Putting a personal perspective on police shootings.

[Bronzeage]

I had lunch today with one of my oldest friends. We are the same age, but he recently retired on disability. One of his first retirement disabilities was to buy a female English Mastiff. The dog is about 5 months old right now. I saw a man walking his full grown mastiff yesterday. It looked like a buffalo without horns.

My friend is from the "Don't do anything wrong and the police won't bother you," political school. This is an easy thing for a middle aged white man to say. He was able to catalog all the things Michael Brown and Eric Garner did wrong which contributed or even directly caused their deaths. I told him it could just as easily been him. This was dismissed, because the police aren't going to find any problem with him. He'll cooperate and everything will be civil.

That is, until they shoot his dog. He takes the dog with him most times. This means if he is stopped by a policeman, he has to make a choice whether to get out of the SUV(Yukon) immediately, or restrain the dog. Restraining the dog might look a lot like retrieving a weapon. If he gets out of the car and the dog follows him, the police will shoot the dog.

Let me repeat that. The police will shoot the dog. My friend says they won't shoot unless the dog growls. This is not true. The police will shoot the dog. They will shoot a dog through a door, before entering a house. They will certainly shoot a dog on the shoulder of a road. Now, my friend's opinion shifts a little. He has a 44 Magnum Pistol, which he keeps to protect himself from grizzly bears. If the police shoot through his door, he will return fire. I know him well enough to know he means it.

I feel kind of bad about it now. If he has enough time to think about it, he'll shoot first.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Your whole culture is so paranoid that I can't see a way to begin to reverse/fix the trend.

Some of our politicians think it would be nice to replicate that here. We don't want a bar f it.

Seriously, how do you work towards training your police to use their judgement instead of their fear? How do you reverse the trend of suspicion and anxiety in the civilian population?

I saw a Michael Moore doco where he claimed that your news reporting is deliberately biassed towards increasing anxiety levels in the populace.

 

[Valjean]

The "psychological screening" of police academy applicants seems to be selecting for Right Wing Authoritarians. Maybe we should revise our testing.

 

[bilby]

Your whole culture is so paranoid that I can't see a way to begin to reverse/fix the trend.

Some of our politicians think it would be nice to replicate that here. We don't want a bar f it.

Seriously, how do you work towards training your police to use their judgement instead of their fear? How do you reverse the trend of suspicion and anxiety in the civilian population?

I saw a Michael Moore doco where he claimed that your news reporting is deliberately biassed towards increasing anxiety levels in the populace.

This is a direct result of having a news media with no large public player. When the vast majority of news is aimed at making profits, and not at informing the public, the results are truly ugly.

This is why the ABC and SBS need to be defended from Tony Abbott's fraudulent behaviour. He was elected on the basis of a clear and specific pledge not to cut the ABC or SBS, and he must not be allowed to discard that promise with impunity.

Fear is bad for rationality; but as any roller-coaster operator can tell you, it is great entertainment. And it is easy to sell at a profit.

Important information is boring. If it is available free of charge, people will take notice of some of it. But they won't pay for it, and they won't sit through ad breaks in order to watch it, either.

What people want and what they need are, sadly, very different things.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Your whole culture is so paranoid that I can't see a way to begin to reverse/fix the trend.

Some of our politicians think it would be nice to replicate that here. We don't want a bar f it.

Seriously, how do you work towards training your police to use their judgement instead of their fear? How do you reverse the trend of suspicion and anxiety in the civilian population?

I saw a Michael Moore doco where he claimed that your news reporting is deliberately biassed towards increasing anxiety levels in the populace.

This is a direct result of having a news media with no large public player. When the vast majority of news is aimed at making profits, and not at informing the public, the results are truly ugly.

This is why the ABC and SBS need to be defended from Tony Abbott's fraudulent behaviour. He was elected on the basis of a clear and specific pledge not to cut the ABC or SBS, and he must not be allowed to discard that promise with impunity.

Yes, I'm sure the state-run media that the NATIONAL SOCIALISTS had was just fine! /s

 

[bilby]

This is a direct result of having a news media with no large public player. When the vast majority of news is aimed at making profits, and not at informing the public, the results are truly ugly.

This is why the ABC and SBS need to be defended from Tony Abbott's fraudulent behaviour. He was elected on the basis of a clear and specific pledge not to cut the ABC or SBS, and he must not be allowed to discard that promise with impunity.

Yes, I'm sure the state-run media that the NATIONAL SOCIALISTS had was just fine! /s

LOL. Yes, you need both. If either gets a near monopoly, trouble is not far behind.