You can’t make this stuff up.
In the initial chaos Friday, it wasn’t clear whether Johnson or the officers were responsible for the trail of wounded, but based on ballistic and other evidence, “it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters on Saturday at a community event in Harlem.
NYPD: 9 shooting bystander victims hit by police gunfire | Fox News
Most cops spend little or no time on the shooting range, and when they pull their guns out they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
I’ve never understood why you guys are great fans of the death penalty, despite being well aware of the shortcomings of the State, like in this case.
Well it’s about making sure a killer doesn’t do it again. You see there is no other way. We do not have prisons staffed by robocops, there are flesh and blood humans chaperoning these dead-enders who have nothing to lose when sentenced to “life”. Every correction officer or fellow inmate they kill while doing time is a freebie and gets them a merit badge amongst their peers.
Besides, the death penalty is not used a whole lot, you just think it is. Here in NY they reinstated it at least 20 years ago and still they haven’t managed to locate a single murderer to terminate!
Better the death penalty than this…
http://thestreetjournal.org/2012/08/brevik-norwegian-mass-killer-gets-21-years/
21 years? It will cost quite a bit of money to feed him, and the water and electricity he’ll use. A bullet is very cheap and could immediately end his life. Instead, Norway wants to spend 21 years feeding and housing a mad man—wait, “an extreme narcissist”. To each their own I guess.
Yep. A lead aspirin is the only thing Brevik needs.
Unfortunately world leaders know that they are sitting on a powder keg now. The police are also scared and trigger-happy.
This AGW blog and these videos illustrate the absurdity of their effort to control reality:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-818
http://tinyurl.com/4ysul36
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcF75h4BHk8
Public Safety should always be job #1 for any police department. I realize the NYPD is huge, but there are a lot of examples of NYPD cops just being moronic thugs. Chief among them being …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo_shooting
Here’s a recent one I came upon while looking for the Dialo shooting…
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-03/news/31023058_1_officer-shot-police-commissioner-raymond-kelly-unarmed-man
By comparison, Zimmerman’s behavior makes sense.
Most police departments REQUIRE time at a shooting range for their officers. If your job might require the use of deadly force you need to know what you’re doing.
I have heard that most police shoot less than 100 rounds per year. I have shot that many in 50 seconds.
IMO,
Time at a shooting range doesn’t turn a knucklehead into a good police officer. Use of deadly force should always be a last resort and IMO, it was questionable whether completely unloading was necessary. When the divilian hit score is cops 9, bad guy 0, something is terribly wrong. Kelly is an idiot.
If you are going to shoot, you have to be able to hit your target. It takes thousands of rounds to become good with a pistol.
I don’t think anyone would volunteer to be downrange of someone firing a pistol regardless of how expert the shooter is. Not a lot of information on how it happened, but the NYPD shouldn’t be proud of their shooting *OR* their ability to protect the public at large.
Those people would have been fine if the police hadn’t of been there.
Agree the public would likely have been fine w/o police shooting.
I wouldn’t say it’s a wild conjecture to say that the perp didn’t point his gun at the officers.
If he had then it would make sense that he fired at least one round and then the cops would have said he was firing on them.
It will be interesting to see what video comes out of this.
Police aren’t trained marksmen. In fact, as the shape of their targets at the shooting range attest, they are trained to aim at centre of mass, just like soldiers – trained to kill. They’re never trained to “kneecap”. Only police snipers are specially trained for accuracy and none of them were there at the time.
There are lots of cops I trust, having shot with many who are very good and very serious, and would definitely share a foxhole with them in a heartbeat. It’s all the others that worry me 🙂
Having said that, they’re saying the cops hit the perp with 10/16 shots (about 62% ratio) leaving 6 misses ricocheting around (and perhaps several pass-throughs) to strike 9 civies. They were said to be just eight feet away. ~sigh~
I haven’t seen it reported yet but it would be a good guess that these guys carry 9mm hardware, likely Glock 19’s, have no serious range time, and use politically correct fully jacketed rounds.
