When the Met gunned down Jean Charles de Menezes, I don't think one single civilian witness agreed with another - and the Met officers all exactly agreed with each other.
But the broad consensus was that the Met were mostly lying, and the civvies were mostly telling the truth as they experienced it.
When writing up their pocket books, Poliuce Officers have always been able to confer in order to get to the most accurate account.
You can be sure if two or more witnesses agree on every point, they have colluded and/or been "tampered with".
E.g., the tobacco company executives when they appeared before Congress. Granted, their most infamous statement ("I believe tobacco is not addictive", said exactly by each and every one, one after another, right down the line) was framed as personal belief. (Clever, so they wouldn't be forced to prove it's not addictive.) But they most definitely colluded--about something that kills people.
O how naïve can you get? Of course they want to convince the courts - but sometimes, alas, truth is sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
Proving that is quite another matter, of course.
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
It's not that simple; even leaving aside that they were in someone else's house and there was a Castle doctrine in effect.
The root cause is the choice to issue a no-knock warrant, followed by the choice to execute that warrant, followed by the choice to execute it badly.
If you are an American, who legally owns a gun for self-defense, and someone breaks in to your home with a weapon in the middle of the night, you might well shoot them. We'll call that "a reasonably foreseeable consequence of breaking in to someone's home." If you're an armed police officer and someone shoots at you, you probably shoot back.
If you want to avoid the suspects disposing of the evidence, perhaps you could wait till they left the home, arrest them then, and then search the home. I'm sure we can come up with any number of other possible courses of action that don't provoke a violent confrontation. Not choosing one of those alternatives makes the officers with command authority culpable in the death of Breonna Taylor.
... how three men can force their way into an apartment and shoot the young woman living there six times and face only the most minor charges.
Because, it makes no sense to me at all.
When armed Police officers are confronted by someone shooting at them, they tend to shoot back. It's self defence.
Is it self-defence if you provoke someone into shooting at you? Like, maybe break in their door in the middle of the night.
Besides, the cops in this instance didn't seem to shoot back ... almost every direction, including into a neighbouring property, except towards the person who'd fired a single shot.
O how naïve can you get? Of course they want to convince the courts - but sometimes, alas, truth is sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
Proving that is quite another matter, of course.
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
These police had just killed an entirely innocent woman - they weren't just "normal witnesses".
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
Are you sure it's not you who doesn't know how things work? Whenever a group of 'witnesses' to an incident are also potential suspects (as arguably are the police in this instance), they are kept apart and interviewed separately, with the precise aim of extracting their individual perspectives on the event, uncontaminated from the influence of others.
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
Are you sure it's not you who doesn't know how things work? Whenever a group of 'witnesses' to an incident are also potential suspects (as arguably are the police in this instance), they are kept apart and interviewed separately, with the precise aim of extracting their individual perspectives on the event, uncontaminated from the influence of others.
I am totally certain about how it would work with Police officers and I guess that it would be optional with other witnesses. Whether or not it would be acceptable would be matter for the court. Before you say it I guess I am backtracking a bit.
It's strictly illegal for civilian witnesses to confer on their statements.
It's not illegal at all for the police to confer on their statements, despite many, many years of trying to make it so - explicitly after cases of Mark Duggan, when the officers involved were in the same room for 8 straight hours, writing up their reports. The guidelines merely suggest that they shouldn't, and say that they have to give a reason for colluding conferring.
O how naïve can you get? Of course they want to convince the courts - but sometimes, alas, truth is sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
Proving that is quite another matter, of course.
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
Any group of witnesses whose story to perfectly align are lying. Full, fucking stop.
The question is how much they are lying. The police routinely lie to present a unified front. Sometimes it is not completely dishonest, but we already know this group lied to get the initial warrant, so they credibility falls apart really quickly.
This is just one notorious example of what can happen when officers “agree their notes”.
I can’t answer for today, but thirty years ago when I was in regular practice in magistrates courts it was routine for officers to be asked to confirm that their notes were (a) contemporaneous with the events they recorded and (b) the officer’s own unaided recollection, and not shaped by consultation with others.
This is just one notorious example of what can happen when officers “agree their notes”.
I can’t answer for today, but thirty years ago when I was in regular practice in magistrates courts it was routine for officers to be asked to confirm that their notes were (a) contemporaneous with the events they recorded and (b) the officer’s own unaided recollection, and not shaped by consultation with others.
