Has Anybody Figured Out Why The Cops Shot Him Yet?
Monday, November 27, 2006Posted in: Uncategorized
Man shot to death by cops on his wedding day
Was he acting suspiciously? Did he have a gun? What was he doing? Getting blown to bits on your wedding day would probably count as having a bad day.
I heard that the car that he was in crashed into a police vehicle, but since when do we shoot people for crashing cars? This is why I’m kinda glad that here in England, beat cops still don’t carry guns. Gun crime is rife enough, but I know that the minute regular cops start carrying guns, the problem would treble in no time.
Mistakes do happen, but when a life is taken so recklessly, (did they really need 50 bullets for three unarmed men?) questions have to be asked. And answered.
I’m hoping for the sake of peace in the city that the men were real threats to people in the immediate vicinity. If it’s proven that they weren’t doing anything that warranted those cops to shoot them, there will be hell to pay. And rightly so.
Most black people will wonder if he was shot because his face was too dark. That was the first thought that popped into my head when I heard about this case. I guess that’s just a black person’s way of thinking. Anybody would think we had a persecution complex.
Anonymous
November 27
10:32 pm
Karen, I just did some reading and linking on this. While there seems to have been some suspicious activity by the occupants of the car, there certainly doesn’t seem to be anything to warrant a single officer shooting 34 rounds. One of the officers from the minivan fired 34 of the 50 rounds. That’s just crazy! I wonder if we will ever know the whys or wherefores to this.
Sandy Schwab
November 27
11:38 pm
Most black people will wonder if he was shot because his face was too dark. That was the first thought that popped into my head when I heard about this case. I guess that’s just a black person’s way of thinking.
Well, I’m not black, Karen, and I thought exactly the same thing. Wrong place, wrong colour — sadly, this wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened. God, it really makes you sick.
eggs
November 28
12:20 am
From what I understand, the plainclothes cop who instigated the entire incident started shooting through the front windshield of the car at the unarmed occupants. His bullets exited through the rear window of the car, striking a second cop car that arrived at the scene after the shooting had already started. Those cops couldn’t really see the other cop in front of the car. Not understanding that it was the *cop* shooting at them, they thought it was the guys in the car shooting out the back window, so they started shooting back. Essentially, the guys in the car got killed by two groups of cops shooting at each other.
I don’t know that I blame the second car full of cops for emptying their guns into the car. From their persepective, they were being shot at by someone in that car. I totally blame the fuckwit undercover cop who started shooting at the car, basically because they wouldn’t stop their car for some random nutjob waving his gun in the air at them. If some guy, not in uniform, leapt up on the hood of my car in the middle of the night, waving a gun at me, you can bet your arse I’d try to run him down and get the fuck away too.
As for the skin colour thing, there’s no need to be coy about it. Of course the first cop thought he could shoot them because they were black. I bet I could run a cop down on the street in broad daylight and get nothing but a ticket for my shit driving skills, because I’m a rich white chick, instead of a disposable poor black man. This kind of shit makes me sick. And we all know the cops will get off with a golden handshake and smack on the bum.
eggs.
Dawn
November 28
12:16 pm
I do hope – and I realise that this is very naive of me – that the cops involved are prosecuted.
Jade James Truth or Dare
November 28
12:50 pm
I’m from New York and unfortunately this isn’t the first time this has happened here. There was absolutely NO REASON those police officers should’ve emptied out there guns and pause to only reload and shoot again.
The occupants of the vehicle were NOT ARMED and the cops never identified themselves.
So if I saw a couple of men jumping out of a car, heading towards me with guns in there hands and not once did they say “police officer freeze”, I would’ve done the same thing and probably tried to leave the scene. Not the smartest thing to do-because then you have the driver backing into another vehicle in his anxiousness to leave the scene. Not the smartest thing to do-BUT your only human-and we can’t help the fear of impulse that sometimes overides our sensible decisions in matters like these.
This all equals to the cops-being morons. They should be fired from the force. Worse-they should be charged with murder. They are trained-to not act like idiots.
Barbara B.
November 28
10:12 pm
I think he was shot because he was “born suspect.” I was listening to a Chris Rock CD the other day and Born Suspect was the title. It seems very appropriate. People of certain ethnicities and races are generally believed to be guilty until proven innocent. At least here in the U.S. I’m a law abiding woman but that doesn’t stop me from being pretty paranoid about it, to be honest. I’ve seen SO MANY cases of innocent people getting killed by the police that I’m almost as afraid of them as I am of criminals. I’m no cop hater. I’m truly thankful that there’s somebody out there willing to do the dangerous, underpaid, and fairly thankless job of being a cop. I just hope never be the focus of their attention because I know that they would cap my black ass in a minute.
FerfeLaBat
November 28
11:41 pm
British cops don’t carry guns?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4706787.stm
FerfeLaBat
November 28
11:51 pm
In the NY case the driver hit the cop – his body — with the car. They hit a cop, they hit several vehicles and they did not stop when they were told to stop. A car is a lethal weapon and whether it was a drunk thing or just a terminal case of stupid, you do not hit someone with your car, THEN hit several other cars, and expect anyone capable of making you stop to stand there and let you go off and hit some mother and her baby on a sidewalk. Cops are not psychics. This is not CSI.
Do we know that the cops were white? Is the thinking here that white cops were sitting outside a black bar planning to shoot to shit anything walking out for fun?
