Cop who "accidently" shot panhandler charged with misdemeano

[Raw Shark]

Anecdotal Evidence in support of non-tackling: One of our drivers at the company related an incident a couple months ago in which a drunk guy t-boned her, jumped and ran, and got tackled instead of tazed by a cop who witnessed the incident and shattered his kneecap on the curb in the process. The other cops beat the suspect so badly that the cab driver couldn't positively identify him (harming the case; way to go, you vindictive, bloodthirsty fucking retards) even though Officer McDumbass decided on his own to try to go all NFL on the guy, surprising absolutely no one of course, but that was probably small comfort to the one who was writhing on the ground screaming due to his own poor decision at the time.

[Simon_Jester]

Please spare me your incessant preaching. I'm not interested in debating the trials and tribulations of the downtrodden at the hands of police. I'm also not missing any point. A person who is subject to police abuse has my sympathy and outrage at how they were treated. A person who runs from the cops, and suffers injuries/tazing does not - particularly when they were in fact criminals.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but...

You're prepared to ignore the way that the tone of police interactions with civilians makes police brutality (like wrongful shootings, let's remember that the suspect in this case was shot) more likely.

In that case, you are entirely missing the point, and the reason stories like this keep appearing in endless waves.

The tendency of the police to aggressively confront and pursue anyone and everyone they deem suspicious is one part of the problem. Because if you look at the original post there's one important thing missing: there is no mention of Butts having actually committed a crime in this case.

The original article takes pains to note that Butts has a criminal record, but doesn't claim he was actually doing anything illegal at the time of the shooting. Panhandling is not, in and of itself, a crime.

Now, there was a warrant out for him over an allegation by a probation officer that he'd violated the terms of his parole. One hopes he'd been informed of the fact, but I am assuming nothing. One might argue that the warrant out for his arrest means that he was acting illegally simply by standing around in public... But at the same time, we have very little information on what Butts knew and when he knew it.

To me, it's curious how the police didn't bother to bring him in for a warrant issued in 2013, given that his identity is apparently well known to many, including the officer who shot him. It's not like he'd skipped town or anything.

So apparently he wasn't enough of a risk to justify any policemen actually taking time out to locate him, his fiance, his family, or any of the other people in Springfield, Missouri who apparently knew him on sight. For six months.

And yet once someone spotted him panhandling and said "hey, police, it's that guy," the need to arrest this mentally disabled unarmed man was urgent enough to justify electrocuting him. And to greatly mitigate the fact that he was, y'know, SHOT IN THE BACK.

So now, in addition to being an underemployed mentally disabled panhandler, he shits in a colostomy bag. Joy.

---

And this sort of thing is why I'm accusing you of missing a point. That this kind of thing happens quite often. It happens to petty criminals. It happens to innocent people mistaken for petty criminals. The excessive zeal, the excessive use of force, the reluctance of the system to apologize (which here they are doing, to their credit, but even here a misdemeanor seems disproportionate to the nature of the offense committed against Butts).

And the attitude that certain people are just plain criminal scum who have no reasonable expectation that the police will deal with them in a forthright manner. Say, actually bothering to show up to arrest them when there's an outstanding warrant and they have (as far as I can tell) a job and a fixed address and have been living there for some time.

And likewise, no reasonable expectation that the police will restrain themselves from excessive use of force (say, by not shooting them in the back, or by not beating them bloody in the case Raw Shark mentioned).

[Raw Shark]

[snip] And likewise, no reasonable expectation that the police will restrain themselves from excessive use of force (say, by not shooting them in the back, or by not beating them bloody in the case Raw Shark mentioned).

I would be honestly shocked if they hadn't beaten the guy into a pulp after one of them broke a kneecap chasing him down. They reacted the way a crack gang would if you walked up and smashed one of them in the knee with a baseball bat, with too many witnesses to shoot you in the face but a definite need to send a loud and clear message not just to you, but to everybody who sees you and can barely recognize you for a month or two, and we've come to expect that around here.

[TheHammer]

Please spare me your incessant preaching. I'm not interested in debating the trials and tribulations of the downtrodden at the hands of police. I'm also not missing any point. A person who is subject to police abuse has my sympathy and outrage at how they were treated. A person who runs from the cops, and suffers injuries/tazing does not - particularly when they were in fact criminals.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but...

You're prepared to ignore the way that the tone of police interactions with civilians makes police brutality (like wrongful shootings, let's remember that the suspect in this case was shot) more likely.

In that case, you are entirely missing the point, and the reason stories like this keep appearing in endless waves.

The reason this is a story is BECAUSE he was shot rather than tazed. And I'm not excusing the officers behavior in this instance, nor do I buy his story that he "accidentally pulled his gun instead of his tazer". He is either lying, or incompetent and should certainly not be allowed to remain on the force in addition to whatever criminal penalties he would suffer. All I've said is that had Butts been Tazed then I believe everything would have been done more or less "by the book" in this case.

The tendency of the police to aggressively confront and pursue anyone and everyone they deem suspicious is one part of the problem. Because if you look at the original post there's one important thing missing: there is no mention of Butts having actually committed a crime in this case.

What a dumb statement to make in light of your next paragraph where you admit that yes he did have a warrant out for parole violation, and that he had already done something illegal to warrant being arrested.

The original article takes pains to note that Butts has a criminal record, but doesn't claim he was actually doing anything illegal at the time of the shooting. Panhandling is not, in and of itself, a crime.

Now, there was a warrant out for him over an allegation by a probation officer that he'd violated the terms of his parole. One hopes he'd been informed of the fact, but I am assuming nothing. One might argue that the warrant out for his arrest means that he was acting illegally simply by standing around in public... But at the same time, we have very little information on what Butts knew and when he knew it.

He ran from the cop, therefore he must have felt he was going to be arrested. Again, its not like he'd never been in trouble with the law before. As you noted, "pan handling" isn't the crime, he just happened to be doing it when the officer spotted him. He could just have easily been shopping, sitting in a bar, whatever. If Butts happened to think he was being arrested for "pan handling" and ran for that reason, well tough shit.

To me, it's curious how the police didn't bother to bring him in for a warrant issued in 2013, given that his identity is apparently well known to many, including the officer who shot him. It's not like he'd skipped town or anything.

So apparently he wasn't enough of a risk to justify any policemen actually taking time out to locate him, his fiance, his family, or any of the other people in Springfield, Missouri who apparently knew him on sight. For six months.

Just because they hadn't issued a manhunt for him, set up roadblocks, or conducted house to house searches doesn't mean they weren't looking to apprehend him. The officer spotted him, knew him, was aware there was a warrant for his arrest and attempted to do that when Butts ran. Up until he shot him in the back the officer had done everything right.

