Maria Roque was just 34 years old when she was shot and killedon the steps outside her West Side Chicago home, in front of her 8-year-old daughter.
Her daughter and her 14-year-old son both witnessed Roque take her last breath.
In the weeks before she was killed, Roque repeatedly took all steps domestic violence victims are told to take. She got a protection order against her former boyfriend, Kenneth Brown. She also repeatedly went to the Chicago Police Department for help. She filed one police report after another and never gave up.
But the system failed her.
The reason is because we DON’T pay the Police Officers ENOUGH! If we paid them ENOUGH of our Tax Dollars they would Do Their Jobs!
-Republicans trying to Defund Teachers, one of the only Professions that CAN PREVENT CRIME!
Worthless system. After the initial threats and subsequent violence that guy should have been on death row. Idk why we cut people so much slack. Seriously.
“Oh golly gee y’all, we will try to do better in the future.”
-Local Police Chief
Meanwhile this woman is dead because of their lack of empathy, education, and basic human dignity. But they’ll sleep well every night for the rest of their lives while her children never will again.
They’ll continue to get promotions while failing the people they’re meant to protect.
“They” were created to defend rich people, ie: slave owners, and the rabble aren’t part of that demographic.
I don’t know why you all still hold this, but the police have no obligation to protect and serve.
In a functional society they would, instead we have low IQ ex military / military rejects in acting they’re power fantasies for the corporate overlord’s
They empathize alright with their domestic abusers brethren
I was with you up until your absurd drive to use the death penalty…
Evil people sure are glad they have you to stand up for them.
“Evil” isn’t real, it’s a word we made up to describe shitty people. Beyond that, until we humans are perfect and never make mistakes, the death penalty is never going to be the acceptable answer. Too many innocent people end up killed by it.
Or the fact that it does nothing to address the causes of crimes that don’t stem from a “risk-reward” assessment and just lets whoever’s left behind have some false sense of having done something
What’s extra comical about this claim is that if nihilism were true, as you claim, then a fortiori the death penalty would be completely permissible.
if nihilism is true, as you claim
They made no such claim. They were just noting that your argument uses the word “evil” as if it were a tangible, quantifiable thing, and it absolutely isn’t. This doesn’t mean that they embrace moral relativism or reject the concept of morality outright, but rather that they recognize you use of “evil” as a rhetorical device in bad faith.
The idea that being against the death penalty implies endorsement of the crimes that land people on death row (“evil” as you call it) is inherently fallacious. One can condemn violent crime without supporting violence as a punishment for crime. If anything, it is consistent with a philosophy of nonviolence.
The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.
I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.
The issue here is that you use the arbitrary “evil” label to strip humanity from people who commit wrongs. You’ve decided that these people deserve the most extreme forms of punishment imaginable, and then pretend that anyone challenging you on that is somehow defending the actions of the people you are asking be killed.
This then leads to the absurd situation where someone says “violence is unacceptable under all circumstances” and you accuse them of abetting “evil” because you demand that everyone want to kill the same people you do.
You honestly don’t see the issue here? I mean, you already have to be jumping through some serious mentality hoops to arrive at the conclusion “not killing people is evil”, but c’mon now…
This being in the US, I suppose if the police had actually reacted in any way to her numerous reports, they would have come over to her house and it would have been them shooting her instead of her ex boyfriend.
When there is a well documented case of violence, the cops sit on their asses and do jackshit.
When it’s time to shoot people in the back though, they have a thousand reasons.
To serve and protect my balls.
I don’t want to come off as callous or victim blaming, this is nobody’s fault but the murderer and the cops for their refusal to act. However, I would like to take this opportunity to address an issue that is closely related to this one, since it is related.
Gun laws did fuck all to stop this. Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and yet this Chicago resident presumably with an IL ID (which would bar him from purchasing firearms out of state), a state police issued FOID card, a mandatory safety course complete with signed affidavit from the instructor, and was approved for a CFP, and since gun sales are banned in the city drove to the suburbs to buy one, still was able to do all that and it didn’t prevent him from killing her.
Of course that is assuming he didn’t just get one from 600 Breezy or someone, BDs don’t check FOIDs.
And in order to protect herself against him if she so chooses, since the police obviously fail and the courts clearly take time, time she ended up not having, she would have to do all the same things, she can’t just stroll by O Block and pick one up illegally, if she uses it in defense she’d be fucked, she has to obey the laws, the murderer however can break other laws in service of the murder, “in for a penny in for a pound.” Not only did Chicago’s “common sense” gun laws do nothing to stop this, they could well have actually prevented her from obtaining a gun legally in the time it takes him to get one illegally, had she been so inclined.
Of course the real failings here are on the police, but every other comment has touched on that, I don’t feel the need to jump in the pile. Again, in conclusion, I do not blame this woman who if given the option may not have even wanted to have a gun to protect herself from this man, however clearly he was able to get one and I think it’d be better if victims had an easier time getting them than their assailants. In this case that would mean actually charging him with the crimes he’s committed to block his legal access before he murders her, and make legal access less hard for victims like her because we can’t actually stop him from getting one illegally.
