California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool

They constantly get away with it too, i wonder what the stat is for the amount of cops that get put away for misconduct like this versus the ones that don't, it's gotta be like 1 out of every 10/100/1000 or something similar.

Edit: Ok, I read the article. Yeah, him charging at the cop with that tool was a really bad move. I still think the situation could have been handled differently. Could have.

Tasers, batons, or just run away. Diffuse the situation. Imagine a judge saying "You charged against a cop with a gardening tool? Sentenced to DEATH!"

The boy didn't get a fair trial. He was murdered with no justification.

As a father of a child with Autism I feel I am more than adequately equipped to respond to this.

I don't think many, if any, neurotypical people understand how Autism can impact a person's ability to process the world in a way that is deemed "normal". This child may not be verbal, may have aggression issues, may have a learning disability, etc.

The last thing that should have happened is someone pulling a gun.

I cry thinking something like this could happen with my son. All it takes is one bad interaction with someone who has absolutely no experience with Autism and this can happen.

For anyone reading this, do yourself a favour. Volunteer with autistic people. It could be at school or in the community but you all need to learn that Autism does not look like the doctor in The Good Doctor.

... So why didn't the officers just fucking leave the house?! There's no reason for them to stand their ground here. Retreat to safety and call for a crisis counselor and psychiatrist to come help. Call the boy's parents.

Fragile masculinity is why those pussy ass cops shot a kid. I hope it tortures them for the rest of their days. And I hope whenever they see a kid with autism from here on out, they're forced to realize what they've done.

In Canada (afaik) cops rarely kill anyone who is not wielding a gun, this includes people out of their minds on drugs wielding knives. They are usually able to disarm and subdue the suspect by non-lethal means.

The idea that a 15 year old kid running at a cop should be shot on sight is absolutely absurd and only normalized in the US, please reconsider your perspective.

All that said cops still fucking suck in Canada and have a history of being racists and abusive.

Father of an autistic teen here - very good chance that kid couldn't even begin to understand that the police gun would not only harm him, but kill him dead.

He possibly didn't understand or was too deep into an autistic meltdown (overstimulated fight or flight response) by that point to possibly comply with the commands from the officer, and (looking at my own son as an example) I doubt that he comprehended the seriousness of wielding such a weapon at the cop or at anyone.

My son knows he has to be careful with knives, and that he generally shouldn't touch them unsupervised.

Does he know he could hurt someone with it? Yes I think so.

Does he know it's even possible to stab someone to death with it? He doesn't even have a concept of "dead" vs "asleep" and has never witnessed a wound that couldn't be healed with a bandaid. Explaining these concepts in abstract is of very limited value with him.

They need to send more cops, and with nonlethals less lethals, and try harder not to kill these kids - many of whom exist in a world that almost entirely works in a way they don't understand, no matter how intelligent they may be otherwise.

Elijah McClain

Linden Cameron (not dead, but not for lack of trying)

Ryan Gainer

My list of "names of autistic kids shot or killed by cops" that I can list off without trying is slowly getting longer.

As I always say - I can't imagine more a of a nightmare than my son interacting with police while neither me nor my wife is present. I'd be less worried if he was playing in traffic. At least I can count on people driving down the street trying not to kill him. And that's really sad because I wish I could count on the help of police if ever he would need it.

He's also autistic and a pig shouting at him probably didn't even register as anything but a threat.

Yea sadly the kid was an aggressor here

But the cops should be using tazers or something non-lethal to deal with this kinda altercation

Too bad there aren't things cops could do other than murder when this sort of thing happens.

If only a cop had literally any other option to stop someone with a garden implement other than a gun.

Too bad guns are the only option to stop people....

Police in other countries are constantly able to non-lethally subdue people wielding knives. Do not normalize this reaction.

15 yo with a hoe, vs. 2 "trained", "fit" men with weapons specifically designed to kill instantly with a twitch of a finger.

Everywhere else in the world the kid would get a slap on the wrist, parents penalised, settled and sorted.

Sensationalist bullshit title from the guardian. Typical now. You can't just get unbiased news in many places. They all have to push an agenda.

I'll write that down as a "maybe".

