Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still didn’t stop after pointing a hand out the window and turning onto a darkened dirt road as the trooper sounded his siren.
Five minutes into a pursuit that began over a broken taillight, the 60-year-old Black man was dead — shot in the forehead by the white trooper who fired a single bullet mere seconds after forcing Lewis to crash into a ditch. Trooper Jake Thompson insisted he pulled the trigger as Lewis revved the engine of his Nissan Sentra and jerked his steering wheel as if trying to mow him down.
“I had to shoot this man,” Thompson can be heard telling a supervisor on video recorded by his dash-mounted camera at the shooting scene in rural Screven County, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”
But new investigative details obtained by The Associated Press and the never-before-released dashcam video of the August 2020 shooting have raised fresh questions about how the trooper avoided prosecution with nothing more than a signed promise never to work in law enforcement again. Use-of-force experts who reviewed the footage for AP said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.
“And I’m just scared”.
Maybe it’s time to increase Georgia’s police basic training up from ten weeks to maybe eleven or even twelve! Source: https://www.trainingreform.org/state-police-training-requirements
The fact that there isn’t a minimum of 2 years classroom work before they even get a ride along is fucking ridiculous.
As a German, the contrast in education and training for police is unfathomable. Yes, we still have a problem with some cops being Nazis, but cops don’t kill people because “I was scared” here. They usually kill them after an act of terrorism that killed a lot more people, or if they had a standoff for like 2h and the guy has a gun.
Which absolutely is the better way.
But ofc, banning guns is really helpful in the first place, because wouldn’t you know, banning a killing device rapidly decreases the amount of killings. Funny how that works. I would even argue it’s cause and effect and not just coincidental.
It’s worse than that here. There’s a famous “police trainer” who spends his time giving seminars to officers all over the country telling them they have to have a “warrior mindset” and not only is it okay to kill, they should do it first before they get killed. It’s not proper training, it’s a fear cult indoctrination. Given that cops are - apparently required - to not be the brightest, it results in the horrible situation we have.
Which. Is not helpful.
There’s a lot of them and, extremely unsurprisingly, they are right-wing lunatics themselves.
I don’t think that 2 years is a must. Here in the UK police officers have 5 months of classroom and 3 months of field training. That works pretty well. What also helps is that British police officers are trained to diffuse the situation and don’t have guns.
Then they’d have to pay them more.
There’s still tons of places that police, firefighters, and EMT’s, like $35k a year starting. Everyone always talks about teachers not making enough, but forgets about the people who show up in 5 minutes in the middle of the night because you called 911 and have no idea what to do and need to get help fast. Firefighters and emts are exploited because of a love of the job and what it means to them. Police are often not of that same track. If you don’t want to just attract the guy who wants to walk around looking for trouble and have a gun, you’ll have to make it worth the money.
Oh trust me, I’m well aware how shit most (non cop) first responders have it. Round my neck of the woods, cops start at around 60k will full benefits. That’s still damn good money here, and they go up quickly.
Our firefighters don’t even make minimum wage. They finally just got a pension. Our EMS hardly makes more than minimum wage.
The rationale, at least in part, is that people with high IQs get bored and quit and the department loses out on the money they invested in training.
Already happening. Required training hours were roughly doubled a couple of weeks ago effective Jan 1:
That said, this was a state trooper. GSP have long been known for a culture of cowboy recklessness and special treatment codified into law. They report up directly to the Governor and are explicitly excluded from many of the restrictions put on local police (the moniker God’s Special People has been around for decades for a reason). They are one of the few major agencies in the state that still refuses to use body cameras, for example.
Institutionally, it’s a group set up to be and that views itself as special enforcers that are above the restraints put on others. GSP is routinely involved in high speed pursuits that end in either a fatal accident or a shooting.
More training is always a good thing, but I’ll just say I was unsurprised a trooper was involved here.