That would depend on how you define 'contemporaneous' It would , for instance, be totally impractical for Police officers to write up their notes during a violent arrest. As far as I am aware, the rules are that they write up the notes as soon as practicable afterwards.
I accept that I was wrong about civilians. I disagree with everything else If you are going back to 1990.
Maybe...or perhaps to the account that suits them best...
Courts found it perfectly aceptable for officers to agree their notes. It can only have been to ensure accuracy. There could not be any other reason.
Oh, no, it couldn't possibly to get their stories straight in the face of overwhelming evidence against them - as in, for example, the Breonna Taylor murder incident.
It is interesting to note that many (no, not all) police officers started out as garden-variety bullies who acquired a badge and service revolver.
Yup. Was just mentioning that as another example. Plus the dangers of smoking are pretty well known, and those guys were *still* let off the hook. A lot of people, for a variety of reasons (including ignorance, and not wanting to know), still (want to) believe that cops usually get things right, and that the "justice" system mostly works, etc.
My instinct is that regular police shouldn’t be allowed firearms & gun laws should be tighter.
It’s terrifying that those employed by the state to protect the public are armed IMO. I don’t think it gives the right message.
I don't think there is any way to look at the result and not conclude that the police are seriously in the wrong.
Agreed. It is, perhaps, less obvious how much blame accrues to the individual officers executing the warrant / breaking down the door vs how much accrues to the officer(s) involved in deciding that that was the correct course of action. They might, of course, be the same people.
This.
I understand that Taylor's family has received financial compensation, as they should. The trickier conversation, though, and the one going on right now, is criminal liability.
I would note that here in Australia there is a police officer charged with murder over what happened when he tried to arrest the victim, for whom there was a warrant. Part of the basis of the charge is that it was known the victim was very likely armed, and so there had been a specific plan drawn up as to how to go about the arrest. The police officer in question is alleged to have completely ignored that plan, and so part of the case against him is that he in effect set up the rapid confrontation that led to death.
Which gets to the heart of notions like Telford saying it's self-defence for police to shoot back. It very much depends on where you decide to start telling the story.
And here in Australia, there was at least an arrest warrant and they were trying to arrest the right person. And he's still charged with murder.
Whereas in the case of Taylor, you've got several layers of extra reasons of why the situation should never have been created by the police in the first place. And it's quite possible that the individual police officers aren't going to be charged because they WERE 'following the plan'... only the plan was completely idiotic and dangerous.
In the case to which you refer, you might have mentioned that the officer was previously highly decorated for having saved two lives; that he was stabbed by the "victim" before any shots were fired; that medical aid was not immediately available to the "victim" because the medics who served the community had departed - being fearful for their safety when their cars had been previously trashed by members of the community; and when an ambulance did arrive it was stoned by members of the community - who also abused the medics for the delay (it had to come from an hour away).
In the case to which you refer, you might have mentioned that the officer was previously highly decorated for having saved two lives; that he was stabbed by the "victim" before any shots were fired; that medical aid was not immediately available to the "victim" because the medics who served the community had departed - being fearful for their safety when their cars had been previously trashed by members of the community; and when an ambulance did arrive it was stoned by members of the community - who also abused the medics for the delay (it had to come from an hour away).
Why? Because all that means the bastard deserved to die so fuck him?
This is just one notorious example of what can happen when officers “agree their notes”.
I can’t answer for today, but thirty years ago when I was in regular practice in magistrates courts it was routine for officers to be asked to confirm that their notes were (a) contemporaneous with the events they recorded and (b) the officer’s own unaided recollection, and not shaped by consultation with others.
That would depend on how you define 'contemporaneous' It would , for instance, be totally impractical for Police officers to write up their notes during a violent arrest. As far as I am aware, the rules are that they write up the notes as soon as practicable afterwards.
I accept that I was wrong about civilians. I disagree with everything else If you are going back to 1990.
Yes contemporaneous was taken to mean as soon as reasonably possible after the event. This would sometimes be checked by when the Inspector had next signed the notebook.
Any suggestion that the notes had been written up collaboratively would count against them, and an averral that they were all an officer’s own work would be cast into doubt if his wording was suspiciously similar to that of a colleague, and especially if he claimed in such wording to have witnessed something that on examination could only have been witnessed by said colleague.
