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Excerpts from a long-ish but entirely worthwhile thread by excessively black (afrodesiaq), posted between 2022-01-15 and 2022-01-17:
it's odd to see people say they're glad the hostage situation ended "without violence" when the hostage-taker was killed. i am so thankful for the safety of the hostage, and keenly observing what violence goes unmarked in our society.
calling it "without violence" when police kill a person is a political choice itself: decoding that the state exerting violence doesn't count as such, that the lives of violent criminals don't count as such.
calling it "without violence" when the police kill a person also ties into the vitriolic pushback black jews receive when we say we do not want their violence in our shuls.
[...]
i know, it's not good etiquette to express even a dollop of care or concern for the life of Someone Evil, but it is, i believe, fundamentally jewish to do so.
[...]
previously to hearing about HOW the standoff had ended, i had not, actually, weighed in on whether or not it WAS necessary, despite the many comments on this thread with no reading comprehension that claim i "side with" the instigator;
despite the terminally twitter-minded on here not being able to read this thread for what it was, i do in fact think there are instances where violence is necessary and justified.
i can safely say that i don't think the state extrajudicially executing people for their crimes when their victims have all gotten safely away is one of those times."
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Which part of "protect and serve" does 'executing without trial' fit into?
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As for the arguments over "death penalty vs. life sentence"...I prefer the life sentence not only because you cannot apologise to or compensate the wrongly executed, but because death lets the righteously arrested, charged, tried and convicted of such offences as may merit drastic punishments off the hook on this side of the graveyards far too soon for my liking.
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We, society, are entitled to get to try people who commit crimes, most especially heinous ones. Trials have value to society. Every time police kill someone – whether justified or not – they deprive society of the trial to which it is entitled, encroach upon the prerogatives of the Judiciary, and thwart all the social effects that trials are supposed to give us. This may be forgivable under some circumstances of life-and-death, but it is always a bad thing and should be seen as such, because they deprive society of something valuable.
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Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
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I hadn't heard "without violence", but yeah, that's wrong. "Without innocent victims dying", sure, but there was definitely violence. And from what I've heard about the rabbi, it's not violence he would have wanted, either.
I wish we knew what happened inside the building after the hostages escaped. It makes a huge difference if they went in planning to kill the perp or if they were trying to arrest him and he fired at them. Big difference, and nobody's talking or releasing bodycam footage (if any even exists).
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The question then is how culpable, if at all, the police were for the following death. It sounds like there was an hour more of standoff after the hostages escaped and that they tried to convince him to surrender, but he was insisting on what amounted to suicide by police. That said, without danger to life and limb, I don't know why it was incumbent on the police to do a forced entry, rather than wait him out, use putatively non-lethal means to try to force him out like tear gas, etc. Obviously, they -did- need to take him into custody; he'd just threatend people's lives and only been stopped by their escape, but it sounds like there were some suboptimal choices (that said, not an expert on that kind of standoff).