17-year-old shot and killed by officer conducting welfare check

ZeroCool@slrpnk.net to News@lemmy.world – 568 points –
17-year-old shot and killed by officer conducting welfare check
abcnews.go.com
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Wow. There are literally zero details in this article and everyone has labeled the cop a murderer. What a thankless, shit job, police. Could it not have been that the officer arrived on scene to an armed individual who then attempted to murder him? He's conducting a welfare check, the person he's checking on may not be all there.... Both the checker and the checkee are humans and matter here!

Which is where I and the rest of the ACAB folks will probably start to agree - cops shouldn't be the ones responding to these calls. The hard part is that sending unarmed social workers into dangerous scenarios is not the answer either. Tough problem to solve. World's not perfect. Give your fellow human the benefit of the doubt, though. Not every cop is a murderous bastard, and thinking that way isn't helping anyone except tickling your own smug feelings. It's also a sweeping generalization, something that's both foolish and frowned upon these days. This an appeal to the humanity in all of you - quit writing off humans with a single acronym. You are removing their humanity and labelling them a monster. We can look to history to learn from the same mistake.

Wow. There are literally zero details in this article and everyone has labeled the cop a murderer.

If they stopped randomly murdering innocent people, people would stop assuming it...

Or - we could stop passing the blame and take accountability for making assumptions about our fellow man we should not make.

I'd call it pattern recognition. We'll see whether this reinforces it after lots of fighting and delays about whether to release bodycam footage, I would guess. (Or if they release it immediately that will be a good sign that they think their officer did nothing wrong.)

It is one thing to be wary of something because you experience it often.

It is another to spew masturbatory hate at each mention of police.

I don't know if I'm quite there yet, but I've most certainly flipped from 'they must have had a reason' to 'what is their excuse this time' over the course of about the last ten years.

He's conducting a welfare check, the person he's checking on may not be all there....

Which is exactly why a person with minimal mental health training shouldn't be the one doing this. Especially if they're armed.

I wouldnt be surprised if this was suicide by cop. But its still indicative of a structural problem that such a thing is possible.

Level headed take gets downvotes. Classic Lemmy.

Regardless of how people feel about the above posters opinion, it's a valid opinion, and people should engage in an open minded discussion instead of knee-jerk downvoting.

As a community, we're better than that.

If you go to check on someone knowing they're trying to self-harm and that they have a knife, you know what you can do to protect yourself?

Back away.

Unless this is one of those automatic machine knifes I've been hearing about.

Even so, I'm still pretty sure "self-harm" doesn't mean "attack others," so backing away would probably work.

It is his job and duty not to. If he arrived to the welfare check and immediately turned around and left...?

Even though this is a cherry picked argument - a melee weapon - I'm not sure it will help your point. Cops get stabbed, man. It happens even with their shoot first training.

I didn't say turn around and leave.

I said back away.

You know, out of knife range?

Was it a house-sized knife or something?