Revelations of serious corruption in the Metropolitan Police and in the West Midlands Police in the 1970s and 80s led to stipendiary magistrates and even lay justices being much less willing to accept officers’ testimony uncritically and automatically assuming it to be honest. And clearly the problem has not gone away as both Hillsborough and enquiries around the Stephen Lawrence murder have revealed.
Which gets to the heart of notions like Telford saying it's self-defence for police to shoot back. It very much depends on where you decide to start telling the story.
Which is why I'd earlier asked if "self-defence" is an appropriate term if you provoke someone into attacking you. If a white man walks into a black neighbourhood wearing a shirt proclaiming "ni**ers are thieving b*stards - ship them back Africa" is he justified to pull out a legally owned gun to shoot people because he feels his life is in danger from the mob that gathers? In the case of the murder of Breonna Taylor, the provocation of forcefully entering a home in the middle of the night is such a provocative act that the owner can claim justifiable self-defence for opening fire but I can't see how the police can do so, as they created the situation in which getting shot at was very likely.
Tangent. I wish a certain person could be reading all of this, since it was held that two matching accounts of an incident outweighed a differing one, which was incidentally the truth, and the long tail of the effects of this are still being lived through, as the person with the differing account still does not know the substance of the colluded collaborative accounts held against them, or whether it is being circulated.
In the case to which you refer, you might have mentioned that the officer was previously highly decorated for having saved two lives; that he was stabbed by the "victim" before any shots were fired; that medical aid was not immediately available to the "victim" because the medics who served the community had departed - being fearful for their safety when their cars had been previously trashed by members of the community; and when an ambulance did arrive it was stoned by members of the community - who also abused the medics for the delay (it had to come from an hour away).
1. His previous decoration is completely irrelevant. Completely. The whole notion that someone's previous 'character', good or bad, has any bearing on guilt or innocence is just wrong. It does have a potential bearing on sentencing if found guilty. I didn't mention it because it really shouldn't be mentioned, and plenty of pixels have been spilled on this forum already over people erroneously thinking that these sorts of moral judgement of perpetrator and victim should be included in the USA cases. Including victim in quotes is just bloody rude.
2. That he was stabbed is relevant, and he is certainly arguing self-defence, but then that just illustrates the problems of deciding where to start the story from, including whether the policeman should have been there in the first place. The whole point of the plan that wasn't followed was to avoid such a confrontation, and I suspect the prosecution case is going to be about recklessness rather than intent.
2a. Self-defence, as a matter of law, also looks at not just whether it was appropriate to respond but whether the form of your response was reasonable. It has both subjective and objective elements, as was argued by the prosecution just the other day (in the news story that reported more about this than I'd seen before and brought it to mind).
3. Well shucks, so it's okay to shoot people so long as you bring a medic along? Lots of people don't have medical attention right on their doorstep and I worry about a form of reasoning that starts suggesting that your actions get judged differently. Potentially all this means is the difference between murder and attempted murder.
4. As for any prevention of help by members of the community, the policeman is of course free to argue the law of causation, but again I'm not sure how far you get with arguing that the actual cause of death is the absence of medical attention.
My reference to the absence of medics has reference to the fact that the communities of these kinds of people are their own worst enemies. Their behaviour invites aggressive response.
I wrote “victim” because I do not see him as a victim: he brought it on himself
I wrote “victim” because I do not see him as a victim: he brought it on himself
Oh don't be an arsehole. We abolished the death penalty in this country decades ago. It's part of the police's responsibility to arrest people safely.
As apparently the rest of the police force well knows (unlike in some countries)... you tell me about all the things that I might have mentioned, but what you aren't mentioning is the existence of the police plan explicitly designed to avoid what you claim the man brought upon himself. The plan that one police officer appears to have unilaterally decided not to follow.
You seem to have this cartoonish sense of responsibility where it's all entirely one person's fault or the other. The dead man 'brought it on himself', therefore the police officer is some kind of blameless innocent.
Meanwhile here in the real world, it's possible for TWO people to both bear some responsibility for a situation, with each being answerable for their part. It's not a sporting contest with a winner and a loser.
My reference to the absence of medics has reference to the fact that the communities of these kinds of people are their own worst enemies. Their behaviour invites aggressive response.
And this bit is just fucking stupid. Okay, let's accept for the sake of argument they did drive the medics out of town... how the fuck does that invite an aggressive response?
You behaved badly, so now, with the deepest regret, we're going to have to shoot you?