Fifty bullets seems excessive and the investigation may prove that the cops were in the wrong, but so many times I’ve seen the page twenty update explaining that the choir boy now dead was doing very bad things when killed. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Barbara B.
November 29
2:44 am
I don’t think the cops ever really plan to “shoot the shit” out of unarmed black and brown people. It just turns out that way sometimes. I’m sure that when those NY cops unloaded over 40 bullets at Amadou Diallo back in ’99 they had their reasons. He too was unarmed. But he was black and no doubt that was reason enough. I know that there are many times when police have to defend themselves from criminals. I just find it troubling when the people are unarmed. For all I know the police shoot and kill just as many unarmed, seemingly innocent white people as they do black and brown. Maybe it just doesn’t get as much publicity. Does anyone have any statistics on this? When I hear about these overkill cases the victims are invariably black. Don’t know why that is.
The thing about the driver hitting the police with his car I interpreted as the driver trying to get away from a guy brandishing a gun. My understanding, and I could be wrong, was that the cop was in plain clothes.
This makes sense to me. On the other hand the guys in the car may well have been doing “very bad things” for all we know. So far according to the police they didn’t have any guns. No drugs were mentioned. The cop that got hit by the car is said to have tried to detain the men because he THOUGHT that they had a gun. I really hope this is just my black paranoia and the killing was justified.
Anyway it will be very interesting to see how this one turns out. BTW, did anyone read about the 88-year old black woman shot and killed by the police in Atlanta last week? According to the warrant her house was identified by an informant as a drug house. The police conducted a no knock raid. They removed her burglar bars and pried open the door. She opened fire on them and naturally they returned the greeting. The old woman’s family and friends say it must have been a mistake. They say the woman was so afraid of crime that she wouldn’t even let the neighbors who grocery shopped for her into her house. This is one to watch, too. It could be a mistake or maybe the woman was involved with drugs. It’s been known to happen. Hopefully time will tell.
Lori
November 29
5:20 am
I felt so awful after hearing about this one. How terrible for all involved on what should have been the happiest day of their lives. It’s truly horrid. Some cases I look at and think “Don’t use your skin color as an excuse” but this is definitely NOT one of them. I can’t imagine what else could have prompted such a thing.
Karen Scott
November 29
7:24 am
Ferfelabat, normal beat cops don’t carry guns as a matter of course, these were specialist marksmen, and they’d been trailing the guy, as they suspected him of being a terrorist, and they fucked that up.
In the US, I’m guessing shit like this happens every other day.
FerfeLaBat
November 29
3:19 pm
Depends on the city Karen. Here in S. Fla everyone is pretty much shooting everyone else for whatever reason seems right at the time. Cops get shot. Moms throwing birthday parties for their seven year old sons get shot. Read http://www.Herald.com now and then for the freak show.
Last report on the Atlanta case was that the womans’ granddaughter was dealing drugs from the house. The cops had been watching the house for weeks and had built a case for a warrant. The granddaughter was out at the time of the raid. I’m sure the grandmother knew. I am also reasonably certain she thought the men at the door were associates of her granddaughters. She shot them through the door before they ever came inside.
Diallo was reaching for his wallet.
A federal agent friend was in a massive gun battle in San Juan and I was asking him why he didn’t see the attack coming. He was there doing an undercover sting and the gang members thought he was with a rival gang and just opened fire. I could not comprehend how a trained agent with twenty years experience could not anticipate a situation going bad. As I was talking he picked up an eraser and hit me square in the chest with it.
“Did you see that comng?”
“Umm Nope. Didn’t see that coming. I was still talking BTW.”
“Yeah. So was I – thinking I could talk through it. But you don’t see it coming. It’s not like in the movies. They don’t let you make your case or offer your reasons and alibis. They just shoot you. You don’t have 30 seconds or even two.”
He had a vest on but the entire housing project opened fire. Every window opened and a gun from each started shooting as the Blackhawk came into the open area trying to pull the team out.
None of the people involved on that day was black. Why that would even matter to anyone is the mystery of the ages here in the US. A massive gun fight worthy of a major motion picture breaks out with literally thousands of bullets spent and I bet no one but the people there are at the time know anything about it.
One car, three guys, one bad night and fifty bullets later and everyone in the known world knows it happened because the victims were black and the cop was probably white.
Does it happen every day in the US? You woulda heard about it — I promise you that, but only if it was a white cop killing a black man. Black men killing black men? Doesn’t even get section A of the paper.
That’s a distinction that we should be looking into a little harder because there-in lies the root of resentment on both sides of the race wars here in the US.
FerfeLaBat
November 29
3:31 pm
Another story – true and I’m taking the time to tell it because I don’t believe people not living in a big American city can comprehend what it’s like.
My husband was running ambulance duty (volunteer work in real life he’s a pilot) in Homestead just south of downtown Miami. They were taking a patient from his house to the ambulance when shots were fired. Kids were playing outside. Their grand mother opened her front door across the street and from behind the door she yelled to the kids.
“Ya’ll hear that?! You git your asses inside ‘for you git shot.”
They scurried in and she closed the door.
Husband and crew kept on about their patient transport and left.
It’s a daily thing. I seriously doubt parents in S. Dakota are teaching their kids what the sound of gunfire is and to run inside when they hear it. Miami ain’t all that different from NY. So. Take that into consideration when prejudging the cop or the men who were shot.