12 x more likely to kill a citizen than kill themselves and no one thinks this is a problem?
Cowards or Heroes?
The Statistics Behind a Cop's Right to Murder the Mentally Ill
Thank God we have cops. One that I know tells people that he is a garbage collector and in a way that is an apt description, taking the garbage off the streets so that society can be a bit safer. I know it is a hard job and many of the men and women doing the task are good and decent people doing the best they can.
And then there is this coward who shot down a mentally ill man for no reason at all. Yeah, the guy was mentally ill, yeah he had a sheath knife in a scabbard on his hip, but the guy was walking down the street minding his own business till some do good-er called in and said the guy was acting strange. Yah think? He is crazy. Officer James Moore simply executed a mentally ill man because he wasn't capable of understanding or was just too damned crazy to comply with screamed commands.
When you watch the video the crazy guy tries to avoid confrontation and tries to walk away when the cop starts screaming at him. You can tell the guy is confused but anything but aggressive. The cop is saying the guy isn't complying and is starting to run. You know, if I was to scream at my dog in that manner he would probably want to walk away too. Instead of driving up a half block and getting in front of the mentally ill guy and calmly talking to him the cop acts like the guy is completely normal and capable of making good decisions. Well no, the guy is mentally ill and should have been treated like a child.
After the cop follows the guy for a half a block screaming at him the crazy guy pulls his knife most likely because he feels threatened but the crazy man is still walking away and being non confrontational. Finally the crazy guy turns and starts shouting parts of the Ten Commandments including "Thou shalt not kill" and takes a half step forward and gets three shots into his chest cavity.
No Tazer, no call for back up (there were two cops in the video at one point), no shot to the leg, no mace spray, no knock the guy down with a car business, just pump three shots into his chest.
No one was at risk in this situation until the cop escalated the situation. Should a mentally ill person be carrying a knife? I wouldn't think so but do we have a death penalty for doing that?
A thousand ways of dealing with this situation come to mind. Hit the guy with the patrol car and knock him down. Call Dan Fisher and have him do his Jesus impersonation. Mace him, tazer him, call the fire department and hose his butt down and he would drop the knife. Toss the guy a damned Popsicle or candy bar. Call for back up and bring a six foot T post to whack the guy with. Put a dog on him. Knock him down and wrap the guy up with a big blue tarp. Hopefully they would have tried calling his family first or penned the guy in with five or six cars before executing him.
Of course the Muskogee police department and local D.A. believe the shooting was justified to avoid a lawsuit but NO human being should be comfortable with a system that murders crazy people unless other lives are at risk if you don't.
Ultimately the problem is Terri White closing down all the state mental health beds and spending 90% of her budget on contractors. The state needs to have several thousand beds or wards to lock these unfortunate souls away from society instead of using group homes or hoping they will stay on their medication. Instead Commissioner Terri White has the state down to less than 400 slots for the mentally ill and long waiting lists to access those few spaces.
Wait... Terri White thinks throwing water and screaming at people motivates them. Anyone see a connection here?
And save your time emailing if you are a boot licker. There are always those that are fine with cold blooded murder when a cop does it because the boot licker feels safer knowing the cops can murder when they feel like it. Shame on us for not wanting that cop to go home after his shift is usually the first argument. Second argument is that we aren't cops so we can't judge.
And how dangerous is a cop job? If you count all reasons for death, number 15 from the top of the list, below loggers, farmers, ranchers, taxi drivers, lawn mowing, fishermen, construction workers, miners, garbage collectors, truck drivers, roofers, pilots, iron workers, and linemen. But they are just barely ahead of construction management workers. A garbage collector is twice as likely per hundred thousand workers to die on the job as a cop. A pilot is four times more likely to die than a cop on the job.
But it gets worse. The number one killer of cops isn't bad guys, it is cops killing themselves via suicide and yes those numbers are included. The cops have an organization tracking this and they say that every 81 hours, twice a week, a cop commits suicide.
Around 40 cops are actually murdered per year by bad guys, the rest die in vehicle accidents or heart attacks or blow their own brains out. More cops kill themselves than die each year in vehicle accidents and murder combined.
When you do the math you realize that cops have fairly safe jobs. There are over 750,000 officers with powers of arrest, over one point one million in total counting the ones siting at desks. We lose around 40 cops a year to murder, 40 too many I know, but math is math so stick with me. That means the mortality rate per 100,000 cops is 5.3 per 100,000 or one cop out of 20,000 dies each year from true violence from a bad guy or crazy guy with a knife that is trying to walk away. That level drops the ranking down to around 34 from the top of the list, right about where carpenters and car mechanics are at.
If you really want to compare deaths by violence cops are way down on the list too with cashiers, food service managers, retail sales managers, property and real estate managers, security guards, food service and serving jobs, tax drivers and chauffeurs, and retail salespeople all have a greater risk of dying a violent death than a cop.
Using the statistics tells us that we ought to allow 7-11 clerks and McDonald workers shoot people too if they refuse to show their hands as they are much higher risk of being killed on the job by violence. And as a cop is two and a half times more likely to commit suicide than be killed by a bad guy perhaps we ought to be collecting their weapons or doing like Sheriff Andy Taylor did and giving them just one bullet to carry in their pocket.
The culture is the problem, kept in place by CLEET and the law enforcement agencies, preferring ten dead innocent citizens over one dead cop any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Shooting someone ought to be a career ending move for any law enforcement officer unless there is real danger involved. Iron workers and 7-11 clerks accept the risks of their jobs and don't ask for the right to murder when they are scared or panicked. If someone wants to be a cop the first test ought to be if they are courageous enough.
