Posted on 03/21/2018 5:34:46 PM PDT by Mariner
Sacramento police shot Stephon Clark dead Sunday night within seconds of encountering him next to his grandparents’ home in south Sacramento, video released Wednesday by the department shows.
About six minutes after the shooting, after backup arrives, an officer can be heard telling another officer, "hey mute."
Sound then cuts out as officers apparently turn off their microphones. But video continues and the officers can be seen speaking to each other and to at least one civilian on scene for about two more minutes before the video ends.
“We asked, ‘Can they do that,’” said Les Simmons, a pastor and social activist in Sacramento who viewed the footage with two of Clark’s family members Wednesday afternoon prior to its public release. “They all just muted their mics. … It was a moment of, what are they doing? What are they saying?”
Sacramento Police spokesman Sgt. Vance Chandler said, “there are a variety of reasons why officer have the opportunity to mute their body worn cameras.”
Chandler referred a Sacramento Bee reporter to the department's general orders for details.
Simmons and Clark’s aunt, Saquoia Durham, said after viewing the videos, they believe the fatality could have been avoided.
"As soon as they did the command, they started shooting. They said 'put your hands up, gun' and then they just let loose on my nephew,” said Durham.
"They didn’t give him a chance to put his hands up or anything, and then when they shot him down, they knew they messed up,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Then that is a bullshit SOP. The majority of people out for a walk are jabbering into their phones.
clean shoot cause he did not comply within 30 seconds? Umm, no offense but are you out of your mind?
What if the guy was def? What if he had earbuds and music playing?
I don't give a rats ass if the cops say show me your hands and the person stands there for ten freaking hours. If there is no threat to the officer or other innocent person the police DO NOT GET TO EXECUTE SOMEONE JUST BECAUSE THEY DON'T COMPLY.
Yeah, but it was a 45 caliber phone. Good shoot. /s
I wonder how the Daniel Shaver case went.
How about to avoid incriminating themselves?
Let’s agree that we disagree. Weird but I stopped watching the video after the shoots were fired. I stopped and thought it was a clean shooting because the cops honestly thought the perp had a gun. They called out a gun at least 15 seconds before the shooting. When they rounded the corner the perp was in complete darkness. The flashlight lit him up along with his shining black phone which appeared to be a gun. There is nothing in the video that counterdicts self defense in their eyes. Cops killers are everywhere.
If the perp stopped when first commanded he would still be alive.
Not really. Muting the mic is not textbook at all. I had a buddy do that and he got in kinds of trouble, almost lost his SGT stripes and did get pulled off of patrol and put in the jail...and that was over nothing near as bad as this. He was just talking about how corrupt the chief was. Any lawyer is going to have a field day...and the department is going to take action against him for failing to follow protocol. Watch.
Absolute nonsense. From the earliest common law standards, the use of deadly force only requires a reasonable belief that one is facing imminent death or serious bodily injury. Whether for a law enforcement officer or a private citizen, the standard is never that you must “positively” identify what someone is threatening you with as a weapon, Even in Communist California.
The standard California jury instruction contains the following language:
“Defendant’s belief must have been reasonable and (he/she) must have acted only because of that belief. The defendant is only entitled to use that amount of force that a reasonable person would believe is necessary in the same situation. If the defendant used more force than was reasonable, then the [attempted] killing was not justified.
When deciding whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed. If the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, the danger DOES NOT need to have actually existed.”
That last sentence might be hard for you, but it means that the standard is reasonable belief, not positive identification.
Here is the classic example of this:
This video isn’t used in Use of force classes for law enforcement and non-law enforcement alike. The first video looks really bad for the officers. The second and third video show what they actually saw and what they reasonably believed at the time.
The object the suspect was hold was not a gun, it was a cell phone.
The officers had no obligation to verify what it was that the suspect was holding. The belief they had was REASONABLE.
You really should stop practicing law without a license. ;)
> I stopped and thought it was a clean shooting because the cops honestly thought the perp had a gun. <
If that’s an acceptable standard, then each and every one of us is in danger. I don’t like cell phones. But I do carry an old transistor radio on my walks. It’s silver-colored. I suppose at dusk it might look a little like a stainless-steel pistol.
If a cop yells at me while I’m on one of my walks, I guess I’d be a bit confused. I might not react quickly enough to his commands. For sure I wouldn’t think to drop my trusty old radio. So I guess I’d get shot.