And yet once someone spotted him panhandling and said "hey, police, it's that guy," the need to arrest this mentally disabled unarmed man was urgent enough to justify electrocuting him. And to greatly mitigate the fact that he was, y'know, SHOT IN THE BACK.

So now, in addition to being an underemployed mentally disabled panhandler, he shits in a colostomy bag. Joy.

Yeah I think we pretty much agree that the shooting in the back thing was the wrong thing for the officer to do. Had he been tazed this doesn't even make the news. Nor would he have been "electrocuted" had he been tazed. Your gift for hyperbole is astounding.

And this sort of thing is why I'm accusing you of missing a point. That this kind of thing happens quite often. It happens to petty criminals. It happens to innocent people mistaken for petty criminals. The excessive zeal, the excessive use of force, the reluctance of the system to apologize (which here they are doing, to their credit, but even here a misdemeanor seems disproportionate to the nature of the offense committed against Butts).

I'm not arguing that abuse doesn't occur, a prominent example of that abuse can be found right here. I'm arguing that in this case the use of a tazer would have been justified and A-OK with me. You apparently are trying to draw some sort of blanket generalization, when I'm looking at a specific case for someone who was a known criminal, with a history of making threats and in general being an asshole.

http://www.news-leader.com/story/news/l ... t/8998881/

...
Butts' family members have stressed that Butts is mentally disabled. His neighbors along Monroe Terrace in Springfield have complained about him being disruptive and threatening and say he has often been the subject of complaints to police.
...

I'm not saying he deserved to be shot, but he wasn't innocent, or mistaken for someone else.

And the attitude that certain people are just plain criminal scum who have no reasonable expectation that the police will deal with them in a forthright manner. Say, actually bothering to show up to arrest them when there's an outstanding warrant and they have (as far as I can tell) a job and a fixed address and have been living there for some time.

And likewise, no reasonable expectation that the police will restrain themselves from excessive use of force (say, by not shooting them in the back, or by not beating them bloody in the case Raw Shark mentioned).

Look, I don't know all of the arrest procedures in cases where a warrant was issued. But what does it matter if he is at his home or his place of employment, or out on the street when an arrest attempt is made? Why wouldn't he simply run at those other instances as well if the policy is just to let fleeing suspects go? Use of a tazer against a resisting suspect is legitimate in my eyes.

No one is arguing that shooting wasn't excessive force, nor that the cop should be given a pass in this situation. So your repeated circle back to that aspect is pretty much a waste of space in these posts.

[General Zod]

I'm not saying he deserved to be shot, but he wasn't innocent, or mistaken for someone else.

Here's the lynchpin. If he didn't deserve to be shot, then what do the other parts matter?

[Darmalus]

I'm not saying he deserved to be shot, but he wasn't innocent, or mistaken for someone else.

Here's the lynchpin. If he didn't deserve to be shot, then what do the other parts matter?

Its the difference between excessive use of deadly force and gunning down a random person, a partial screw-up versus a complete screw-up.

[TheHammer]

I'm not saying he deserved to be shot, but he wasn't innocent, or mistaken for someone else.

Here's the lynchpin. If he didn't deserve to be shot, then what do the other parts matter?

If you've been following along, the whole thing was sparked because I felt that had he been merely tazed that it would have been ok. Simon et al decided to take exception to that for some reason.

[Simon_Jester]

[snip] And likewise, no reasonable expectation that the police will restrain themselves from excessive use of force (say, by not shooting them in the back, or by not beating them bloody in the case Raw Shark mentioned).

I would be honestly shocked if they hadn't beaten the guy into a pulp after one of them broke a kneecap chasing him down. They reacted the way a crack gang would if you walked up and smashed one of them in the knee with a baseball bat, with too many witnesses to shoot you in the face but a definite need to send a loud and clear message not just to you, but to everybody who sees you and can barely recognize you for a month or two, and we've come to expect that around here.

Yeah.

This is pretty much what I'm getting at: when it comes to avenging themselves in this way, the police are acting like 'just another gang.' And if they somehow screw up while pursuing you, you subhuman filth, that is your responsibility. Not an accident, not their responsibility, yours. And they assign responsibility by beating you into a pulp.

Basically, the mindset is that there are three kinds of people in the world: police, citizens (who deserve respect) and filth. Filth have no honor, no rights, no standing, and no cause to complain no matter what happens to them.

The biggest single reason this attitude is a problem (and there are many) is how easy it is to go from being 'citizen' to being 'filth' in the eyes of someone who thinks this way. Changing the way you dress, or losing your job, or an undercover cop mistakenly thinking you're rolling a joint, or walking through the wrong neighborhood, or standing still in front of your own home, or breathing while black or Hispanic... all these things can turn you from being a citizen into being filth, no matter what the Constitution says.

Which is a very toxic environment, and I would argue that it crosses the line between 'law enforcement' and 'state terrorism.'

This is related though perhaps not 100% related:

http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/how- ... ry-thomas/

The reason this is a story is BECAUSE he was shot rather than tazed. And I'm not excusing the officers behavior in this instance, nor do I buy his story that he "accidentally pulled his gun instead of his tazer". He is either lying, or incompetent and should certainly not be allowed to remain on the force in addition to whatever criminal penalties he would suffer. All I've said is that had Butts been Tazed then I believe everything would have been done more or less "by the book" in this case.

The question is, did this officer shoot Butts because he's a homicidal maniac acting on impulses that exist only in his own brain? I doubt it; by all indications I've seen his record is otherwise good- he acts like a perfectly normal cop at other times. Maybe even a little better than average; he's received at least one commendation.

So is the problem that this particular cop turns into a liar/lunatic/whatever on the night of the full moon? Or is the problem something that could be affecting many cops, in many places, in their interactions with many people? The fact that mistaken police shootings keep happening all over the place, along with various other forms of brutality and trigger-happiness, suggest that we have a widespread problem, affecting a noticeable percentage of all cops.

To make an analogy, when one person falls over dead in the middle of the street we assume it's a fluke. If one person falls over dead in the street every day under similar circumstances, we begin to suspect an underlying cause that needs to be addressed. At some point it's not just a coincidence, and I think one has to be willfully obtuse to recognize that there's more than coincidence behind 'police get brutal' stories in America today.

The tendency of the police to aggressively confront and pursue anyone and everyone they deem suspicious is one part of the problem. Because if you look at the original post there's one important thing missing: there is no mention of Butts having actually committed a crime in this case.

What a dumb statement to make in light of your next paragraph where you admit that yes he did have a warrant out for parole violation, and that he had already done something illegal to warrant being arrested.

What I mean is, he had not committed a specific crime other than still being walking around. He wasn't told to stop and reeled in by police because he'd stolen someone's property, or because harassing passersby. He was just... there.

