BREAKING NEWS – Mistrial declared in Michael Slager murder case…
I can’t say I would have voted differently. The perp was not entirely innocent, and it takes a second once you decide on lethal force to react to changing circumstances and de-escalate back to less-than-lethal force. The amygdala is funny that way. Once you go hyper-focused on shot placement in a life or death situation, you will not be as adept at big picture issues for a second or two.
But even beyond that, the left has made everything about brute force. It is a matter of time before we adopt their rules, and fight back by ignoring their sacred ideals purposely.
They insisted on forcing the idea that Michael Brown was an innocent young waif who was walking on the sidewalk when a cop approached him and killed him in cold blood as he held his hands up and tried to surrender. The evidence showed him in the cop car beating the cop, the video showed him manhandling some small shopkeeper, and social media showed a gangbanger, but they shoved that bullshit down our throat, and tried to make us swallow.
Now try to find a jury of twelve people that does not have a pissed off, fuck-you, alt-righter on it, who rejects everything the left alleges, and is willing to burn everything to the ground, to take the burden off the cops and make sure the left has no chance of ever prevailing.
[…] Michael Slager Gets A Mistrial […]
The left’s entire battle plan depends on fighting Bushie type schlubs who wear “kick me” signs.
I imagine there is no possible way they can adapt to the changing landscape quickly enough. Of course under r/K they never had that chance to begin with.
Ehh, I’m an alt-righter and Slager is pretty obviously a murderer. He shot him in the back as he was running away, and then lied about what happened (and in fact got his fellow officers to lie to cover him.)
He’s a rabid dog, so it’s time to put him down. They’ll retry him, do their jobs on jury selection this time (because this sounds like a juror that just won’t convict anyone) and he’ll go under the jail.
Walter Scott isn’t Michael Brown. Scott got shot in the back while running away for not paying pussy taxes.
I can understand though, how once you are in a fight, and make the call to go lethal, as you focus on the process of getting the gun up and placing the shots, there could be a second or two before you realize the lethal force justification has passed, and you then de-escalate. The amygdala is designed to focus on one thing. If it is focused on shooting, there will be a delay before it focuses on analyzing justification.
Not that he should be right out on the beat again. His brain didn’t make the transition the way you would want. But I would still be generous in understanding the situation.
Now, if the black guy hadn’t fought, and had just run, I would agree. But once you lay hands, most brains are not going to flow well from one process to another in that situation.
I do find it interesting the #blacklivesmatters assholes are seemingly ignoring this, where as they really come out in force on every pristine shoot of some ultra-scumbag. I have to think there is some strategy there.
I’ve got to agree with AC on this. When you train on something mechanical enough it becomes second nature. Changing a tire, shooting a gun, moving out of the way of a car. Doing it FAST you don’t really think you just do. Now training can take you to higher orders of ‘operation’ but really you are using the same part of your brain. Imagine if a Truck swerved towards you in a parking lot- how fast would you move, or try to move? Slager was using amydala. Now I can’t speak for why he lied or if his training could have been better but Scott should have known better, and that he wasn’t going to succeed in evasion. If Scott put his hands up it likely would have immediately stopped Slager from putting even one ounce of pressure on his trigger.
And what I’ve noticed about BLM is that they always pick the worst behaving blacks to support. It’s probably what Soros wants, feels natural to him. Rabbits backing rabbits.
AC,
You make good points, especially on the need for time to refocus.
My own points are 1) as a private citizen I can not shoot a man in the back if he has laid hands on me and is running away and not expect to be run through the legal ringer, and it is unlikely I would get the benefit of the doubt from a jury. Why should a policeman be held to a lesser standard then myself? These are supposed to be trained professionals. #2) wasn’t there a video of Slager moving a piece of evidence? I think he moved the taser closer to Scott’s fallen body. Why? Did he realize he screwed the pooch and had to make it look better?
Bottom line is to avoid contact with the machine, be the grey man, and be ready to go hot at a moments notice.
