- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
Prosecutors have charged a Metropolitan Police officer with murder after he shot rapper Chris Kaba in London last year.
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Here in the States he would have won a free vacation (suspension with pay) and suffered no actual consequences.
Nice to see consequences
Where did this constable think he was? America?
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This is England not America, so the title makes sense. It is written in English, not simplified English.
It makes total sense in America. Here we would have shot him before he was dead though.
If a headline can be interpreted in multiple ways because the word choice makes it vague it is the headline that is the problem, not the reader.
This is solved by choosing more precise language. “Cop who fatally shot unarmed black man” is just as concise but is also unambiguous.
Let’s not let our desire to make fun of Americans get in the way of doing things properly.
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He shot a dead guy?
Ha ha very funny. Except this is grammatically correct and not ambiguous. It would work with your joke interpretation if it said “who shot dead, unarmed, black man”
I disagree that this is unambiguous, I was also confused reading this headline. It’s odd wording. It may be technically correct but that doesn’t mean it’s unambiguous.
“…shot and killed an unarmed…” would be a much better phrasing
Or “shot dead an unarmed black man”. Three additional characters would have fixed this. I’ve long been frustrated by the journalistic style of removing every possible word from headlines. We’re no longer reading these things printed on dead trees, there’s no extra ink being spent or space wasted.
Many apps or websites cut titles off, though. It’s important to keep them short.
I wish more people followed proper journalistic formats. Frustrates me when the first sentence is supposed to have everything you need to know - who, what, where, when, why, how - but instead these gen Z journalists think they should bury the details 5 paragraphs deep.
The proper way to write an article is to give the reader everything they need to know from the first sentence, and then expand in detail with each following paragraph, from most important to least.
“Dead” and “unarmed” are adjectives and if they were being used like you thought, they should have a comma between them. I agree that it’s potentially vague, but if you read it in your BBC broadcaster voice it should help
It’s ambiguous. Adjectives don’t need a comma like that, especially when there are two. You don’t say “look at that small, red, fire hydrant”, you just say “look at that small red fire hydrant” (and technically, you could call “fire” an adjective there too).
I’m not sure whether it is a hard and fast rule, but that sentence to me should be:
Look at that small, red, fire hydrant
Looks like it’s a fairly complicated and nuanced grammar rule:
I’d probably go with
London Cop Charged With Murder For Shooting Unarmed Black Man Dead
This is absolutely ambiguous diction.
“…who shot and killed unarmed black man…” would have been substantially more specific and readable without potential confusion.
In school you learn to keep titles short. You added a lot of filler words that can ruin the headline on apps that cut them off, or printed media.
Shot dead is correct.
“fatally shot” is the same amount of words and less confusing
“shot dead” is a phrasel verb, therefore it can (I would argue in this particular context it should) be split:
shot (whom?) dead.
I shot him dead
He shot his wife dead
Cop shot unarmed black man dead (including press-specific omitting of articles because English is stupid)
And yet, we wouldn’t be having this discussion if the wording was actually unambiguous.
I removed one word and added two. That’s not “a lot of filler words”.
Except “shot and killed” it self can be ambiguous. What did he kill them with? Did he shoot him then kill him with a knife?
Shot dead, means the shooting is what killed the man.
“who shot an unarmed black man dead”
That just sounds weird to me
weirder than “shot dead unarmed man”?
Yes! I didn’t realise “shot dead” wasn’t a phrase in US dialect until today.
Yeah, definitely. I think this is more of a UK vs US thing. I’m from the UK so it sounds much more normal for a headline
Quick tip - if the majority of people who read something find it ambiguous, it is. Plain and simple - especially for languages like English that don’t have a central authority for setting language rules.
Quick tip - People with a poor grasp of un-simplified English are not the majority
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It’s written by a British person in OG English. This phrase isn’t unambiguous here and it took me a sec to figure out why people were confused. It’s just a syntax difference but surely you can figure it out with context clues, just like I did with your interpretation.
Dammit…thats what i said in another post!
The word order of this title is just… yikes.
It’s actually the correct way to write a headline, but it definitely feels weird.
The man was shot dead, as in, not shot and injured.
You learn to format titles a certain way in school, as to keep them short and to the point. Sometimes they can be read multiple ways, though, but it’s not wrong.
Okay but no one says “shot dead black man”. It would be “shot black man dead”.
Or ‘shot and killed’ maybe?
Maybe even “fatally shot”?
Could also be “Shot Dead an Unarmed Black Man”
This is the most correct I think
Also good!
Lol, it sounds like he shot a man who was already dead.
I expect so little form cops that I read it that way and just accepted it.
Commas?
