The NYPD have killed a man on his wedding day, gunning him down with over 50 bullets. His crime? Being involved in a traffic accident with an unmarked police van. If this was done by anyone other than the police, the suspects would be being questioned right now - but this being the NYPD, officers are given a day to collude and get their stories straight before being questioned, and most are never even talked to by prosecutors. The result is no effective check on the NYPD's use of lethal force - and more tragedies like this. You'd think that after Amadou Diallo they would have learned their lesson...
This is one reason why I do not want the New Zealand police to be regularly carrying firearms: they are supposed to be there to protect us, not to murder us. They would have to degenerate a long way to reach the levels of unaccountable violence seen in the NYPD, but it is better to keep them off that path entirely.
Your headline is exactly what I thought I/S. I was reading through the article trying to figure out if they told us his ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteThe BBC story very carefully doesn't talk about it, but the NYT has photos. He is, of course, black. So the new standard for police execution in NYC is having a traffic accident while black. Wonderful.
ReplyDeletethe solution is not to not give NYPD cops fire arms (although that might help if they combined it with not giving anyone else fire arms)
ReplyDeletethe better solution is to record every action every cop makes, all the time.
(btw see who complains loudest, fire them and put them on your list of 'people to watch')
After-all you seem to be complaining mostly here about the lack of disincentive to police officers - as opposed to the fact that they shot him as opposed to beating him to death.