The thing is, when you are driving, distractions are deadly, because the amygdala focuses your brain . While you are fucking with the radio, your brain is absorbed with the radio. That knob and the station is all you’ll see, and all you will notice, right up until you rear end the stopped tractor trailer in front of you, at which point it may take a minute or two to realize what just happened.
My own take is this cop wasn’t a martial artist, was out of shape, and probably didn’t really know what he was doing in the fight. He almost loses his taser, and he knows if he gets tased and loses his gun, he may end up dead. Now he is worn out, about to lose the fight, panic enters, and his amygdala is all fucked up. He makes the call to go to lethal force, and now his amygdala is on the draw, sight picture, and firing mode. I suspect hypoxia may diminish the ability of the amygdala to multi-task as well.
So he goes to a step by step shooting procedure, and I think by the time he realizes he has lost justification, the guy has run twenty feet, and all the shots are gone. If you look at the video, he drew and fired the flurry of shots fast, and I think it was all one motion in his brain. When the draw began, the perp was right up against him, and just starts running. Bang bang bang bang bang, and the guy is fifteen feet away and down.
I do not think he would have fired if he was operating clearly, because what cop, knowing about forensics, puts bullets in a perp’s back, and that far away, even if he is a psycho killer? I think his amygdala was tunneled in the draw/sight-picture/shooting process, and failed to realize he shouldn’t have shot. It is possible that he moved the taser because as he looked at the thing afterward, he realized it wouldn’t look good.
Don’t forget that reaction time is such that if a guy is within 21 feet with a knife, he will stab you faster than you can draw and shoot him. In reverse, if you decide to draw and shoot, the reaction time to stop that process is probably similar, given you will notice the beginning of an attack when you are ready for it better than you will notice the cessation of an attack when you are not expecting it.
I tend to be prone to cut slack on something like this, given the totality. If you end up rolling on the ground with a cop, you are riling the cop’s brain, and you shouldn’t be surprised if he shoots. As for the cop, if this guy had just run, or if he was innocent, I would have no patience for it. But I can see the heat of the moment mixing with exhaustion and fear, and fucking him up mentally, and how that could produce the shoot, even if he wouldn’t want this while thinking rationally.
Now that said, clearly his days on the job should be over, because his brain did fail to make a good call. But locking him up, and throwing his family to the wind because this guy decided to try and wrestle his taser away seems extreme too.
Now as for you shooting a guy in the back, I personally think the Texas model is best, and I support it for everyone. If I was on your jury, and you were attacked and cleaned up the mess for everyone else as he tried to flee, I would have your back too.
But good advice in the end.
Increasingly I am us vs them, and all anti SJW. Until they get reasonable, I will be unreasonable and totally extreme too.
Negative. I rewatched it today. Scott already has his back to the Slager and is fleeing before Slager clears leather.
I remember going through the sequence contemporaneously, and I think it was here. The amygdala that I see is of a marginally competent cop who has lost three times. He lost control of the original stop, he lost control of the chase, and now he’s lost control of the fight at the end of the stop. His amygdala is in the highest gear, replaying all of the mistakes he’s made so far, at the stop, at the time he spent watching football instead of cardio, at the time he hit the bar instead of the dojo, about not calling for backup soon enough, all of it, and most importantly losing the fight to this bozo, and now this bozo is about to get away and there is only one way out of it for his amygdala, only one way to soothe the burn, and that is to kill the guy and make it Slager’s word against a corpse.
What kind of cop does it? A desperate cop who would rather kill someone outside his tribe than live with continued ridicule within it, who knows that if he just says the magic word, his tribe will overlook all but the hardest of evidence against his story, and back him up to the ends of the earth.
And if we hadn’t had the hardest of evidence — video of him shooting a man in the back as the man ran away — we would have gotten away with it already. The gears were already in motion when the video surfaced.
He knew about the forensics. He knew they would be a sham. That’s why he did it.
For the record, if you shoot a man in the back as he runs away in Texas, your ass is grass. Unless he has felony amounts of your property on his as he’s running and it is at night, you’re going to do the time. Texas juries will reliably convict for that. (On the other hand, if he’s still coming at you in virtually any manner, you can probably win the case. Just shoot him in the face and not the back.)