Idk why he would shoot a dead man
…who shot dead, unarmed black man…
Nope, no commas necessary mate
Word order:
London Cop Who Shot Unarmed Black Man Dead Charged With Murder
I’m curious how this could even happen in England, I thought their police force was totally different from the US? I thought they only used guns as a last resort instead of as a constant threat of their gangster-style authority? was this some sort of very strange circumstance? was the cop who did it some kind of deranged murderer who somehow infiltrated the police force? or are cops around the world just not as different as I thought?
edit: this wasn’t meant to make a statement about English and American cops being similar, I’m just an idiot. was only trying to ask for more context (which I have now gotten).
Around 4.3% of English police officers are armed and they are only called out on special calls.
Also, afaik, the UK does not have “qualified immunity” like the US (which, I should add, is a categorically idiotic judicial precedent).
It’s only a stupid judicial precedent if you assume the police are there to enforce the law and help people.
Ideally, they should be. But yes, I am also aware of the genesis of police forces in modern society.
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It is different. In the US, the cop wouldn’t be charged with murder.
I thought the main difference was police generally don’t have guns in the UK. Has this changed?
No. There are of course some armed units, but they don’t do regular patrol work with their guns.
Armed units were involved here because the car Kaba was in was linked to a shooting the day before. Any involvement of firearms will invoke an armed response from police, however that does not mean they can simply shoot on sight and say they felt their life was threatened.
It hasn’t changed. The proportion of police carrying firearms in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland operate separately, so E&W is the biggest UK data source) has held steady at about 5%. There are typically fewer than 10 total incidents in which the police actually fire a gun each year. Of course, it only takes one to result in a story like this one.
No it hasn’t, but there are some police there with guns that are only supposed to be used as a last resort. Sounds like the shooter was one of those, but went a bit crazy:
by a Metropolitan Police firearms officer
I mean he’s literally being charged with murder and the last event like this was back around 2005, but do go on about how it’s basically the same as a country where police murdering citizens and not getting charged at all is the norm.
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yeah I think I went on a bit too much in my original comment, just genuinely wanted to know more details, I wasn’t trying make some big statement. thanks for this info I didn’t know that about British police
Needs more information, which obviously will come out after the trial.
Here’s some from a more detailed article:
There are still many unknown details about Chris Kaba’s death. What we do know is that on 5 September, Kaba was driving through south London when an automatic number plate recognition camera flagged the car he was in as recently being linked to a firearms incident. The IOPC has said that the car was not registered under Kaba’s name.
Police officers then pursued Kaba, eventually performing a “controlled stop” – two police vehicles collided with his car, cornering him in Streatham Hill. A specialist firearms officer then fired a single shot at the driver’s side through the windscreen, hitting Kaba in the back of the head. He was taken to hospital, where he died two hours later. According to Kaba’s family, they were not told of his death for 11 hours.
After a thorough search of the car Kaba was driving, the IOPC reported that no firearm was found
I’d love to know what “recently linked to a firearms incident” actually means, especially given that it seems to have been flagged by an automated system and that “firearms incident” was seen as justification to ram a car off the road and then shoot the occupant in the back before any actual threat was verified.
According to OP’s article it had been used in a shooting. Still not really an excuse to kill its occupant though.
I think this leaves out a bit.
At around 10.07pm, Kaba made a left turn from New Park Road onto Kirkstall Gardens.[5] A marked armed response vehicle was waiting on this road.[5] Police vehicles boxed the car in, and witnesses claimed that Kaba ignored repeated orders to get out of the vehicle, and was trying to ram the Audi through the roadblock.[6] Armed officers exited their vehicles then approached the Audi on foot.[5] According to the IOPC, a police officer fired a single round at Kaba through the car’s windscreen, striking him.[5][6] He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died of his injuries just after 12:00 am the following day.[7]
Also I found this really interesting
On 21 September the family of the deceased viewed the police body-worn camera footage of the incident. Having seen it, Kaba’s cousin said that they would be taking a step back in their protest about the death.
The original BBC article words it a bit differently
Afterwards, Mr Kaba’s cousin Jefferson Bosela repeated Ms Nkama’s comments, saying the family now wants “justice” but that they would now be taking a “step back” after some initial campaigning following Mr Kaba’s death.
Not sure what they changed their mind about
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Yeah I looked around. It still needs the trial to be completed first.
Did the guy do something silly that made the policeman shoot, is an unanswered question.
What was the criteria for releasing the shot would be the second question. The CPS will not prosecute without a fair chance at conviction, but innocent until proven and all that.
You could also be asking what was he doing in a car with the history it had, but that should not be justification to kill someone. I would not wish for the UK to follow in the US footsteps of frivolous shootings.
Did the guy do something silly that made the policeman shoot, is an unanswered question.
I saw this in the Wikipedia article
But witnesses claimed the driver ignored police requests to give himself up and when he attempted to ram his way out of the roadblock, officers opened fire.
Dunno how the situation actually went down though
@Syldon I agree, presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
But it does sound to me that there’s definitely going to be a strong case for this prosecution.
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