I haven’t said anything about the Philando Castile murder verdict, even though it’s been on my mind and it should be on the mind of every potentially shady-looking gun carrier in the country, because I just didn’t know what to say. I’m always reluctant to speak the conclusion I naturally jump to, since I wasn’t there and I don’t know what really happened and there’s always so very much impassioned rhetoric and logic-twisting on every side that I’m unlikely to ever know what really happened. Sometimes the smartest thing is to just shut up.
But immediately after Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted the dashcam video from his cruiser was released – and to my mind it’s pretty damned damning. A carefully-picked jury disagreed. And I still don’t know what to say that would be of any positive value to anyone.
So read this instead.
Lessons Of Philando Castile and the Reasonably Scared Cop Rule
It seems weird that we are willing to make excuses for people who should be the best prepared for such scenarios that we wouldn’t make for a civilian who made the same kind of panicked decision without the benefit of training.
I’ll just say the same thing I’ve been saying: Cops are scum
as a former cop, if i shot everybody that presented a gun and failed to listen to instructions i’d have a date with mr. crispy the electric chair. that guy was too scared to be on the job. yeah, you should be a little scared, but he was on a hair trigger from the start. now, the victim was no angel. he really didn’t have a permit, he was a felon, and maybe he learned in the joint to tell cops that to get the jump on them. seen it happen. but the cop really jacked up, and he knew it instantly. everything is 180 degrees out compared to back when i was a cop. fourth amendment was king back then, cops were held to a much higher standard and the dept would leave you high and dry in a millisecond, you make a bad shoot you may as well shoot yourself. these days a homeowner gets charged for a righteous shoot and bad cops get off. the world is upside down.
I can understand how the jury came to their decision, based solely on the understanding that the US legal system lets the jury see and use ONLY what is raised by prosecution and/or defence, and requires a value judgement be made by ordinary people.
I sometimes wonder if, in some cases, adversarial jurisprudence should be replaced with something more Napoleonic – where the court seeks the truth, and takes a more active role in pursuit of same.
I’ve watched the dashcam video of the murder of Philando Castile multiple times. What I see is a totally out of control person yelling nonstop at full volume (how could he possibly hear what Castile was saying?), his gun is pointed directly at Castile and is partly in the car window, at one point his hands almost resting on the window frame. There is a second police person on the passenger side with a gun initially pointed at Castile’s companion. There is a child in the back of the vehicle. It looks to this uninformed observer like a gang style execution – over a taillight??? – by an intensely emotionally and mentally disturbed police person who needs to find another job and should not be able to own or use a gun again. Watching Philando’s curbside execution and the consequences for the shooter vs what happens to a citizen unfortunate enough to be involved in self-defense or property defense is for me an unforgettable life lesson.
“the victim was no angel. he really didn’t have a permit, he was a felon”
That is all false.
Yeah, but it makes copsuckers feel better to repeat the lies.
okay i was going off of first reports that are now nowhere to be found and the few articles i can find on him have no mention of prison time or criminal past, only that he was stopped 52 times for minor traffic offenses, whatever that means. but my point still stands, things are upside down. citizens are held to ultra high standards and cops only have to claim they were scared whether they reasonably should have been or not. seems like a license to kill. to say its racial is bs though, just as many whites are being killed by cops as anybody else. including a deaf 70 year old walking down the street shot for the capital offense of not obeying the cop he couldn’t hear. and levoy finicum, well i won’t get into that here. btw, i got out of le early on when i realized it was going full blown military from protect and serve. and kent, get a life.