Destinee Thompson was supposed to be on her way to lunch with her stepmother in August 2021 when Colorado police, mistaking her for a robbery suspect, fatally shot the pregnant mother as she fled in her minivan.
Destinee Thompson was supposed to be on her way to lunch with her stepmother in August 2021 when Colorado police, mistaking her for a robbery suspect, fatally shot the pregnant mother as she fled in her minivan.
Most of your response indicates that either I’m failing to adequately convey my viewpoint or you are failing to fully comprehend it. The fault might very well be mine, but I’m not really enthusiastic about trying to rephrase it again, especially with the likelihood that you’ll reject it out of hand again.
I’ll just pluck at these two points.
My argument is that the vast, vast majority of the responsibility lies with police because their training and behavior are the controllable variables in the interaction, and they are the ones empowered to end lives and deploy violence based on their assessment of the situation, and who should be trained to do so with the utmost care.
The very clear answer is that they do so by treating people as innocent until they have more to go on than a failure to comply and a partial description match (christ, “you match the description” is the most commonly cited example of racial profiling I can remember hearing) to decide otherwise. Had they done so, something less escalating than smashing out a window would have been done, regardless of whether you and I agree on the details of what that something could have been.
Frankly, with no snark intended, I think there’s little chance that further discussion is going to cause either of us to change our minds.
But she wasn’t innocent. She had warrants out for her arrest, and while the police did not know about that, she did refuse to identify herself which is also an offense. Then, when she drove the car into the officers she presented a very real threat to them. This isn’t an example of racial profiling, either, and one way or another they would have had to get her out of the car, which was probably going to involve smashing a window at some stage.
While ordinarily and in general I agree with your points, they really don’t apply well enough here. The police were far from perfect, but she was further.
She was innocent of the crime you have used to justify their escalation throughout this entire discussion. Had they treated her with the presumption of such, given their extremely shaky evidence to the contrary, different decisions could have (and should have) been made, as I’ve expressed a number of times already.
Thank you, and have a good day.