> Evan Snow, a thirtysomething “user experience design professional”..., who had moved to the neighbourhood about six months earlier (and who has since departed for a more suburban environment)
> Snow never seemed to recognise that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr Nieto. Mr Nieto became further – what’s the right word? – distressed, moving very quickly and rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at that point vocalising, barking, or kind of howling.”
>– in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female “jogger’s butt”. “I can imagine that somebody would – could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point,” Snow said. The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking. Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog-owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr Nieto that night”
Is this guy real? This is the sort of person I'd expect to see on Silicon Valley not in the real world, he fits the techbro stereotype exactly. After each sentence I read, I thought this guy couldn't get even more stereotypical, but he managed to lower the bar further.
This is a person Rebecca Solnit chose to single out, carefully juxtaposing reports of his (incredibly obnoxious) behavior against Nieto's shooting, to which, even by Solnit's account (read carefully), he was not a party.
I don't want to get drinks with this character in Solnit's story, either. But I'm not sure we should applaud the tactic of summoning up and focusing outrage on people like this.
Her implication is that this guy's dog is why the taser was visible, and the taser was reported as a handgun, and the police responded to that. I'd say he's a party -- his self-reported distraction started the whole series of events.
Applying the same label to different people doesn't make them equal or equivalent.
He certainly wasn't a murderer, not even close. But he was an unusually big asshole. I, for one, do not express any serious wish to shoot people very often.
I certainly wouldn't express it in writing over any electronic medium in today's world, but that's a different discussion.
Other people said he seemed agitated and nervous when their dogs were walking about by him. I imagine if a dog just charged at you and was barking/howling while its owner was staring at someone's ass, you'd be on edge for a bit as well.
No shit! I agree. I read the first half of the first graf of the story angry at Solnit, for singling out this guy and scare-quoting his occupation. Then I got to the bit about the dog jumping up on Nieto and the simpering excuse-making this guy made about that and I instantly got angry at the guy instead. What an asshole!
That lasted a couple minutes. But "poorly managed, barking dog jumps up on someone" happens millions of times a day, and those dogs owners are not complicit in murders.
As reported elsewhere, Solnit's story leaves out Nieto's mental illness, which is apparently severe: he appears to have been schizophrenic. We don't know what Nieto's reaction was to the dog. He could have terrified, or he could have been outraged.
A previous version of this comment suggested that Nieto had tased someone else at the park; he had not. I misread something; the taser incident I read about was unrelated to the park.
You are entitled to that perspective. You might be right. But Solnit is not entitled to make that decision for all of her readers by withholding that detail.
I am going to gently push back on you, though, because you're making it sound as if Nieto had a completely unrelated historical diagnosis that is being used here as a smokescreen. Here are some details salient, I personally think, to this case:
* Nieto had been prescribed two antipsychotics. He had not been taking them at the time the police confronted him.
* Just three weeks prior to this shooting, Nieto had tased the ex-husband of a friend while they were putting their kid in a car. The victim removed the taser darts, and Nieto tased him again. The victim managed to get into the car and drive away as Nieto screamed and threatened him.
* The second of Nieto's two antipsychotics was prescribed two years prior, when he was placed on psychiatric lockdown after trying to set his parents house on fire.
There is mental illness of the kind that many of us suffer and manage, with varying kinds of assistance. And then there is uncontrolled, ongoing, and violent psychosis.
Nobody is arguing that Nieto's mental illness is a good reason for him to have been killed. But the notion that the police, dispatched to confront a subject reported in a 911 call to have been carrying a pistol, faced someone who did indeed refuse to show their hands and then did indeed draw a weapon is corroborated by Nieto's history.
This is not a gentle pushback, you're seeking to blame the victim without quoting any sources. Your inference that the story is "corroborated by Nieto's history" is pure speculation and does not explain the contradictory statements given by the police officers. If you've left something out here then I apologise but this story disgusted me, as does your comment.
I misread an article summarizing the DA report. He had, three weeks earlier, repeatedly tased someone as they were putting their kid in a car. He had not tased people at the park.
I don't think people should be allowed to arbitrarily carry tasers around, either, by the way. Certainly I don't think it's OK for bar bounces to have them. Dozens of people die every year when the police tase them. Tasers are not safe.
I don't have good statistics, but late last year I went through the Guardian's police shooting database and bucketed all the killings in a spreadsheet, and I was startled to see how many people were killed by tasers. Tasers are dangerous.