There was a longstanding (six to eighteen months old) warrant out for him, for precisely what reasons we may never know*. However, he was not committing a breach of the peace, was not wronging or harming any specific person. If, for whatever reasons, this mentally disabled man thought he had a right to be out in public at all, he might reasonably ask "what did I do wrong?"

Granted, the appropriate response is "what are you, stupid? There's a warrant out for your arrest!" But the answer to that question is "Yes, yes he is stupid." Breathing while stupid is not in itself a crime. And if arresting this man is important enough to justify hitting him with a tazer, I'd think it's important enough to justify knocking on his door or coming for him at work. When the police get around to it. You know, some time less than six months after the warrant is issued.

*Seriously, this could matter. What terms of his probation/parole did he violate? Did he commit an administrative offense like failing to show up for a meeting? Did he commit something we normally think of as a crime like vandalism or theft? Did he simply tick off his parole officer, causing him to decide to reel him back in? This might impact both the reason why the city of Springfield didn't serve the warrant, and whether or not it is justified to serve the warrant against him in a violent way.

He ran from the cop, therefore he must have felt he was going to be arrested. Again, its not like he'd never been in trouble with the law before. As you noted, "pan handling" isn't the crime, he just happened to be doing it when the officer spotted him. He could just have easily been shopping, sitting in a bar, whatever. If Butts happened to think he was being arrested for "pan handling" and ran for that reason, well tough shit.

What if Butts is simply afraid of policemen? For all I know, he's been beaten by policemen in the past, either when he was committing a crime, or at entirely different times when he wasn't. A lot of Americans are afraid of the police these days, and a lot of Americans have gotten unjustly arrested or roughed up by them.

Certainly Butts has excellent reason to be afraid of the police now. I imagine his desire to run from them is even greater- except, perhaps, that he's learned the lesson that expressing your fear of police gets you shot in the back, so it's better to stand there like a deer in the headlights.

Which is great if all we value is compliance with the police. Terror is a great way to get compliance. It does, however, present other problems when we use it as a motivator for a large chunk of our nation and people.

Just because they hadn't issued a manhunt for him, set up roadblocks, or conducted house to house searches doesn't mean they weren't looking to apprehend him. The officer spotted him, knew him, was aware there was a warrant for his arrest and attempted to do that when Butts ran. Up until he shot him in the back the officer had done everything right.

My question is, were ANY efforts made to locate Butts?

Because it entirely defeats the purpose of issuing a warrant if the police aren't going to so much as ask around to figure out where he is. I mean, for crying out loud he had a job, is it that hard to call up whoever handles local income taxes and ask if there's someone by the name of Eric Butts working in town?

Maybe it is- in which case that's a problem in its own right. It should be easy for police to find people who have jobs and live at a fixed address, for a lot of reasons.

Maybe Butts was taking serious steps to 'go underground' and hide from the police- in which case that does affect my perception of the case, but I've seen no evidence of anything other than a spinal-reflex fear of cops on his part.

Or maybe following up on this warrant wasn't a high priority for the Springfield police. In which case, in my opinion, that raises issues that fall under the Sixth Amendment. How can you have a right to a "speedy trial" when a warrant goes out for your arrest and the police don't even bother following up? If people with warrants out for their arrest can just live in an area for a year at a time and nobody shows up to arrest them, perhaps we should take some of that antiterrorism and antidrug funding and use it to hire police to serve more warrants.

Rather than just waiting for a warrant to be served haphazardly.

Yeah I think we pretty much agree that the shooting in the back thing was the wrong thing for the officer to do. Had he been tazed this doesn't even make the news. Nor would he have been "electrocuted" had he been tazed. Your gift for hyperbole is astounding.

Hm. I'm sorry, you're right. "Electrocution" applies only to lethal electric shocks. I apologize sincerely, I thought it also applied to nonlethal shocks- that a person counted as "electrocuted" if you hit them with ten thousand volts and they didn't die, too.

Thank you for educating me on that.

And yes, this wouldn't have made the news if he'd been hit with a tazer instead of a bullet. That doesn't mean there isn't something wrong. The key issue then, for me, would be that while Butts is dangerous and important enough that the use of force is justified to make him stop running away from a policeman, no policeman seems to have put in much effort to find him earlier.

That suggests that either:

1) The Springfield police don't consider it important to detain this man, in which case their using violence to subdue him when he's not threatening anyone isn't a just action. Or...

2) The Springfield police are taking so long to serve warrants in an orderly fashion that it infringes on the right to a speedy trial. Even against people who really should be locatable with a bit of due diligence.

For all we know, Butts never even found out there WAS a warrant for his arrest, although I suspect otherwise. There's precedent; all sorts of legally important information (like court appointments) can go astray that way.

I'm not saying he [Butts] deserved to be shot, but he wasn't innocent, or mistaken for someone else.

I agree. I think that, since there was a warrant for his arrest, he should have been arrested in an orderly fashion- say, by a couple of officers going to the known address(es) where he could be found, in response to one or more of the complaints against him.

He should not have been able to walk around free and clear for a year or so, possibly beginning to wonder in his beady little brain whether he was actually in trouble or not at all, until someone randomly reports him in a parking lot a quarter mile from his (known) home address for doing something that is NOT illegal.

One important quality of justice is that it is consistent, and another is that the agents of the law are willing to work to enforce those laws in an appropriate, consistent fashion. The way the Butts case was handled even before that gunshot offends my sense of propriety and consistency.

And the lack of consistency and propriety contributes to the atmosphere of terror I'm talking about above. You get criminals who view the police as, essentially, a bigger gang, one that can fuck you up with legal impunity. Their families also view the police as a bigger gang. So do their neighbors. Keep it up long enough and you don't have police anymore, you have oprichniki.

Sure, they're still unleashing all the beatings and abuse and terror on 'enemies of the state'- on criminal elements and undesirables. That doesn't mean they're a good thing to have around.

Look, I don't know all of the arrest procedures in cases where a warrant was issued. But what does it matter if he is at his home or his place of employment, or out on the street when an arrest attempt is made? Why wouldn't he simply run at those other instances as well if the policy is just to let fleeing suspects go? Use of a tazer against a resisting suspect is legitimate in my eyes.

My point is that there is a contradiction between saying "we can use tazers on him even when he's not a threat, in order to secure compliance and arrest him" and "we can't be assed to bring this guy in until some time next year, and even then we're only doing it because we happened to get a tip off that he was panhandling in front of a Wal-Mart."

Tazers hurt. If it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it's worth doing a little legwork and making a few phone calls to bring them in six months sooner. And yes, if he ran or resisted as a result of the arrest attempt that happened at his home or workplace, it would be totally fair to taze him, or even shoot him if he posed a threat to the officer's safety.

