This is too bad....


Boulder Police shoot naked man reportedly high ... - YouTube
Video for boulder police likk man at party...you tube▶ 2:16
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y28tzZkMld0
3 days ago - Uploaded by 7 NEWS - The Denver Channel
A naked man was shot and killed by police officers in Boulder Monday night after reportedly attacking a man .

excessive force & brutality by the police claims another life. Very sad that we live in a world where those whose job it is to protect us are so quick to take the life of another human & use the flawed legal system to their advantage to get off free of any punishment.
There was an incident like this relatively close to me recently as well.

I think police who deal with the general public should not be allowed to carry firearms or any deadly weapons. Yes, people have been killed by tasers. Probably by rubber bullets and pepper spray as well. But they are much less lethal alternatives that when used properly are extremely effective.

I watched this video the other day and I was wondering if Canada might be more accepting of something like disarming police officers over the United States because we're far less aggressive in terms of our use of firearms and we have a stronger tie to the UK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9TFvh6Xps4

Just a reminder...contrary to popular belief, police don't exist to protect you. Police exist to uphold the established social order. In the US, modern policing can be traced directly back to slave-catching gangs and attempts to eradicate members of the "dangerous classes" (especially the urban poor, vagrants, and prostitutes).

Excellent reading material on the subject of police in the US (with a brief treatment of the development of modern policing in European contexts as well).

Some of them do. They just don't get into the news. Well, I suppose their very sole existence isn't to protect me. It's just their job. Yes the police are in a pretty bad light, especially stateside right now, but I think although your comment is rooted in some truth, as a broad statement it is not itself the entire truth. I've known good policemen who have done good things. They just don't raise as much attention as the bad ones.

As individuals, sure, a "good" cop will do what they can to protect you. But as an institution that is not why the police exist nor is that what they spend their time/resources doing. The only time I've ever actually needed a cop in my entire life they were unable to help me because of protocol. We need to get this idea out of our heads that we need people with guns roaming the streets looking for "troublemakers".

And don't forget that the idea of police forces is a relatively new phenomena. Throughout most of human history we've gotten along just fine without them, this idea that the police are fundamental to society is unimaginative at best and a downright lie at worst.

Have you ever heard of transformative justice? In a nutshell it's a harm-reductionist approach to justice. When harm is done, our current model seeks to find someone to blame and then to punish them--but we understand that not only does this not address the root causes of the problem that created harm in the first place, but that simply punishing someone doesn't actually help the person who was harmed. When harm occurs transformative justice frameworks have us ask who was harmed, how can we help, and what can we do to make sure this never happens again? Instead of just punishing someone, transformative justice works on a case-by-case basis, understanding that there is no single reason people harm one another, and that people who are harmed have different needs, different methods of coping, and different ideas of what justice looks like.

This is awful news though. My heart goes out to this persons friends and family. This could have been any one of us

Stay safe everyone.

One has to face the facts that without [some law]..[and police].. i The country would be like the old west people settling their diferences with a gun. every day..

So i guess in that sense society needs police and some law and order to a degree..and the police needs villians to chase its all in the game of life..

But the report above of the college kid that was killed..judging on the report I read ...
it appears that a couple cops had itchy trigger fingers because they were too quick to kill when the kid stood on his second floor balcony holding a hammer ...and thats a sign of someone lacking in skills ...


They used a weak excuse to pull the trigger within a few seconds after tasering the guy..

Because if he would have jumped off the balcony with his hammer he probibly would have broken booth legs in the fall doing NO harm to the police...

Then it would have been a simple task to subdue the guy...
In my opinion..they didnt need deadly force...

my two cents...

In some reference to cops and what goes on much of the time, especially given inner cities all over the country; I highly suggest this more recent JRE podcast with Michael Wood.

It's an incredibly blunt interview in regards to police brutality. Really fascinating and highly suggested. This guy was a Baltimore police officer for 11 years.



