Quote:
Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
And for my next amazing act, I'll pretend that what people see is not real.
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In some ways, it kind of isn't, though. First of all, eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. But more importantly, the way each person sees the world is so completely determined by that person's world view and biases that it's wholly possible, likely even, that two people can look at the same event and come to totally incompatible conclusions about what, factually, happened.
And that's even in a case where you have some knowledge, background and context for the event. Look at the Wideman suspension this year - presumably all of us have watched a ton of hockey in our lifetimes, and most of us have played it for years. Yet many presumably intelligent, thoughtful people looked at an event for which there were multiple high-quality camera angles and had entirely different accounts of how that event took place.
Now take a civilian who has, very likely, no experience in situations where police force is being applied, and ask him or her to judge who was culpable after looking at a short, low quality video.
This isn't to say that civilians can't respond to police incidents because we lack the required training and experience to understand what it's like to be a cop in that situation - we obviously can and should. But in doing so, we should recognize what we don't know - to say nothing of taking account of the fact that hindsight is 20/20. There are a number of people in this thread (as there always are when these sorts of events happen) who not only don't know the first thing about what it's like to be in that kind of a scenario, but are
absolutely certain that their take on the event is clearly and unequivocally correct. That sort of position is facile.