But again, if it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it should be worth placing a few phone calls to see if he can be found and arrested promptly.

[Geminon]

I'm going to avoid all of the questions regarding brutality or appropriateness of methods of arrest or the 'blue wall' and limit myself to the 'mistaken' use of the service pistol instead of the taser. I believe it is entirely possible that the officer really did mean to deploy/employ/draw his taser and not his pistol. Because I don't know the officers service record or training, I can only make generalizations.

In general, pistols, even fully loaded, are actually relatively light. A fully loaded Glock 19 is 2 pounds. A one litre bottle of water weighs more. A taser weighs about half a pound. While that is certainly easily discernible in the hand in a calm, stress free environment, is it noticeable when you're amped up with adrenaline? In my personal experience, I can't make that differentiation when I'm stressed. 2 pounds just isn't heavy enough for me to register when I'm pumped up, and that is from athletics and recreational pursuits.

In addition, if the officer only ever trains in drawing his pistol from his holster on his right hip, raising his weapon and firing when he acquires his sight alignment/sight picture, it is entirely possible to do that while consciously thinking "I need to tase this fleeing suspect." Because he is building a single set of actions into a default motion, that is what he is most likely to do when he feels under threat. If the department doesn't strenuously train its officers in deciding to use their tasers, drawing the taser and then discharging it, that isn't what the officer is going to do. A quick google search gives me prices around $25 each for training cartridges for the taser. Assuming that the department only spends even fifteen dollars for each cartridge, that's a lot of budget getting used up for each training firing. Bullets are pennies each in bulk. You can fire a hundred of rounds of ball ammo for the cost of one taser cartridge.

In short, budgetary constraints that lead to training issues can lead to accidental shootings. If the taser training course is mostly book work about use of force, with a bit of weapon familiarization and "here, you get to fire this one cartridge to see what it feels like", they are creating a force of officers that are almost bound to screw up at some point.

Is that what happened in this case? Damned if I know. Could it be a factor? Sure. Generally, why assume malice when incompetence is just as likely?

[Thanas]

If you are too stupid to check what you just drew on a guy who is running away when you are not in any danger then you don't deserve to be a cop anyway.

[Geminon]

If you are too stupid to check what you just drew on a guy who is running away when you are not in any danger then you don't deserve to be a cop anyway.

I won't deny that. My point boiled down to only that incompetence is at least as likely as malice, nothing more.

[Thanas]

Yeah but that's the kind of incompetence that is punishable as a felony in most European states. It boggles the mind that there is not even talk of the guy losing his job over this.

[TheHammer]

*droning on and on before finally coming to the crux of the matter*

My point is that there is a contradiction between saying "we can use tazers on him even when he's not a threat, in order to secure compliance and arrest him" and "we can't be assed to bring this guy in until some time next year, and even then we're only doing it because we happened to get a tip off that he was panhandling in front of a Wal-Mart."

Tazers hurt. If it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it's worth doing a little legwork and making a few phone calls to bring them in six months sooner. And yes, if he ran or resisted as a result of the arrest attempt that happened at his home or workplace, it would be totally fair to taze him, or even shoot him if he posed a threat to the officer's safety.

But again, if it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it should be worth placing a few phone calls to see if he can be found and arrested promptly

You keep wanting to argue some larger point that I have no interest in debating. There may well be a large scale problem with abuse, or training. But that's beyond the scope of what I'm arguing.

I bolded the relevant portion of your response above. If you concede it would be "fair to taze him" should he attempt to flee officers when confronted at his home or work place, why give some special consideration because he was confronted in a Walmart parking lot? Why does it matter that it took that long for them to have the opportunity to arrest him? Maybe he'd evaded police in earlier attempts. Maybe they didn't have the resources to stake out his home and place of business (perhaps he did odd jobs that made such a thing impossible to begin with).

The bottom line is that the police had legitimate cause to arrest him, and rather than comply and go peacefully he tried to get away. The mistake the officer made was in drawing his gun instead of his tazer - an inexcusable mistake mind you - but that doesn't invalidate everything that lead up to it. What I'm saying, and all I'm saying is that had Butts been tazed it would have been completely justified given the circumstances. Its the sort of situation a tazer was designed for.

Yeah but that's the kind of incompetence that is punishable as a felony in most European states. It boggles the mind that there is not even talk of the guy losing his job over this.

Agreed. In all honesty, I expect he will probably lose his job, but on the other hand I wouldn't be totally surprised to see him keep it.

[Simon_Jester]

I get that you have no interest in the question of "Is modern policing lending itself to this kind of ham-handed whack-a-mole approach, where instead of orderly, speedy efforts by police to restrain dangerous criminals, people are declared persona non grata by virtue of a warrant that isn't worth their time to enforce, until it entails the suspect actually defying a cop to his face, at which point it becomes proper to cattle-prod them into submission?"

That is why I'm accusing you of missing the point.

Because that's the unified point that arises from surveying all these police abuse threads. The fundamental accusation here is that these are not isolated incidents. That there is a pattern which connects a man being beaten bloody because someone broke his knee chasing him, and another man being beaten into a pulp for resembling a suspect, and another man being accidentally shot in the back when he was only supposed to be tazed in the back, and that same man not being actually arrested within a 6-18 month period of when the warrant for his arrest was issued despite having a known and presumably easily found address.

There's a pattern here. Which is that a certain vein within American policing is becoming thuggish and counterproductive. It's using an escalating level of violence to enforce compliance on a population that no longer sees any advantage in cooperating with police.

And that at its core, all this is caused by a single unifying idea: that citizens have rights, scum don't. And the way to patrol and 'keep the peace' in society is to constantly run around beating and harassing the 'scum' while being too terrifying for those 'scum' to resist. Not just to physically resist, but to resist by legal procedure either; I could speak more of that if need be.

And in this case, the act that seems to have caused Butts to cross the line between 'citizen' who didn't need any special attention despite the warrant out for his arrest (which could be safely ignored for months as far as I can tell) and 'scum' who did need such attention appears to have been... the act of panhandling. Which is kind of a disturbing subtext if you ask me: this guy isn't worth sending a squad car to his place of work or his home, even if his neighbors are complaining about him... but suddenly he IS worth tazing and arresting just as soon as he starts panhandling.

It shouldn't surprise me that you miss this point, because the idea that not everyone actually has rights, and that rights are a matter of degree where certain classes get more of them than others, is something you've adhered to in the past.

