It didn\u2019t take long for the two camps \u2014 pro- and anti-police \u2014 to emerge in the wake of an officer-involved shooting in Juneau this weekend.<\/p>\n
In fact, it took about nine minutes on the Juneau Empire Facebook page for people to begin posting divisive comments on an article about the shooting, apparently having already made up their minds about who was to blame.<\/p>\n
\u201cWow just open fire on a person locked in there (sic) car. This just goes to show react first think last,\u201d the person wrote, before others chimed in that police are \u201chiding behind the badge,\u201d and can\u2019t be trusted.<\/p>\n
On the other side of things, \u201cJPD are heros (sic),\u201d another person wrote, one of several siding with the police officer.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to make comments online, but we\u2019re hopeful that people offline are being more cautious about jumping to conclusions. The fact is that we don\u2019t know the facts in this case. As of Monday afternoon, police have not shared the circumstances leading up to the shooting, due to the ongoing investigation by the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Special Prosecutions and other agencies.<\/p>\n
We do not know why the police officer shot the person. We do not know what led up to the shooting. We do not know if the person was an imminent threat to the police officer. We do not know if the shooting was justified.<\/p>\n
And even if we did know some of these crucial facts, typically these situations prove to be complicated and nuanced, with no clear \u201cright\u201d or \u201cwrong\u201d answer.<\/p>\n
All the facts and details in this case will be investigated and then shared with the public at a later time (hopefully sooner rather than later). Only then though does it make sense to form opinions, react, heed a call to action, etc. Until the facts are known, it is premature to speculate about what happened, and doing so only needlessly divides and hurts our community.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen what happens with communities Outside that form sides and are pitted against each other before all the facts have come to light. Let\u2019s not let that happen in Juneau. Instead, let\u2019s learn from other communities\u2019 mistakes and deal with situations like this with aplomb and compassion. At the very least, let\u2019s wait for the facts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It didn\u2019t take long for the two camps \u2014 pro- and anti-police \u2014 to emerge in the wake of an officer-involved shooting in Juneau this weekend. In fact, it took about nine minutes on the Juneau Empire Facebook page for people to begin posting divisive comments on an article about the shooting, apparently having already […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30626"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}