The behaviour of US police officers

[quadraginta]

If you want to train someone to shoot as quickly and accurately as possible you are going to drill them until they do it without thinking about anything.


This, IMO, isn't a skill police really need and they shouldn't be trained that way. The only shooting skill they really need to train is accuracy. The rest should be mental checklists of things "like why am I drawing my sidearm at all", can I clearly see my target", "do I really know what I am shooting at", "what necessitates firing it at this time", "what else could I hit if I miss my target", "what other alternatives do I have", etc.

IMO it goes back to the warrior mentality that has been adopted by police, they train to win the fight rather than to think about the situation. The inevitable result is that guns are drawn far to often and are far to likely to be fired when they are drawn.


There is lots to dissect in this case but I don't think you can come up with criminal action. The fact that she is shouting for taser use is a pretty good indication she didn't intend to shoot him, and that rules out most criminal charges. Civil wrongful death lawsuits and re-evaluating training should be the end result here IMO.

I think a lot of it depends on how negligent you believe it is to fire a pistol at someone while believing the pistol to be a stun gun.

Does that rise to criminal negligence?

If she hadn't been a police officer and did the same thing, do you think she would be let off the hook for criminal negligence?

 

[Nessie]

This is one reason why, according to the Washington Post, the police have been consistently shooting and killing nearly 1000 people a year;

"In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Bakersfield Police Department in California after its officers jailed a Black man who was driving a car that had an air freshener hanging from its rearview mirror. The police also demanded personal information from the man's passengers, the ACLU said.
The city of Bakersfield settled the lawsuit in 2019 without admitting any liability."

The police can legally bribe people when they get it wrong and have no duty to admit liability, let alone show they have taken action to prevent or at least reduce the chances of the same thing happening again.

 

[lomiller]

And how is it still not manslaughter, like getting confused and hitting the gas instead of the brakes and running your car into a crowd?

I one put my car in drive instead of reverse. Fortunately all that happened was that I broke a leg on the workbench at the front of my garage. I'm sure most of us have done something similar, but have been lucky enough that it wasn't in time or place that someone could be harmed. It will happen to someone eventually though.

WRT the your example if you had driven up on the sidewalk illegally in the first place it could be manslaughter, if you were known to dislike the people in question it could be that no one believes hitting the gas was really an accident.

For this shooting I haven't seen a credible suggestion of what other crime she was committing at the time, and we have pretty good evidence she didn't intend to fire so my best guess is non-criminal wrongful death. I'd like there to be a re-evaluation of the training for when, where why guns are drawn in the first place but I don't see that happening. any time soon. The current military style weapon training is too engrained IMO.

 

[JoeMorgue]

If the outstanding warrant was for a violent offence letting him back into the vehicle.

And if pigs had wings they'd be eagles.

He was pulled over for a goddamn air freshener and had an open warrant for misdemeanor.

Again LEOs do not have some inherent right the rest of society does not have to murder (or illegally kill in some technical manner before the pedants pounce on the word 'murder') people to achieve some level of 100% perfect metaphysical sense of absolute safety.

 

[Dr.Sid]

yeah, let's try giving "do nothing" a few more decades to work.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. Riots threaten the stability of the system and elicit a response. Whether or not that's a good thing remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, there's no way to ignore a riot the way society seems willing to ignore police brutality.

Yeah .. street thugs against police thugs .. USA in a nutshell.

 

[lomiller]

Here's the statute:

609.205 MANSLAUGHTER IN THE SECOND DEGREE.
A person who causes the death of another by any of the following means is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than ten years or to payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both:

(1) by the person's culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another; or

(The statute then describes other cases that might be manslaughter, but none of them fit.)


I think the officer was guilty of "culpable negligience" in this case.

There's a little bit of wiggle room if she claims that she was not conscious that her actions were taking a chance of causing death or great bodily harm. i.e. she thought she had a taser, which could not cause death or great bodily harm, so therefore she was not "consciously taking a chance". I think it's a stretch, though. It would be similar to "I didn't think the gun was loaded", which would never get you off of a manslaughter charge.

At any rate, manslaughter does not require any other criminal activity.