Now, with police being targets by leftest thugs, they are even more jumpy.
Yes the ‘reasonable and prudent person’ concept has been trashed over the years by ‘police procedure’ reasoning that allows the ‘snap decision’ version. If you and I shot someone holding a cellphone we would go to jail. That is, unless we were an illegal in California.
So why is it that McCabe, Comey, Strzok and the merry band of ‘lawmen’ do not wear a body cam and microphone?
There’s no such thing as a “good shoot”.
There is an “unfortunate but had absolutely no other choice shoot”, and “murder”.
This, as in the case of every other government killing of a civilian, is the entire range of acceptable options.
Some people do need killing. But that is the job of the courts, not the cops, to decide.
> If that’s an acceptable standard, then each and every one of us is in danger.
We are in danger.
Research the Peairs case. The standard jury instruction: “ A defendant is justified . . . in using deadly force if, at the time of the homicide, she had reasonable grounds for believing, and did believe, that she was in imminent danger of death or grievous bodily injury, and that deadly force was necessary to repel the threat, although it turned out later that these appearances were false.”
Peairs wasnt a cop. Peairs was acquitted.
I agree, but I get the other side of the debate.
The armed agents of the state get to engage on perceived threat, not needing to see a weapon, just something that could be roughly the same size and shape of a weapon, or a move that they think can be construed as reaching for a weapon. They don’t have to ID themselves. They get to empty a half mag each into the target after he’s down. They get to mute the mic so they can talk privately. It’s all by the book, righteous and good.
Store clerk in a bad part of town gets jumpy after a few armed hold ups, shouts “Gun! Show me your hands!” and shoots a suspicious looking guy reaching for a comb, then puts another quick five rounds in the now perforated and prone comb wielder. He then mutes the mic on the store security while he confers with his boss. Guess who’s going to jail?
The difference is the store clerk is a peasant and the cops are the King’s men. You can paint that with a pretty coat of legalese and officer safety, but it’s the truth underneath.
Meanwhile, many of the King’s men are now openly advocating for the disarming of the peasants.
There is also an active effort by some well funded groups like BLM and Antifa to ratchet up hatred of the King’s men.
That all adds up to a scenario that doesn’t bode well for anyone.
The historic standard was to judge a decision made by a ‘reasonable and prudent’ person. Basically, we dropped the ‘prudent’ test and supplanted it, for the police, to being ‘police procedure’ as the standard.
I don't give a crap if legally they don't have to positively identify a weapon. That's their damn job. We don't as a society expect our peace officers to shoot and kill someone anytime it's by legal definition ok to do so, that's not protecting and serving.
Now in this situation the officers could not see very well at all so when the first cop yells gun he simply saw something in the guys hand. Merely seeing and object in someones hand at night when little detail can be made out and ASSUMING it's a gun is NOT REASONABLE. That is exactly what happened here. In fact with virtually everyone carrying cellphones and other electronics the likelihood that object was not a gun was the most reasonable conclusion as it in fact was not. The police were responding to someone possibly breaking out windows with a crow bar or similar tool. From that point they really had no reason to believe the person they saw was armed with a firearm. He certainly could have had a firearm but seeing a object in his hand is not enough to justify deadly force.
It's becoming nearly a weekly occurrence where we have cops shooting people with video game controllers, cell phones, MP3 Players, BB guns, Makeup cases but more often they end up having nothing at all in their hands. I can't believe how many people think this is acceptable. When I was younger if a cop shot someone and it turned out that person was unarmed there was no excuse even in the minds of the officers themselves. The last thing a cop back then wanted to ever do is shoot and kill someone who ultimately was not a threat. Today the only thing that seems to be of any concern at all is can it be classified a "good shoot". As long as it can be said they appeared to be armed and or the officer felt threatened then it's ok to pump a 15 round mag into a unarmed citizen and call it a day. Then I come on here and see so many posters think this is okay. It sickens me. I don't know what has happened to reason. Please do not take this as saying all officers have no concern about shooting the wrong people, I know many many do. That being said it can't be denied we have way to many shooting when there is simply no justification whatsoever. It can't be denied, the police have a major use of force problem that needs to be corrected and fast.
Well.. As a citizen, it is your job to make sure the police officer feels safe.
Although, when I was a kid, it was the police officer’s job to make the citizen feel safe.
When did that turn around?
When they became Law Enforcement Officers instead of Peace Officers.
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