Imagine my surprise when I changed the channel and CNN was discussing this shooting.
Now the Albuquerque PD is under federal review and will most likely be put under Federal Supervision because the feds took an interest in the video and called it a bad shooting.
Ugh, is more federal oversight the answer? Let's just set up federal oversight for every police precinct, wouldn't that be better? Sounds ineffective. There has seriously got to be a better way to skin this cat. There's arguably a lot of material out there to show where police have made mistakes. How about instead of trying to crucify everyone involved, we try to learn from mistakes, make sure we implement those lessons learned, and get better next time? Yes, some people (officers and citizens alike, on both sides) may need to be punished, but the mob clamoring for revenge, getting enraged and wanting pain inflicted in retribution is just destructive and creates the us vs. them mentality that further fuels the fire.
I've always wondered if we have become so intolerant of mistakes as to actually create more of them by never ever allowing people to learn from them. We won't admit they are mistakes for fear of punishment (sometimes cowardly, other times there may be some justification for this given the lynch mob mentality that can be generated). One mistake and then you're done, because there is a pool of applicants with perfect records that we could take in your place. Well, many with a zero mistake record have maintained it by never taking any risks and so never being put in compromising situations; however we cannot, statistically speaking, avoid these situations from happening. So, what we are doing is putting essentially people in with no experience for what some of them will face, and end up making the wrong decision at the wrong time.
Now I'm not saying everyone who makes a mistake gets a pass, and not that risk taking is necessarily appropriate, or that we shouldn't hold those in authority to high standards - don't think I support carelessness - but consider what would have happened in WW2 had we always had the same no-mistakes allowed mentality. Chester Nimitz would have been canned after running a destroyer aground as an Ensign. He was court martialed and found guilty of neglect of duty with a letter of reprimand. That type of thing today would be game over, you have no career anymore. The fact remains that some mistakes can be recovered from, and some can't. But in either case, trying to exact as much punishment as possible in retaliation is just going to get things covered up instead of making the most of a situation gone bad. Remember Sgt. Powell from Die Hard? C'mon, he was a hero at the end! (yes, there's even a bit of humor in the most serious of discussions, but think about how in every bit of humor there is a grain of truth).
So, in all of this, what I'm trying to say is that maybe if we weren't trying to take the heads of everyone closely associated with any mistake, the incident could be admitted as a mistake, and people could learn from it.
