At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.
If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.
Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.
This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
I mean look at this one...
https://twitter.com/jayjanner/status/1267111893753307137
A large volume of misleading hyperbolic claims by a biased collector/poster don't get more meaningful through volume of posts.
Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation.
I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.
Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?
The police rule by fear. I’ve never broken the law and yet Im really affraid of cops in the US. I know I should not have a reason to but can’t help but be intimidated by their tactics, their orders, their demeanour. And I act like a scared ghost anytime I get stopped by them: I am afraid that if any answer I’d give them might make them punish me with one more more tickets.
2. Have you ever shot a gun? Have you ever shot a pistol? Now to simulate the Andrenaline dump run few sprints then try again. You CAN NOT shoot to disable this is not a Hollywood movie, it does not work. Most people can’t hit anything past few meters away with a pistol.
Gun is not a taser or a nightstick. It is a lethal weapon and should only be employed when you have a reason to kill.
Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes.
De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.
No, it's not that simple. Police escalation itself can put innocent people in harms way. The police can shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders. Escalation can provoke a criminal to start shooting and kill innocent bystanders or police. That's not to mention the now better-documented situations where the police escalate against someone who's not a threat and murder them in the process.
You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.
> You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.
There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unsourced) statistics. If you want to reason from statistics, they have to be measuring comparable situations, which yours are not. Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].
Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply. For instance, Philando Castile was armed, but clearly should not have been shot by police.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
> Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].
The question at play as I understood it is whether, being in a dangerous situation as a bystander, you should call the police knowing that they may respond with lethal force. If someone, even someone you know, is posing a threat to you, then the police pose much less of a threat by several orders of magnitude. Yes, police are imperfect and occasionally kill bystanders, but they kill less bystanders by far than people killed through criminal acts.
This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.
Which brings us to the Philando Castile case, in which he was not threatening anyone. He was stopped for a traffic incident.. not waving a firearm around, not because someone was panicking. The police officer who shot him was wrong, and that's why he was charged and faced trial.
> Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply
It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person. If we are interested in those cases where the police acted wrongfully instead of just those cases in which they acted at all, then that number is important. Yes, there are cases where someone armed is unjustly shot, those cases are obviously more rare.
[^2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...