That's the kind of fucking perverse logic that domestic abusers use to justify what they do. I had to beat my wife, she made me so angry. I tortured my son because he misbehaved.
No. If you're the person in authority, be the better person. There's no sane universe where having driven the medics out of town should have a consequence of 'an aggressive response'. The main consequence should be not having any medics, and even that should be a situation that the authorities should be trying to solve.
The situation is not remotely comparable to matters of domestic violence.
The police and the medics were confronted by people whose second nature is to resist arrest. The offender had been released on bail to attend a funeral.
The police and the medics were confronted by people whose second nature is to resist arrest. The offender had been released on bail to attend a funeral.
Which. Is. Why. THERE. WAS. A. PLAN.
You genuinely don't seem to realise that you're actually explaining why the policeman should've known better than to go in the way that we did. This is the very essence of the prosecution case. You are literally explaining why the man charged with murder was reckless.
Prosecutor Philip Strickland SC told the judge Constable Rolfe's knowledge of Mr Walker's violent history should have led him to approach the arrest with "great caution" in order to avoid using lethal force.
"But that appears not to be the lesson learnt by the accused; indeed the lesson is the opposite," he argued.
"The lesson that appears to be learnt was that he should be prepared to use lethal force as the first option if he was confronted by the deceased with a weapon."
No, you're not the only person to find such remarks offensive and distasteful. I just couldn't be arsed being distracted into another line of argument which is going to go nowhere.
People were angry after a teenager had been shot. How dare they. Never mind if their anger was because they knew it was preventable.
We've seen it all before in the American cases. Welcome to racism Australian style.
Your being offended does not change the situation on the ground.
LOL. Because your description was so objective.
I'll tell you one thing that changes the situation on the ground. A policeman going in ignoring the advice that's been given by the local sergeant about the situation and how to handle it.
I'm beginning to wonder whether you're the kind of person who would run headlong into a beehive in search of honey, and then explain how it was all the bees' fault that you had to squash them all. Every time you talk about the situation on the ground as if everybody knew the situation, you're just strengthening the argument that everyone knew better, which is precisely why a plan had been devised to deal with the situation on the ground.
You want to talk about the situation on the ground, and yet you don't seem to believe that the situation on the ground should actually factor into planning. It's a justification to use after everything goes wrong because someone utterly failed to plan for the known situation on the ground.
Do you actually understand? The whole reason there's a murder charge is because the outcome was foreseeable, and had in fact been foreseen. And this policeman is accused of having reckless disregard for everyone's safety.
I wouldn't need to be condescending if you showed mental development beyond the schoolyard. It's all your fault. You made me do it. Your sort of people bring condescension upon themselves.
Comments
When armed Police officers are confronted by someone shooting at them, they tend to shoot back. It's self defence.
When writing up their pocket books, Poliuce Officers have always been able to confer in order to get to the most accurate account.
Maybe...or perhaps to the account that suits them best...
E.g., the tobacco company executives when they appeared before Congress. Granted, their most infamous statement ("I believe tobacco is not addictive", said exactly by each and every one, one after another, right down the line) was framed as personal belief. (Clever, so they wouldn't be forced to prove it's not addictive.) But they most definitely colluded--about something that kills people.
Courts found it perfectly aceptable for officers to agree their notes. It can only have been to ensure accuracy. There could not be any other reason.
Proving that is quite another matter, of course.
You do not appear to know how things work. The same principle would also apply to two or more normal witnesses who witnessed the same incident from the same location to get together to write notes at the first opportunity.
It's not that simple; even leaving aside that they were in someone else's house and there was a Castle doctrine in effect.
You are wrong. I do know how things work - but I tend to have a rather cynical and world-weary view...
The root cause is the choice to issue a no-knock warrant, followed by the choice to execute that warrant, followed by the choice to execute it badly.
If you are an American, who legally owns a gun for self-defense, and someone breaks in to your home with a weapon in the middle of the night, you might well shoot them. We'll call that "a reasonably foreseeable consequence of breaking in to someone's home." If you're an armed police officer and someone shoots at you, you probably shoot back.
If you want to avoid the suspects disposing of the evidence, perhaps you could wait till they left the home, arrest them then, and then search the home. I'm sure we can come up with any number of other possible courses of action that don't provoke a violent confrontation. Not choosing one of those alternatives makes the officers with command authority culpable in the death of Breonna Taylor.
