Men’s Rightsers discover the true villain behind the police killing of Walter Scott: His ex-wife

If only something was surprising about this, other than how long it took them.

Leave it to MRAs to take a complex situation and boil it down to “it’s a woman’s fault.”

This would be a great opportunity to talk about how black men bear the brunt of state violence. That is a men’s rights issue, an important one. But let’s not have that conversation! That would be hard, and stuff, and involve talking about structural and institutional racism, and admitting that middle-class white men are actually not particularly disadvantaged.

How we deal with people who are behind on child support is also an important conversation to have, but let’s not do it in any kind of realistic way. Let’s instead make it into a discussion about how women rule the world.

By making these adjustments, we can keep the focus where it belongs: on the persecution complex that too many privileged cis het white men have a psychological need to maintain.

I bet his ex-wife was the party who smashed the taillight that (allegedly) led to Scott being pulled over in the first place.

Does anyone else see how the MRAs basically assume the cop was justified in shooting an unarmed fleeing man?

According to MRAs women have 3 flaws: Everything we say, everything we do and they fact that we even exist in the world. Basically I think just the same about MRAs…

It is seriously fucked up that parents who can’t afford to suppprt their kids get jail instead of help, though.

@brooked

I’m unsurprised but unhappy about the way the person being interviewed in that story clearly assumes that any time a police officer shoots someone, it’s justified unless proven otherwise. I mean, that makes sense, given that this is an organization that defends cops as its mandate, and the person being interviewed is a former LEO. But that’s exactly the problem. At a minimum, all shootings should be viewed through a neutral lens from the outset, but that’s not what actually happens.

There’s good evidence that when a citizen group is charged with reviewing all instances of taser use, police use their tasers less. The citizen groups almost always find that the taser use was justified, because the unjustifiable instances go almost entirely away when cops know that they’re going to have to answer for it to non-cops after the fact. I haven’t heard of a similar mechanism for (fatal or nonfatal) deadly weapon use but I certainly would like to.

So he got sent to jail because of what he claimed was a DHS clerical error–right payment, wrong Mother–and so lost the best job he ever had (that paid only $35,000), couldn’t find another, the child support kept piling up even when he was in jail for not paying it… the way the courts treat poor and black people (and especially poor black people) is amazingly fucked up. That has nothing to do with child support. He could have ended up in the same cycle for traffic tickets (watch John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight).

It sounds like he really, really wanted to help his children, but the criminalization of being a poor black man stopped him. (Causing a father to lose his job because he has become slightly behind on child support? Where the fuck is the logic there?

I was pleasantly surprised that the president of The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, an ex-FBI officer, felt that Slager very likely would be indicted even without the video.

Yeah, but. Firstly, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think he would have been indicted without the video. I don’t even think Hosko thinks that’s true, which is why he says he would hope that the investigation would ask pertinent questions like, why did you discharge your weapon from 30 feet away into the suspect’s back? He hopes that would be asked and taken seriously, but I think it would have been swept under the rug and I bet Hosko does, too.

Secondly, the remainder of his remarks just carry this tone that I can only describe as “agency point of view.” Also, note the lead-in at the top:

The organization recently invited several journalists, including this reporter, to experience a simulator that police academies use to train cadets in order to give the media a better sense of split-second decisions officers must make.

I think everyone knows that cops sometimes have to make split-second decisions, and there is increased room for error when that is required. Those instances do not occur on a day-to-day basis and did not occur in the situation at hand. Showing journalists a cadet-training simulator that implies that cops have to deal with this every day, day in and day out, not long after Ferguson and when police brutality is all over the news, is a transparent ploy to increase sympathy for the mostly-white cops who shoot young black men in the back.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and that bad taste stays there for the entire article because of statements like this:

I do not know, and I guess it will ultimately come out, what the officer had in mind, what he knew about this person who he shot.

Hosko returns to that at another point, that we just don’t know what happened prior to the beginning of the video. I don’t think he consciously is attempting to imply that there might be some kind of legitimate justification for this shooting, but that’s what he’s doing. I mean, we just don’t know … what Walter Scott might have done to deserve being gunned down like an animal. That’s what this kind of weaseling says. It doesn’t seem to be a deliberate, conscious thing, but it’s still there.

All in all … bleh. But unsurprising.

Here’s an excellent New Yorker article. It’s a shorter news piece rather than one of their full length Goliaths. It also fails to address The ex-wife’s culpability due to our culture’s oppressive gynocentrity.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/walter-scott-shooting-south-carolina

It’s crucial to point out that had the bystander not turned on his smartphone camera, that creaky counter-narrative—I thought he was reaching for my weapon—would almost certainly have given Slager a pass. And no doubt, the swiftness of the political and narrative unity in the shooting death of Scott owes much to the lessons of Ferguson. But South Carolina is not Missouri—its racial past, in fact, is more violent, but its attempts to move away from that history, while less known, have been more bold. The state’s history of violence against black men and women is excruciating to know, or to read.

And here’s an article for MRAs to mangle and misread, as they fail to see that race and class issues are central and how this is about the mass incarceration of poor minorities.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/walter-scott-child-support-_n_7036174.html

One-Eighth Of South Carolina Inmates Were Jailed Over Child Support Payments. Walter Scott Was One Of Them.

Patterson told The Huffington Post in an interview that most states are more forgiving than South Carolina when it comes to child support payments. In general, there is no set number of days after which the debtor automatically goes to a contempt hearing.

“There’s a more flexible process [in other states],” she said. “It’s less likely you’ll go the contempt route. You may enter a payment agreement, or may determine there’s no money. The person may pay up without going through the judicial process.”

The professor said she has found only one other jurisdiction in the country — the 9th Judicial District of New Mexico — whose rules are as stringent as South Carolina’s.

In a separate study in 2010, Patterson surveyed hundreds of cases across South Carolina and found that low-income, noncustodial parents like Scott often ended up in jail without being represented by an attorney in civil court. In fact, the study showed that over 98 percent of parents being held in contempt for non-payment of child support did not have legal counsel. Ninety-five percent of the parents held in contempt ended up being sentenced to jail, with an average sentence of three months.

Seventy-five percent of the parents Patterson examined in her 2010 paper were indigent, meaning they testified that they were presently or previously unemployed or that they were having difficulties finding work. And nearly 70 percent of the noncustodial parent-debtors were black, even though blacks made up less than 28 percent of South Carolina’s population that year.

@M

In NYC, questionable fatal shooting usually end with the officer involved being suspended and the victim’s family receiving millions of dollars form a lawsuit settlement.

Here’s an article from 1997 about a police officers being sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years for shooting an unarmed man.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/22/nyregion/prison-term-for-officer-who-killed-unarmed-man.html

Yesterday’s sentencing was the first in two years for an officer convicted of committing homicide while on duty. In 1995, Jonas Bright, an 18-year veteran of the housing police, was sentenced to one to four years in prison for criminally negligent homicide in the fatal shooting of a man on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1992.

Apparently the only other time an officer was convicted and sentenced in such a crime was 1978, when Thomas Ryan of the 44th Precinct in the Bronx was sentenced to four years in prison, also for criminally negligent homicide, in the beating death of a suspect.

So apparently as of 1997, a NYPD officer had been sentenced for an unjustified shooting three times in history. I’ll try to get more current info.