Really look at it
More than 10 thousand shares on Facebook so far: Look at this picture:
Look at this picture. Really look at it. Look at the way the younger son holds onto his dad’s shirt with one hand and his dad’s thumb with the other. Look at how this father holds both of his older son’s hands in his. Look at how this father cradles his younger son’s tiny foot between his fingers. Look at the way their heads tilt towards each other. Look at their smiles. Keep looking. Don’t look away. Why? Because this father will never hold his children again. Because this father was shot twenty times in his grandmother’s backyard armed with nothing but an iPhone. Because this is why we must march and protest and resist and show up and shout from the rooftops that #BlackLivesMatter.
Those twenty shots represent both police officers emptying their pistols into someone. US police have a sickness, they are taught to be afraid of everything.
The trust on the face of that baby.
Violated forever.
#1
How many American police carry side arms with ONLY 10 round magazines? The various Glocks etc. that have become standard hold anything from 15 to 21. I remember that in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting, when the weapons involved were listed, a simple count should that every officer involved had emptied his gun into a dark doorway.
The switch to these high-capacity automatics, stuck in the hands of panicky, undertrained cops, is crazy. BUT…those police are in constant dread of running into ‘armed to the teeth’ gun nuts at any traffic stop.
John the Drunkard: This is all part of the NRA’s “Let’s you and him fight” con. They oppose gun restrictions, so it’s easy to supply guns even to the small segment of society that is ostensibly barred from having them (violent criminals, etc). Then they turn around and sell weapons to ‘law-abiding citizens’ for ‘self defense’. Then, because everyone else is so heavily armed, they go to the cops and say, “Hey, you need to upgrade your armaments to match what’s out there on the streets.” And then the militia-nuts see how heavily armed the cops are, and decide that Second Coming Day is almost on us, and up their own armament. At every step, the gun lobbyists make money for their masters.
As much as I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut: Given the willingness of American police officers to shoot unarmed and / or innocent black people – usually for no reason other than less-than 100% compliance and respect from the ‘suspects’, those who want to stay alive are now being hyper-cautious around the police, and I think we are seeing less of those tragedies.
However, racists gotta racist! The police have noticed greater compliance to orders from their uniformed or clearly identified officers, so is it a coincidence that in the case above, as well as the one last year in which a 16 year-old, pregnant girl was shot dead by the police, the police officers involved were not in uniform, and there is no evidence that they identified themselves as police?
In the case of the girl, she was in a car with her boyfriend when two men armed with the ubiquitous AR-15s jumped from an unmarked car and ran at the boyfriends car. Fearing ‘gangbangers’, the boyfriend tried to drive away and the officers opened fire.
From the reports I’ve seen, Clark was running from two non-uniformed men who followed him before pulling guns and telling him to stand still, again apparently without identifying themselves as police.
Is this the new trick? If the people comply with uniformed police officers, they go out plain-clothed and in un-marked vehicles, find a target, make the target think they’re about to be robbed or killed by gang members or run-of-the-mill criminals, and when they run, or better still, try to defend themselves, the officers can always claim afterwards, when the suspect is too dead to contradict them, that they absolutely, certainly identified themselves.