Anyone else freaked out about the Kelly Thomas murder?

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I've been reading about Kelly Thomas and I'm kinda freaked out. The police in my area (Ojai, California) aren't very violent and most of them know how to act around schizophrenics and neural atypicals, but it seems to be getting out of control in other places.
Are the police forces slipping?
Are there just more mentally unstable people living without support?
Is there an actual rise in mentally unstable people?
Does this kind of thing happen often where you live and have you ever been a victim of police brutality?

I know that this is more about mental disorders and not aspies and autistics, but it's still very concerning for all of us.

I'd say it's pretty disturbing that you can be caught on tape saying "You see these fists? They're about to **** you up." before beating a suspect to death and getting away with it.

There was also a school resource officer near me that shot an autistic student to death when he had an outburst. The family received a lot of money from the state to settle the case.

AS/ASD people are a high risk of this because they likely display physical and/or verbal behavior that is contrary to what a NT person expects.

Its a very real risk. Police forces will always have some with these tendencies. These guys did not know there actions were being recorded. It's typical school yard bulling made legal with a badge and deadly weapons.

http://www.alternet.org/cops-who-beat-h ... -walk-free

I read yesterday about a deaf guy who was arrested. The cop was giving him orders, but the guy couldn't hear and was giving the "I can't hear you" sign-language sign, which is two fingers pointing up behind your ear. The cop thought the deaf guy was gesturing sarcastically. Fortunately, in court, all the charges were dropped. And, there was another story recently I saw about another deaf man who was beaten by the police for not responding to orders to show his hands. His car had a placard on the back saying that the driver was deaf. Another case was an native guy in Canada who would walk around town carving wood sculptures. A new cop saw him with the knife and shot and killed him in 7 seconds. Fortunately, there was audio and the cop was fired (though not charged with anything). All that in about 2 weeks?

I think the police have gotten more aggressive and thin-skinned. I'm not sure if it's due to the War on Drugs, 9/11, or the recruiting of combat veterans into police forces or what. Probably some of all three and more. Maybe hiring standards have been changed. From the news, there seem to be a lot of George Zimmerman types who 'know' that someone is guilty enough to be killed by looking at them for 3 minutes.

I read somewhere that police are no longer trained to try to deescalate situations, but rather to dominate them quickly and meet any sign of resistance with overwhelming force/violence. I don't know why that changed, but that seems like a big problem to me. Add officers with PTSD from Iraq or Afghanistan and you've got a recipe for disaster.

The US is becoming a police state.
http://www.policestateusa.com/

This is not surprising. The job of a police officer *is* to use violence against anyone who the state does not like. Even if the police attract the same distribution of personalities as are found in the populace at large (though that wouldn't be saying much - see Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgrams Obedience Experiments), they're going to be desensitised by enforcing laws against victimless activities. That's compounded by the human ingroup/outgroup tendencies, and the dehumanisation of people outside the norm.

In other words, if you build a system based on violence (i.e. the state), do not be surprised when stuff like this happens, because you're relying on fallible humans to wield the violence.

I think that the rampant police brutality, which we don't see in other Western nations on this scale, is an indirect result of the American gun culture. In a country where the ratio of guns to people is about 1:1, it is easy to see why the consequently extremely dangerous police work attracts many high-thrill seeking individuals with low impulse control and violent tendencies, aka sociopaths.

Every time I read about American police forces kicking down the door of an elderly woman and shooting her dog after pinning the poor old lady to the ground, I can't help but think "so that's how safe you really are for having the freedom to keep a gun in the nightstand". I'd rather defend myself with a baseball bat against a hypothetical burglar, because all the guns in the world don't help you against the heavily armed thugs in police uniforms that are the price of living in a gun-crazed and highly paranoid country.

The defence strategy in this Kelly Thomas affair was to suggest to the jury that this was a person who deserved it and that the police were doing a service. The judge aided in this by admitting completely irrelevant evidence. Also, the defence harped on the exact cause of death which should also be irrelevant under the prevailing eggshell skull rule. My guess it that eggshell skull never figured in the jury instructions. The judge tipped his hand decisively at the end when he stated that the trial proved that violence begets violence. No one can say that Kelly Thomas was violent in the video, but the defence was allowed to admit irrelevant evidence of Thomas violent outbursts in the past to insinuate that he deserved to die. The judge in this way suggested that Thomas' past violent outbursts were subject to divine punishment through these cops, who are cast as righteous avengers. The judge is scum and should be removed from the bench in any civilised jurisdiction.