Prosecutors have charged a Metropolitan Police officer with murder after he shot rapper Chris Kaba in London last year.
Nice to see consequences
Here in the States he would have won a free vacation (suspension with pay) and suffered no actual consequences.
He shot a dead guy?
Dammit…thats what i said in another post!
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
Could you put a common after dead to make it less ambiguous?
you could, but that would just make it sound like the cop shot a man who has already been dead even more
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:
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.
“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”.
“who shot an unarmed black man dead”
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?
Lol, it sounds like he shot a man who was already dead.
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?
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 is, 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.
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
The answer is simple.
ACAB.
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.