“He needed killing” is a valid defense in Texas, but unarmed men running away don’t need killing (yet).
I was thinking of the case where the neighbor ran outside and shot the guy who was robbing the house next door as he ran down the street. Although I think he did have an armful of property.
Yup:
1) arm full of property
2) at night
3) (what most people don’t know) plain-clothes detective in car as a witness that the guy was coming at the homeowner in his own yard when he shot him
The even better part was the race-baiter who tried to stage a march through the neighborhood and got run off when the entire neighborhood came out and got rowdy.
God bless Texas.
Thank you for your words of understanding regarding the difficulties of police work in America today.
It’s always rough when you lose your license to kill.
“…Walter Scott isn’t Michael Brown…” I agree. I believe he shot him because he was pissed off and didn’t want to run after him any more.
AC,
Thanks for the detailed response. My only disagreement with what you said is that I consider cops to be sjw’s. They may not be out and out sjw, however they are the enforcement arm of the biggest one of all, therefore I am inclined to hold them to strict standards. I admit that I am biased as I live in CA and get a front row seat to how big blue government works. My sympathy for gov’t workers is low.
All the cops I have known personally have been really good guys, and NOT SJWs, so I am naturally prone to cut them slack. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a bad department, but I think by and large most want to protect.
I can understand if you are in Cali a reflexive twitchy at the thought of any form of government, though.
My experience is the opposite — in the large metro Texas area that I’m in, the cops are rabbits through and through. None of them can keep a stable relationship, none of them are any good with money (they get a decent salary for the area despite the constant crying, and all work lucrative cash moonlighting jobs, and I still haven’t met one that wasn’t in massive debt), and about a third of the ones I’ve known were outright bullies, with the other two thirds covering for the bullies.
I have some kin who are small town cops in the northeast, and they are wolves, but they all married rabbits who have worn down their edges and taught them bad habits. I think that the cops will shift wolf quicker than most populations, but I think that they are rabbit through and through right now. Remember how vicious a literal rabbit is when it is dealing with a smaller rabbit.
Wow. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I’ve seen the exact opposite in the cops I crossed paths with. I get the impression they don’t even want to write tickets.
I’d imagine once the bullets are really flying, any rabbits will exit the forces quick, so I suppose there is that.
As for Slager, he doesn’t strike me as an angry guy, and he does strike me as just the type of guy who went out each day expecting to never have a violent encounter, so he never prepared, and then he got in over his head, and lost his ability to think. So I may be biased by my gut in assuming he got hyper-flustered, and then hyper-focused on the act of draw and fire.
But I will say, since looking at amygdala, I have noticed several times where I have tunneled, and hyper-focused on one mechanical act, to the exclusion of everything, only to realize after several seconds, I should have maintained a broader focus on the total environment. I mean I feel smart, but in those moments, I would have looked like a tool to an outside observer, and even I felt foolish. But I was just totally oblivious. And I have noticed sleep deprivation will predispose to it quite well.
If he did have that, I can sympathize, and I’d be inclined against destroying him.
That you referred to the left as acting with brute force struck a chord with me. I notice this all the time, the brutality with which people engage with each other. I am not referring to physical violence, or even verbal screaming, but a coarseness, a decided lack of genuine sensitivity. The genuine sensitivity of one human being respecting the emotions of another has been replaced with an overhwlemingly cloying falseness. The smiling vacuous salesperson we see in all the chain stores with a name tag is an example of this.
What goes on in the pubs and clubs, is brutal, coarse. The programs on television, whether right or left wing, show the same coarseness and brutality. The same lack of respect for people as people. In university, when some SJW is not shouting one down, even in a debate, the debate is less about working with another human being to arrive at the truth, but an attempt to dominate using logic and reason.
Perhaps Im wrong, this is just my own observation.
No, I agree, there is a detachment, particularly as you geto the left, and the only focus is amygdala-relaxation.