Besides, the cops in this instance didn't seem to shoot back ... almost every direction, including into a neighbouring property, except towards the person who'd fired a single shot.
Are you sure it's not you who doesn't know how things work? Whenever a group of 'witnesses' to an incident are also potential suspects (as arguably are the police in this instance), they are kept apart and interviewed separately, with the precise aim of extracting their individual perspectives on the event, uncontaminated from the influence of others.
Tis a good job you are not a magistrate or a judge
I am totally certain about how it would work with Police officers and I guess that it would be optional with other witnesses. Whether or not it would be acceptable would be matter for the court. Before you say it I guess I am backtracking a bit.
It's not illegal at all for the police to confer on their statements, despite many, many years of trying to make it so - explicitly after cases of Mark Duggan, when the officers involved were in the same room for 8 straight hours, writing up their reports. The guidelines merely suggest that they shouldn't, and say that they have to give a reason for colluding conferring.
That is how things work.
The question is how much they are lying. The police routinely lie to present a unified front. Sometimes it is not completely dishonest, but we already know this group lied to get the initial warrant, so they credibility falls apart really quickly.
I can’t answer for today, but thirty years ago when I was in regular practice in magistrates courts it was routine for officers to be asked to confirm that their notes were (a) contemporaneous with the events they recorded and (b) the officer’s own unaided recollection, and not shaped by consultation with others.
That would depend on how you define 'contemporaneous' It would , for instance, be totally impractical for Police officers to write up their notes during a violent arrest. As far as I am aware, the rules are that they write up the notes as soon as practicable afterwards.
I accept that I was wrong about civilians. I disagree with everything else If you are going back to 1990.
It is interesting to note that many (no, not all) police officers started out as garden-variety bullies who acquired a badge and service revolver.
Yup. Was just mentioning that as another example. Plus the dangers of smoking are pretty well known, and those guys were *still* let off the hook. A lot of people, for a variety of reasons (including ignorance, and not wanting to know), still (want to) believe that cops usually get things right, and that the "justice" system mostly works, etc.
Rigged game, of course.
It’s terrifying that those employed by the state to protect the public are armed IMO. I don’t think it gives the right message.
This.
I understand that Taylor's family has received financial compensation, as they should. The trickier conversation, though, and the one going on right now, is criminal liability.
I would note that here in Australia there is a police officer charged with murder over what happened when he tried to arrest the victim, for whom there was a warrant. Part of the basis of the charge is that it was known the victim was very likely armed, and so there had been a specific plan drawn up as to how to go about the arrest. The police officer in question is alleged to have completely ignored that plan, and so part of the case against him is that he in effect set up the rapid confrontation that led to death.
Which gets to the heart of notions like Telford saying it's self-defence for police to shoot back. It very much depends on where you decide to start telling the story.
And here in Australia, there was at least an arrest warrant and they were trying to arrest the right person. And he's still charged with murder.
Whereas in the case of Taylor, you've got several layers of extra reasons of why the situation should never have been created by the police in the first place. And it's quite possible that the individual police officers aren't going to be charged because they WERE 'following the plan'... only the plan was completely idiotic and dangerous.
In the case to which you refer, you might have mentioned that the officer was previously highly decorated for having saved two lives; that he was stabbed by the "victim" before any shots were fired; that medical aid was not immediately available to the "victim" because the medics who served the community had departed - being fearful for their safety when their cars had been previously trashed by members of the community; and when an ambulance did arrive it was stoned by members of the community - who also abused the medics for the delay (it had to come from an hour away).
Why? Because all that means the bastard deserved to die so fuck him?
Any suggestion that the notes had been written up collaboratively would count against them, and an averral that they were all an officer’s own work would be cast into doubt if his wording was suspiciously similar to that of a colleague, and especially if he claimed in such wording to have witnessed something that on examination could only have been witnessed by said colleague.
Revelations of serious corruption in the Metropolitan Police and in the West Midlands Police in the 1970s and 80s led to stipendiary magistrates and even lay justices being much less willing to accept officers’ testimony uncritically and automatically assuming it to be honest. And clearly the problem has not gone away as both Hillsborough and enquiries around the Stephen Lawrence murder have revealed.
1. His previous decoration is completely irrelevant. Completely. The whole notion that someone's previous 'character', good or bad, has any bearing on guilt or innocence is just wrong. It does have a potential bearing on sentencing if found guilty. I didn't mention it because it really shouldn't be mentioned, and plenty of pixels have been spilled on this forum already over people erroneously thinking that these sorts of moral judgement of perpetrator and victim should be included in the USA cases. Including victim in quotes is just bloody rude.