This is because of a long comedy of errors, they’re probably cheaper to purchase in bulk, the low expectation that officers will be able to clean and maintain service pistols firing hollow points, and the desire to avoid newspaper headlines describing expanding rounds or dum dums. Once again, thanks to liberals we have a higher than necessary risk of collateral damage to innocent victims.
I’d guess .40 S&W. The Glock G22 is a great cheap gun in that calibre, makes gobs of noise, scares the piss out of burglars, but inaccurate as hell. But then, that’s personal experience, & I’m horrible with a pistol.
Maybe they’ll try fragmentation grenades next, it would be difficult to create more injured bystanders anyway.
In shootouts, statistics show that about 75% of rounds spent by police officers at close quarters (less than 10 feet), miss their intended target. Shooting on the range does not really prepare one for being fired upon, and pistols require much greater control than the 12ga resting by my bed. 😉
Can hardly wait for the video.
The death penalty is supposed to be managed by the same State that so skilfully handles taxes, and police training and procedures. Again: why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide it with the power to kill its own citizens?
But why stop there? ‘Why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide it with the power to imprison its own citizens?’. ‘Why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide it with the power send its own citizens off to war?‘
There are multiple layers of fail in the premise of your question. The ‘government’ is made up of our citizens. The ‘government’ is a creation of our citizens. So your statement ‘Why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide it with the power to kill its own citizens?’ can be rewritten as ‘Why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide its citizens with the power to kill its own citizens?’. The fail is now exposed because our government doesn’t grant its citizens anything, it is not the highest power. It is the exact opposite , at least in theory.
Perhaps we have a cultural divide here? I know that a lot of foreigners do not grasp the core concept of American republicanism (as designed) where power flows from God (or whatever ultimate deity you prefer) to the people and from us to the several States and then finally the federales. God > people > States > FedGov. Albeit true that modern socialism has somewhat successfully reversed that order. Hopefully only temporarily.
But that is all an academic exercise. In practice, I can supply you with a cuter answer by again re-writing your question. ‘Why would anybody opposed to Big Government, provide it with the power to kill its own murderers?‘ Well if not the citizens, who should kill the murderers? Robots? No-one? Let them live?
Most importantly, Government is already routinely killing its own (mostly innocent) citizens daily for example during actions like SWAT raids, often driven by liberal nanny state drug laws and lesser offenses. In other words, the same stupid liberals that cry about the death penalty have created another non-scrutinized non-transparent non-appealable defacto death penalty (in the name of the ‘greater good’ or ‘for the children’) which involves platoons of highly armed wannabe soldiers in tactical gear, complete with flash bang grenades, night vision, snipers and M16’s that drop by in the dark of night, wielding power that Hitler or Stalin would be proud of. There is no recourse or justice for these cases.
Think of it this way, when Criminals are officially executed for their crimes against the people, after years of appeals and transparency, it is the only time where the people actually benefit because a murderer is not returned to society to kill again and cannot kill any of his guards or fellow inmates. Removing this seldom used punishment would leave us with only the unofficial, non-transparent dead-of-night state actions that kill its citizens without recourse or appeal or question. The death penalty has citizen input and scrutiny all around it, every other case does not.
Only a suicidal society would allow its murderers to walk free, or be given free room and board for life, warehoused in a criminal playground with infinite opportunity to kill again consequence free. Only a suicidal society would remove the ability of the citizens to remove the murderers from their midst. Only a suicidal society would allow only the police and military to be armed. Only a suicidal society would worship the all-powerful government and depend on it for its well-being.
Great post Blade.
It’s the whole thing about requiring a trial by a jury of your peers. The government does not judge the guilt, the jury does.
Apologies for replying this late. Blade: your reasoning doesn’t work because there is no coming back from death. There is coming back from most Governmental errors, and as a matter of fact conscription is no longer, therefore the US Government doesn’t actually “send” anybody to war without they willingly agreeing to be sent.
You talk as if the death penalty were about killing the murderers. So it’s _you_ the one stuck in an academic exercise. In practice the death penalty kills whoever doesn’t have a lawyer who is good enough. The whole process has been tortured to the point that some people actually prefer to be sentenced to death, in full knowledge that platoons of lawyers will come to the rescue and let them free (no such a luxury for those sentenced to life in prison).