This. I forget the court ruling, but there was one, that found you are legally allowed to defend yourself against a police officer who is not acting lawfully, up to and including killing the cop... But good luck surviving that long.

Sadly true

this says more about your subs than anything because i see a lot of socialists on here who cannot wait to tell me about their soviet pistol

I’m in the US and years ago a cop had to come by to put down a rabid raccoon that was wandering around. I jokingly asked him if he’d have a bunch of paperwork later for discharging his firearm (around houses to boot).

He did not seem to care, lol. I think he just gave me a “nah” or something.

And the reality we have now is a lot of dead citizens who didn't sign up to a job inherently involving danger. Is that a preferable situation?

I have been watching a ton of those channels lately. It’s interesting to see how things go down in the real world without a bunch of annoying editing and interruptions.

There are of course many cases where the cops give somebody a hundred chances to stand down or comply with orders or whatever. But there is probably also a strong bias in choosing the clips. These channels seem to heavily lean towards “criminal’s day went from bad to worse” or the opposite towards “idiot cop tries to arrest innocent person / does not know the law.”

Billy club, taser, or just a good old Sparta kick to the chest. If lethal force is your first instinct when a child comes at you with a stick, you should in no way be allowed to carry a weapon.

Are you aware there are countries all over the world where police don't resort to shooting children when situations become tense and potentially violent?

I have been assaulted in a very similar fashion, shovel, around same age, and I was also a teenager. I did not need or want a gun to diffuse the situation. And this officer had grown man strength.

You sure this was what set him off? You sure he didn't hear an acorn drop?

Either one can apparently trigger police officer Psycho Mode.

Yea, he could have reached for anything other than the gun tho.

I wonder why they don't shoot in less vital spots like legs or hands in cases like that. Distance seems to be small enough to precise shoot.

Are they undertrained or deliberately escalating?

PD as a broader category are racist because they will spend hours and risk gory death to avoid killing a mass shooter or a maniac with a hatchet but will shoot a black child on sight. My local PD's efforts to save the lunatic are actually commendable and just. I'm using that as an obvious contrast to behavior in situations like this one. Their commendable behavior proves that its entirely possible and reasonable to preserve life even in harrowing situations. The tragedy is that other cops as a group don't show the same bravery when a black child's life is in the balance.

Were you asleep for the last decade? We've seen over and over how people of color get treated by cops.

I think everyone else had that covered.

Having someone with mental health training would have been more appropriate. This kid was autistic and needed to be calmed down by someone who knows how to de-escalate a situation with an autistic person.

Instead he got a cop who only knows how to shoot people.

To a hammer every problem is a nail.

Wait, they don't?

In Germany every cop has to learn at least the basics of Jujutsu for exactly this reason. If you go to a jujutsu training as a civilian, usually more than half in the class are cops

I saw a video from the UK where a guy charged a cop with a knife and the cop just smacked it out of his hand with a baton and put him in handcuffs. Police in the UK only shoot two or three people each year, and the per capita injuries to the police are lower, seems like a better system.

Any decent martial arts instructor will tell you that if someone has a weapon, your best bet is to run. You can be a master of any art; if your opponent has a knife, you will get cut, or stabbed. It's almost impossible to disarm an aggressive attacker who has a knife without getting cut; unless you get lucky, it usually becomes a struggle to control the knife, and the person holding the handle gets cut up far less. Your martial arts training may allow you to eventually dominate the situation, disarm your attacker, and defeat your opponent -- but you're still going to get cut up in the process. If they have a gun, then all your training for is give you a slight chance of not getting shot, maybe, if everything goes perfectly. The only time things go like in the movies is in the movies. And cops aren't going to be martial arts masters; the best we could hope for for most of them is some basic submission technique, like the shit that murdered George Floyd.

Yes: cops should be getting focused time in de-escalation, but expecting cops to grapple with people, when they have no idea what weapons the person may have concealed in their bodies, or to expect them to perform some Steven Segal weapon disarming is unrealistic.

I agree with you, though; guns are not the answer, and I'm not sure I believe cops should even be armed - although, this is there US, and about 2% of the population goes around daily armed.

