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He was a human being. A son and father. That you'd talk about someone like that, regardless of whether or not you "agree" with their life events/choices, is really sad.
Say what you will, but these factors are a large part of the root cause of these situations. You can feel sad all you want, but there are now 9 children without a father and what will become of them? And the father had mental illnesses and was involved in violence/run-ins with the law in the past. If we're going to talk about how to stop these problems from happening, aren't these valid considerations? The answer is that the police, the community, the parents, the schools, and the economy are all part of it. But the parents are #1 by a country mile. The truth is that parenting and values need to change so that children can grow up in better households. Life choices ARE important and they should include making good decisions about children, lifestyle, and feasibility of having the best life possible. I have two children because I only have so much time and money to give them a good life. If I have 9, I cannot guide them, pay for them, or give them the life they deserve. And my inability to do so would have a large impact on neighbors and public services.
Police arent paid to retreat, what if they left and he stabbed someone else then everyone would blame the police for that.
The police are trained to fire until the threat stops, clearly on the video thats what they did, he continued to come at them and when he went down they stopped fring.
There were 3 calls that day, obviously the family couldnt control him.
Have you ever tried tackling someone with a knife ? the officers shouldnt have to give their lives because he decided to pull a knife. He knew consequences
The tools that might help the police (bean back guns, pepper spray etc) were taken away with the defund the police bs. Even if they had tasers they are largely not effective
Quote:
Originally Posted by cpomp
Certainly no. But between Covid and a second round of riots and looting (although not downtown this time), it certainly does not help growth, recovery or image... And it's sad communities have to deal with this every time there is an incident with the police.
I posted in the Philadelphia crime thread about this. I see faults on both sides, but I find the looting and violence unacceptable under any circumstances and I am tired of it. And the lame attempts from some to justify the looting is even more tired.
Issues I have with police handling...
1. Why fire 14 shots?
2. Call for backup and plan a tackle when they arrive?
3. Temporality retreat?
4. Give the mother more time to calm her son?
5. Fire a few shots then stop.
I do understand the situation was tense, the perp was running around out of his mind, bystanders, etc. And no matter how well trained the cop is, adrenaline kicks in and logic gets pushed out of the mind, therefore the result may not be good.
I would also like to add, it is very hard to shoot a moving target in the arm or leg, cops are trained to shoot at the mass (target), not shoot to kill or shoot an arm.
Some of the judgmental social media comments are ridiculous and unrealistic, also ridiculous that people think a mental health professional should have been sent in lieu of the police. What on Earth would they accomplish without some sort of law enforcement present? Real life does not work like a textbook, but very easy to judge behind a screen.
Issues I have with the rest of the situation...
1. Local politicians remaining silent or claiming murder / stoking the flames. The disgusting tweet from Brian Sims is an example of that. People can certainly be upset, and march/protest, but the moment it turns into what it turned into, local leaders need to shut it down, period.
2. People justifying the looting/rioting? Just no...
3. Destroying our own struggling communities and harming communities nowhere near where the incident occurred such as Port Richmond.
Everything in front of us is a two way street, but there is too much one sided thinking. Police reform needs to happen, but this cannot be the result every time there is a problem.
Former Commissioner Ramsey had a good interview on CNN with Wolfe Blitzer. He gave his view on the situation, a much more level headed approach. A shame the city cannot get him back or someone similar.
Your post is well thought out and fair, but just a couple of things that play into the questions you ask.
1. The police are on the scene with an aggressive individual, armed with a knife and a history of violence. They cannot just leave the scene or give this person time to harm someone else. It is their duty to protect those who might come to harm. This means they cannot retreat, and are hard-pressed to wait for someone else to arrive or calm him down. If he jumps on someone else and starts to stab them, the police can no longer shoot him because they cannot take the risk of hitting someone else. They then have to wrestle a strong man with a knife and that could be deadly. That is beside the fact that they are under pressure to protect themselves as well. He looked as though he was starting to lunge in the video.
2. You mention the adrenaline, but anyone who has shot guns a lot in their life (I am one who grew up hunting) knows that pulling the trigger happens fast and you always shoot more than you intended. What seems like two trigger pulls ends up being seven. This is true in any case, and you can see that when there is a shooting every night in Philly (reports of 50 shots in less than 15 seconds).
The only way to have had a different outcome would have been to have provided services to this man before the situation arose. What's really a shame is that he has 9 children. 9 children.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lpranger467
Police arent paid to retreat, what if they left and he stabbed someone else then everyone would blame the police for that.
