Bettie Jones, a mother of five and grandmother of six, had worked full-time at the Alpha Baking bread factory before being diagnosed with ovarian cancer earlier this year, according to her brother, Robin Andrews. After a successful surgery, Andrews said, Jones was looking for an all-clear from her doctor so she could get back to work.
“She was the kind of person who would come home after a 16-hour shift and then ask you if you needed anything,” Andrews said. “She was always trying to help, sharing whatever little food she had in her fridge. She was one of a kind like that.”
Jones’ other brother, James Reynolds, said he was furious with the way police had handled the 911 call.
“We’re talking about a kid here with a baseball bat. How are you then justified in coming in here, raining down bullets like it’s the wild west?” Reynolds said. “This is about discipline — when you go to a job, you’ve got to do the job right. They didn’t, and now a life has been lost.”
For chrissakes. Yes, we should be talking about racism and we should be talking about over-militarization of police and we should be talking about the response to people with mental illness in general but can we also talk about apparently these people are seriously lousy shots, trained by Dirty Harry movies and their own paranoid imaginations?
You want to get all amped up at me about BLUE LIVES MATTER and how the cops are our last line of defense of the rights of property against the mob or whatever we’re on about now? You need to grant they really ought to be able to take out “the bad guy” without spraying the whole damn place with bullets. Otherwise it’s a toss-up if people should take their chances with the criminals, who don’t seem to have much worse aim.
A.
There’s something seriously wrong with either the kind of people they’re hiring as cops these days, or something is seriously wrong with the way cops are trained. Or both. Either they’re hiring crazy violent people or the training is turning them into crazy violent people. Whatever, something has got to change. Although I hold no high hopes it will.
Police in first world countries will watch videos of American police (both training and on the beat) to see how to not do things. In first world countries, the police try to de-escalate violent situations first and foremost. They get genuinely upset when they feel forced to use violence. In America, violence is the only response they know.