California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool

Edit: Ok, I read the article. Yeah, him charging at the cop with that tool was a really bad move. I still think the situation could have been handled differently. Could have.

Tasers, batons, or just run away. Diffuse the situation. Imagine a judge saying "You charged against a cop with a gardening tool? Sentenced to DEATH!"

The boy didn't get a fair trial. He was murdered with no justification.

As a father of a child with Autism I feel I am more than adequately equipped to respond to this.

I don't think many, if any, neurotypical people understand how Autism can impact a person's ability to process the world in a way that is deemed "normal". This child may not be verbal, may have aggression issues, may have a learning disability, etc.

The last thing that should have happened is someone pulling a gun.

I cry thinking something like this could happen with my son. All it takes is one bad interaction with someone who has absolutely no experience with Autism and this can happen.

For anyone reading this, do yourself a favour. Volunteer with autistic people. It could be at school or in the community but you all need to learn that Autism does not look like the doctor in The Good Doctor.

In Canada (afaik) cops rarely kill anyone who is not wielding a gun, this includes people out of their minds on drugs wielding knives. They are usually able to disarm and subdue the suspect by non-lethal means.

The idea that a 15 year old kid running at a cop should be shot on sight is absolutely absurd and only normalized in the US, please reconsider your perspective.

All that said cops still fucking suck in Canada and have a history of being racists and abusive.

... So why didn't the officers just fucking leave the house?! There's no reason for them to stand their ground here. Retreat to safety and call for a crisis counselor and psychiatrist to come help. Call the boy's parents.

Fragile masculinity is why those pussy ass cops shot a kid. I hope it tortures them for the rest of their days. And I hope whenever they see a kid with autism from here on out, they're forced to realize what they've done.

To be fair Brooklyn 99 dunks on cops. Like a lot.

3rd Batman movie, the one that made even less sense than a superhero movie normally makes.

The entire plan depends on a fusion reactor acting like a fission bomb that Bane didn't even know was down there, Blackgate being moved within city limits after the events of the second movie for no clear reason, and a letter that again no one knew existed while the plan was being carried out.

Also if he broke Batman's back why not just kill him? Why give him a chance to escape?

This. I forget the court ruling, but there was one, that found you are legally allowed to defend yourself against a police officer who is not acting lawfully, up to and including killing the cop... But good luck surviving that long.

this says more about your subs than anything because i see a lot of socialists on here who cannot wait to tell me about their soviet pistol

And the reality we have now is a lot of dead citizens who didn't sign up to a job inherently involving danger. Is that a preferable situation?

I have been watching a ton of those channels lately. It’s interesting to see how things go down in the real world without a bunch of annoying editing and interruptions.

There are of course many cases where the cops give somebody a hundred chances to stand down or comply with orders or whatever. But there is probably also a strong bias in choosing the clips. These channels seem to heavily lean towards “criminal’s day went from bad to worse” or the opposite towards “idiot cop tries to arrest innocent person / does not know the law.”

I’m in the US and years ago a cop had to come by to put down a rabid raccoon that was wandering around. I jokingly asked him if he’d have a bunch of paperwork later for discharging his firearm (around houses to boot).

He did not seem to care, lol. I think he just gave me a “nah” or something.

kids a buck fifty soaking wet, looks all of 5'5 from the pictures, and the family wasn't helping. Did you kill all of those "15 year old thugs"? seems like we might have heard about you if you were as much of a coward as this cop

If I encounter a professional boxer in a bad mood, I would shit my pants. If another professional boxer encounters a professional boxer in a bad mood, they would shrug it off and deal with whatever happens.

Cops get trained. Being prepared for dangerous situations is essentially the core of their fucking job. Apparently, that preparation seems to be often simply "if shit gets ugly, shoot the shit out of whatever frightens you". Cops should be better at dealing with this than random citizens with a gun.

Wow, racism mixed with sexism and slutshaming. you can be really proud of yourself man. go get therapy.

Were you asleep for the last decade? We've seen over and over how people of color get treated by cops.

Yeah, the kid didn't have something dangerous like an acorn.

I have plenty of dangerous gardening tools in my shed.

The fact is, and point I was trying to make, we don't know what the tool was therefore, we can't draw conclusions about acceptable risk yet.

Protecting includes the family, the ones who called the police in the first place, from danger too.

Desecration is definitely not the right word but I'm having trouble inferring the one you meant to use. De-escalation perhaps?

FYI, tazers aren’t “non-lethal.”

The description of the video describes it as such.

Any decent martial arts instructor will tell you that if someone has a weapon, your best bet is to run. You can be a master of any art; if your opponent has a knife, you will get cut, or stabbed. It's almost impossible to disarm an aggressive attacker who has a knife without getting cut; unless you get lucky, it usually becomes a struggle to control the knife, and the person holding the handle gets cut up far less. Your martial arts training may allow you to eventually dominate the situation, disarm your attacker, and defeat your opponent -- but you're still going to get cut up in the process. If they have a gun, then all your training for is give you a slight chance of not getting shot, maybe, if everything goes perfectly. The only time things go like in the movies is in the movies. And cops aren't going to be martial arts masters; the best we could hope for for most of them is some basic submission technique, like the shit that murdered George Floyd.

Yes: cops should be getting focused time in de-escalation, but expecting cops to grapple with people, when they have no idea what weapons the person may have concealed in their bodies, or to expect them to perform some Steven Segal weapon disarming is unrealistic.

I agree with you, though; guns are not the answer, and I'm not sure I believe cops should even be armed - although, this is there US, and about 2% of the population goes around daily armed.

It's far less dangerous than a gun and ideal for melee opponents because cops can still maintain a certain amount of range. You didn't read the article, did you? The kid was approaching fast charging with the sharp end of a gardening tool over his head while being told to back off, I think there is no question that he was suffering a manic episode. There were a number of ways to deal with the situation, but before reaching for the gun they could have reached for the taser. Tasers are quite risky, yes, but less so than shooting several bullets in a residential zone at someone.

He was having a mental health crisis. But instead of being helped, he was executed by a full grown man afraid of a boy with a stick

you don't call the cops on your own family lightly unless you really are an asshole... People don't call the cops on their family as a joke.

That's exactly right, release the footage and stop jumping to conclusions.