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No, I'm not making this about me.
I bring this up to denote my relevant experience to different pieces of this. Because that's how people tend to filter the facts of a given situation. Even if we don't immediately, overtly realize the steps we go through en route to a conclusion. And I think that there are multiple pieces that need serious attention.
I was stabbed in a fight in my early twenties, and I was just fine. It was a deep cut that required stitches. Thing is, it was in my right tricep, and had I been throwing a punch with that arm at that exact moment- which all I was doing, because I was fighting three guys- he'd have stuck me in my rib cage, and possibly my lungs. He was definitely swinging with bad intentions.
To kfine's points above, comparing blunt force injuries to stabbings, I suffered a significantly worse injury in that fight, when some smashed a concrete block over my head to end it. The head wound also required stitches, and I had a concussion. I didn't even realize I'd been stabbed until my, uh, "friends" pointed it out after the fight.
People can survive a lot of shit. But it doesn't take much to change those outcomes. An inch, a second on either side of a given blow, and it's suddenly a far more serious issue.
To the point of the educators above, I've never witnessed teachers breaking up far worse, but I've read and heard the stories. So clearly, they have to address these situations without guns, and seem to do so without killing anyone.
I'm also a human being, and don't always make the immediately correct choice. I can't even say the immediately correct words in a given conversation 100% of the time. But then, I'm not trained for these things. A cop is, or ostensibly should be. I profile cops. Have no love for a single one, and though I've got one mind blowing cop story of a cool ass cop who could have fucked my world up and didn't, I've had, and seen, enough interactions that range from bad to horrible to horrific to think that he very likely wouldn't have made the choice he did if I were a young black kid instead of a White/Mexican blend.
So I view cops with extreme prejudice, and I think we all should.
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I've also been in the foster care system, and prior to that, I had far more abusive family members. The last home I was in, I went awol because my foster mom threatened to shoot my roommate over a piece of my cake, which I said he could have. Foster parents are a mixed bag, and when they're bad, holy hell are they bad.
So I relate to what she was dealing with, at least to what I've read in here. I have not had the time to thoroughly investigate all of those details. But if foster mom was calling in these grown ass woman to come over and fuck with Ma'Khiah, then I got not qualms about one or all of them getting her full fury. Because I know what that shit is like. Not exactly, but I've been in enough similarly abusive situations to know what that boiling point feels like, because I guarantee that anything she'd have done in retaliation, she'd have been the villain, and all that comes with that status.
Everything I've read leading up to this is fucked up, and from what i can tell, this child was failed in monumental ways. Up to and including the pig who shot her.
The issue I have here is, I'm not all in on condemning the pig for this. Watching the video, the speed at which all this happened makes this a bit more complicated. Because at that moment, his duty would be to protect the person who is potentially about to be seriously harmed.
At first thought, I don't think it's reasonable to expect him to try disarm her in that split second moment either. This was lighting fast.
But then, as has been pointed out above, there's a serious discrepancy here, when white males with guns, who have already murdered people in cold blood, are given kids gloves. They're handled with care, as though their lives are precious and to be protected at ANY cost.
Someone above said that we've been conditioned. I think that's dead on. Police are given far too much of the benefit of the doubt in too many situations, particularly when they intersect with Black people- which is fucking often. We're also conditioned, to some degree, to an "eye for an eye" rule of thumb. And there's a place for that, I think, but I think we're collectively, definitely too far in one direction on this.
I'm a father. So if someone, anyone, for any reason, is coming at my children with that knife like that, I can say with honesty, my first second and third emotions regarding the person coming for them are "fuck em". Get them. I don't care one bit what happens to them, as long as my kids are safe.
Which underscores a huge problem with that question in this case:
The question, "what if that's your child" removes, I think for many, all objectivity. Because I'm not at all objective when it comes to my kids and their safety. If you're swinging a knife at my babies, fuck you *and* your parents for all I care.
Another thing that underscores this question is, if Ma'Khia were my child, I'd want everyone involved to burn for this. And no, I'm not saying everyone else is just like me, but I strongly suspect that I'm far from alone there. I'd absolutely think that pig was out of pocket and should have attempted non lethal means of handling this.
Because the "what if that's your child" applies to both of them- and I'd side with my child, and demand greater this or less that on either side of this coin. I suspect most of us would feel the same, to varying degrees.
As has been mentioned, these cops can't fucking wait to kill a person of color. That's the first instinct, it seems.
I think this case does serve a sound reminder that police policies need a dramatic overhaul, to the point where whatever that resulting entity is should bear little resemblance to what we have here.
The question here that needs to be answered is, what else could have reasonably been done? Because if the first instinct, and the training, for a situation like this is "shoot to kill", then we are ensuring that this will always be the outcome for people of color in these situations, because police will magically turn on their caution brains when it's a white man in the situation.
My immediate reaction to this was, what the fuck else was he supposed to do? And I see that I'm not alone in that. Because, as has been said, we've been conditioned. Not all of us, clearly, but too many of us. That's a sobering thought.
Which underscores the fact that police have been conditioned as well. This IS what they do, by design. It's a cowboy mentality that is not conducive to the betterment of the society they *should* be intended to actually serve.
Because I do think this cop was just doing his job to the best of his ability- and that's where the problem lies here. It's not a rotten apple, or even a barrel, or an orchard full of them. The soil itself is bad. The ideology is bad, and we have better examples of better policing from which to draw. We have examples of educators tasked with dealing with such situations, that do not result in the deaths of students, from which to draw.
Yes, this happened very quickly. I do understand the basic, initial analysis of this clip, because again: conditioning.
But there's a very long list of reasons why we shouldn't accept this.
Not from them and certainly not from ourselves. As long as our collective society accepts this, this is what we- and, sadly, the Ma'Khia Bryant's of the world- will get.
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