While I know this is a Baltimore police officer and evidently he can't speak for every cop, he allows you to get a general idea to protocol in the police force and how things are ran alot of the time in terms of police themselves personally and also the political side and the deeper aspects of much of what goes on.

most humans are unconscious robots

further more adding guns is'nt going to be helpful

......so don't be fooled , even for a moment

......because the unconscious robots will shoot to kill

Laws protect criminals, creating a welcoming environment for them. Laws distort and hinder peoples natural ability to perceive the difference between right and wrong. The country would probably experience a purge of sorts due to the laws that man has lived with for many generations, but then society would be healthier.


This is sad and needless. The war on drugs results in so much needless pain, misery, and death.

Horrific incident. I wonder if it was actually LSD he was on. I'm not saying it wasn't, but in my experience LSD very rarely causes violent behavior in the user. Violence is more often visited on LSD users after they display erratic behavior to people who do not understand or empathize with the situation.

Over the years I've personally heard only two reliable reports of violence committed by someone on LSD. One was by someone I knew to be antisocial and violent. The other was a kid who dosed himself way too much, called 911 on himself and, after literally being netted by the police said he panicked in the emergency room while being badgered with questions and hit a nurse.

Could have been LSD, but I don't believe it just because some local newscaster says "Reportedly on LSD".

I watched that podcast as well. It was really thought provoking to me; I think about police brutality often, the abuse of authority, sociological questions, etc. I'm always curious to hear what ex-police have to say about the 'inner workings' of the department and what goes on behind closed doors.

I have to agree with Snozz simply due to the historical evidence he's talking about, first of all. Second of all the personal experiences I've had (I'm an incredibly passive and polite person and I've been harassed numerous times) and the experiences of others I've witnessed. There are some serious problems with the way the public is policed by these uniformed thugs. Yes, there are always exceptions but that's all they are; exceptions to the rule. Some more than others, but most police when tested will respond in a very aggressive, intimidating, and flat-out insulting manner. It could take more to push one cop to that level than another but they will get there and it's never pretty when it happens.

My opinion is that you can't give a group of people that much authority over others without some abuse of power. We're going to have to spread the power around so that no one person can commit such ridiculous crap and then not have to answer to any consequences. People will display different behaviors when uniformed; playing a certain role can change people psychologically extremely quickly. Makes me think of the Stanford Prison Experiment and how terrifying a study like that can be which exposes some of our darkest impulses as human beings.

This is the classic liberal vs. conservative argument. Conservatives seek to use courts, police, and aggressive punishments to deal with problems while liberals seek to eliminate root causes of the problem. Conservatives deal with things on the back-end, liberals on the front-end. However dealing with things before they become a problem is tough for a lot of people because why deal with something before it is a big problem? It takes intelligence and foresight to look into the future and see that you'll save work, but not a lot of people have these.

There are problems with both sides. More courts and police is too simple and just doesn't work. It also sends society down a terrible path. But keep in mind "man is not simply a product of objective circumstances" (Zizek). There is a decision in the process of committing a crime, whether it be robbing a store or doing drugs.

I am going to offer some views which will not be popular here but should be said nonetheless. Police do not make the laws, they just enforce them. I know this phrase gets used a lot, but it's true. They simply don't have the resources to deal with things that are not their responsibility.

Before I go further I should preface that I personally know a lot of cops, and I have trained in my fighting system with police, DEA, and IRS officers. Honestly they were all pretty nice to me, but during the course of my weapons training I can see where issues arise. The aggressive drug user, usually the "black crack addict," is not viewed as a human being, but rather an object-animal that is coming toward you with murderous. We were told that bullets anywhere else besides the head would not save our lives, especially in the case of something like a PCP user. And if you've trained in these types of situations, you would see that this is really the case. When you have a gun in training and someone comes at you with a knife (keep in mind this is just rubber or a magic marker), you will see that if you do not shoot to kill then you will be dead.

Where do we go from here? Imagine the daily life of some police officers, especially ones who work in lower-income areas. They have to get up in the morning, kiss their families goodbye, and literally deal with some of the scummiest people the US has to offer. They have to traverse streets where people hate them and would love the chance to put a few bullets in an officer. They deal with vicious drug dealers who wouldn't have a second thought about nor really any accountability for killing a cop in the dead of night. I would be pretty apprehensive if that was my job too.

