You should thank him for the strudel, and quietly promise him that you'll vote guilty in exchange for it.
"Do you want us to kill the strudel, Your Honor? I'm not objecting; I'm clarifying."
And, as always, don't read the comments on the links.
Good thing the cops showed up! Otherwise he might have killed himself.
So what's the argument here? Cops shouldn't respond to reports of a suicidal person? Cops shouldn't enter a building where there might be a suicidal person? Cops shouldn't fire weapons when being charged by someone with a knife?
Yes, ajay, those are definitely all the arguments here. Good job!
What the article actually says, mildly edited:
"When [he] made contact with [the police officers] [he] approached them with the knife, extended it out, and they felt threatened."
I don't feel the same way about the situation as described as I do when I read "cops...being charged by someone with a knife." This sounds like it still could have been de-escalated, which is what the police should have been doing.
Christ people, do whatever you want but I'm not in the mood for yet another round of "let's pretend we have a clue as to what actually happened" from an initial news article.
The part of it I found interesting in a despairing kind of way was the talk of Aspergers. The hitting yourself thing is Aspergers? Is there a less fucking useful diagnosis in the world right now than Aspergers? It's the chronic fatigue of mental illness but with seems like approximately a thousand possible symptoms in any combination.
I think it's pretty safe to say at least "that was really really the opposite of the hoped-for outcome."
It actually seems like this is the first possibly sketchy police killing I've read about for a while, and there was an actual weapon involved. So, good job, cops! Except for Baltimore PD, they can go fuck themselves.
The judge is bringing us all strudel this morning
I guess they don't take jury pampering very seriously down in Texas.
Perhaps the judge is a supporter of the Anglo-Polish Strudel Appreciation Society, or the International League Against Cheesecake.
http://www.cabinpressurefans.co.uk/cabin-pressure-episode-transcripts/gdansk-transcript/
Deliberate weak-ification of the jury. Texas justice.
There was a time in my life when I would have joined an International League Against Cheesecake. Now, I find the idea risible. I guess it's true what they say about one's politics changing as one gets older.
12: Are you really that shocked to find out a Texas judge is all about giving people their just desserts?
4: So what's the argument here?
Probably: "Cops shouldn't run around murdering citizens and then trying to cover their asses in the aftermath with incredibly weak and suspect claims of 'feeling threatened.'"
But that's crazy talk.
(The spurious victim act of that Chicago cop is just fucking sickening.)
If you do get shot by the cops, make sure you pay the paramedic costs before you die.
15: Fucking rogue pigs, man. They're everywhere.
18: Ralph Steadman
I'll now consider my preferred appellation accepted. It's been hard.
Oh hell ontopic
"Is Hillary Clinton Running the Most Cynical Campaign in Recent History?" ...CR
Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving law enforcement officers and a neighborhood watch representative, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message....breathtaking. If Coates is a leading indicator, possibly risky.
Insulting to targets? Hell not for me to say.
I think Robin is a little unfair to go all the way back to 1992. and arguably the Clinton years were better for blacks than the Obama years.
Alla them policemen are cawmuniss
Do American cops think that cops in other industrialized countries are huge wimps for not gunning people down all the time?
Do cops in other industrialized countries think that American cops are poorly trained for gunning people down all the time?
"International comparisons are not very useful" is the only wrong answer.
22: I don't know about that, but I do know when I had dealings with a British manufacturer of flashing lights for emergency vehicles, they talked incredulously about American police departments, the way two aging con men might reminisce about the biggest heist they ever pulled off.
Anecdotally, there is a certain degree of cultural gap between forces which treat firearms as specialist equipment, only to be handled by officers who have received extensive training, and very rarely used, and forces which give guns to everyone as soon as they start work. Imagine how, for example, essear would feel on learning that most Swiss primary schools have their own research reactors.
That would be pretty awesome!
18 is wonderful. There's clearly an unwritten P.G.Wodehouse novel in which the Empress of Blandings gets arrested for some kind of electoral malfeasance.
22: The comparisons still tend to be stupid, regardless of any proactive attempts to declare pointing that out is off limits.
IME unarmed cops from other countries are cognizant of the fact that their tactics are being carried out in an environment where handguns are rare and that over here it's a whole different set of circumstances. The UK has had four cops shot and killed in the line of duty in the last ten years. The U.S. had that many in the last week alone.
27.2 also sounds likely.
I am reminded of the exchange project a few years back, at the height of popularity of The Wire, when the Guardian swapped police reporters with the Baltimore Sun for a month and they liveblogged it. The Baltimore Sun guy's blog was full of things like "So tonight I was on a ride along with the Manchester police. We went to a part of town called the Moss Side which they say is one of the roughest areas of the city, but we only saw a couple of guys scuffling in the street, oh, and a stabbing, maybe it was a quiet night?" and the Guardian guy's blog was more along the lines of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Was that a terror AAAAAAAAAAAAH or an orgasm AAAAAAAAAAAAH?
The problematic counter-example to 27 is aforementioned Switzerland, where almost every household has a gun and police shootings are rare (though domestic murder-suicides are not).
30: Switzerland isn't problematic at all. Police shootings are rare in Switzerland because it's a low crime country. Similarly, places in this country like Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, etc. have low numbers of murders and police shootings despite guns being hugely available.
29: I'm surprised to learn that you differentiate.
Some people have non-terrifying sex lives.
28: That sounds fascinating--I dug up the series here: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/baltimore-city/wired/2010/03/tale_of_two_cities_nominated_f.html
30: Bullets are hard to come by. People in the reserves do steal them (mainly to shoot their spouses, it seems).
