Comment by RealityVoid
2 days ago
The point is, when tense situations happen, you need to have everyone keep their cool. If someone flinches, people die. Repeat this situation many many times over a day, and tragedies will happen.
The shooting of Alex Pretti was a long chain of escalatory and poor decisions on the part of ICE (well, assuming here that "good" is defined by not shooting people, I'm sure some in this admin might disagree). I might come off too sympathetic to ICE. I am not, but the real killers here are the ones creating these kinds of situations, the ones using ICE as a political gain machine. I'm sure that ICE has its shares of psychopaths, but giving them reign in the first place... those people empowering them have blood on their hands.
> The point is, when tense situations happen, you need to have everyone keep their cool. If someone flinches, people die. Repeat this situation many many times over a day, and tragedies will happen.
Except that "flinching" is not happening. An earlier comment of mine:
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On the most recent event, a reduced-speed video showing one agent (centre, bent over at beginning) removing the victim's firearm from his waistband, then a second agent (left) waiting for the first to get clear, and then pulling his pistol (video stops before any shooting):
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754974
The second waited for the first guy to be clear, then drew, then started shooting. He was waiting for his opportunity.
I saw the video, it was horrifying. My (admittedly, attempting to be as charitable as possible to murderers) take is that the one taking the weapon must have said he has a gun, and the first shooter reacted to that. It's a very sad day for the US, Alex Pretti seemed like a great person and what happened was disgraceful.
I still think that the most dangerous thing from this whole situation is how this admin frames it and effectively encourages ICE to kill people further, because there will be no consequence for them. Essentially, same thing they did with the Jan 6 protesters.
Call me crazy, but I think the most dangerous thing about people killing people is that people are killing people.
>The point is, when tense situations happen, you need to have everyone keep their cool.
That's why we train law enforcement to de-escalate instead of doing what they are doing right now, which is antagonizing and brutalizing. You absolve them of their crimes when you pretend that this was all inevitable.