And so then we come across the more extreme cases (the couple that come from thousands of interactions with police everyday) where the police have to kill someone while on duty. But ask yourself, if these alleged drug users in Boulder really were just tripping on the couch watching TV peacefully, would the police have even been called? Would they have barged into this person's residence to see "what's up"? Not in the slightest.

I live in a college town where the police do not care if underage people are drunk if they are not causing a problem. And the thing is, if they were causing a problem, then it really doesn't matter if they were drunk or not! Police keep order, and if someone is acting out of order and being belligerent, then they will be dealt with. Did the cops know at the time they arrived at this residence that the guys were on drugs? Probably not, they probably just were called and showed up to a scene with questionable and supposedly violent people. The idea that they were on drugs, LSD in particular, probably came up after the entire situation.

We definitely need sympathy and understanding for the victims of police brutality, but we need a similar amount of sympathy and understanding for officers themselves. Not all of them are the vicious animals we love to make them out to be. And even for the ones who are, certain circumstances could have made them that way.

In the end we do not pay police officers to beat people up or kill people. We pay them to safely bring suspects in for questioning in a court of law. Our society is not the movie Judge Dredd where police are judge, jury, and executioner. Change needs to come from the higher, political and departmental levels, and I think it is only fair that we give individual policemen more of a break.

Loggers, construction workers, taxi drivers, garbage collectors, and bartenders are all more likely to die on the job than a cop. There's no excuse to murder people. Imagine the daily life of some of the people who live in the low-income areas being regularly patrolled. They have to wake up in the morning, kiss their families goodbye, and try to make it through the day however they can without getting harassed and potentially killed by some of the most vicious and scummy people the US has to offer. You even said it yourself, they use our heads for target practice.

I know lots of cops too; I grew up around them, I even have cops in my family. But seriously, f--- the police. As individuals yeah I don't think the majority of cops are out there looking for people to murder; but the violence we see perpetuated by police is inherent within the fundamental concept of a police force. The police brutality that is being publicized right now is not a new phenomena at all. What we see here is just a continuation of a legacy of violence, a logical implication of a system designed to be violent.

And we seriously need to stop pretending that cops are out there taking down "dangerous criminals", stopping violent crime, and helping people cross the street. The amount of violent crime that police respond to is an incredibly low percentage of the overall activity that they engage in. In the majority of instances in which police do respond to violent crime, it is after the fact...meaning that the police usually respond to violence after it has occurred; there is very little that cops actually do to prevent violence from occurring in the first place. The vast majority of police resources go towards patrolling low-income neighborhoods searching for undesirable people to search and arrest, protecting private property of wealthy landowners, and protecting the interests of the state. Just last week I saw four police officers arresting a 14 year old boy for open liquor. Four officers in body armor, armed, surrounding a 14 year old kid, who they had handcuffed, because he was drinking underage. They did not call his parents. This kid was going to juvenile detention, and if passerby's hadn't intervened it would have stuck with him for the rest of his life. This is where police resources are going. Not taking down Scarface or Al Capone.

Im not gonna touch any further on the "scummiest people the US has to offer" or "vicious drug dealers" comments, and I'm not going to ask why that's being conflated with low-income areas. But I hope that speaks for itself.

There's a lot in your post worth touching on but it's late and I should probably be asleep, not on the internet. I'm sure other people will have their thoughts to share.

I agree. Although i am a tiny bit sceptical about a PR film released by Northants constabulary. In real life emotions and adrenaline come into play in these situations and they probably would have given the guy with the knife a bit of a beating (but atleast they wouldn"t have shot him).
You mix volatile situations with firearms and it is not going to end well. But in the UK everyday police don"t carry firearms because handguns and automatics are illegal. I don"t know about Canada but this will never happen in the states.



If you were to live in a low income area rather than a college town, you would be less likely to buy into the idea of these areas containing scummy people. It seems to me to be a myth that is perpetuated in order to maintain an us and them situation coupled with a climate of fear.

Unarmed teenager shot for marijuana possession

Yes. Really, it only takes a small consideration to understand that income is not an indicator of sleaziness, or of goodness. Human nature is independent of money, and some of the best people i know have none, and some of the biggest scumbags I've even heard of come from the richest neighborhoods.

