So, in your mind, if someone threatens me with a knife, I should try to run away. If the bad guy chases me down, (it wouldn’t take much) then I can try to find a knife to fend him off. If I only have a gun, I must only, what, threaten him with it since he has only threatened me?
Neither. A wanna be cop killed him. The guy needs to be arrested and prosecuted.
The answer is that you have to retreat if you reasonably can. And you have to use the least deadly means necessary if you cannot retreat. It is simple thing to think up hard cases where it is not clear what is reasonable. That is what judges and juries are for. But under current FL law, a grown man can shoot an unarmed teen and call it justified because there is no requirement that he even try to avoid the conflict or that he use only reasonable force.
Until the next one, and the next one…?
How does one prevent racial profiling among civilians, or more to the point, racism? There is always an inherent danger when neighborhood watch groups become armed. Yet even then, how does one stop those with a right to bear arms from watching the neighborhood?
By making any death resulting from it equivalent to murder, or at least manslaughter. For a hate crime you have to prove racial hatred, which is difficult to do. For a racial profiling crime all that would be necessary is to prove that race alone was used to single out the victim - far easier to do. It would apply to police as well as to the general public and the perpetrator would not even have to be proven a racist.
The man didn’t stand his ground.
I can see such a possibility, but more on the civilian side. If the police are told a black male just robbed a store, they must single out both blacks males for scrutinity. It is neither racial not gender profiling.
I just added the qualifier “alone” to my post (as in using race alone as a basis). If the police have specific information (which usually includes height/weight etc), by all means…if they don’t leave our kids alone - it’s really that simple.
What killed the young man was an angry, racist, paranoid man bent on starting a fight and ending it with an illegal use of lethal force. He should be tried and then thrown in prison, period, end of story.
It would be impossible to prove “reasonable threat” absent a witness. The way that law works, all he has to do is state that he felt threatened. Bad law.
I also think the police officers involved in this need to be suspended without pay and then given some reeducation training on what justified use of lethal force is. Even a police officer who did what this man did should be charged with a serious crime. You cannot shoot an unarmed man, especially not one that hasn’t even approached you or in any way threatened you or anyone else with bodily harm.
This has nothing to do with profiling. The guy is a nut case.
I can pretty much guarantee that in a few days his neighbors will be grabbing their 15 minutes of fame talking about how they just knew he would do something like this.
It isn’t going to matter how many people you put in jail, there will always be nut cases out and about in our world.
Are you talking about profiles built on ethnic group or profiles built from data that includes ethnic group? The first is wrong [morally and scientifically], the second is not.
Wrong again.
This.
I think your point is a very good one. You can’t stop people from racial profiling, but you can make them pay a very high price for acting upon it without cause. You could bump up a manslaughter charge to aggravated manslaughter with a much stiffer penalty.
