I just watched the bodycam of Sonya Massey's murder, and on top of how gallingly wrong her death was--and how many people live in fear of the police in the US & Canada for this reason--my heart just breaks for how often SOP in these cases seems to involve utter indifference to being *with* someone once they're wounded and down.
I'd like to think that if I ever accidentally caused a mortal wound, I'd at least have the integrity to be present with the victim in their last moments.
FFS.
@MLClark I keep going back and forth on watching it
The shooting itself happens quickly, and the version I watched blurred the victim - but it's the attitude of the officer and everything he says and does after that to me was more upsetting. I went back to watch the escalation, and that too was frustrating, because it was *so utterly avoidable*.
Everything around the split-second shooting speaks to how ill-prepared these people were for anything resembling proper de-escalation, & also how normalized passive response to officer error is.
@MLClark FJC. He was insulted. That's what did it. FFS
We might expand the statement to "it's wild how many people consider insulting them to be a crime punishable by violence."
Some jobs / social roles then give some of those people more institutional support for follow-through than others.
But I think we're surrounded by a lot more damaged people than we'd like to think - many of whom have disturbingly limited ideas of who does and does not deserve to live, let alone to live in peace. 🫂
@MLClark @tyghebright I never understand how these people can go through 4,5,6 previous police departments in a short time.. why hire them?
You know how some will leap to the defence of a person who's been called out for sexual offences?
I've had honest chats with a few dudes about that kneejerk reaction, and they tend to reduce to hoping someone would stand up for them, if they were accused of the same. Maybe they'd been in bad situations already, maybe they hadn't - but the offender looks enough like them that they're thinking "what if it WAS me?"
I suspect the same "Do Unto Others" is true for departments.
@tyghebright @MLClark Or just existing as LGBTQ. Especially T.