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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

helping to manage the genocidal war in Vietnam

I stopped reading right there. If you call the war in Vietnam "genocidal" then you most likely have a political bone to pick and are more than willing to ignore the complexity of the situation to support your own narrative.

a young, Latino man named Alex Nieto was shot 14 times and killed by police near my house...Someone had reported that Nieto, a 28-year-old security guard who grew up in the neighborhood, didn’t look right."

Oh you mean the guy the guy that had mental issues severe enough to cause his friend to get a restraining order? The one that was carrying a holstered gun that turned out to be a pistol-shaped stun gun? The one he pointed at the cops?[1] Clearly the citizens who called the police should have minded their own business. Bernal Heights would be much better off in that situation.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Man-killed-by-S-F-police...

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The point is less about the specifics of the shooting (I think it was probably justified.. though 14 seems excessive) and more about the context surrounding it. Community dynamics change whenever there is a large influx of people. When that large influx is wealthy, strongly tied together, not a part of the existing community and commands the respect and deference of community officials, then those struggles become real.

I have no idea if this is true, but it may be that a community of neighbors that knew Alex well would have been less likely to call the cops, to give the police more information about his mental state, etc. and that those measures would have saved his life.

"Class warfare" is an apt term. Wealth is only a part of it.. this is the Old San Francisco (Hippie/Transient/Outcast) class and the New San Francisco (Techie) class. I'm a part of the latter (and live on the edge of the Mission and Bernal Heights). I'm part of the problem. But, I think I can also be a part of the solution.

There was a group dedicated to solving these problems called EngageSF. They met and discussed at local mission restaurants. I can't seem to find any information on them now, though. http://missionlocal.org/2014/02/new-and-old-residents-engage...

> though 14 seems excessive

Not defending or condemning the police's action (honestly don't know anything about it), but the number of gunshots is pretty much irrelevant. 14 rounds is two police officers firing most of the rounds in a magazine - this is what they're trained to do. Unlike movies, it's near-impossible to consistently disable somebody with a gunshot in a non-lethal way. This means that when cops shoot, they shoot to kill: centre of mass shots, often nearly emptying the magazine. It's not like it's a video game, where you can tell if you hit, so the safest thing to do is to keep shooting until you're 110% sure the target is dead. A police officer who only fires one round in an engagement like that wouldn't be acting in a safe manner, for himself or the people around him.

Thanks for the insight. Do you know anything about "downward" shots. That is, bullets that go from the head towards the toe in line with the body. There were several in this case (and a couple in the case of Mike Brown).

Also, why do medical examiners often conflict when looking at the evidence? Is it open that much to interpretation? Are the primary medical examiners motivated in the wrong ways somehow? Or are the alternative opinions coming from quacks?

I realize you may not know all these answers, so I apologize for lobbing them all at you. It is hard to get genuinely balanced knowledge in these things and I want to be as informed as possible.

you know, I am regretting my one liner.

What I meant was, there's more substance to this post than you'd infer from the title (stanford douches, wow).

Unfortunately, that probably came off as an endorsement, which wasn't my intention.

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