In fact as you say, nothing gets scrutinized as much as a death sentence, implying that many innocents must be languishing in with an unscrutinized life sentence.
Eric, you write: “whether [the Government is] effective at providing a level playing field for all, justice, life, liberty, etc.”. Given the agreed fact that the Government is not effective in pretty much anything it does (apart from some rare example), the answer to your “whether” has to be a “NO”. That’s another reason to remove the power to kill from the hands of the state.
And please let’s avoid the argument about people not committing crimes out of fear of being punished. I don’t remember having read any finding supporting that concept…most people that commit a punishable crime are likely too dumb to understand what consequences their actions might have.
Stark: I understand your reasoning. For death penalty sentencing is wholly in the jury’s hand. Or so it appears. I am not aware that what the jury decides is then reviewed by “peers”, rather it goes all through the Government’s machinery where it can be accepted or rejected without a single convening of any jury whatsoever.
It all ends up with the Government having the power to select whom exactly to kill, among those so sentenced by a jury. This can’t be right.
Omnologos September 15, 2012 at 9:26 pm,
You’re welcome to your opinion omnologos. I’d prefer to live where a death penalty exists, and is administered only when appropriate ( there is no chance of the offender being not guilty). I don’t even mind that there are jurisdictions where the death penalty is off the table. I just wouldn’t want to live there.
You stated…
“And please let’s avoid the argument about people not committing crimes out of fear of being punished. I don’t remember having read any finding supporting that concept…most people that commit a punishable crime are likely too dumb to understand what consequences their actions might have.”
I think your view of homicide is not balanced (tilted towards social darwinism perhaps?). Some of the most “successful” murderers are very intelligent.
What would you think of the following story (told to me by an old timer some time ago)?
In the early part of the 20th century, harvesting crews harvested wheat near where I grew up (North Central Montana). The farms were very large and isolated. Law enforcement hardly existed. The wheat was scythed into shocks of wheat which were thrown into a threshing machine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTtWnBrnLzM .
On a particular farm, a young boy who was scything had been giving the man who was feeding the threshing machine a particularly hard time. The thresher operator eventually snapped and threw the boy into the thresher killing him in what you can imagine was a horrific fashion.
The crew passed judgement that very day and the thresher operator was swinging from a tree before the sun set. In my opinion a perfectly reasonable outcome given the circumstances.
Eric – I don’t think many people who are sentence to death come from cases as clear-cut as the one you describe. Perhaps you should campaign for a different application of DP in case of self-evident situations.
I tell you, the current system can only generate monstrosities. And all you have to do to see how people live without DP, is move to another state in the USA itself. Not sure there is much of a difference.
omnologos says:
September 15, 2012 at 10:54 pm
I agree there are jurisdictions where the death penalty is unjustly administered or the law is just plain bad. In those places IMO, it is the responsibility of the citizens to make the law just. I think the lack of a death penalty is just as horrific (eg brevik case). I don’t think we’re that far apart. 🙂
This is one of the most common liberal arguments: “there is no coming back from death. There is coming back from most Governmental errors“. That’s a variation on the classic Mario Cuomo line: “better the guilty go free than punishing an innocent”. It is a huge logic fail because you start from a simple binary decision – to execute a murder or to not execute a murder. If you take the former off the table because of the possibility of a mistake, you are left with the latter. Okay, now what happens when the latter is a mistake and a murderer kills again? We take the latter off the table. What do we have left? You have a binary choice, you have made your choice, that choice you made is to completely eliminate the possibility of executing an innocent by allowing another innocent to be executed by a freed killer.
Put simply, if your logic allows stopping the death penalty so an innocent is not executed, how does your logic not allow supporting the death penalty so an escaped/commuted/paroled/pardoned/furloughed murderer or imprisoned lifer cannot kill?
First you must face the fact that you yourself are voting for the death penalty for others. Yes you are, just the same as so many liberal politicians have done in our urban hellholes. It as a liberal sacrament, sacrifice a few of the commoners, be they civilians on the street or their prison guards in order to appease the “intellectual” machine that spawns such irresponsible drivel.
