also: the number of injuries to civilians and to cops from high speed chases is ridiculous; they shouldn't do that. so a car is stolen, so what. it's just property. it can be taken back another time. no more 90 mph jaunts down highways in the wrong direction with head on collisions with innocent people; no more 60 mph racing through residential neighborhoods. it's real life, not tv. you know?

 Reply

if that's all you have to say, it'd be preferable that you say nothing at all. honestly. it's useless. there's nobody here in favor of police brutality. there are, however, people here in favor of having a reasonable discourse on the topic, and that's something that your statement makes impossible.

 Reply

That's some sick fucking logic.

 Reply

eh, nevermind. i give up. it is, apparently, impossible to argue that not every police officer fits Trixie's initial summation without angry people reading it as my attempting to justify police brutality.

sorry i tried. carry on irrationally judging an entire group of people based on the actions of a few.

 Reply

And . . . So, what? What do those thousands that don't have to do with the dozens that do? I don't agree with Trixie's assessment regarding MOST cops (but I dare say, it does fit more than a few I've come across) but I also don't see how your quest for stats on the miraculously manslaughter-free (which would prove what, exactly?) contributes anything.

No need to martyr yourself.

 Reply

Piss off.

 Reply

Accidental discharge or not, he shot a guy in the back who was lying on the ground.

I really couldn't care less why he did it and I don't much see how it's relevant.

We spend way too much effort in this country trying to figure out people's intent when all we really need to do is judge the results of their actions. The problem with that mentality is that you can end up excusing pretty much anything. The mentality that says this guy should be excused because he "accidentally" shot a guy in the back as he was lying on the ground is the same mentality that says George Bush should be excused for torturing people, getting us into an unnecessary war and illegally wiretapping citizens because he was only trying to protect the country.

There's no mystery here. A guy was shot in the back as he lay on the ground. And we know who did it. End of investigation.

What ever happened to personal responsibility? You carry a gun, you are responsible for what you do with it.

 Reply

Dude killed another guy by shooting him in the back as he was lying on the ground with another cop's knee in his neck.

If you or I did that, we'd get the goddamn chair. What uniform a person is wearing at any given time has no relevance to whether or not they need to adhere to basic morality and law.

 Reply

Now, the way I understand the situation to be right now is that this attempt to widen the readership was done to pay the bills, and youre saying that the readers ought to just accept that and keep only to the posts that they like. Furthermore, you are saying that for a writer to try to indulge and pander to the segment of readers who don't like some of the posts that are being written would be "coddling." Okay, I accept that.

I agree that coddling should be out of the question. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care that there is more of an emphasis on celebrity news. I don't think that was the issue. I think the issue was finding the right tone in the article. Also, it is imperative that they are as well researched and fact checked as your Valleywag stories are.

Moreover, I hope for a level of decorum when dealing with grieving people. (This criticism doesn't just apply to you.) I'm a fancy jerk in that respect. It's embarrassing for me to be associated with a site that points fingers in mean ways -- I think that the message has been received, though, and that we can just let the issue drop. It's still all right, and encouraged, to point fingers in funny ways.

Thanks for engaging a little with us to try to explain what's going on here and make your position clearer.

On a completely unrelated note: Would it be asking to be coddled to hear more dirt about Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin and Cory Doctorow? That stuff is always gold.

 Reply

Your point was also good, though it was more vitriolic, which might put a bee in some peoples' bonnets.

I used to live abroad, and I can tell you that in Western Europe, the police force has a completely different view of itself. They see themselves as servants of the state, charged with the task of keeping the citizens from killing and stealing from each other, not as some badass cowboys who constitute "the thin blue line between law and disorder."

 Reply

"frankly they should be protesting themselves, their culture of tolerating thug culture is what gets them into such situations in the first place."

What "situation" are you talking about? Oh yeah, getting shot in the back while laying face down on the ground.

You are making excuses because YOU simply cannot believe,comprehend, fathom that a cop would shoot someone in cold blood.Not possible! Has to be an "accident"! A mistake!

What I saw was a cop pull his weapon, aim and shoot a young black man,but who would ever believe that a cop would intentionally murder someone in front of others? I do.

 Reply

i'm sure being a cop is a lot harder of a job than i could imagine, but the suggestion that this trained police officer couldn't tell the difference between a taser and a pistol is... well, you know, fucking retarded.

 Reply

Has the family issued a statement about the video? Did they request that it not be watched?

 Reply

But, F.Y.I., clicking on the YouTube video won't generate page hits for Owen.

 Reply

Maybe you should go air your concerns here.

 Reply

Maybe it's because I was in middle school but I don't remember any "sensation" of that story either, and don't remember hearing about it until after...remember a blurb in the "U.S. News" part of the Times perhaps.

 Reply

Second...every time a police officer shoots someone/something it's a major media event here in Cleveland. Yet somehow there are several civilian shootings every week.

 Reply

I can't say with absolute certainty whether the story would have reached such wide circulation without YouTube, but it seems that the protests in a major city are, as a virtue of their own nature, a pretty un-ignorable story for any major national news outlet.

It's hard to determine the hypothetical outcomes in this situation: If there were no protests, would the story have gained traction? If so, was it the result of YouTube or on the local outrage in one of the country's major population centers?

Personally, I think that a story like this fits perfectly into the television news cacophony because the ratings boost that the narrative of railway cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back would provide is too substantial to pass up.

Also, not to be overlooked in rating the value of YouTube in disseminating the story of this shooting nationwide is the fact that the New York Times didn't even mention that the videos were uploaded to YouTube.

Thanks for your clarification though. It made it clearer what you were trying to get at.

 Reply