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In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their
crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.
Seems like at least two guys, maybe three restraining the one dude. https://twitter.com/_barringtonii/status/1653941898023665665
Everyones only focusing on that shot with just the marine and the guy, probably taken later than the above pic
Not everyone, Black Lives Matter thinks all three should be prosecuted. Because the mentally ill homeless are ordinary people's social and moral superiors and raising a hand against them, regardless of provocation, is verboten -- and black homeless especially so, of course.
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
I'd really like to discuss this sentiment. I see this kind of hyperbolic statement expressed all the time, often in the form of "There shouldn't be a death penalty for X" or "Doing X doesn't mean they deserve death". Where action X provoked response P which lead to the person's death.
If this isn't just a rhetorical sleight of hand, I really don't get it.
Let's say somebody decides to take a stroll on the Autobahn. I approach him at 200 km/h. Instead of swerving off the road, likely killing me and my passengers, I instead hit the brakes, and subsequently, him. He dies. Would people now come out and say "There shouldn't be a death penalty for people strolling on the Autobahn" or "Taking a stroll doesn't mean he deserves death". No, but he risks justifiable reactions by others that could lead to his demise.
What kind of logic is this?
It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.
The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.
I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.
The Left's position in isolation isn't the biggest issue. Although I can argue that it's vastly underestimating how messy actual violence is to think you can easily damn someone for imperfect defense.
The issue is that position as part of a package of other positions that make self-defense more necessary - like weakening the ability to contain segments of the population that disproportionately create these safety concerns by trying to make the prison system "fairer" (i.e. less punitive).
Yeah, I think the second paragraph is a big part of it. If once every now and then a homeless man threw trash at people on a subway, then endure it and wait for the police to show up is pretty tolerable. If they're doing it constantly and the police do nothing then the temptation to take matters into your own hands is quite high. Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.
I think the Left has worked itself into a shoot - to use wrestling lingo - on cops being if not useless or outright harmful, at least vastly overdeployed as a solution to problems.
I suppose I can see that argument for a high trust, low crime society. I just don't know how it maps to the US.
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