In the following days and weeks, Randall’s mother searched for answers in vain, calling the Texas Rangers and the Rusk County district attorney’s office. She had no idea how her son wound up dead after a police traffic stop. “No one was telling us anything,” said Tippitt, who was born and raised in Rusk County and now cleans houses for a living.
Her first shock came two months after the shooting when a grand jury returned a no bill in the case, meaning it chose not to indict Iversen for killing an unarmed man.
The second came last summer when Iversen’s lawyers turned over the dashcam video after she filed a federal lawsuit. Nearly two years after the shooting, she finally got to see, in brutal detail, what happened in the moments before her youngest son was killed.
“The only person that was attacking anybody was Sgt. Iversen attacking my son,” Tippitt said.
Iversen quietly retired after the shooting and fought in court to keep the video from being made public. Its release sparked a backlash in rural Rusk County. It also set Randall’s mother on a crusade to get justice for his killing.
But whether that will happen — and what it would even look like — remains to be seen.
Archived at https://archive.is/CNGGK
An early portion indicates that, at the time Randall allegedly ran the flashing stop sign, Iversen was likely too far away from the intersection to see it. Iversen acknowledged as much in his interview with the Texas Rangers, saying he couldn’t see the full intersection but knew it well enough to deduce that Randall’s vehicle hadn’t come to a stop.
So not only did he shoot an unarmed man who posed no threat whatsoever, but it wasn’t even a legal traffic stop in the first place. No wonder he didn’t want the footage released.
So free. So brave. What a shithole country. ಠ_ಠ
Totally not a police state.
I never see more cops than when I go to Texas. It’s insane
The real question is why Texans like to live like that. 🤷♂️
Research has shown that getting traffic stopped by police is correlated with lower likelihood to vote (arc). I think it’s reasonable to infer that the heavy visibility of constant police actions against citizens has a huge chilling effect on democratic participation in Texas (and like every other red state in the south too).
State is gerrymandered to hell.
education. eliminate the humanities from the curriculum (also book bans) = no empathy = racism/“i just smoked a dude”/etc. eliminate science/critical thinking = unquestioning obedience = muh paw is a preacher and says _________ are bad people, so we shoot’em
the list goes on…honorable mention: absurd “my AR15 is who i am” gun culture
What if we just had the death for cops who were found guilty of shooting unarmed people for no reason? Like, no appeals, nothing; just straight to the firing squad upon guilty finding.
That said this was Texas.
Two days after the killing, Iversen sat for an interview with the Texas Rangers, the agency that investigates police shootings.
The WHO investigates police shootings in Texas?!
two police use-of-force experts contacted by NBC News said they saw no reason for Iversen to open fire during the encounter.
Mickie McComb, a former New Jersey state trooper, said Randall never made any movement that would suggest he was “drawing or attempting to draw a weapon” and at no point was he “charging the officer.”
“There was no threat,” added McComb, who now works as an expert witness on use-of-force cases. “He should have never used deadly force. It was completely uncalled for.”
McComb said he believes that Iversen would have faced criminal charges — and likely ended up in prison — had the incident occurred in the Northeast.
Are people even thinking for five seconds about the ideas they’re upvoting?
- As we understand it today – given the mix of studies that say it reduces crime, say it increases crime, and say it does nothing at all – a claim that the death penalty deters crime isn’t tenable.
- Over 4% of people who are executed are innocent. This is to say that after a trial and after often decades of appeals, they are still murdered by the state on false pretenses. So we’re talking 1/20 people killed for something that ostensibly does not reduce homicides.
- “Straight to the firing squad” reduces the cost from being 4x as expensive as life, but then we take that 4% figure and turbo-charge it to some ungodly number (I wouldn’t know what that is because we haven’t been fucking stupid enough to try it lately). The reason the appeals are so extensive is because the false conviction rate is so high. If it’s 4% after decades of appeals, imagine what it is with this stupid bullshit.
- Removing the appeals process would incentivize prosecutors even more than they already are to fabricate, misrepresent, and hide evidence and to falsely accuse. They know that this will never be found during appeals because there is no appeal.
- This kind of rhetoric normalizes
the death penaltystate-sanctioned murder, but it’s a fucking awful practice that doesn’t do shit. That’s why so many first-world countries and even many developing countries no longer have it and why the US is such an outlier. The US should be embarrassed about its continued use of the death penalty, not clamoring for more and worse.
This is just masturbating your rage boner to fantasy land punitive justice, not a serious policy suggestion to fix a single problem with the police.
Cops are armed, terrified, and don’t need to consider literally any consequences. Gotta love it.
Probably one of the few situations I wpuld actually support the death penalty.
