Police officer says he had no other choice but to shoot & kill elderly, wheelchair-bound man in the back
American policing reared it’s almost incomprehensibly cowardly head again, this week, to tragic ends.
American policing reared it’s almost incomprehensibly cowardly head again, this week, to tragic ends. Video from Tucson Arizona this week show Richard Lee Richards, an elderly, wheelchair-bound man being shot in the back nine times and killed by police officer Ryan Remington.
According to reports, the 61-year-old, handicapped Richards was suspected of shoplifting from a Walmart. For some reason a Walmart worker with absolutely no sense of proportion or class solidarity called police on the old man for supposedly having shoplifted a toolbox.
When police confronted Richards, he produced a knife, refused to let it go, and sped away from them. At that point, with his back turned to them and while he posed no threat to them, Tucson police officer Remington unloaded his gun in the back of the elderly man, and killed him.
The Tucson police department has issued a statement distancing themselves from Remington and have reportedly fired him. That might be a smart public relations move but it won’t bring Richards back to life.
The damage has been done. American police kill more people than any other wealthy nation’s police force on earth, by far.
Seeing it happen, up close and personal, gives one a real sense of the fundamental incompetence and unfitness for duty that pervades American policing, and helps explain how we got to the point where more Americans die at the hands of police whose own jobs are less dangerous than pizza delivery drivers.
These officers are jumpy, easily angered and/or startled, and simply have no idea what to do when faced with a tricky situation other than to beat or shoot people, even if they’re old, wheelchair-bound, with their back turned.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Tucson police at the scene then refused to administer CPR to their victim as they are required to do, and instead handcuffed and arrested the old man as he bled to death. Ryan Remington’s lawyers say that using lethal force was his only option.
It is little wonder why so many of us then believe that abolishing American police as we know it is now our only option.