2. That he was stabbed is relevant, and he is certainly arguing self-defence, but then that just illustrates the problems of deciding where to start the story from, including whether the policeman should have been there in the first place. The whole point of the plan that wasn't followed was to avoid such a confrontation, and I suspect the prosecution case is going to be about recklessness rather than intent.
2a. Self-defence, as a matter of law, also looks at not just whether it was appropriate to respond but whether the form of your response was reasonable. It has both subjective and objective elements, as was argued by the prosecution just the other day (in the news story that reported more about this than I'd seen before and brought it to mind).
3. Well shucks, so it's okay to shoot people so long as you bring a medic along? Lots of people don't have medical attention right on their doorstep and I worry about a form of reasoning that starts suggesting that your actions get judged differently. Potentially all this means is the difference between murder and attempted murder.
4. As for any prevention of help by members of the community, the policeman is of course free to argue the law of causation, but again I'm not sure how far you get with arguing that the actual cause of death is the absence of medical attention.
I wrote “victim” because I do not see him as a victim: he brought it on himself
Oh don't be an arsehole. We abolished the death penalty in this country decades ago. It's part of the police's responsibility to arrest people safely.
As apparently the rest of the police force well knows (unlike in some countries)... you tell me about all the things that I might have mentioned, but what you aren't mentioning is the existence of the police plan explicitly designed to avoid what you claim the man brought upon himself. The plan that one police officer appears to have unilaterally decided not to follow.
You seem to have this cartoonish sense of responsibility where it's all entirely one person's fault or the other. The dead man 'brought it on himself', therefore the police officer is some kind of blameless innocent.
Meanwhile here in the real world, it's possible for TWO people to both bear some responsibility for a situation, with each being answerable for their part. It's not a sporting contest with a winner and a loser.
And this bit is just fucking stupid. Okay, let's accept for the sake of argument they did drive the medics out of town... how the fuck does that invite an aggressive response?
You behaved badly, so now, with the deepest regret, we're going to have to shoot you?
That's the kind of fucking perverse logic that domestic abusers use to justify what they do. I had to beat my wife, she made me so angry. I tortured my son because he misbehaved.
No. If you're the person in authority, be the better person. There's no sane universe where having driven the medics out of town should have a consequence of 'an aggressive response'. The main consequence should be not having any medics, and even that should be a situation that the authorities should be trying to solve.
The police and the medics were confronted by people whose second nature is to resist arrest. The offender had been released on bail to attend a funeral.
Which. Is. Why. THERE. WAS. A. PLAN.
You genuinely don't seem to realise that you're actually explaining why the policeman should've known better than to go in the way that we did. This is the very essence of the prosecution case. You are literally explaining why the man charged with murder was reckless.
The key reason for the charge being this part:
...the communities of these kinds of people are their own worst enemies. Their behaviour invites aggressive response.
and
The police and the medics were confronted by people whose second nature is to resist arrest.
I hope I'm not the only person reading this thread who finds these remarks offensive and distasteful.
People were angry after a teenager had been shot. How dare they. Never mind if their anger was because they knew it was preventable.
We've seen it all before in the American cases. Welcome to racism Australian style.
@orfeo
Your being offended does not change the situation on the ground.
Meanwhile, news from the BBC in connection with the Taylor case:
https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54303410
LOL. Because your description was so objective.
I'll tell you one thing that changes the situation on the ground. A policeman going in ignoring the advice that's been given by the local sergeant about the situation and how to handle it.
I'm beginning to wonder whether you're the kind of person who would run headlong into a beehive in search of honey, and then explain how it was all the bees' fault that you had to squash them all. Every time you talk about the situation on the ground as if everybody knew the situation, you're just strengthening the argument that everyone knew better, which is precisely why a plan had been devised to deal with the situation on the ground.
You want to talk about the situation on the ground, and yet you don't seem to believe that the situation on the ground should actually factor into planning. It's a justification to use after everything goes wrong because someone utterly failed to plan for the known situation on the ground.
Do you actually understand? The whole reason there's a murder charge is because the outcome was foreseeable, and had in fact been foreseen. And this policeman is accused of having reckless disregard for everyone's safety.
My last post was actually directed @Bishops Finger, but never mind.