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Sammy Yatim Shooting

Peepers said:
No its not a big assumption at all. The video does not lie. What we see is the victim lying mortally wounded when the second officer enters the streetcar. The victim is lying motionless in the supine position on the floor. Why would you shout at him to "drop the knife" under these circumstances? I have no doubt that the officer shouting "drop the knife" did that for effect only. It's the same thing they do when they assault people. They instinctively shout "stop resisting" as they land punches on their victims.
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^100% true. Ask a cop.
 
How does stuff like this get out?

UnIyw3gh.png


More pics here

http://imgur.com/a/HRvjJ
 
What is the relevance of the kid's profile on facebook? I feel like the people defending the police are just begging for this to not be a big deal. Plenty of teenagers behave like wannabe gangsters and act in a completely douchey fashion, but that's still not license to kill them, no matter how tempting it may be to you, arm-chair moralists. The facts on the ground remain: the police reacted with unnecessary force against a teenager with a knife. This is not me or any forum member in a dicey situation, this is a supposedly highly trained, heavily armed force (tasked with the protection of the public, including the protection of this idiotic kid) dealing with a minor threat. Unacceptable no matter how you look at it.
 
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The most tragic thing has gone on here and I am hoping (maybe in vain) that something is accomplished with the loss of this kid's life.

- There doesn't appear to be mental illness involved here, just a kid temporarily gone off the deep end ---

- Leading to the fact that I have a mentally ill relative living in the west part of our central city. What would happen if he had a bad night? Would he end up dead, like poor Sammy?

I think, and hope, that there is hell to pay for this. If it's police training then that must be solved. This shooting is inexcusable.

And so, this morning I find that I am more and more incredulous, as I ponder this event. And I have serious doubts about the mental state of the cop involved, not that of poor Sammy. IMO, the force has to lose cops like this one. And of course I wonder how many the training has produced.

I want to say R.I.P. Sammy, but that isn't going to happen. The poor soul.
 
Minor in the grand scheme of things - it doesn't require the ETF or police snipers. There is a kid with a knife on an empty streetcar cornered in place - what does that sound like to you?

AoD
 
Is it still too early to hand down eJudgement here? Like is anyone actually still defending the police on this one?

Seems cut-and-dry.
 
typezed said:
Seems like nonsense to me for activists to be glorifying someone who instigated the tragedy by pulling a knife on transit and taunting police.
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I don't know if you were at the rally yesterday, but speaking for myself and many others there, the point was not to glorify Sammy because of who he was (frankly, I had never heard of him before Sunday). The point was to make clear that his life was of great value and that we are outraged about how it was taken from him.
 
TonyV said:
The most tragic thing has gone on here and I am hoping (maybe in vain) that something is accomplished with the loss of this kid's life.

- There doesn't appear to be mental illness involved here, just a kid temporarily gone off the deep end ---

- Leading to the fact that I have a mentally ill relative living in the west part of our central city. What would happen if he had a bad night? Would he end up dead, like poor Sammy?

I think, and hope, that there is hell to pay for this. If it's police training then that must be solved. This shooting is inexcusable.

And so, this morning I find that I am more and more incredulous, as I ponder this event. And I have serious doubts about the mental state of the cop involved, not that of poor Sammy. IMO, the force has to lose cops like this one. And of course I wonder how many the training has produced.

I want to say R.I.P. Sammy, but that isn't going to happen. The poor soul.
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My neighbour is mentally ill and he was cop. He's suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. He will never work again, he has some good days and some really crazy days. I remember his wife telling me he started acting a little strange a few years before he was diagnosed, while he was still working as a police officer.

I'm not defending the officer that killed Sammy, but was the officer mentally fit to carry a firearm? Maybe the police force should increase the amount of times an officer has to go for a psychological evaluation?
 
ketan said:
The point was to make clear that his life was of great value and that we are outraged about how it was taken from him.
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Is there a scale of the value of life? I would argue his life was of value, same as the rest of us. Great value suggests that some lives are worth more or less than others. With the exception of violent criminals, I'd say this isn't the case.
 
Admiral Beez said:
Is there a scale of the value of life? I would argue his life was of value, same as the rest of us.
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i'd stop there and agree with you. i only used the term "great value" because of how much disregard there seemed to be for human life in general in other comments.
 
In the giant PR campaign this will turn into profiling Sammy Yatim is important, however I feel it irrelevant to the central issue here. The central issue is how do police deal with these kind of scenerios?

I'm not even saying that police didn't follow procedure or that a crime has been commited. I have no idea. What I do feel is that there is something not right with the philosophy or culture that underlies how police officers often interact with the public. If anyone has any question why some people are so upset about this it is because this feeling of something not being right is bubbling to the surface based on a string of personal experiences.

I'll recount a very similar experience I had on a streetcar just like this case:

There were a bunch of teenagers of mixed ethnicity although primarly black wearing hip-hop gear on a streetcare I was riding on Bathurst late one night. They were being loud and obnoxious, particularly the teenage girls. To be honest there behaviour was really annoying to the other passengers myself included. The driver stopped the car at College and Bathurst and left the vehicle. He must have phoned the police ahead because they were waiting there. An officer boarded the streetcar at the front for a split second probably to visually identify that the teenagers were there. Shortly after, two police officers stormed into the rear doors, grabbed the nearest guy who was black, smashed his head on the glass and threw him out of the streetcar. Personally, I benefited from the interaction because an annoyance was removed, but there is just something utterly wrong about how the police delt with that situation. They never communciated, racially profiled one of the guys even if he wasn't even the one being annoying, and resorted to force first. What would have happened if the guy was high on something and, motivated by a sense of perceived injustice, fought back a bit? Would he have been killed for that? Would it really have mattered how annoying they were if a life was taken?
 
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