[TheHammer]

I get that you have no interest in the question of "Is modern policing lending itself to this kind of ham-handed whack-a-mole approach, where instead of orderly, speedy efforts by police to restrain dangerous criminals, people are declared persona non grata by virtue of a warrant that isn't worth their time to enforce, until it entails the suspect actually defying a cop to his face, at which point it becomes proper to cattle-prod them into submission?"

That is why I'm accusing you of missing the point.

Because that's the unified point that arises from surveying all these police abuse threads. The fundamental accusation here is that these are not isolated incidents. That there is a pattern which connects a man being beaten bloody because someone broke his knee chasing him, and another man being beaten into a pulp for resembling a suspect, and another man being accidentally shot in the back when he was only supposed to be tazed in the back, and that same man not being actually arrested within a 6-18 month period of when the warrant for his arrest was issued despite having a known and presumably easily found address.

Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems? The one failing to grasp the point is you for the sake of scoring cheap political points. If you want to discuss some sort of larger police issue, please feel free to start a thread on the matter. I honestly don't understand why you wish to continue to belabor (in your typical long winded fashion) on this particular case when it is actually pretty clear cut, and you've all but conceded that had he been tazed it would have been a non story.

There's a pattern here. Which is that a certain vein within American policing is becoming thuggish and counterproductive. It's using an escalating level of violence to enforce compliance on a population that no longer sees any advantage in cooperating with police.

And that at its core, all this is caused by a single unifying idea: that citizens have rights, scum don't. And the way to patrol and 'keep the peace' in society is to constantly run around beating and harassing the 'scum' while being too terrifying for those 'scum' to resist. Not just to physically resist, but to resist by legal procedure either; I could speak more of that if need be.

Again, Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems?

And in this case, the act that seems to have caused Butts to cross the line between 'citizen' who didn't need any special attention despite the warrant out for his arrest (which could be safely ignored for months as far as I can tell) and 'scum' who did need such attention appears to have been... the act of panhandling. Which is kind of a disturbing subtext if you ask me: this guy isn't worth sending a squad car to his place of work or his home, even if his neighbors are complaining about him... but suddenly he IS worth tazing and arresting just as soon as he starts panhandling.

Panhandling is what got him noticed. Had he been stopped for a traffic violation, spotted in a convenience store, or even just walking down the street by someone who recognized him he would have been arrested. He wasn't going to get tazed for "panhandling". He was going to get tazed for running from the officer who was rightfully trying to arrest him. There is no argument that shooting him was wrong, so there is no need to even discuss that aspect of the incident.

It shouldn't surprise me that you miss this point, because the idea that not everyone actually has rights, and that rights are a matter of degree where certain classes get more of them than others, is something you've adhered to in the past.

Stuff your strawman up your ass. I haven't missed the point, you keep wanting to move the goal posts. My contention is and always has only been that tazing in this case would not have been an excessive use of force. If I myself were running from the police and they had the means to taze me, I'd expect to get tazed. As I mentioned earlier you keep wanting to make this about some larger issue with police abuse and brutality, which is beyond the scope of anything I'm saying.

[Rogue 9]

This is related though perhaps not 100% related:

http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/how- ... ry-thomas/

As an aside, at the end there in the author's byline... twice the victim of assassination attempts by his superiors? Really? You'd think that would make the news, rather than just the fact that he fired a warning shot at a dog in self-defense. Though apparently he did make some batshit crazy remarks about overthrowing the government while still an active officer.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Simon, while there is such a thing as fugitive apprehension team that goes out looking for people to pick up on warrants they usually restrict their activities to violent felonies or felons in general. That doesn't mean that the others aren't being looked for by your standard rank and file patrol officers. We routinely print out warrant lists and go looking for them when we have down time. The issue is a lot of those people have moved or are homeless and constantly on the move.

Basically, your concern that he wasn't arrested within a 8-16 month period is frankly not important and not a cause for concern. What likely happened here is this patrol officer was aware of this individuals warrants and decided to arrest him. He ran. The officer make an unforgivable error and should be terminated at the least.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd like to reply to TheHammer in a second post later, but right now time presses.

This is related though perhaps not 100% related:

http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/how- ... ry-thomas/

As an aside, at the end there in the author's byline... twice the victim of assassination attempts by his superiors? Really? You'd think that would make the news, rather than just the fact that he fired a warning shot at a dog in self-defense. Though apparently he did make some batshit crazy remarks about overthrowing the government while still an active officer.

Conceding the guy's a lunatic.

His basic complaint about serving warrants, specifically, seems to be valid- that having the SWAT team regularly roll up to people's houses and batter the door down results in unnecessary violence. And that forty years ago, this was often done differently and the police didn't carry as much heavy artillery around, in large part because the criminals didn't either.

It is clearly not your intention to commit an ad hominem, though, so this is an aside.

Simon, while there is such a thing as fugitive apprehension team that goes out looking for people to pick up on warrants they usually restrict their activities to violent felonies or felons in general. That doesn't mean that the others aren't being looked for by your standard rank and file patrol officers. We routinely print out warrant lists and go looking for them when we have down time. The issue is a lot of those people have moved or are homeless and constantly on the move.

Basically, your concern that he wasn't arrested within a 8-16 month period is frankly not important and not a cause for concern. What likely happened here is this patrol officer was aware of this individuals warrants and decided to arrest him. He ran. The officer make an unforgivable error and should be terminated at the least.

Well, here's the thing that bothers me.

If no actual officers are being tasked to bring in people with warrants out for their arrest, I can think of three sane-ish explanations:
1) We expect them to turn themselves in of their own accord.
2) We don't have the time/manpower.
3) The person with the warrant out for their arrest has "gone underground" and is evading the police by keeping no fixed address.

If we're issuing warrants for people on traffic offenses and unspecified violations of probation terms (which I can't for the life of me find any information on) and expecting them to turn themselves in, then that's operating with a degree of willful ignorance about human nature. While it's not unethical to be that willfully ignorant as such, it's hard to imagine a police force being effective if they don't have that firm a grasp of human behavior.

If we're not enforcing warrants for lack of time and manpower, that strikes me as a very serious deficiency. Part of the point of having large, well-funded police departments is to get known criminals off the streets, into and through the judiciary in a timely fashion. If police departments' warrant enforcement is so backlogged they can't spare a couple of men for a couple of hours to arrest someone who was supposed to have gone up before a judge about a year ago, then we need to dedicate more men to that task.

If we're not enforcing warrants because suspects are "going underground," then that is justified- at that point, it does take an unreasonable amount of police time to find the suspect because they've gone off the radar. But it shouldn't be pathetically easy to do that. Living in one neighborhood for an extended period while people make complaints to the police about your behavior, and while you're holding down a regular job somewhere in the area, should be enough to put you back on their radar, at least long enough to dispatch one squad car to one address, or make a few phone calls to the address.