But the math is really simple, you only have two choices, to kill or not to kill. And the latter choice really is kicking the can down the road into someone else’s backyard where the murderer kills an innocent or his guard, or an armed citizen takes him out.
The math also demonstrates the folly of just theorizing another way. As it stands almost no innocents ever get executed, the few cases we hear about DO NOT involve innocent parties, but NOT-GUILTY parties due to technicalities. It is easy to manipulate the data years later (like Hansen does) by saying 50 people should not have been executed because the trial wasn’t fair, no DNA, a cop lied, a witness was a druggie, etc. But liberals then make the long jump from there to innocence and it is rarely so, in fact so rarely that I am not aware of a clear case. However we have thousands of examples of multiple or serial killers worldwide. And the reason is that the death penalty is mostly a figment of your imagination. It is seldom used, even in the wild west days of yore. Repeat offenders, of every level of crime however are all around.
It doesn’t matter to me if they repeal it, they might as well since they never use it here in NY. The citizens pick up the slack, and thwart many further murders by either brandishing their weapons (most often) or shooting the perp (less often). The only reason we can even have so many states without a functioning death penalty is because we are so well armed. However, having a death penalty on the books, even unused, is better than nothing at all statistically.
Trust me, you would prefer to be in a place that has a strong death penalty even if you presently don’t think so. You would also prefer to be in a place that is well-armed by responsible citizens, again even if you don’t think so. I always ask people that fail to understand that an armed society is a polite society this question – if you were parachuting into the States where would you rather land? A random “red county” suburb of Texas, Alaska, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, etc, or a “blue county” hellhole in LA, NYC, Chicago, DC, ad nauseum? All of the former are well-armed and polite, all of the latter are disarmed and gun-free (hehe not really, only the honest ones are unarmed) and not very polite at all. When a few say the latter is okay, I suggest they prove it by visiting and wearing a shirt that says: “I’m Anti-Gun and proud to be Unarmed!”. No takers yet.
But this discussion really is all academic. It’s meaningless because liberals coddling criminals is already the norm, it is their way. Releasing criminals and murderers already happens, everywhere. So debating a rarely used death penalty is only gilding the lily and stems from ivory towers in academia by social engineers that think they can make a perfect society. It’s liberal day-dreaming with the typical disregard for consequences, even though it results in innocent deaths by un-executed murderers. Liberals should visit Greenhaven, Downstate, Sing Sing, Attica or Riker’s Island. Perhaps they’d understand who they think they’re protecting. Converse with correction officers and they might then understand who they are screwing over. The real world is far removed from the fantasies of the eggheads in academia, well, unless they happen to live near one of these places and have heard the sirens when a headcount comes up low. Then they will either quickly move away or they suddenly change their tune.
IMO, it’s not whether government is big or not, but whether it’s effective at providing a level playing field for all, justice, life, liberty, etc.
It’s too bad that in the US the federal government is on a never ending power grab. The ability to vote with your feet is becoming less and less relevant as the feds insert themselves into every corner of our lives.
W/O the death penalty you give more power to the random turdburger, who can kill w/o fear of the ultimate penalty being paid. I’d rather let the state decide (hopefully wisely) whether a perpetrator deserves death. Too bad the US legal system can’t be swifter when someone deserving is found (They always manage to get paid though).
There is a video of the shooting. It looks like it is facing down 5th avenue from 34th towards 33rd right in front of the Empire State Building. When the video starts, the shooter is walking briskly at the top of the frame from left to right in front of the white car ( actually he is walking up 5th on the edge of the sidewalk ). A few seconds later the two cops come into view, they must say something, the shooter turns with his .45, the people scatter and they shoot him.
You can’t see the civilians actually getting hit but if you keep your eye on the bench where there are 3 people sitting before they scurry off, they are right in the line of fire. In fact, the guy sitting in the middle with the white and blue shirt is likely this guy named Asika Roberts …
http://medialab.infobae.com/fotos-wp/files/2012/08/24_08_2012_Tiroteo_NY_006.jpg
Here is the video …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYWgrHwrlf8
TY Blade. It seems like the officers weren’t acting in concert and it’s easy to see how things could be confusing. Seems like the perpetrator was determined to have a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_cop ? How did they miss at all?
