It took nearly two years, and a federal lawsuit, for Wendy Tippitt to see the police video that captured the fatal shooting of her 29-year-old son.

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

  • DominusOfMegadeus
    6211·
    22 days ago

    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.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      505·
      22 days ago

      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 penalty state-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.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
        2·
        22 days ago

        In general, I oppose the death penalty. My argument against it goes broadly along the lines that our social contract is based around the system protecting each individual (thus, it cannot kill them), and that rehabilitation should always be on the table (benefits everyone).

        I definitely think that people in power that abuse their power in order to commit a crime should be far more severely punished that an ordinary person committing the same crime.

        Whether the above extrapolates to the point where it is justified to execute police officers that have body cam footage of themselves executing unarmed, non-threatening civilians (there are plenty such cases) is actually a question I’m a bit torn about. There are a couple videos out there (that no one should see) which show police straight up purposefully executing civilians that are either incapacitated or otherwise neutralized (lying face-down, spread eagle, unarmed). Should these warrant execution of the officer involved? I haven’t concluded for myself what I think yet.

      • DominusOfMegadeus
        111·
        22 days ago

        So Texas’ state sanctioned murder by police officers is cool with you?

          • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            2·
            22 days ago

            Straw men are ubiquitous on this site… It’s always the final destination of every discussion with someone “just asking questions” (yet somehow hitting every right wing talking point).

            Lemmy has a lot of benefits over reddit, but I believe people have started to realize that it’s very simple to game and astroturf.

            Not saying that’s the case here, just something I’ve noticed recently.

            • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              22 days ago

              i just immediately block people that are like that, or trying to bait an arguement, you learn to recognize it if you been to reddit.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
      20·
      22 days ago

      I would settle for ANY fucking accountability at this point. If an unwarranted killing by a police officer meant they could never again serve as police or any kind of security officer in the US that would be a giant leap forward.

      • DominusOfMegadeus
        8·
        22 days ago

        Yeah, some people wanted to use my spitballed idea as a platform to voice their anti-death penalty sentiments (despite me clearly delineating what I was saying from that process), but all I’m really trying to get at, is that if there were SOME sort of very very serious consequences for what is essentially negligent homicide, then maybe these cops would think twice before gunning down unarmed people.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
      18·
      22 days ago

      Cops are armed, terrified, and don’t need to consider literally any consequences. Gotta love it.

    • sowitzer@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      22 days ago

      He wasn’t convicted and the whose system was used to cover for the cop. It took two years to just see the actual event. They investigated themselves. The use of the grand jury is almost always a farce. The death penalty is no deterrent for those given Free rein to kill as they see fit with no consequences.

      And even if by some miracle those with the power to prosecute do so, they still have to find a jury to actually convict a cop. In many places, that is not happening. The guy in Florida who got some popcorn thrown at him murdered a man and was let go by a jury. And I’ve seen many people argue he was in the right.

      It is not just a problem with a corrupt system. It is a corruption of a large segment of society. Too many people are ok with this happening. The US especially is on a course to destruct. I don’t think there is anything that can stop it. It has been happening for a while, and seems to be speeding up. But most don’t see it. Those in the future will be better able to pinpoint when the tipping point came. I think we are already past it. Oh well.