Perhaps i took this all out of context, i haven't read the entire thread, and if so, apologize and will edit accordingly as time permits..

So it seems you're insinuating that conservatives exhibit less intelligence and foresight than liberals. I have no argument for that.


There are decisions made in everything you do in life. Just like the decision to put on a uniform and become a police officer. You are accepting the dangers (and all the perks) that come along with the uniform, badge, and title. Unlike some of the decisions people make which they are coerced or manipulated into making, choosing a career is something that is ultimately up to you. You decide what you do with your life; no one else. Allowing others to make those decisions for you is your own fault and is not a legitimate excuse, IMO.


"I was just following orders." I have never been able to see that for anything but what it is; nonsense. Again, you make a decision whether or not to blindly follow orders and enforce laws, or to question the merit of those laws/orders and come up with your own opinion. Those who never question authority are those who allow themselves to commit the most heinous acts. Blindly following orders is what created Nazi Germany.


Emphasis on "When you have a gun". If you don't have a gun you are forced to come up with a less lethal alternative to subdue the suspect and diffuse the situation. Could you be killed by a knife wielding suspect? Well, yes. Does he deserve to die simply for threatening a police officer with a weapon? No. I extend that to every person and it makes it very simple. No one deserves to be killed, no matter the circumstances. "Kill or be killed" is an outdated model that we need to abandon.


If you're a good law-abiding citizen then you should have nothing to hide, that kind of mentality? Well that is how your rights begin to be trampled. Be a good little robot and sit in front of that TV and don't cause any trouble. Yes, police have to respond to calls about violent altercations and the like. That is their job. But you know what else they've done, something I've personally witnessed?

Someone called the cops on one of my friends because they smelled some pot outside of his door. They banged on the door for five straight minutes, then began yelling threats saying they were going to kick the door in because they had "probable cause" to do so. So my friend opened the door and they tried to force their way in, no warrant, nothing. He is a big guy like me thankfully and both of us managed to keep the three officers from barging into his private residence. They then proceeded to try to intimidate us into telling them how much pot we had in the apartment, where we got it from, etc. When we wouldn't answer questions they became more belligerent and one of the officers pinned me against the wall in the hallway with his forearm, demanding I tell him my drug dealers name. When it escalated too far my friend would only say "I want my lawyer, I want legal counsel." I had stopped talking almost immediately when I saw how aggressive they were. They couldn't charge us with anything so they left leaving us with "a warning".

They barged in there like some Gestapo SS Nazis and tried to bully us into giving up some of our most important civil rights. I've witnessed this far too many times to see it as "one bad apple" or to assume that there are a lot of good cops, because my experience has been the opposite.


The same could be said about every human being. Certain experiences have changed them, for better or worse. That does not give them a free pass; no more than it does for any civilian. I had a violent childhood, I dealt with some very disturbing circumstances. Am I a serial killer? Do I harm people? Do I take out all that horrible stuff that happened to me as a child on random strangers because I know, being a cop, that I can get away with such horrific behavior? No. Because I recognize that I'm a human being and that hurting other human beings is like hurting myself. Those cops are vicious animals; it's hard to see them as anything but.


They chose the job, they chose to learn to deal with the stigma attached to the uniform and the badge. I don't give military personnel any more of a break than I give law enforcement. It was your choice to take a job where you might possibly have to kill someone. Just choosing to do a job like that takes a certain kind of psychological position. If you thought to yourself, "I could never take someones life." You probably wouldn't choose a career in law enforcement or the military, would you. Because taking those jobs is conceding to the fact that you may be put in that situation one day where you'll have to choose if someone else lives or dies. I could never do that and those who can, and live with themselves afterward, I really don't understand. It's a viciousness and indifference that I will never understand.

That is very true, and many people have difficult jobs. But this does not take away from the fact that many individual police officers also have tough jobs and deserve a similar amount of consideration for the risk they take. As much as we want to think that all police officers are mindless, dysfunctional robots that need to be deactivated, it is simply not true.




I'm playing devil's advocate a lot here but trying to make some points that might not be taken so well too. Honestly, as a citizen with my own moral code that involves rarely if ever hurting others, I prefer not to interact with police either. I do and possess drugs, which is mostly against the law, so it poses kind of an issue for me to interact with and share my personal life with them. And yes, we have cameras now!! Imagine the police brutality that occurred in the pre-dashcam days!!