Between 7 and 11 seconds, Johnson turns and faces the officers w/o being shot? Literally an eternity. *AND* he points his weapon at the officers before they shoot? IMO,
it doesn’t seem like the officers say anything until Johnson turns on them. The fellow at the far end of the bench is oblivious until 8 seconds into the video. That would seem to be the likely time the officers verbally confront him.
Looking frame by frame, it doesn’t seem apparent that they know Johnson is the perpetrator until he pulls his weapon on them. No wonder it was so screwed up. Throw that in with the 12 pound trigger
http://www.bonzerwolf.com/today/2012/8/28/nypd-12-pound-trigger-contributed-to-empire-state-building-m.html
and things start to make sense.
Definitely not working in concert. There was a story in the Post that those two cops were not part of the pursuit at all but were stationed in front of the ESB all along and spotted the perp as he walked North up 5th.
The one cop that is leftmost in the video moves toward 5th avenue while the perp moves in toward the ESB, changing the angle so those people that ran from the bench were suddenly in the line of fire again. In fact the lady running out of the bottom of the frame also might have caught one.
I would say the close cop was at the reported 8 feet distance, but the other one was farther away at least 20 feet and at a different angle. Really no-one on 5th or on the sidewalk above the ESB was safe!
I still haven’t seen a story with the actual bullet count.
Arrrrgh! typed the opposite of what I meant!
I just now noticed something else. Watch the big flower pot that is in between the perp and the bench. It is hit at least once, possibly twice at 0:12. Those things are usually concrete, in fact post 9/11 there are a lot of bolted-down barriers around the “important” landmarks to stop cars that are disguised as planters. This would add to ricochet risk since they are impenetrable. It really is crazy for them to carry anything except hollow points given all the factors.
What is very odd is that no muzzle flashes seem to be picked up by the camera whatsoever.
There’s about 20 frames per second. I’m guessing the shutter speed (or digital equivalent) must be very fast on that camera.
You’d think that especially in NYC, that the NYPD would want to have officers have the right ammunition and weapon for fast and accurate close quarters firing.
I was right about the location. Here is Google Streetview of the exact spot (albeit an older picture).
You can click the fullscreen button ( 4 dotted square icon ) to really get in there. The sign, two flower pots and bench are in the middle. You can see the camera hanging off the building just above and to the right of the red sign. Swipe/drag left to look North and see the potential line of fire.
Swipe/drag right to look South and it helps clear up some things. That next street down is 33rd and it is where the perp popped out onto 5th avenue (where the google image is taken). He managed to walk almost the entire block north on 5th from 33rd to 34th until the cops stationed in the front door of the ESB spotted him.
Not a place to brandish a gun in a post 9/11 NYC.
Hello Blade
I still believe you’re too much into abstract territory.
I have already explained how the fate of death row inmates is ultimately in the hands of the State. I am advocating the abolition of death penalty precisely on the point of removing the power of life and death from the State. This is totally contrary to any American liberal theorizing, that is based on an ever-expanding role for the State. Perhaps I should back send the accusation of being liberal…
Your math too makes only sense in theory. In the real world there is no correlation between having or repealing the death penalty and the number of homicides and/or serial killers.
I have to jump in here…
“From 2001 to 2007, 12 academic studies were carried out in the US that examined the impact of the death penalty on local crime rates. They explored the hypothesis that as the potential cost of an action increases, so people are deterred from doing it. Nine out of twelve of the studies concluded that the death penalty saves lives. Some of their findings are stunning. Professors at Emory University determined that each execution deters an average of 18 murders. Another Emory study found that speeding up executions strengthens deterrence: for every 2.75 years cut from an inmate’s stay on death row, one murder would be prevented. Illinois has just voted to stop executions across the state. According to a University of Houston study, that could be a fatal mistake. It discovered that an earlier Illinois moratorium in 2000 encouraged 150 additional homicides in four years.”