In the second or third cases, that's not so much an accusation against police as it's a "in this respect the system is broken, how do we fix it?"

And there are problems with the system being 'broken' in this way. Several of them:

1) It means that people accused of minor offenses experience VERY long delays between being accused and being tried, which raises Sixth Amendment "fair and speedy trial" issues. It's hard to mount a defense and present evidence in a case where all the relevant events happened years ago... and where the accuser already filed and stored all his evidence far in advance.

2) For another, it means that habitual criminals (and I can believe Butts is one) are free to commit crimes a larger percentage of the time, and are unlikely to see any direct consequences of a given illegal act, which can give them a false sense of impunity, as well as a sense of persecution that makes them unruly when justice finally DOES catch up with them. Thus, arrests are more likely to get violent than they otherwise would.

3) It means that if they actually want to hold petty criminals accountable, the police are forced to 'trawl' entire neighborhoods looking for them, because they're not specifically targeting the criminals by going to their homes. This results in large numbers of innocent people being harassed by police who are (supoosedly) really looking for a handful of serious criminals who have offenses on their record or contraband in their pockets. Which seems to be the dark side of 'broken windows' policing: you have to enforce a huge number of very minor offenses in order to catch a few people accused of major ones, and the glut of petty cases chokes the system in short order.

This can have a chilling effect on low-status communities that find themselves constantly singled out for police dragnets.


So anyway, I perceive this kind of practice as haphazard and undesirable. I think that police should hire a slightly larger chunk of their manpower for the purpose of following up on the addresses of people with warrants out. They'll still miss people, but I doubt they'd miss someone like Butts.

[Terralthra]

Simon, the type of warrant you're looking for is a "bench warrant", ostensibly called that because it's issued from the bench by a judge, and referred to by many people involved in the criminal justice system as a warrant issued because someone's ass was not in the appropriate bench. They authorize any officer who comes into contact with the person named in the warrant to arrest them on the spot, but are almost never pursued outside of incidental contact with police officers, because they're issued in the case of parole violations, probation violations, failure to appear, etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, the type of warrant you're looking for is a "bench warrant", ostensibly called that because it's issued from the bench by a judge, and referred to by many people involved in the criminal justice system as a warrant issued because someone's ass was not in the appropriate bench. They authorize any officer who comes into contact with the person named in the warrant to arrest them on the spot, but are almost never pursued outside of incidental contact with police officers, because they're issued in the case of parole violations, probation violations, failure to appear, etc.

While I understand the practical reasons for such an arrangement, I nonetheless criticize it.

Failure to follow up on bench warrants has a cost: it promotes the attitude of "gotcha justice," the idea that there are thousands and thousands of secret criminals, who are not visibly different from anyone else, just waiting to be rounded up if the police cast the net widely enough by detaining and interrogating enough people. Which, again, tends to result in the police taking measures that are burdensome on and aggressive toward the general populace.

And the way it's implemented today also means that every moron who slept through his court appointment (because he's a moron) is one of those "secret criminals." As is everyone who couldn't get to the courthouse on time (because the bus broke down and they don't have their own transportation). Or who didn't get the summons (because the court happens not to be keeping track of people's addresses very effectively, or sends a letter to the wrong house) is one of these "secret criminals." Which greatly inflates the overall number of people the police can catch with a wide net and makes trawling through the innocent people with aggressive policing in order to catch the mildly guilty more appealing.

I repeat, I DO understand the practical reasons why the police don't follow up on bench warrants. But it would seem desirable to:

1) Give people whose sole offense is a bench warrant a relatively... 'gentle' way of making amends provided they do so quickly and take responsibility. Basically, if God forbid I ever do sleep through a court appearance or fail to make it because a bus ran late, it'd be nice to have some way of resolving the issue without ending up in handcuffs and a night at the local jail.

2) Make VERY sure that good faith efforts are made to inform people of their appearances before issuing the warrant.

3) Put in at least some effort to following up on bench warrants when the accused's whereabouts are known, prioritizing the old bench warrants, so that you don't have people wandering around trying to dodge policemen for years at a time. It is undesirable to create this kind of semi-permanent underclass in a community. This would go well with having a 'gentle' means of resolving them, because there's really no good reason why you should throw someone in jail for failure to appear at a parole hearing that took place three years ago, if they haven't been committing crimes since.

3a) Note that this is not the same as saying that someone who skipped court because they were charged with driving while under the influence or robbery or whatever should be able to dodge the police until the statute of limitations expires. What I'm saying is that if you receive a bench warrant for a petty crime (say, a traffic ticket) or a purely administrative failure to appear, and if the police can't be bothered to go looking for you for a long period of time... it's questionable as to whether you should be considered a fugitive when no one's been bothering to chase you for three or five or ten years or whatever.
______________

(Again, I can't figure out how to learn why Butts' specific bench warrant was issued, or what was and was not done to inform him of his obligations and later to inform him that he was now subject to arrest; this would inform how I feel about the warrant itself.)

[Simon_Jester]

Now that I have time I shall respond to this other guy.

I get that you have no interest in the question of "Is modern policing lending itself to this kind of ham-handed whack-a-mole approach, where instead of orderly, speedy efforts by police to restrain dangerous criminals, people are declared persona non grata by virtue of a warrant that isn't worth their time to enforce, until it entails the suspect actually defying a cop to his face, at which point it becomes proper to cattle-prod them into submission?"

That is why I'm accusing you of missing the point.

Yes. You're rolling your eyes, because you have no interest in the question. I agree that you have no interest in the question, and clearly you agree too. But I reserve the right to talk about things you aren't interested in.

[By the way, I would like to thank Terralthra and KS for telling me things about bench warrants; even if I have a weird and disagreeable position on the subject, it's good to have facts rather than conjectures.]

Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems? The one failing to grasp the point is you for the sake of scoring cheap political points. If you want to discuss some sort of larger police issue, please feel free to start a thread on the matter...

I honestly don't understand why you wish to continue to belabor (in your typical long winded fashion) on this particular case when it is actually pretty clear cut, and you've all but conceded that had he been tazed it would have been a non story.

It certainly wouldn't have been unusual for him to be hit with a tazer under the circumstances. I doubt anyone would have reported on it- just as there are a lot of cases where police end up "having to" violently detain someone as an indirect result of modern policing methods.

It would not be news, in much the same sense that the 500th patient keeling over and dying in the middle of an epidemic is not news. The 500th guy dying from exploding flu doesn't really give us any new information we didn't already know from the 499th victim. It's still the same disease. It's not news.

If you're going to be so blind to the nature of the world you live in that you say "ho hum, so what if another guy died of exploding flu? It's not like that's unusual" and decline to care about exploding flu, there's something wrong with you.

