The family of a 20-year-old man, Donovan Lewis, who was shot dead by police is filing a lawsuit (read below) against the officer who shot him. https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc6on...ision-of-police-franklin-county-shooting-ohio Quarter of a million settlement seems like pennies for somebodies life!
Most people's lives hold very little value. What's so special about this guy? Why is his life worth so much money ?
Looks to me like another SOP 'shoot first' incident. Police unions, city lawyers and other bean counters tend to agree that paying out compensation for 'wrongful death' suits is cheaper than the costs associated with injured and dead officers, so they tend to train their officers, in any situation where a threat is perceived, to 'shoot first' to eliminate the perceived threat, then determine the validity of the threat later. A quarter of a million $ very likely is less money out of the city's coffers than the hospital bills and sick pay for an injured cop or the life insurance payout to the family and resultant increase in insurance premiums for the rest of the police department. To put it more simply, police lives are more valuable and more expensive than the lives of common citizens, at least as far as the bureaucracy is concerned, and the bureaucracy rules law enforcement. Bigger and more frequent lawsuits would be one way to reverse this mindset that most large cities share regarding the valuation of their officers lives over we the common citizenry, but probably a faster and more effective approach would be for more people to get involved in city govt, like at city council meetings, where policies like 'shoot first' are born. These policies, while demonstrably effective at reducing the manpower costs of policing in the short term, inevitably make the officers jobs harder and more dangerous in the long term as more and more people become scared and angry at law enforcement shooting so many people who turn out to have vape pens or cell phones instead of weapons. The bureaucracy isn't concerned with long term costs- those will just be used as a justification to continue on as normal and raise taxes. Meaningful reform has to come from either putting the department in immediate financial jeopardy (which risks a dramatic reduction in effectiveness of that department maintaining order), or occur above the authority of the bureaucracy with the elected officials to whom it is beholden.
Ok paladin but that "$250k" payout could also have been avoided if the pd was not so trigger happy or that the life of the victim was not deemed to be worthless. It's a society wide issue, not just the bureaucrats.
Yup, but the bean counters are looking at statistics that show a correlation between cops shooting people more quickly and less cops getting shot/stabbed. Thats a much easier correlation to make than the one of cops shooting more people = more hostility toward cops. Thats really more of a logical deduction than a detectable trend, and the bureaucracy is concerned with what they can easily graph on a screen. The compartmentalization inherent in large bureaucracies means the folks recommending policy don't come into contact with its effects. They just sit in their office, look at spreadsheets, forecast trends and propose policy based on those trends. If the trends forecast that wrongful death lawsuits will cost less overall than hospitalizations, insurance premiums and increased manpower budgets, that's what they're gonna go with. Stalin wasn't wrong when he said one death is a tragedy, 10,000 deaths is a statistic. By and large, bean counters wouldn't shoot someone themselves to save the city a boatload of money, but if their policies result in that, they're only gonna see it as numbers on paper, and their job is to save money, not lives. This single incident might cost the city $250K, but a single incident of a cop getting shot probably costs them more than that, so even though this single incident didn't prevent a cop from getting shot, the training policy of shooting any percieved threat likely still results in less cops getting shot. Over a long enough timeline, the policy only has to have a 51% success rate to save money on paper. Logically, of course, we know that if 49% of cop shootings are wrongful deaths, that's going to increase hatred against cops, increase overall violence in police encounters, and cost everyone more money and lives. But that trend has less objective datapoints and is harder to make firm forecasts with which to direct policy.
