logic?
You're unhinged because you go to words like Gestapo and Lucifer so readily. His police department has a problem with its training, but it's not the same problem as that of Hitler's secret police.
From my perspective, this isn't a question of whether the man is "okay" or not. It's a point of human nature. Some specially virtuous few aside, people do what they're trained to do when upset. Or they just screw up, because they can't think.
And sad to say, some people are just fuck-ups from day one, yet get enough cover to maintain their job. However, most of those people are not in a job where it may cost another his life.
One of the very worst things ever done by a President, was JFK allowing the public work force to unionize. That made getting rid of bad apples an order of magnitude harder.
You're unhinged because you go to words like Gestapo and Lucifer so readily.
You have yet to successfully argue against the point. If the words are all you complain about, you have no advantage on that. It becomes a free speech issue, you don't like the words I use, but you can't argue against it using some kind of argument. It's your emotions, not your logic, making a point. You, Grim, have made many logical arguments, so I know you can do it, when writing at Blackfive at least. I, when I use a word, am speaking the truth. You can try to prove me wrong on that, but it's not likely to work. If you don't want to spend time doing that, that's your choice to take. But complaining about my usage of words is a bit futile if you wish not to contest the issue.
You also didn't like how I characterized Hussein Obola as "amoral" back in 2009-2010 was it. You thought he was moral/immoral, in his own definition of morality. I claimed he was amoral because he didn't have any morality whatsoever. You didn't like the wording I used, such as "inevitable", but you fail to successfully argue against it. As I've illustrated, there are plenty of "words" you don't like. Emotional dislike cannot make something non existent or false. Lucifer or the equivalent, exists. The Gestapo once existed, and will likely again given human cyclical history at work. Even people here have written about this supposed "police state" in the US. Wonder what they are speaking of, those words appeal to your more, perhaps, even if they claim the same point.
It's a point of human nature.
What does human nature have to do with criticizing the police union's training and conditioning methods that allow human beings to pull the trigger based on stimuli? They were only in the academy for a few weeks, certainly not as long as boot camp. If they can produce killers so easily, what else can they produce with full military and full boot camp time constraints.They're not natural born killers, so if it was in their natures, it wouldn't have shown up this way.
I had written two stories about what I mean for combat state of mind, but that's beyond the character limit.
Ymar,
As I have explained numerous times, strict logic doesn't apply to complex physical objects. This is because no two of them are exactly alike. Logic's ability to guarantee truth preservation only works insofar as the objects are alike in the important ways. In ethics and politics, what we work with is analogy.
Even electrons differ in position, apparently; or if you like, the waveforms that give rise to the appearance of electrons do. By the time we get to human beings we are very far up the chain of complexity, meaning that we are always making not logical but analogical arguments.
Now, it is characteristic of analogies that they break. They always break. The only way an analogy could be perfect is if the two things were really actually the very same thing. In that case, you're not really making an analogy but noticing a heretofore unremarked identity (e.g., Hesperus is Phosphorus).
Since all analogies eventually break, the strength of the analogy is a key part of any political or ethical argument.
Thus, it's not merely a question of whether I like the words you choose. Your analogies are not only not very close and careful analogies that will bear the weight you put on them, they are ridiculous.
That your analogies are ridiculous means that your arguments are ridiculous.
Square up your analogies, or don't bother.
Post a Comment