Police unnecessarily kill a third black man this week, threaten to kill more [Greg Laden's Blog]

Police had cornered a murder suspect. There were negotiations and there was exchange of gunfire.

Normally this stand off would have been maintained as long as possible. The way these things end, usually, is that the suspect gives up, the suspect kills themselves, there is what the police would call a “fair” exchange of gunfire* and the suspect is wounded or killed, etc.

But the police had a new tool they could use to shorten the time span for such standoffs. They blew the suspect up with a bomb delivered specifically for that purpose. A robot drove over to the suspect, got the bomb near him, and blew him up.

This means that the police had a method of killing people that involved bombs ready to go. They would not think up a new technology and deploy it in a high profile case unless they already had a method of deploying it and a reasonably good idea it would work.

This was the Dallas police department. I would like to know how many different police departments have bombs designed to kill suspects ready to go. How many police departments have the robots at the ready, how many have been engaged in training programs. I would like to see copies of the protocols for using bombs to kill suspects, and I’d like to know which legal or legislative authorities have been involved in developing those protocols.

As far as I can tell, this is homicide. There were other ways to do this. There were no hostages being held. No one was being protected by killing this suspect at that time.

I’m also a little concerned that during the same incident, the sniper shooting of several police officers in Dallas, that at least one, possibly two, other people were arrested or detained but released because they were found not involved. So, by my count, there was a maximum of a 3 in 5 chance that the police correctly identified suspects in this incident. Are we pretty sure the suspect that was assassinated by the Dallas Police Department, using the bomb, was not just some wigged out dude that wanted to be thought of as a suspect? I doubt that is the case, but one normally determines these things by some sort of due process. This was not that.

As the events in Dallas unfolded last night, a police expert (former top cop guy of some kind) issued an explicit threat to all Americans. He said that given the assassination of several Dallas Police officers, police around the country were going to do two things.

First, they would double up or get into larger groups, so there would be fewer units to respond to calls, and maybe some reluctance to respond to certain calls. So, forget about the police doing their jobs. In many areas they already don’t do their jobs. But in the few places they were doing their jobs, perhaps expect this to become a thing of the past.

Second, he said they wold be much more trigger happy an more likely to kill when they do show up to do their jobs.

Essentially the police response to being the rare victim (instead of perpetrator, as the commonly are) of random killing of innocent people is to stop protecting people from such violence, and increase the amount of such violence that they themselves carry out.

So, that’s where we are at right now.

If you see a cop, avoid them. If yo are not white and you see a cop, really really avoid them. If you have a reason to call 911 other than a dire medical emergency, do not call. You may end up being responsible for someone getting killed, because when the cops show up, anyone around who is not white is at serious risk, and actually, everybody is at risk.

People are seeing the shooting of the Dallas cops as the most recent escalation in a very bad downward spiral of civilization. But it is not. The most recent escalation was the killing by the police of a suspect that they had cornered, using a robot and a bomb.

Expect worse.

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*According to several cops commenting on Dallas, a the only fair way to have a gun exchange with the cops is for the non-cop to stand in the open and only shoot at cops that are facing them.