What kind of person was Stephon Clark?

[Derec]

If they shot and killed my brother, I would do way more than that. I'd flip out on someone. Temporary insanity.

Pro tip. If you plan to use temporary insanity defense for a murder, best not to lay down your plans in writing beforehand.

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I love how they seem to think that if they can say he was a bad person, then he deserved to be killed in the streets without the bother of a judge, jury, and a trial.

Nobody is saying that. But
1) him being a bad person increases the chances of him getting himself in circumstances where he is likely to get shot
2) when family perpetuates a narrative that praises him facts that go contrary to that narrative should be presented as well.

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It is not going to pay the rent.

Doesn't matter. He is living with grandma.

That you would begrudge anyone such a cheap "luxury" says everything anyone needs to know about you.

It's not really cheap for a pair of headphones.

 

[Toni]

He wasn't "being" there, he fled there from an attempted break in.

He lived with his grandmother. He was going to her house. You have no proof that he was doing anything illegal or had any reason to flee. This is just your assumption.

He fled as soon as he saw police. That's resisting.

WTF? He didn't even know that it was the police in his yard because they didn't bother identifying themselves.

How much money do you earn as a clairvoyant? You have zero idea what he knew or saw or thought. You weren't there, you never met him. All that informs you is your own prejudice.

BTW, the autopsy is out. He was shot in the back 7 of the 8 bullets that hit his back; the other one struck his thigh, probably as he was falling.

More about the autopsy in the main thread but suffice it to say now that this is not the official autopsy nor is it an independent autopsy. It is an autopsy commissioned by the family lawyer.

The autopsy was performed by a rather famous pathologist with a great deal of expertise. Why would a police commissioned autopsy be less suspect? Don't the police have more to hide than the Clark family?

So try again. This time, let actual information AKA facts guide your opinions, not your prejudices.

LMAO! You were the one pushing the completely wrong "he was just taking a shortcut" falsehood.

Really? You don't know anything other than the story the police have told, which is not supported by their own video and not supported by the autopsy performed. They couldn't even be bothered to identify themselves as the police or to know whether the person they thought was a suspect in some vandalism was armed. Guess what? He wasn't armed, he was in his own back yard and he was shot in the back. All I did is ask how anyone knows he wasn't just taking a short cut--and the answer is: we don't know that. We don't know that.

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If people are so desperate they will look at his social media pages from a year ago, then there's going to be a lot of useless material posted in the other thread.

His low opinion on (dark skinned) black women is not relevant to the shooting but it should dampen the praise and support he has been receiving from the black community.

Btw, I wonder if those social media pages are fake.

Probably not. These statements (together by social media statements of the girlfriend) have been all over (black) Twitter. If they were fake, they would have been falsified by now.

Wait? Black people have their own twitter?

 

[Derec]

But as long as you are going to derail this thread over a pair of headphones because you think a black man doesn't deserve them, I am going to state as a "FACT" that he received them as a gift from one of the holiday charities.

What charity is that?

Give up your prostitutes for a couple of months, then buy your own Dr. Dre's if you are so jealous

Not jealous. I was just saying that it is incongruent to complain about poverty while wearing overpriced luxury headphones.

and what evidence to you have that he gets "benefits"

Kind of assumed it from complaining about poverty.

Your history betrays you.

No, it does not.

 

[Toni]

Your history betrays you.

No, it does not.

Heh. Yeah. It does.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

If people are so desperate they will look at his social media pages from a year ago, then there's going to be a lot of useless material posted in the other thread.

His low opinion on (dark skinned) black women is not relevant to the shooting ...

Full stop. There is no reason to say anything further.

 

[RavenSky]

That you would begrudge anyone such a cheap "luxury" says everything anyone needs to know about you.

It's not really cheap for a pair of headphones.

It's really cheap in the grand scheme of life, but you derail an entire thread because you begrudge a young black man even that much.

 

[Ford]

That you would begrudge anyone such a cheap "luxury" says everything anyone needs to know about you.

It's not really cheap for a pair of headphones.

It's really cheap in the grand scheme of life, but you derail an entire thread because you begrudge a young black man even that much.

To further derail...

Beats are terrible headphones. They're overpriced, they don't sound all that great, and as someone who works in a recording studio every day I try to steer anyone who wants to know away from buying them.

But they're not a luxury item.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Pro tip. If you plan to use temporary insanity defense for a murder, best not to lay down your plans in writing beforehand.

First, it ought to be clear I have no plans. Second, I don't know what a hood rat is and if you are one, but your professional tip as a career criminal is appreciated....even if it was misplaced.

 

[Derec]

He lived with his grandmother. He was going to her house.

So far we are in agreement.

You have no proof that he was doing anything illegal or had any reason to flee. This is just your assumption.