Again, Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems?

Did I say (or imply) that it was anomalous for people to get tazed for running away from police?

If your claim is that restricted, you should have packed up and left this thread about a page ago because that's noncontroversial.

It's also very normal for politicians to get de facto bribes from political action groups these days; that doesn't make it right. Nor does it mean that TheHammer should wander around trying to tell people they're being foolish just because they talk about this "not unusual" thing like it's a problem.

Sometimes it seems to me that you put a great deal of importance into persuading others to NOT discuss certain things. Particularly, the question of whether there's a systematic problem with the way the government operates, especially the police and intelligence services. Especially when it's a problem that is infringing on or stripping away people's basic rights.

I have never understood why you are so allergic to such conversations, or why you choose to participate in them given that you are.

Stuff your strawman up your ass. I haven't missed the point, you keep wanting to move the goal posts. My contention is and always has only been that tazing in this case would not have been an excessive use of force. If I myself were running from the police and they had the means to taze me, I'd expect to get tazed. As I mentioned earlier you keep wanting to make this about some larger issue with police abuse and brutality, which is beyond the scope of anything I'm saying.

In which case why have you devoted such time and energy to contesting what I'm saying?

Why the allergy?

[TheHammer]

Now that I have time I shall respond to this other guy.

Yes. You're rolling your eyes, because you have no interest in the question. I agree that you have no interest in the question, and clearly you agree too. But I reserve the right to talk about things you aren't interested in.

No one said you couldn't. The problem is that when you invoke my statements in some sort of larger context and then accuse me of "not getting it" it makes it into a misrepresentation of my position.

Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems? The one failing to grasp the point is you for the sake of scoring cheap political points. If you want to discuss some sort of larger police issue, please feel free to start a thread on the matter...

I honestly don't understand why you wish to continue to belabor (in your typical long winded fashion) on this particular case when it is actually pretty clear cut, and you've all but conceded that had he been tazed it would have been a non story.

It certainly wouldn't have been unusual for him to be hit with a tazer under the circumstances. I doubt anyone would have reported on it- just as there are a lot of cases where police end up "having to" violently detain someone as an indirect result of modern policing methods.

It would not be news, in much the same sense that the 500th patient keeling over and dying in the middle of an epidemic is not news. The 500th guy dying from exploding flu doesn't really give us any new information we didn't already know from the 499th victim. It's still the same disease. It's not news.

If you're going to be so blind to the nature of the world you live in that you say "ho hum, so what if another guy died of exploding flu? It's not like that's unusual" and decline to care about exploding flu, there's something wrong with you.

Wrong. It would not be news because it would have been correct use of the tools at the officer's disposal. You already admitted that had they come to his home or work place and he ran that you feel the use of a tazer would be okay. Yet you feel that because he was found in a Walmart parking lot instead that this somehow invalidates the use of the tazer because? You've already lost, concede that you're wrong and move forward. If you want to debate larger issues of police brutality go ahead. I agree there are issues there worth talking about. But don't fucking accuse me of "missing the point" because the point you are making isn't in anyway related to what I was saying.

Again, Did I say (or in any way imply) that any of those things were not problems?

Did I say (or imply) that it was anomalous for people to get tazed for running away from police?

If your claim is that restricted, you should have packed up and left this thread about a page ago because that's noncontroversial.

Nice backpedal. You called me out for my claim that a tazing would have been perfectly legal and acceptable in this case. And I have rightly called you out for the absurdity of you taking issue. You realize you've lost so you've repeatedly attempted to move the goalposts and I have repeatedly pulled them back.

It's also very normal for politicians to get de facto bribes from political action groups these days; that doesn't make it right. Nor does it mean that TheHammer should wander around trying to tell people they're being foolish just because they talk about this "not unusual" thing like it's a problem.

Another strawman from Simon. Big surprise. Everyone can see through your horseshit so that's as far as I'm addressing this statement.

Sometimes it seems to me that you put a great deal of importance into persuading others to NOT discuss certain things. Particularly, the question of whether there's a systematic problem with the way the government operates, especially the police and intelligence services. Especially when it's a problem that is infringing on or stripping away people's basic rights.

Again, where did I tell you not to discuss anything? Where I took issue is that somehow because I feel that this incident would have been a warranted tazing that this somehow means I'm stamping approval on Police abuse. Its a bullshit fabrication of your making.

I have never understood why you are so allergic to such conversations, or why you choose to participate in them given that you are.

Stuff your strawman up your ass. I haven't missed the point, you keep wanting to move the goal posts. My contention is and always has only been that tazing in this case would not have been an excessive use of force. If I myself were running from the police and they had the means to taze me, I'd expect to get tazed. As I mentioned earlier you keep wanting to make this about some larger issue with police abuse and brutality, which is beyond the scope of anything I'm saying.

In which case why have you devoted such time and energy to contesting what I'm saying?

Why the allergy?

I have an allergy to bullshit and distortion of my statements of which you are often prone to do. You have often accused of me saying this or saying that with no fucking proof. You have no idea what I feel or believe but you think you do and that's what is so irritating about talking with you, aside from your inability to be concise.

[Simon_Jester]

Nice backpedal. You called me out for my claim that a tazing would have been perfectly legal and acceptable in this case.

Would you mind quoting the exact words of my "calling you out?"

Because my perception, and I might be wrong, is that I did not say it was unusual for a tazing to happen in these circumstances, but that there is a broader issue about police violence. Which you somehow interpreted as "tazings under attack... must... defend... righteousness... of the security forces..." and started accusing me of moving the goalposts and being wrong simply because I even have an argument about anything other than about whether tazings are normal.

And in fact I think that your argument "tazings are normal!" is in fact pretty much irrelevant, because there's a reason this kind of tazing happens separate from "it would be in accordance with proper procedure to taze him under XYZ circumstances." The way we handle lawbreakers and people who skip court appointments ensures that XYZ circumstances will arise more often than necessary, and that some percentage of the time XYZ circumstances will lead to unjustified shootings by sheer statistics.

Which is why I originally accused you of missing the point.

And you are now reduced to saying that you refuse even to talk about this, and jump up and down beating your chest and going "CONCESSION ACCEPTED" about the irrelevant and petty claim that tazings are normal procedure when dealing with a noncompliant but unarmed fleeing suspect.

So as far as I'm concerned, you've just doubled down on missing the point, only now you're missing it harder and on purpose, which is basically the equivalent of failing the Turing Test.

[TheHammer]

Nice backpedal. You called me out for my claim that a tazing would have been perfectly legal and acceptable in this case.

Would you mind quoting the exact words of my "calling you out?"

