excellent analysis of the SF shooting

[rm]

http://pecunium.livejournal.com/374216.html

Of interest to:

- Those in the SF area
- Those following the story
- Writers, who want to grok stuff about weapons, security, etc. It sounds callous, but this is a seriously useful post from that standpoint.

This case is fucking awful.

Comments

[eac.livejournal.com]

Yea, my spouse was recounting this to me this morning. I prefer the stupid mistake to the willful murder explanation, but BART police have a lot to answer for here in terms of bad training. :(


It IS awful, and I can't imagine being the cop who has to live with this mistake.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, murder happened here, but it looks like it was the SFPD's training/practices that gets that label, rather than this poor idiot who committed manslaughter because of how he was trained. The whole thing is a complete and utter outrage.

[eac.livejournal.com]

For clarity, I think the BART police separate from the SFPD administratively. Because it IS an outrage, I don't want pinned on the wrong cops. :/

[rm.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, good to know. And I agree with you. One of my peeves, and this is even after doing my investigative journalism piece in college on police brutality in DC, is people who just demonize all cops, all the time, even when shit like this isn't going on. This is bad bad bad, and there's a lot of blame to go around, but it doesn't need to go everywhere.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

When I see things like this, I wonder why anyone is ever surprised. I find it more surprising that the police don't shoot more people, by mistake or intention.

[eac.livejournal.com]

I save my SFPD hate for Fajita Gate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajitagate). :)

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Another article agreeing with pecunium: http://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/1772254-BART-shooting-raises-issue-of-TASER-confusion/

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Yes, BART police are a separate entity from SFPD.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

On the one hand I prefer to think the cops are letting people who will commit willful murder out on the street.

On the other hand I really don't like to think the people building the policies are so inept they couldn't see the systemic flaws in the training which are evident if this is an honest mistake caused by same.

Because, if the latter is the case, this is, almost certainly, not the only place this sort of failure is extant, and untraining people is a lot harder than training them.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The question isn't administrative separation, but the training. If they have the same training/guidelines, then this probably isn't an independant problem.