A reasonable one. Why else would he have jumped over the fence to get home? And don't give me the tired "shortcut" excuse. Again, this is grandma's house. He jumped the fence from the yard to the north. There is no shortcut leading through there. And note that somebody (i.e. Stephon) broke the sliding glass door of the next door house.
And don't forget that he also has a record for these types of crimes.

WTF? He didn't even know that it was the police in his yard because they didn't bother identifying themselves.

You don't know he didn't know it was police.

How much money do you earn as a clairvoyant? You have zero idea what he knew or saw or thought. You weren't there, you never met him. All that informs you is your own prejudice.

No clairvoyance, just ability to analyze data. And read maps.

The autopsy was performed by a rather famous pathologist with a great deal of expertise. Why would a police commissioned autopsy be less suspect? Don't the police have more to hide than the Clark family?

I would trust the official autopsy more, as there are more checks and balances. And the examiner is paid for by the state regardless of the outcome. There is a German saying relevant to the family autopsy, wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, meaning "whose bread I eat, his song I sing". The doctor is singing the song written by Crump. It is very similar to the autopsy of Tyre King, the 13 year old robber. The family autopsy found that shots were to the side but the examiner concluded that the kid was "most likely running away" because he was expected to come up with a finding friendly to his paymasters. And regardless of the family autopsy, the police officer was not indicted.

Really? You don't know anything other than the story the police have told, which is not supported by their own video and not supported by the autopsy performed.

The video shows Stephon jumping the fence from the yard where the window was broken.

They couldn't even be bothered to identify themselves as the police or to know whether the person they thought was a suspect in some vandalism was armed. Guess what? He wasn't armed, he was in his own back yard and he was shot in the back.

He just entered the back yard (and police had no way of knowing he lived there), had no way of knowing he wasn't armed, and it is highly questionable that he was shot in the back.

All I did is ask how anyone knows he wasn't just taking a short cut--and the answer is: we don't know that. We don't know that.

Again, look at the map. There are no shortcuts leading through that yard. And there is the issue of the broken window.
Are we to believe some other person broke the window at the same time as Stephon innocently parkoured though that same yard for no reason at all?

Wait? Black people have their own twitter?

We went through that when Michael Brown was shot.
 Black Twitter

 

[Derec]

To further derail...
Beats are terrible headphones. They're overpriced, they don't sound all that great, and as someone who works in a recording studio every day I try to steer anyone who wants to know away from buying them.

Good to know.

But they're not a luxury item.

Whether something is a luxury item is dependent on its price relative of other things in the same category, not absolute dollar amount.
A $300 laptop is close to the bottom of the range, so clearly not luxury. But a $300 steak dinner would be. And I think same applies to $300 pair of headphones.

 

[Derec]

It's really cheap in the grand scheme of life, but you derail an entire thread because you begrudge a young black man even that much.

That applies even more to a $10 cup of coffee, but that is clearly luxury coffee.

 

[ruby sparks]

The influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot

"Our hypothesis suggests that participants in the shoot/don’t-shoot task perform two parallel sets of
processing operations. As they attempt to identify and react appropriately to the object in the target’s
hand (a task-relevant process), they quickly and inadvertently process information about his race (a
task-irrelevant process) (Ito & Urland, 2003). To the extent that a racial category is strongly associated
with danger, this irrelevant information may bias the ultimate response."

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjw07.pdf




How stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli.

"Three studies examined how participants use race to disambiguate visual stimuli. Participants performed a first-person-shooter task in which Black and White targets appeared holding either a gun or an innocuous object (e.g., a wallet). In Study 1, diffusion analysis (Ratcliff, 1978) showed that participants rapidly acquired information about a gun when it appeared in the hands of a Black target, and about an innocuous object in the hands of a White target."

http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/pspa0000015




Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon.

"Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face."

http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/0022-3514.81.2.181



In a nutshell, it seems being black = being perceived as being more of a threat.

Which would make 'He was a black person' one apparently relevant answer to the OP. Possibly a significant one, since the police didn't know anything about him otherwise. Other than that he was acting suspiciously (clambering through back gardens), was not stopping when pursued and had been, I think, reported as engaging in criminal activity (breaking car windows).

Two things to note: (a) helicopter footage shows Clark moving towards the officers when first shot and (b) police officers, although they shouted 'stop, show me your hands' and he continued away from them (around the corner of the house), did not seem to identify themselves as police, though it appears Clark may have seen them as they 1st approached the house.

ETA: My tuppenceworth: I think this killing will probably go down as 'justified' (by American legal standards). On a wider level, prejudice about black people is probably a factor in police killings.