The police are trained to fire until the threat stops, clearly on the video thats what they did, he continued to come at them and when he went down they stopped fring.
There were 3 calls that day, obviously the family couldnt control him.
Have you ever tried tackling someone with a knife ? the officers shouldnt have to give their lives because he decided to pull a knife. He knew consequences
The tools that might help the police (bean back guns, pepper spray etc) were taken away with the defund the police bs. Even if they had tasers they are largely not effective
I understand both posts, I was just thinking out loud regarding options that didn't involved killing the perp. In this case though, I don't think the cops were 100% in the wrong due to the situation at hand. However, that doesn't matter to many people these days unfortunately. I truly don't know what the "defund the police" crowd wanted from this situation?... And the looters and rioters don't care, its just a chance for them to cause trouble.
Interesting about pulling the trigger comment though regarding multiple shots.
Additionally, of course the Inquirer morning headlines are misleading / anti-police headlines, and not one article taking a middle ground or neutral approach. That only makes the situation worse.
The cops were called because he was attacking someone else with the knife (and he had a past history of doing so to boot).
The cops are here to protect us from people like Wallace. They aren't here to protect Wallace from himself.
The cops did their job and should be commended by responding and handling an unwinnable situation. You could tell they gave the guy every chance +1 to stop what he was doing.
Additionally, of course the Inquirer morning headlines are misleading / anti-police headlines, and not one article taking a middle ground or neutral approach. That only makes the situation worse.
I cannot even read the Inquirer anymore. I don't think there could be more misleading, overly-simplistic articles possible. There was one this morning that was an opinion about how some woman had similar mental health struggles as Mr. Wallace, and her over-arching point is that he would not be dead if he was white. Her examples of violence were as follows:
Quote:
There were two times I brandished a knife in public, as Walter Wallace Jr. did on Monday. The first time was at a state mental hospital in Texas. I was told to relinquish the knife or they wouldn’t admit me to the hospital. I said I would never let the knife go (I had some strange ideas at the time about the magical powers of the knife). They simply said, “Well, you’re going to have to leave. We can’t have that knife in here.”
The second time I was at a hospital ER, where, after demanding to see a psychiatrist, I was put into a curtained waiting room with a bed. Within minutes, I had taken my knife and cut the curtain into strips and stabbed the mattress until its stuffing bled out. I knocked things over. The little room was a mess. Were the police called? Of course not. Instead, a nurse came in and said, “Oh, honey, you don’t want to do that.”
I have thrown bottles at people on the street; I have stolen things under the gaze of retail cameras; I have talked to myself out loud in stores that I stayed in for hours at a time. None of it got me in the slightest bit of trouble, or even attracted much notice.
So, she was in a mental hospital already and that's the same thing as someone calling the police due to problems outside of a mental hospital with someone who was activing violently/already attacking someone? I guess these examples are the same as "acting aggressively while holding a knife on the street and being told by police to put the weapon down." She also fails to mention she is a smaller woman and Wallace was a full-grown, strong man surrounded by family members and neighbors. But I guess we're all supposed to ignore those differences. What is missing is context, and that context means everything.
The biggest failure of this situation, that I have yet seen, is about how Wallace had visited a therapist prior to this incident, and that the service is supposed to be in contact with the police department in the event that there is an issue. The police did not inform the mental health organization when they were called to the scene and that could potentially have helped calm him down. However, there are a ton of assumptions. 1. That these folks could have gotten on the scene quickly enough to intervene, 2. that these folks could have successfully intervened (If you're angry and waving around a knife even with police there and guns drawn, we have to entertain the idea that no one could have successfully gotten Mr. Wallace to calm down and relinquish the knife), and 3. if all of that could be successful, could it be avoided again in the future?
He was a human being. A son and father. That you'd talk about someone like that, regardless of whether or not you "agree" with their life events/choices, is really sad.
Honestly, this is a bit of a ridiculous comment. This guy fathered 9 or 10 children (note I said "fathered" and not "was a father to"), routinely terrorized his neighborhood (friends/family and strangers alike) and caused panic and I'm sure extreme stress to others for years. I believe his past excursions include holding a gun to a young lady's head, multiple violent domestic assaults (some with weapons) and at least one sexual assault. Geez, who don't you feel bad for? Mao Zedong?
I'd love for you to look some of his innocent victims in the face and tell them how you feel. They might feel a bit different.
