Imagine being woken up at 4am and told to get on the ground while you get arrested, treated like a criminal, threatened, have guns pointed at you and then told … sorry … wrong house … waddaygonnado
This is stuff you would expect in a third world country.
As a nurse, I have to verify your name and birthdate 27 times a day to make sure I don’t give you any medications that could kill you, but a cop is allowed to just assume. No triple checking verification of an address or person’s identity.
Cool. Totally makes sense 👍
I work in the finance industry and it’s similar. We have to be certain we’re talking to the right person as fraud is rampant. This is ridiculous.
But you guys get training to do what you do as efficiently and correctly at possible.
Police also get training … they spend about three quarters of their time training how to use a gun and look at the world as a place with nothing but suspects and criminals that are ready to kill them. Basically they are trained thugs to intimidate the public and keep people in line.
They are performing exactly how they were trained.
Now look at it another way:
How many police interactions didn’t go this way?
And conversely, how often does a nurse mess up and give someone a medication that could kill them, despite the training?
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that in any field, people are going to mess up, and the distribution is usually pretty standard across all fields.
So then the questions are:
- What is done to minimize the impact of someone messing up, and
- What is done to resolve things after someone messes up?
The perception is that the police are lacking in both 1 and 2; I’d be interested to know the reality.
When a nurse messes up … it may hurt a patient and possibly even kill them but it rarely happens
When an accountant messes up … the client ends up losing money, get in trouble with their taxes and in the most extreme rare cases might even lead to the death of someone
When a police officer is mostly only ever trained to deal with any problem with a firearm … when they mess up, they often severely hurt people and when it comes to guns is more likely to kill someone.
A nurses tools are mostly meant to heal people and only in large doses or in very unique doses or situations can it become deadly, in most situations, it takes a bit of effort for a nurse to kill someone
A financial professional would have to go insane and berserk to try to kill you with their bare hands … their ability to kill you is the same as any other random person you would encounter
A police officer has multiple weapons that they legally carry with them that can severely wound or kill someone very easily … namely, they legally carry guns, firearms, blunt weapons, tasers and potent pepper spray … all of which could kill someone if used in the right way … it’s far easy for an officer to kill you than anyone else
Agreed; now go back and read what I wrote instead of what you think I wrote.
and the distribution is usually pretty standard across all fields.
Citation needed.
You really think a highly trained and tightly controlled job like air traffic controller screws up at the same rate as the high school kids stacking crackers at the grocery store?
Yes, and no. The difference is that ATC has processes in place to mitigate the mistakes and others to recover from them as quickly as possible. End result is that most people will never notice.
On average, people’s brains don’t fully develop until 25, so teenagers are expected to make more mistakes.
But the distribution of people making mistakes appears to be relatively even, the difference being what the processes in place enable/prevent.
And I’m going to be lazy and not cite anything.
Then I guess there’s no reason for me to believe you aren’t talking out your ass.
- Basically nothing
- See 1.
On the other hand, if you think you’re dealing with a dangerous criminal that can pull out a gun and shoot you and a buddy dead in the time it takes your squad to react and shoot him dead, I don’t think it’s reasonable to politely ask to see three forms of ID before tying up the target just in case you got the wrong house.
Sure, it’s bad on them for getting the wrong place, but having to apologize to one person because they got the wrong house is far better than triple checking and asking the suspect to make sure they got the right place only to risk turning a quick one and done incident into a lethal shootout.
You don’t need to wake the house up to confirm the address.
I looked a bit closer at the article, and it said that the man was the one who came out of the building first, so the police wasn’t even storming the building yet when he showed up.
When you’re expecting an armed criminal, you think it’s better for the police to politely ask for the person’s ID to confirm that he has nothing to do with the operation, or remember that being within 7m of a man with a knife is being within killing range, and not take any unnecessary risks to their lives since they don’t know yet if he isn’t some armed criminal until they can safely examine him?
His own testimony states that the police hadn’t even started storming the building, so for all you know, they were in the middle of confirming they were at the right location when he suddenly came out face to face with the officers who were expecting a dangerous criminal.
Look a little closer at the article, the warrant was for a different address and the man was naked. It would’ve been extremely easy to confirm he wasn’t the right guy, and that he wasn’t armed.
Let’s say that it was the correct address and the police weren’t sexually harassing the man, why use tear gas when the guy that they believe to be the threat was already handcuffed on the ground?
He could’ve been packing an AR15 in his prison wallet
If you’re expecting an armed criminal, you’re already primed to do all sorts of stupid, violent, unhelpful things, so you’d better be extra fucking sure to apply the policies and procedures that are designed to keep you and everyone else safe in these tense, dangerous situations, and were written in the blood of officers and innocent victims.
You got some shoe polish on your chin. Lil’ smudge.
The police still had to arrive at the wrong address for him to come out to strange noises late at night on his property. I get how high risk take downs work but this kind of mistake should not be shrugged off and steps should be taken to determine if this can be prevented in the future as well as compensation for the victim.
ACAB, always and forever.
The problem is that we think it’s okay for police to treat criminals “like criminals”. That’s a euphemism for a whole lot of fucked up shit. Police owe us all the same professional and dilligent duty of care, whether they personally suspect us of committing a crime or not.
This is stuff you would expect in a third world country.
First world countries are those that are aligned with the USA in the cold war against the USSR. This is exactly what I would expect of a first world country.