There are others far more well versed in the law than I am, but by interpretation is that it still requires the person to knowingly be doing something reckless or criminal. The evidence here suggests she wasn't doing in knowingly so I think a civil wrongful death suit is as far as things can go.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/culpable-negligence/

Culpable negligence means recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences).

It is the omission to do something which a reasonable, prudent and honest man would do, or the doing something which such a man would not do under all the circumstances surrounding each particular case. [State v. Emery, 78 Mo. 77, 80 (Mo. 1883)]

"The term culpable negligence should be construed to mean a negligence of a higher degree than that which in civil cases is held to be gross negligence, and must be a negligence of a degree so gross as to be tantamount to a wanton disregard of, or utter indifference to, the safety of human life." [Smith v. State, 197 Miss. 802 (Miss. 1945)]

 

[JoeMorgue]

And we're back at "Well she didn't KNOW she was in the wrong apartment so it wasn't murder" argument.

The whole legal concept of intent and "knowingly" and (pause for dramatic effect) IN MENS REA OMG! have to have be built on a broader concept of things people SHOULD know or else you're basically arguing that you can murder people by being so stupid you don't know what you are doing and getting away with it.

 

[lomiller]

I think a lot of it depends on how negligent you believe it is to fire a pistol at someone while believing the pistol to be a stun gun.

Does that rise to criminal negligence?

If she hadn't been a police officer and did the same thing, do you think she would be let off the hook for criminal negligence?

If she wasn't a police officer having the gun out in the first place would have met the requirement for reckless or criminal behavior IMO.

Police do need to draw their weapons at times, and as much as I disagree with the training this seems like a situation where they are trained to have them drawn.

 

[JoeMorgue]

If she wasn't a police officer having the gun out in the first place would have met the requirement for reckless or criminal behavior IMO.

Police do need to draw their weapons at times, and as much as I disagree with the training this seems like a situation where they are trained to have them drawn.

So they need to be more responsible when they do, no "ooopsie doodles."

They can't have it both ways.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I one put my car in drive instead of reverse. Fortunately all that happened was that I broke a leg on the workbench at the front of my garage. I'm sure most of us have done something similar, but have been lucky enough that it wasn't in time or place that someone could be harmed. It will happen to someone eventually though.

WRT the your example if you had driven up on the sidewalk illegally in the first place it could be manslaughter, if you were known to dislike the people in question it could be that no one believes hitting the gas was really an accident.

For this shooting I haven't seen a credible suggestion of what other crime she was committing at the time, and we have pretty good evidence she didn't intend to fire so my best guess is non-criminal wrongful death. I'd like there to be a re-evaluation of the training for when, where why guns are drawn in the first place but I don't see that happening. any time soon. The current military style weapon training is too engrained IMO.

She certainly intended to fire, she was just mistaken about which weapon she was using. And that is either a normal reasonable mistake any reasonable person could make in which case it is a minor thing that shouldn't be a big deal, or it is reckless and therefor should be manslaughter.

You seem to be arguing on both sides here.

 

[lomiller]

So they need to be more responsible when they do, no "ooopsie doodles."

I don't agree. Intent is a key concept in criminal law, you can't just discard it without wide ranging consequences. Nor do you need to since civil law and things like wrongful death already cover situations where there is no intent.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I don't agree. Intent is a key concept in criminal law, you can't just discard it without wide ranging consequences. Nor do you need to since civil law and things like wrongful death already cover situations where there is no intent.

So yeah you're arguing both sides. Cops are special expect they aren't except when they are except when they aren't.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I don't agree. Intent is a key concept in criminal law, you can't just discard it without wide ranging consequences. Nor do you need to since civil law and things like wrongful death already cover situations where there is no intent.

And so does manslaughter, homicide when it was not the intent to harm someone. So yes intent matters and that does seem to be a key difference here vs Amber Guyger, she intended to kill because of a mistake in fact. Here there was a lack of intent to kill but the death was caused by a mistake in fact. This is exactly why manslaughter was not the right crime for Amber Guyger and why it is here.

 

[lomiller]

She certainly intended to fire, she was just mistaken about which weapon she was using. And that is either a normal reasonable mistake any reasonable person could make in which case it is a minor thing that shouldn't be a big deal, or it is reckless and therefor should be manslaughter.