Last edited by Pennsport; 10-30-2020 at 12:21 PM..
Honestly, this is a bit of a ridiculous comment. This guy fathered 9 or 10 children (note I said "fathered" and not "was a father to"), routinely terrorized his neighborhood (friends/family and strangers alike) and caused panic and I'm sure extreme stress to others for years. I believe his past excursions include holding a gun to a young lady's head, multiple violent domestic assaults (some with weapons) and at least one sexual assault. Geez, who don't you feel bad for? Mao Zedong?
I'd love for you to look some of his innocent victims in the face and tell them how you feel. They might feel a bit different.
Honestly, you need to look up the meaning of the term "ridiculous." He was a human being. He was a son and a father. That is not ridiculous to say. It is true.
It is sad that people are going out of their way to proverbially spit on his grave. If you are tuned in at all to the situation, there are obviously many people grieving his death. It was a loss for his family. I can't imagine having the desire to salt that wound.
There's probably no point in engaging with people who want to go on about him like this. To talk about the facts of the incident and whether or not the police were justified in their use of force is one thing. To talk about someone who has died, who was close to people who actually know him and understand him, and whose death represents a piece of a greater social injustice to many --- to talk about such a person in this way, is a sad thing to do.
You talk about his victims in quite a presumptuous way. You are obviously reading something into my intent that is not there. He obviously never received the rehabilitating services he needed. Spitting venom like this, in a situation like this, on an anonymous public forum, won't make you feel fulfilled.
Last edited by Muinteoir; 10-30-2020 at 12:59 PM..
Say what you will, but these factors are a large part of the root cause of these situations. You can feel sad all you want, but there are now 9 children without a father and what will become of them? And the father had mental illnesses and was involved in violence/run-ins with the law in the past. If we're going to talk about how to stop these problems from happening, aren't these valid considerations? The answer is that the police, the community, the parents, the schools, and the economy are all part of it. But the parents are #1 by a country mile. The truth is that parenting and values need to change so that children can grow up in better households. Life choices ARE important and they should include making good decisions about children, lifestyle, and feasibility of having the best life possible. I have two children because I only have so much time and money to give them a good life. If I have 9, I cannot guide them, pay for them, or give them the life they deserve. And my inability to do so would have a large impact on neighbors and public services.
Perhaps the best thing you've written on this incident.
There's certainly plenty of blame to go around here, and even though we can point to things that would have, could have or should have been done, I can't really blame the cops for reacting as they did given the circumstances. And I read something yesterday in the Inky where Wallace's family said they didn't want to see the cops charged with murder because they felt that it was systemic failures (specifically, the training the cops get) rather than the cops themselves that were responsible for the tragedy.
Some of the problem is cultural, though, and you touch on this here. What I would like to say on this would derail the whole thread; it really deserves a topic of its own. But I'll just say here that street values tend to militate against the sort of life choices you say the parents and kids should make. Compound that with a common sentiment that children are the only thing that might give a young Black woman a boost in self-esteem, then toss in the Black men who have been rendered superfluous by lack of steady work and you get cases like Wallace's.
However: The impression I get from the behavior of the Wallace family is that they did try to "raise Walter right," as we would say. What I see is a family that holds "decent" middle-class values and doesn't go around causing trouble. Yet even decent families produce children who stray. I think you can find any number of lower- or lower-middle-income families, Black and white, whose members lead decent, respectable lives save for one "problem child." I know that's the case in my own family, where one of my cousins was more of a "tough guy" than the others — he tried to teach me to fight, but it didn't take — and ended up doing time for robbing a bank. (And there are probably more than a few affluent families who have similar "problem children," the difference being that said children don't grow up in environments where the "code of the streets" is enforced and their parents have access to more and better resources for dealing with their problems.) So the problem may not always be the parents, either.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 10-30-2020 at 01:41 PM..
I am, however, gong to say this while putting on my flak jacket:
Had we actually integrated our neighborhoods when the Great Migration occurred, or even when their children got to the point where they were ready to get homes of their own, rather than fight to maintain segregation even after it was outlawed, we wouldt be seeing far fewer of the problems we've been talking about.
I am, however, gong to say this while putting on my flak jacket:
Had we actually integrated our neighborhoods when the Great Migration occurred, or even when their children got to the point where they were ready to get homes of their own, rather than fight to maintain segregation even after it was outlawed, we wouldt be seeing far fewer of the problems we've been talking about.
Neighborhoods are segregated on economic lines, not racial.
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