I see that Taser combined with drugs or alcohol can increase risk of heart arrhythmia. That seems to be responsible for most of the deaths. Police Officers would encounter those folks more often than the general population.
Nope. Sorry, Evan Snow's recklessness in not getting his dog under control resulted in a innocent person getting shot, and cops whose careers are probably ruined.
Snow deserves a big chunk of blame here.
It's simple folks: if you're not highly confident that your dog will behave itself
For those of you who still harbor sympathy for Snow, do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.
Now Snow's dog didn't end up biting, but that's beside the point. His dog clearly caused a major disturbance because he didn't control it. Snow's recklness is the root cause of this profound tragedy.
I'm not sure I have a lot of sympathy for someone who's career may be ruined for shooting an innocent person in this situation. There is a lot of bs in the police story (staring the victim in the eye when her wore glasses, the tazer being off in photos, the tazer having been fired in later photos etc).
>>do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.
Also kids get killed being mauled by dogs.
Not sure why people don't get this. If you own an animal that can kill a human being, you don't own a pet, you own a very dangerous animal, responsibility of actions of whose should solely rely on you.
Pets are parrots, squirrels etc. Tender animals which can't cause meaningful harm to human life.
I'm pretty sure that pointing a device that appeared to be a gun at a group of cops after ignoring their requests for him to put his hands up had a bit more of an impact than the dog in this case.
One of the key assertions of the story is that he had no reason to believe that the people requesting he show is hands were police officers. It was dark and they hadn't properly identified themselves or used sirens when arriving at the scene.
We can't know the state of mind of the victim, but there's every possibility that he believed he was pointing his tazer at a group of assailants. It's incumbent on police to properly identify themselves before making demands of someone they expect to comply.
There was one eyewitness to the shooting. Their testimony contradicted physical evidence in multiple ways (from the location of the shooting, to the number of police cars that were present.) That same witness was forced to admit on the stand that their recall was compromised by alcoholism.
The same eyewitness is the basis for claims Nieto's hands were in his pocket when he was shot. But Nieto's hands were wounded by the shooting, and his pockets were not damaged.
Ok, I'll play along. Unless you believe the cops unholstered his taser and placed it on the ground, chances are it was in his hands. Time taken to raise object that appears to be a gun and shoot someone <= time to unholster and raise weapon to shoot someone. Police need to be proactive in situations like this because being reactive could lead to getting shot.
The article suggests his hands were in his pockets when shot and that police fired the tazer after he was dead. The current rate of police killings indicates something needs to change. Being proactive doesn't mean killing someone each time you feel threatened. This case shows how that can play out. A little more "reactive" is exactly what was needed.
A very similar narrative was built for what happened in Ferguson: eyewitness testimony that the victim was no threat, claims that police assertions amounted to "superhuman powers" for the victim, &c.
Then the DOJ report more or less refuted all of those eyewitness claims.
The police were called to the scene based on a report of a subject brandishing a firearm. They found the exact person the report referred to. The subject was indeed armed (though not with a firearm). They did not need to tamper with evidence. They didn't need to fire the taser. In fact, doing so would only put them at risk, if they somehow managed to screw up firing it themselves.
I agree that he should have controlled his dog better, but he certainly wasn't at fault for the conflict escalating to a shooting. It was out of his hands by the time the police arrived.
I do not like being manipulated by journalists abusing their positions to push their preferred narrative.
Solnit would like us to believe Snow was complicit in Nieto's killing, because it supports her narrative.
Surely Solnit was made aware, before this article was published, of critically important details, like Nieto's diagnosed and medicated psychosis (he was off his meds), or his record of having violently confronted people in that same park. She chose to leave those details out of her story, entirely, because it would have muddied the point she hoped to make.
Meanwhile, Solnit is perfectly happy to write the story in such a way that a casual reader would have believe Snow was at fault. Some readers on this thread have apparently come away with the impression that it was him who called 911!
Psychosis: not important for us to know about. Later unrelated racist text message between friends: very important for us to know about. You don't feel manipulated?
no... Solint is using Snow as a narrative for representing the attitudes the gentrification brought into Alex's neighborhood. The attitudes that lead to Alex's death.
SoInit is not presenting all the facts because that is not a journalist's job. She has only a limited amount of space (yes even on the web) to work with.
But why are you talking about the messenger rather than the message?
