(July 10, 2016 at 6:59 am)ignoramus Wrote: I would like to explore how people subconsciously "profile" other people and come to the conclusions they do.
EG: with respect to the last shootings, did the police officer decide the person was an imminent threat to which he had to take lethal action?
What if the same black man was in a new BMW? Or wearing a suit? Or spoke eloquently? (and innocently still went for his license in his glove box when asked).
Would he still have been shot? Was this black man also a muslim? A potential Terrorist maybe? Did the police officer assess this?
So the officer quickly decided upon profiling the situation in all aspects (demographically, economically, racially, religiously) and decided that the "8 ball" said that if anybody is going to be a risk to your life, it is this man, right here, right now, or someone in his similar position.
Is this ultimately how they teach the police to assess a situation? By number crunching the odds?
What they can never teach you is that life is made up of so many layers, that you cannot easily and accurately determine the mental motives of a person at that moment by profiling them (statistical probability).
We all do it. We all subconsciously profile. But we don't kill people based on our conclusions.
If that police officer was not a psychopath, but genuinely believed that his life was in serious risk, then something has failed him.
Either his training, or the govt, or his job (overwork, underpaid, stressed, low morale, etc)
Thoughts? Can anything be done better at a systemic level? Or do you feel what happened was a byproduct of social tensions of the day?
From what the officer is saying is that he told the man to not reach for anything. Philando's girlfriend is saying the officer told Philando to get his license out of his pocket then shot him when he went into his pocket.
In either situation, it being the police officer giving faulty commands, or Philando not following the commands, it doesn't seem like it was an assessment. It seems like it was a spontaneous reaction to Philando reaching for something that the officer either thought he told him not to reach for or he had told him not to reach for.
There's something going around on websites about Philando vaguely matching the description of an armed robbery suspect who was a black male of a similar age who also had a handgun. I don't know how true that is.
From the video you can't tell if the officer approached the car with his gun drawn or if he drew it once he knew the man was armed or what happened at all before the shooting.
Sometimes I make a guess about what I think has happened but in this situation I wouldn't even like to guess.
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.