 

[ruby sparks]

"And Clark had a criminal history, four cases in four years that included charges of robbery, pimping, and domestic abuse. Sacramento County court files show he pleaded no contest to reduced charges, spent time on a sheriff's work detail and was on probation for the 2014 robbery when he was killed. Community leaders were adamant that Clark's criminal record was immaterial to how he died, and said the officers who killed him are the ones who ought to be scrutinized."

"If you understood most of the culture of African Americans in the city, when police officers get near us, there's a nervousness," Williams said. The urge to run is prevalent, she said. "I think understanding our culture and our young men being traumatized so much, their first reaction is not the first reaction of a white male."

"Rumors have swirled in the Meadowview neighborhood that someone turned himself in for the vandalism that took place the night Stephon Clark was killed. "That is not accurate," said city police Sgt. Vance Chandler. "At this time, [Clark] is the only suspect that we have." He reiterated that deputies in a sheriff's helicopter observed Clark smashing the window of a sliding glass door of a home to the north of his grandmother's home."

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-stephon-clark-profile-20180328-story.html

 

[LordKiran]

It's really cheap in the grand scheme of life, but you derail an entire thread because you begrudge a young black man even that much.

To further derail...

Beats are terrible headphones. They're overpriced, they don't sound all that great, and as someone who works in a recording studio every day I try to steer anyone who wants to know away from buying them.

But they're not a luxury item.

To further derail, all consumer goods are technically luxuries if we define luxury purely as a state of being superfluous to your continued survival. The notion that poor people should be discouraged entirely from consumer spending would not only destroy the economy but would reduce the standard of living for people back to something closer to serfdom.

 

[ZiprHead]

That you would begrudge anyone such a cheap "luxury" says everything anyone needs to know about you.

It's not really cheap for a pair of headphones.

It's really cheap in the grand scheme of life, but you derail an entire thread because you begrudge a young black man even that much.

It is cheap compared to the days when people would spend thousands on full size stereo systems with large speakers. Now you can have the same excellent sound much cheaper and very much more portable.

 

[laughing dog]

Some people want to say he was terrible. A "hood rat." etc etc. Some people, not so much. I see this as a completely separate issue from his shooting and so I want to set this space off somewhere else, other than the thread where police killing him is discussed. So, what are your thoughts on Stephon Clark?

I think he was trash.

Of course you do.

And I disagree that it is irrelevant to the shooting. What kind of person he was affects his behavior, including what led to the shooting.

Of course you disagree. But the kind of person has no relevance to what he did and what the officers did. What motivated him to behave in the manner he did is not relevant to the issue of whether the police acted appropriately - only what he did. This is very simple to understand.

Also, what kind of person he was affects support he should be getting. There is unfortunately too much uncritical praise these people get whenever they get killed by police.

And you feel the need to balance that "uncritical" praise of "these people"? Wow.

Your history betrays you.

No, it does not.

Not only does your posting history betray you, this thread and the Stephon Clark thread betray you with your calling him trash, and your references to "hood rats" and "these people". Really, you are not fooling anyone but yourself.

 

[Frikki]

The reason it's relevant is that almost all these shootings are cases of resisting arrest where the guy does something that makes the cops think there's danger.

The black community always tries to portray them as innocents but they almost never are.

I work intimately with police and where I live and in most of the 1st world police rarely shoot people it is only one country where this is a common thing and that is the USA which suggests one of two things either the police in the rest of the world does not shoot enough people or the police in the US shoots too many.

 

[ruby sparks]

The reason it's relevant is that almost all these shootings are cases of resisting arrest where the guy does something that makes the cops think there's danger.

The black community always tries to portray them as innocents but they almost never are.

I work intimately with police and where I live and in most of the 1st world police rarely shoot people it is only one country where this is a common thing and that is the USA which suggests one of two things either the police in the rest of the world does not shoot enough people or the police in the US shoots too many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Well, at least we're not as bad as South Africa. Imagine how people reference victims' social media pages there.

 

[Derec]

To further derail, all consumer goods are technically luxuries if we define luxury purely as a state of being superfluous to your continued survival. The notion that poor people should be discouraged entirely from consumer spending would not only destroy the economy but would reduce the standard of living for people back to something closer to serfdom.

I define luxury as items that are significantly more expensive than the usual price of that kind of an item. Cars by themselves are not luxuries. A Mercedes AMG S65 certainly is. A smart phone in itself is not a luxury, but an iPhone X is. And so on.
Nobody is begrudging people consumer goods, but there is a wide range of price points for almost all consumer goods.

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I work intimately with police and where I live and in most of the 1st world police rarely shoot people it is only one country where this is a common thing and that is the USA which suggests one of two things either the police in the rest of the world does not shoot enough people or the police in the US shoots too many.

I think it mostly has to do with high availability of guns and higher crime rate.