150 innocents dead in 4 years, because the death penalty is on hold in one state. How many are you willing to sacrifice for your feelings? 50 states X 37.5/year = 1875 innocents dead per year. Now how many wrongful executions per year are you seeing?
I watched the author of one of these studies interviewed a couple of years ago, and to his credit, even though he is still opposed to the death penalty he readily admitted he was wrong about its efficacy. Innocents do not get executed, ever. The accused may not have been the actual trigger man, so to speak, but rest assured the rap sheet will be long and nasty. I have no pity for career criminals, who have the potential to become killers.
Gator – I think everybody on this site whose name is not David Appell knows that every published study on matters of public health and safety should be taken “with a pinch of salt”.
That is why I chose a quote citing twelve studies done over seven years, I do not cherry pick, so please do not start any straw man arguments here, Please acknowledge the fact that out of these many studies, 75% agree. So we have 25% salt already added. If we do not include academic studies we are left with nothing but noise and feelings.
The fact remains that we can show innocent after innocent who has been slaughtered by known and stoppable predators , while you have to my knowledge not submitted even one innocent who has been executed by the state (we the people, BTW).
And I have already explained several posts back that you are NOT “removing the power of life and death from the State.” You are in fact only removing the rarest, and most transparent and scrutinized avenue of state sponsored murder. What remains is the practically daily use of swat teams and other paramilitary operations which have no recourse or appeal. They happen instantly not over the course of 15 to 20 years of legal proceedings. And those actions would increase directly proportional to how many more criminals you return to the street.
I also explained in the last post that you are not really “removing” anything, you are just moving it from the courtroom to someone else’s backyard, or bedroom or prison cell. I also pointed out that mathematically you are not even necessarily subtracting a net body from the death column, and could be in fact increasing it if the perp kills several others along the way. This is almost like the static vs dynamic logic in action we see demonstrated by the climate crooks with AGW and sea-ice and temperature and other steady state environment theories..
Oh, and sorry if I pushed you into the liberal category, obviously I don’t know what you really are. You are advancing extremely popular but very tired American liberal clichés but I didn’t mean that you are one of them since I don’t even know where you are. Sometimes I interchange my “they’s” and “you’s”, in fact I do it often, even mid-paragraph, it is a lifelong curse of pronoun dyslexia but makes for interesting re-reading later.
You wouldn’t want to do that ( calling me a liberal, American sense ) because that would Tony Duncan level industrial strength stupid! 🙂 I am pretty sure I am as far from that as anyone can be so doing so that would mean your ammunition is completely spent and are reaching for spitballs and paperclips.
I disagree. This is a simple demonstrable examination of faulty logic. What I said above …
Put simply, if your logic allows stopping the death penalty so an innocent cannot be executed, how does your logic not allow supporting the death penalty so an escaped/commuted/paroled/pardoned/furloughed murderer or imprisoned lifer cannot kill again?
We do not have robot staffed prisons. They also can escape. They can be pardoned. You have to make your choice somewhere. You seem to choose to save the guilty murderer’s life in lieu of wrongly executing an innocent but will not acknowledge the potential deaths of innocents as a result of saving the guilty murderer’s life.
gator69 has shown some great statistics and there are many more. Firearm statistics are even more dramatically clear. But even without resorting to them I can give two more logical reasons why I know these arguments are wrong …
For one thing, given enough time humans tend to correct their mistakes because the brilliance or folly of something will become crystal clear over centuries and millennia. In the case of capital punishment, it has been with us for thousands of years and if it was a mistake we would have left it in the past long ago. If we were piling up mountains of dead falsely accused instead of deterring murdered innocents we would all have known and agreed by now. We humans were not born yesterday.
The other reason I know the liberal arguments are wrong is precisely because they come from liberals ( American sense ). There is no surer way to always be right ( and correct 🙂 ) than to always do precisely the opposite of what a liberal thinks or does. I don’t care what it sounds like, but the leftists are the enemy, it is in their DNA to be troublemakers and malcontents and their vision involves the destruction of a functioning and traditional society. And I have not even mentioned the fact that they are natural born criminals believing they have a right to take other people’s money. But I digress!