What? Presenting all the facts is exactly a journalist's job. If a journalist is presenting a "narrative" instead of the facts, that journalist needs to quit their job and become a novelist.
Is there evidence that Nieto was behaving in a threatening manner, beyond that of having been attacked by a dog? Is there evidence that the responding officers knew of Nieto's diagnosis?
The message does indicate the state of mind of the responding officers.
No, I don't. I also do not think Snow was complicit or otherwise responsible for Nieto's death, but help contribute to the environment where it was made possible.
I can tell you first hand that the neighborhood has been overrun by men like Evan Snow.
Considering you live in Chicago and that Rebecca and I actually live in Bernal Heights I think we have a much better perspective on the situation.
Where I come from you don't call the cops because you think you saw "a Mexican crazy man waving a gun around". If you see something, you leave, and you don't say anything to anyone. If you don't be a snitch then people don't get shot.
If you move from fucking Iowa and you think San Francisco is like adult Disneyland and you parade around town with your white ear buds and you're totally oblivious to reality, you might think that the SFPD is like the security guards at the mall and think you need to call them when you see some "Mexican kids hanging on the street in a pack".
The cops have fucking handguns and are very familiar with using them throughout years of gang violence in the Mission and Bernal. People who live in these neighborhoods don't look forward to having the police roll up searching for a Mexican with a handgun. Bullets fly in all directions. Completely innocent people get gunned down. Someone acting scary and just having a bad day but not hurting anyone gets gunned down. This shit happens all the time. I've been watching people get shot for no god damned reason for years and years and years.
This just feels like another damning indictment of US policing. "Don't call the cops, because innocent people will end up getting shot." In most civilised countries you can call the police without first wondering if its worth the risk of bystanders ending up dead.
It absolutely is another damning indictment of US policing.
There are two very different worlds here. The world Eric Snow lives in and the world Alex Nieto was taken from.
Eric Snow and Justin Fritz don't know the rules and never bothered to find out the rules yet decided to live in this world. Their actions got people shot.
Is this ideal? Hell no! It shouldn't be like this. No one fucking wants this. But pretending like it doesn't exist is irresponsible.
Let's be clear, it was the actions of the police officers that pulled the trigger that got him shot. I'm glad to live in a country where the police don't routinely carry firearms, and when they do evey instance of them even firing a round is investigated, never mind shooting someone dead.
Calling he police on someone waving a handgun around in public is not "snitching," it's doing everyone a favor.
That said, this isn't directly related to the story at hand as it is not clear that Mr. Nieto was in fact waving a gun around, but appears to be a convenient story from the police to justify having shot him.
> Calling he police on someone waving a handgun around in public is not "snitching," it's doing everyone a favor.
From the perspective of someone who's used to the benefits of calling the cops outweighing the costs. The parent poster gives valuable insight into the thought process learned from the very real places where the cost of calling the cops outweighs the benefits.
The Mission and Bernal are very real places indeed.
I heard a man gunned down by the cops just six months ago on a construction site on my block. Four years ago someone got shot execution style on the sidewalk 10 doors down from my apartment. That same apartment still had three bullets lodged in the walls and ceiling. Two years before that three people got blown away in a pizza restaurant underneath another apartment I was living in. That's five murders within 200 ft of where I was sitting in just 6 years. All of these happened in the Mission and Bernal neighborhoods where I've been living and where Alex Nieto grew up. That's just reality.
Tom, I seriously can't figure out why you think that I'm trying to show people that "I'm hard" or something. I'm not. I'm a total wimp. I've had very few issues living in the Mission and Bernal because I keep my head down and mind my own business. Whatever picture you're trying to paint of me is completely irrelevant.
The point I'm making is that if you're in a neighborhood where there happens to be a history of gang violence you should know that calling the cops more often than not just escalates the tension and creates more opportunities for unneeded violence.
If different cultures are going to learn to live together peacefully we need to learn how to do so without getting the cops involved. How different would this have been if these people had just talked to Alex instead of making assumptions? That's the whole fucking point of the article. Eric Snow isn't in San Francisco to get to know people like Alex. He's here to make money and he doesn't know about nor care about what was going on in the Mission or Bernal before he moved to town.
And for fuck's sake, these are real murders I'm talking about and they rattle me to the bone. I'm a sensitive dude.
Seriously, follow these simple instructions for a much better life:
I don't think you're trying to be hard. I think you're trying to rep San Francisco as hard, to sell a narrative of the city as a place so beset by crime and class conflict† that responsible residents all follow a code. Knowing that code, any responsible white dude should know that letting his dog off the leash could end in someone losing their life.
