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This is always the case in history. The agitators and revolutionaries or whatever you want to call them are not the most shelf-stable individuals.
Sam Adams was a perennial business fuckup. He could barely make money smuggling. Thomas Jefferson was terrible at running a plantation (he was more interested in rewriting the bible). Patrick Henry was a firery lawyer living on daddy's money. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Politics in general is not for people who have their life together. But also many people just routinely don't have their life together all that well. I've been lucky enough to say that my life has never been in shambles. But my father had his life in shambles for what sounds like a ten year stretch when I hear the stories.
As much as the people involved seem like fuckups I think it is still important to have good policy and procedures for handling situations. If only 5% of the population is career criminals and fuckups, the police will be spending most of their time dealing with that population, and they should know how to handle them as best as possible.
I said with the Good shooting that I don't think there was a policy that would have prevented her shooting. With the Pretti shooting I'm not so sure. I haven't watched the videos and evidence enough to be certain, but I feel like it was a communication failure on the part of the officers that led to the shooting. You'll see police officers sometimes calling out the situation to other officers as they restrain an individual, or giving commands to the individual that let other officers know where in the process of the arrest/restraining they are at. You'll also see police officers only have two or three officers close to a person they are restraining, and additional officers will stand back and keep other people at bay. But also keep an eye on the situation. I think either of these tactics employed with Pretti might have prevented him from being shot. Either they would have known he was restrained, or the officers standing back would have seen that he had not pulled a gun. Bad training on the part of the ICE agents involved, but I get that is not really their specialty area. So some of the responsibility loops back around to "why are they not getting backup from local law enforcement that does know how to handle these people".
I feel the need to be against any kind of policy that just casually wastes the lives of people who are fuckups. I owe my existence to someone who was a temporary fuckup. People can improve their lives. They can have kids that are better than them, etc.
Good reminder, thank you.
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