If you're the wrong color or ethnicity and encounter police, don't take your hat off.

I have seen far too many videos of people dying in the past few years. More than this, it's so often due to cops.

Well, yeah. That's evil.

If you're stopped by the police, I hope you've made out your will. Just in case.

As much as I hate the wave of cop-on-black-person murder going on this country, this strikes me as a greyer situation than normal. The guy keeps dropping his hands and doesn't seem entirely together which, right there, is going to put cops on edge, but then when he drops his hands the final time with his hat, his right arm goes behind his back. So, I mean, I can see how that would definitely freak out cops. Shooting him 8 times seems a bit out there, but I think in this instance the suspect kinda dictated the situation. Still, it's complete bullshit that it took years for this video to come out. I like how cops can release dozens of videos of X murder victim in an attempt to smear him and that's not a "privacy" issue, but cops fucking up their jobs so badly that people die warrants the "oh, we must protect the privacy of these poor officers."

Cops have a lot of things to legitimately be scared of and people who have never been in situations like this really can't understand that deep animal fight-or-flight instinct when face to face with people who may or may not have the means and desire to kill them. It's not a thing that can be trained out of humans, despite what Hollywood likes to pretend by showing us cool, collected action hero badasses who never mess up.

We can sit here and rewind this video a hundred times and say "Yeah they overreacted." But when you're standing there in the dark and you have one chance to get it right and about half a second to think about it while your hands are shaking and your heart is pounding in your ears... well things like this end up happening.

That being said, it's time that they start finding better ways to deal with it than shooting everything darker than them. I'm sick of seeing unarmed people getting killed, and I'm sick of there never being any real consequences for it. Giving the cops tasers hasn't really reduced incidents like this as far as I can tell-- it's just led to them using tasers for every routine problem, on people who certainly don't need to be shot by tiny scalpel blades and painfully given electric shocks.

In my book the life of an unarmed civilian is worth more than the life of a cop. Police know what they signed up for, and their job is to protect us.

I would propose something like: any shooting regardless of justification is grounds for an immediate, unpaid six months suspension while they investigate. Making an honest mistake like this isn't a good enough reason to get you reinstated-- shooting someone is a once-a-career event unless you're literally saving someone's life, despite what you knew or didn't know at the time.

It wouldn't prevent every mistake, but it would, I hope, make them think a lot more carefully about drawing and discharging their weapons.

I am fairly certain you could submit a police murder video to the hopper every day for a year without submitting the same one twice. The Sciencopogists will come out in force screaming "they deserved it because ethnic crime thetans" and everyone will argue. Nothing will change. Genocide continues. Dystopia abides. White makes right.

When I saw the title, however, I remembered Beavis and Butthead sitting around saying "Gardena" over and over, and that is five stars.

Maybe police side arms should be powder coated and designed to look and feel less cool.

A hat can be a dangerous weapon. I mean, look at that Oddjob guy.