False dichotomy. There is a lot of ground between normal reasonable mistake and criminal negligence. This is why wrongful death laws exist in the first place. They allow for consequences even when something doesn't meet the standards of criminal behavior.

 

[JoeMorgue]

There is a lot of ground between normal reasonable mistake and criminal negligence.

And that ground is getting a little too littered with dead black people is the point.

I can find firm cases of LEOs "mistaking" their pistols for their tasers 4 times. Every time it there was a black person on the wrong end of the gun barrel. 3 times the black person didn't live to see the end of the altercation. My benefit of the doubt meter is falling rapidly.

 

[quadraginta]

And we're back at "Well she didn't KNOW she was in the wrong apartment so it wasn't murder" argument. The whole legal concept of intent and "knowingly" and (pause for dramatic effect) IN MENS REA OMG! have to have be built on a broader concept of things people SHOULD know or else your basically arguing that you can murder people by being so stupid you don't know what you are doing and getting away with it.

Funny you should mention that.

In less than two weeks (April 27) Amber Guyger's appeal hearing is scheduled. Her lawyers are going to argue that there was insufficient evidence to convict her of murder, and the charge should be criminally negligent homicide. Therefore she should have a new sentencing hearing.

The article gets one thing wrong though. It states;

"The negligent homicide charge would lessen her jail time to between 180 days and two years."​

This was discussed in our thread on the murder. In Texas, if a firearm is involved in a criminally negligent homicide case then the maximum sentence can be ten years. I cited a Texas case which was an example of this.

So she could feasibly win her appeal and still be left with a ten year sentence.

 

[lomiller]

Cops are special expect they aren't except when they are except when they aren't.

I don't see what is special here. If your job requires you to do something and you are doing it according to the training and standards that have been established it doesn't matter whether you are a cop or a construction worker.

If a cop tries to operate machinery they are not trained to use they are doing something reckless and could warrant criminal charges if someone gets killed even if it was an accident. Likewise if a construction worker tries to detain a suspect and kills them in the process they also open themselves up to criminal charges even if it was an accident.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I don't see what is special here.

Well the fact that I can't murder my neighbor because he didn't sufficiently prove he wasn't a threat to me at every point in every interaction we've ever had.

The whole "But they could have been a threat" benefit of the doubt that LEOs and only LEOs get is the problem.

 

[Meadmaker]

For this shooting I haven't seen a credible suggestion of what other crime she was committing at the time,

I posted the manslaughter statute earlier. There is no requirement that any other crime is involved.

It requires "culpable negligience", which was clearly present, and "consciously taking chances of causing death or great bodily harm", which is arguable.

What I don't know about the second clause is how it is generally interpreted. Do you have to consciously take an action, or do you have to be conscious of the possibility of death or great bodily harm?

For example, an occasional story you hear about is some brilliant prankster decides to drop something off an overpass onto a passing car. Let's say it's a water balloon. The startled driver loses control of the vehicle, causes an accident, and someone is killed. Is the prankster guilty of manslaughter? The act he committed had the potential of death or great bodily harm. He committed the act consciously. However, he hadn't thought through the possibilities of how death could be caused by his actions. So, he consciously committed an act that could cause death, but he was not conscious of the possibility of death. Is it manslaughter? I don't know, but I think it is.


One thing that is important to realize is that the fact that dropping a water balloon on a car is a crime is not relevant. As noted, the presence of a separate crime is not required for an act to be manslaughter.

 

[Meadmaker]

I don't see what is special here. If your job requires you to do something and you are doing it according to the training and standards that have been established it doesn't matter whether you are a cop or a construction worker.

I think it will be a tough sell for her to say that she was "doing it according to the training and standards that have been established".

Of course, establishing that is why we have trials, and she will undoubtedly use the "it was an accident" defense, but I've watched the tape from her body cam. I think it's going to be a very tough sell to a jury. I do think that she had no intention of killing the man, and I do think she thought she was holding a taser, but I don't think she stands much of a chance of convincing the jury that this was not "culpable negligence" of the sort mentioned in the manslaughter statute.