What I have a problem with are stories with "good guys" and "bad guys". Very few stories are really like that, despite what Solnit so obviously wants you to believe. There's just tragedy layered on top of tragedy. There are injustices to be found, but they're probably not the ones you want --- the injustice isn't "white dude didn't follow the sacred white dude code", but rather "we give all the police firearms and put them in situations where they'd need to be superhuman to forestall tragedy", or "our care for the mentally ill is fucking appalling".
I don't care why Eric Snow is in San Francisco. He's a racist gun enthusiast. I'm never going to be his friend. But I also don't feel like I have any right to tell him where to live, and I don't feel like you do either.
And he sure as shit didn't kill anyone that day.
I'm "Thomas", by the way. :)
† We can both name cities that are really like that.
I'm just telling it how it is. If you wanna sit there in Chicago and tell me there's no crime and no class conflict going on in the Mission District of San Francisco, well, that's on you.
As a white male, I would only call the cops on a white male with a gun.
Everyone else I would try to ignore, because I don't want them shot. Anyone remember 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot by cops because he had a toy gun?
I would never live in Texas where I would be surrounded by white males with guns. At this point, I am more worried by crazy white dudes with a gun than I am by non-whites.
Update: I love the fact that I am talking exclusively about my own reactions and getting downvoted; love ya all.
No, people do get shot. 12 year old boys get shot by gangsters in broad daylight, and no one says who did it. People get smashed on the head with poles by roving teenagers. That the cops are just another gang sometimes doesn't mean they aren't necessary, or that Stop Snitchin' is anything but aiding and abetting murder.
Without knowing anything more than what was written in the article, I think the clear intent is that he's supposed to fit the techbro stereotype exactly. I think this article crosses the line into propaganda to ensure that one way or another, that's what the reader will take away.
That's not to say the underlying story they want to tell is necessarily wrong. I'd agree with the basic thesis that gentrified neighborhoods bring in people who cause no ends of problems for the people who have lived there forever, with in some cases, tragic consequences. And the guy may genuinely be exactly the preppy little asshole they're telling me he is. But my general political sensitivities are already as "bleeding-heart-lefty" as you can imagine, and if you cherry pick bits of my life -- "chief software engineer, according to LinkedIn", "likes golf", etc., you can paint pretty much any picture you like.
San Francisco used to be an awesome place, then all those people moved in from some white-only places and it's pretty much gone down hill. It used to be an awesome, diverse place with strong and creative people... now look at it. It's so sterile and void of originality it is sickening in comparison to what it used to be.
Alot of those people imitate the culture and creativity from San Francisco's once diverse population until it's just become another vapid rendition of a once vibrant city.
Look at clowns like "Lil Dicky" for example that exemplify the notoriety of the idiocy that is confused for San Francisco culture.
The worst are the police from the MidWest and other racist places where they openly shoot minorities (Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Latinos, etc...) then they are assigned to places like San Francisco, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Portland, etc... to gentrify the area. They have been working a lot with the white supremacist "techbros' that plague San Francisco, such that when altercations occur, the police will abuse the minority every time. They even laugh about it too. It's sickening.
"San Francisco used to be an awesome place, then all those people moved in from some white-only places and it's pretty much gone down hill. It used to be an awesome, diverse place with strong and creative people... now look at it. It's so sterile and void of originality it is sickening in comparison to what it used to be."
I think you would do well (and perhaps be surprised/enlightened) to read about the population and racial makeup of the mission district (as an example) prior to the immediate post-WWII era.
Are you confused, since you are confusing "evolution" with gentrification. San Francisco de-evolved.
To undo your over simplification, in terms of evolution San Francisco is over specialized in an evolutionary sense. Can you parse that and understand what that means?
> Snow never seemed to recognise that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr Nieto. Mr Nieto became further – what’s the right word? – distressed, moving very quickly and rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at that point vocalising, barking, or kind of howling.”
>– in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female “jogger’s butt”. “I can imagine that somebody would – could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point,” Snow said. The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking. Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog-owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr Nieto that night”
Is this guy real? This is the sort of person I'd expect to see on Silicon Valley not in the real world, he fits the techbro stereotype exactly. After each sentence I read, I thought this guy couldn't get even more stereotypical, but he managed to lower the bar further.