It's far less dangerous than a gun and ideal for melee opponents because cops can still maintain a certain amount of range. You didn't read the article, did you? The kid was approaching fast charging with the sharp end of a gardening tool over his head while being told to back off, I think there is no question that he was suffering a manic episode. There were a number of ways to deal with the situation, but before reaching for the gun they could have reached for the taser. Tasers are quite risky, yes, but less so than shooting several bullets in a residential zone at someone.

you don't call the cops on your own family lightly unless you really are an asshole... People don't call the cops on their family as a joke.

He was having a mental health crisis. But instead of being helped, he was executed by a full grown man afraid of a boy with a stick

Yeah. It sucks, but what did the family expect? They couldn't control him and as soon as the police arrived he charged them with a weapon. Shit situation, but an entirely justified shooting.

Since autism isn't an easily visible disability, almost no one will have sympathy. It's a sad truth.

I'm autistic, does that automatically make me an incompetent who can act with impunity because I can be impulsive? This logic only hurts the people you're pretending to help. Law doesn't care about intent except for sentencing.

Inside his house, you'd be right and the cop ran away. After he's outside, he sees it's a cop, and charges him in anger with a big pointy metal thing. Do you expect the cop to divine someone's psychological diagnosis? What if it's a brain tumor that makes him actively murderous? Is everyone in the walking dead committing murder by killing the poor zombies who cannot help themselves?

It was and will be ruled so when the investigation is complete. No one wants to see a 15 year old die, but it was clearly justified.

I'm on the spectrum aswell but I'm under no illusion that it's going to protect me from violence if I go around physically attacking other people.

I've seen plenty of clips where the cops are in the wrong. Idiot cops firing pistols by accident or shooting in the absence of imminent threat. And that's why I support body worn cameras and full disclosure. Is is also why I am extremely skeptical of newspapers jumping to conclusions in the absence of the footage. It is very easy for relatives of the deceased to decry the cops as racist, or trigger happy and it be reported as such. And then the footage comes out and it shows something completely different.

there was some footage floating around 4chan depicting someone running at the police officer brandishing a shovel

That's exactly right, release the footage and stop jumping to conclusions.

It's not a punishment. The cop was defending his own life from a legitimate threat. He could have done things better but this isn't the unjustifiable killing that people here are trying to make it be.

Yeah, the kid didn't have something dangerous like an acorn.

How should police have handled it?

The bodycam video shows the officer approaching with his gun holstered, drawing it while backing up, turning and trying to run away, while the kid quickly closes the distance and tries to strike the officer's face, head, and upper body with a long-handled tool.

How should the officer have handled this?

How would you have handled this?

If a random person were attacked in such a manner, is it possible that they could have lost an eye? Is it possible that they could have been permanently disfigured? Had their carotid artery severed and quickly bled out? Been knocked out?

Is it possible that a reasonable person could have reasonably believed this attacker posed a credible, criminal, imminent, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to an innocent person?

That's the beauty of it, police don't have to protect and serve in America. Courts made sure of that. Don't need to know the laws they're enforcing either. Just run an obstacle course and take a 40 hr course on killology - the idea that policing is the most dangerous job on the planet and everyone is trying to kill you at all times- and presto, they give you a gun, body armor, and protection from the legal and financial repercussions of your actions.

Plus, there's lots of networking opportunities with local white supremacist and christofascist organizations.

I can crack your skull with a single swing of a gardening hoe. It's hilariously unreasonable to expect police not to treat this as a lethal weapon. Look at the video; they're telling him to stop or they'll shoot and even turn around and start running away in order to avoid doing that.

Also the "kid" is a 15 year old adult sized man.

I have plenty of dangerous gardening tools in my shed.

The fact is, and point I was trying to make, we don't know what the tool was therefore, we can't draw conclusions about acceptable risk yet.

Protecting includes the family, the ones who called the police in the first place, from danger too.

I hear what you're saying, and black people are targeted disproportionally for these sorts of extra judicial killings, but there are plenty of videos of white people being executed by cops and also facing the same cushy "repercussions".

If minorities aren't safe then nobody is safe.

Some do carry batons, pepper spray, or tasers. All carry guns.

Some might be trained in deescalation. Some might be trained in "killology": https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html

Desecration is definitely not the right word but I'm having trouble inferring the one you meant to use. De-escalation perhaps?

FYI, tazers aren’t “non-lethal.”