Multiple times you made statements contending that tazing him was unjustified. Here is but one example:

And yet once someone spotted him panhandling and said "hey, police, it's that guy," the need to arrest this mentally disabled unarmed man was urgent enough to justify electrocuting him.

Because my perception, and I might be wrong, is that I did not say it was unusual for a tazing to happen in these circumstances, but that there is a broader issue about police violence. Which you somehow interpreted as "tazings under attack... must... defend... righteousness... of the security forces..." and started accusing me of moving the goalposts and being wrong simply because I even have an argument about anything other than about whether tazings are normal.

No, I believe I used stronger language than saying that tazing in this situation was "normal". I said that tazing in this situation would have been justified. I accuse you of moving the goalposts because that's exactly what you did. Your "larger point" had nothing to do with anything I was saying. Had you not invoked my name saying that I was "missing the point" as the segue to your larger discussion, then we wouldn't be going around in circles here. I agree that police abusing their authority is a problem that should be addressed. In many past postings I've been very critical of them, usually arguing against Kamikaze_Sith. However, this situation was not one of them up until the point the cop shot rather than tazed Butts.

And in fact I think that your argument "tazings are normal!" is in fact pretty much irrelevant, because there's a reason this kind of tazing happens separate from "it would be in accordance with proper procedure to taze him under XYZ circumstances." The way we handle lawbreakers and people who skip court appointments ensures that XYZ circumstances will arise more often than necessary, and that some percentage of the time XYZ circumstances will lead to unjustified shootings by sheer statistics.

Again, your disconnect in logic is that you keep saying he would have been tazed for "panhandling" or "missing a court appointment", when in fact he was resisting arrest. When you are resisting arrest, officers have the right to restrain you by physical means. The Tazer was designed as non-lethal means of physical restraint for exactly that purpose. An officer using a tool for which it was designed, and within legal procedures is doing his job. An idiot who pulls his gun when he "meant to pull his tazer" is not, and should be punished civilly and criminally.

Which is why I originally accused you of missing the point.

And you are now reduced to saying that you refuse even to talk about this, and jump up and down beating your chest and going "CONCESSION ACCEPTED" about the irrelevant and petty claim that tazings are normal procedure when dealing with a noncompliant but unarmed fleeing suspect.

So as far as I'm concerned, you've just doubled down on missing the point, only now you're missing it harder and on purpose, which is basically the equivalent of failing the Turing Test.

Oh Simon, the reason I'm beating my chest going "Concession accepted" is because you conceded the only dispute we really have. We both agree that shooting Butts was unjustified and that the officer should be harshly punished. And we agree that police abuse is a problem, and something to be addressed. I know you'd like to pretend you weren't making the argument earlier now that you realize it simply makes no sense. Let me refresh your memory.

Tazers hurt. If it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it's worth doing a little legwork and making a few phone calls to bring them in six months sooner. And yes, if he ran or resisted as a result of the arrest attempt that happened at his home or workplace, it would be totally fair to taze him.

You admit that had the arrest attempt taken place at his home or work, and if he ran that tazing was "totally fair". I've asked you to justify why the Walmart parking lot is supposed to be some sort of "safe zone" in which under the same circumstances no tazing should take place. You have essentially waived it away.

So once you concede that point, then you and I really have nothing further to argue about here do we?

[Simon_Jester]

You're right, why would I criticize someone for a narrow legalistic approach that ignores a wider issue? That doesn't make sense. Of course they're right to demand my "concession" on their narrow legalism and declare victory rather than engaging on the wider issue.

It's almost as if I have conversations and like them to be far-ranging, and like to be free to bring up social topics of some actual importance. Instead of doing it just to keep score on some sort of winnable point tally that gives me an incentive to make narrow but irrelevant statements of fact and then dare anyone to do anything that might be interpreted as questioning them.

Sorry, did my social criticism get in the way of your attempt to pick up warm fuzzies by scoring a point by asserting something basic about what police procedure is as if it were a subject for controversy?

Nice backpedal. You called me out for my claim that a tazing would have been perfectly legal and acceptable in this case.

Would you mind quoting the exact words of my "calling you out?"

Multiple times you made statements contending that tazing him was unjustified. Here is but one example:

And yet once someone spotted him panhandling and said "hey, police, it's that guy," the need to arrest this mentally disabled unarmed man was urgent enough to justify electrocuting him.

Well, you're arguing that it was urgent enough to justify zapping him.

If it sounds as though you're objecting to me because when I state the facts in that way, it sounds sarcastic. Like there's some niggling sense in your mind that maybe I, or someone else, actually might reasonably question whether or not hitting a fleeing, mentally disabled unarmed man with a tazer because he's now in need of arrest where it wasn't worth sending a squad car to pick him up at a known address for many months prior.

How dare I imply such a thing?

Is that really all you're upset about?

[Note that the use of 'electrocuting,' specifically, was unintended hyperbole on my part because I honestly didn't know that 'electrocute' was a verb used only for lethal electric shocks. That much, I freely concede.]

Oh Simon, the reason I'm beating my chest going "Concession accepted" is because you conceded the only dispute we really have. We both agree that shooting Butts was unjustified and that the officer should be harshly punished. And we agree that police abuse is a problem, and something to be addressed. I know you'd like to pretend you weren't making the argument earlier now that you realize it simply makes no sense. Let me refresh your memory.

Tazers hurt. If it's worth hurting someone to bring them in, it's worth doing a little legwork and making a few phone calls to bring them in six months sooner. And yes, if he ran or resisted as a result of the arrest attempt that happened at his home or workplace, it would be totally fair to taze him.

You admit that had the arrest attempt taken place at his home or work, and if he ran that tazing was "totally fair". I've asked you to justify why the Walmart parking lot is supposed to be some sort of "safe zone" in which under the same circumstances no tazing should take place. You have essentially waived it away.

So once you concede that point, then you and I really have nothing further to argue about here do we?

You have still not understood, or rather ignored, why I even said that.

[To recap, my argument is that if the arrest were being done in an orderly fashion that indicates Butts as an important enough target to justify violence, then the warrant should have been followed up on. Not left to sit there while Butts went about his business as though it didn't matter if the warrant was served or not. There's nothing special about Walmart, but there's something very special about that attitude toward policing, that serving a warrant only seems to matter when the person it's being served against commits a disagreeable but legal act in public]

Now, how can I concede to you that you were 'right' in an argument that consists of you saying "X" and me saying "I have a problem with the entire system that gives rise to us invoking X," and you saying "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION X WHEN X IS CLEARLY TRUE" and therefore entirely missing the nature and cause of my problem with X?

That's just encouraging people to be fools and wander away from conversations feeling like they've "won" because they're too obtuse and willfully blind to social issues to notice anything other than whatever legalism they feel like spouting that day.