The other pandemic
“I knew there were some crazies out there. But I underestimated how many,” a friend said at an event last night.
“Our culture is so sick…” Digby wrote in her last Thursday post.
Scanning through Twitter every morning reinforces that assessment. Couldn’t it have just been a dancing fever?
Police in Huntington Park, Calif. on Saturday shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect, a double amputee who dismounted his wheelchair to flee on his stumps.
The Telegraph reports:
Police said they got a call on Saturday that a man was stabbed by another man in a wheelchair. Officers said when they arrived on the scene they found Mr Lowe with a butcher knife.
Video footage taken by a passerby which was released online on Monday shows Mr Lowe out of his wheelchair, trying to get away from two officers using his arms to propel himself along the ground.
When a third officer arrived, they shot Lowe “around ten times,” killing him, said Lt. Hugo Reynaga.
‘He tried to run away, and every time he turned around and did the motion like he was gonna throw the knife at him, they Tased him,’ said Reynaga. ‘They were trying to give this guy the less-lethal Taser shock. And because it was ineffective, they had to go to something that was more effective.’
“The suspect attempted to throw the butcher knife at the officers again, at which time an officer involved shooting occurred,” the sheriff’s office statement said.
“Attempted”? “Again”? Might the cops have boxed him in or followed him until he wore himself out? Were they late for an appointment?
Ed Obayashi, a national policing expert specializing in use-of-force investigations, who has watched the video on social media, said that to justify a shooting, officers must show they had been under immediate threat and had considered reasonable alternatives, including using a Taser.
“But here we see an individual that, by definition, appears to be physically incapable of resisting officers,” he said.” Even if he is armed with a knife, his mobility is severely restricted.
“He’s an amputee. He appears to be at a distinct physical disadvantage, lessening the apparent threat to officers.”
High-profile police shootings and Memphis police beating to death an unarmed Black man seems not to have given police in Huntington Park reason to consider something less effective than death for subduing a double amputee.
A selection follows of other recent insanity:
The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper continues to document the mass insanity.
MAGA believers insist that Donald Trump is the real president today despite losing to Joe Biden in 2020 by seven million votes. Trump is in charge of the military, they tell Klepper, except for any arms sent to Ukraine.
They believe Trump is serving his second term from Mar-a-Lago and planning for a third. Klepper does not point out that that would violate the 22nd Amendment. That would go over their heads.
We are so screwed.