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

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.

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.

... 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.

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

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.

To be fair Brooklyn 99 dunks on cops. Like a lot.

3rd Batman movie, the one that made even less sense than a superhero movie normally makes.

The entire plan depends on a fusion reactor acting like a fission bomb that Bane didn't even know was down there, Blackgate being moved within city limits after the events of the second movie for no clear reason, and a letter that again no one knew existed while the plan was being carried out.

Also if he broke Batman's back why not just kill him? Why give him a chance to escape?

Not really. It's just on these forums.

As soon as you go out into the real world, you'll see cops are people too and have about the same amount of respect as everyone else.

First you need to go out into the real world, though.

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.

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.”

kids a buck fifty soaking wet, looks all of 5'5 from the pictures, and the family wasn't helping. Did you kill all of those "15 year old thugs"? seems like we might have heard about you if you were as much of a coward as this cop

If I encounter a professional boxer in a bad mood, I would shit my pants. If another professional boxer encounters a professional boxer in a bad mood, they would shrug it off and deal with whatever happens.

Cops get trained. Being prepared for dangerous situations is essentially the core of their fucking job. Apparently, that preparation seems to be often simply "if shit gets ugly, shoot the shit out of whatever frightens you". Cops should be better at dealing with this than random citizens with a gun.

Wow, racism mixed with sexism and slutshaming. you can be really proud of yourself man. go get therapy.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.