Did or did not the boy break the law? It's akin to the enemy combatant thing; if you are an enemy of the state or the state's interests/ideology, you lose some if not all of your rights. Do I think it's absurd that underage people can't peacefully drink? Yes. Do I think four officers in armor dealing with one kid is also absurd and a waste of money? Yes. But it was the kid's responsibility to know the law and to not break it. As much as we might dislike the law, there are still consequences for breaking it. Also so much goes on, that while some of the higher-up criminals may evade capture or prosecution for some time, it's ridiculous to say that law enforcement doesn't focus on catching higher level criminals too.



Tell me, where would you feel physically safer walking, west Detroit or a rich neighborhood in Beverly Hills?

I do not mean to appeal too much to anyone's pathos, but one family friend of mine was raped on her way to school in Detroit and her mother was robbed at gunpoint there. Ironically their family still supports and loves Detroit (although they have since moved to a rich suburb), which I find preposterous. Where would you rather send your children to school, Hillsborough, CA or Detroit??

I used to live near Detroit and I have spent some time in and around the city. You would not want to live in some of those neighborhoods. The things you have, the computer you're typing on? It would be gone after a couple days. People I know who have lived there were terribly unhappy and generally frightened.

I'm not saying that all poor people are sleazy and rich people aren't. I know rich people who are garbage and poor people who would give their lives for me. But in general, I would much rather be in a safe, high income area with better schools than a poor one. Poverty and crime come in a nice little bundle, and I'm just saying that police who patrol those areas have an especially hard time!

Following orders and enforcing laws are two separate things. The militarization of police, like we saw in Ferguson, MO, involves policemen ceasing to make decisions and starting to blindly follow orders from higher ups. But with how much hate this thread seems to have for police, do you really want them making decisions? Wouldn't you rather have a sane, educated police chief that hands down sensible orders that police are required to follow?

Cops usually have agency guided by policy in how they choose to enforce the law. Not every criminal is made equal. Let me ask, did George Zimmerman (even though he was not a police officer) follow orders? Did the cop who shot Michael Brown follow orders? Did the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray follow orders? How about the cop in Texas who threw all the pool party kids on the ground?

You'll see a trend here of officers not following any explicit orders (or especially departmental policy in the case of Freddie Gray!) and making their own moral judgments. So yeah, I'd almost rather have cops having to strictly follow orders set by rational courts and lawmakers and have body cams to back enforce proper cooperation on their part. This might be hard since we do not want a militarized police force, but I think this is where the US might have to go.



I'm afraid I cannot argue this because we flat-out disagree. I do not think anyone should have to be threatened with a knife, and death, in my (and the United States' ) opinion, is a proper and legally protected form of retaliation.



I'm sorry this happened to you, and this kind of event would foster even more contempt in me than I already have for repressive state apparatuses. From your story, the police were in the wrong and were not following the law. If there were properly installed body cameras at the time with courts willing to use that as evidence, you probably could have sued the city for money.

I really wish we could live in a totally peaceful world where no one had to worry about violence from either criminals nor the police. But we don't. And to solve these issues, I think it requires the same amount of understanding for police officers that we give to the criminally inclined. Why are they like this? How can we solve the root cause here? How can we look at the circumstances of the officers to solve issues of brutality, while properly using some kind of enforcement on the other end (such as body cameras) to make sure they are following the rules?

If we're going to take a liberal approach to criminality, we also need to take one to brutality.

I do not think that where i would feel safer walking, or choosing which school to send my kids to, has anything to do with you (who i am guessing are a privileged white male) referring to those that live below the poverty line as scummy. Why are they scummy? How did they end up so scummy? Is it their fault that they are so scummy? Are they any more scummy than rich scummy people? Or are lower income areas not as clean as Beverly Hills, therefore accentuating the scummy ambience of poor areas? Maybe you should have chosen your words a little more carefully.

I will add that i always admire someone for having a go at playing devils advocate.



Although, with comments like the above, you are making a bit of a pigs ear of your advocative duties.