A civil rights attorney says deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong unit and fatally shot a Black U.S.

Deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong unit and fatally shot a Black U.S. Air Force airman who was home alone when they saw he was armed with a gun, an attorney for the man’s family said Wednesday.

Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, who was based at the Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, was in his off-base apartment in Fort Walton Beach when the shooting happened on May 3.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said in a statement that Fortson was on a Facetime call with a woman at the time of the encounter.

  • stembolts@programming.dev
    1132·
    2 months ago

    Sure, you are allowed to have a firearm. As long as we (the police) never see you with it, or anything shaped like it, on your person ever, even if you are inside your own apartment. Oh, also don’t be black. Black people all have guns all the time. /s

    That constitutional right doesn’t feel very constitutional when it’s a death sentence to exercise it.

    He’s got a gun! Quick! Murder him as fast as possible!

    But we have the right to have them? Oh wait I get it, you have the right to have a firearm but not the right to be alive at the same time, ahh, now it makes sense. Got me with the loophole, no “right to live while bearing arms” in the constitution, but you can bear arms, just gotta forfeit your right to be alive.

  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
    76·
    2 months ago

    Is the Air Force at least going to care about this? When is this shit going to be stopped?

    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
      557·
      2 months ago

      They didn’t care about him when he was alive.

      They may care about the operational loss, but they certainly wont bring any kind of hammer down on the local PD.

      • Cipher22@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        2 months ago

        I’m honestly curious about a source for your perspective on the first sentence. I’ve seen firsthand where the USAF negotiated on an international level for enlisted Airmen over a DUI. This particular case was in Japan and while the Airman had to serve his term as dictated by the Japanese courts, he was aloud to do so in a US Military facility, which was a significantly higher QOL for that Airman.

        I couldn’t find an article while looking for a minute, but it’s been quite a few years. I also promise that skin tone was not a distinguishing factor.

        At the end of the day, though, I would simply like information on your perspective, not to convince you to change.

        • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
          41·
          2 months ago

          Are Japanese prisons that bad? I would expect them to be much better than ours based on my understanding of their society but I honestly have no idea.

          • sparkle@lemm.ee
            142·
            2 months ago

            Japan is an ultraconservative hellhole, their law & justice system is probably the most backwards in the first world. Their crime management is pretty much just fascism many times, extremely out of proportion punishments for the crimes, and if the government accuses you of something and it goes to trial, you’re basically toast. They all but torture you while you’re being processed, often times they use harsh treatment to try to force a confession out of you before trial. The state prosecutor also has no legal obligation to present all the facts, they have a lot of freedom to cherrypick and withhold information relevant to the trial in order to make the defendant look as guilty as possible.

            They have a 99.8% criminal conviction rate.

            Japanese inmates are often treated inhumanely, the way Japan treats prisoners regularly would be considered a human rights violation in most western countries.

            Imagine how Republicans treat criminals, and multiply it by a hundred. Japanese society/government HATES anything that’s out of order and does all it can to stamp out any “deviance” from norms. This usually results in them treating financial crimes, theft, drugs, etc. extremely harshly, but doing pretty much nothing about crimes like sexual harassment & sexual assault, which are kind of culturally prevalent or even slightly acceptable in Japan. Legally rape victims are treated far worse than rapists. You’d even probably be treated leniently for DUI as long as it wasn’t a taboo/illegal drug (i.e., if it’s alcohol).

            The reason urban Japan seems so nice and orderly is similar to the reason that the streets of Pyongyang seem so clean and behaved. Extremely terrible treatment of people who step out of line, except in Japan it’s mostly culturally than politically. There’s a reason they’re known for suicide and hikikomoris.

            It is a very common misconception that Japan is very progressive because of anime and the extremely rampant sexualization/objectification of women in the form of cute/funny things like panty dispensing machines and wacky television game shows and cat girls, and in general Japanese stuff just being very bright and bouncy and all that. But it’s very misleading, their culture obsessed with cuteness/“kawaii” stems from an attempt to radically and rapidly distance their cultural image from that of Imperial Japan. They definitely succeeded in changing the world’s perception of them, but they didn’t address their deep societal issues which were in part caused by the US basically controlling their politics after WW2.

            I should point out though that not all Japanese prisons are dystopian torture chambers. But you still get very few rights and freedoms while imprisoned, even socializing may be completely forbidden.

        • jonne@infosec.pub
          2·
          2 months ago

          Americans getting arrested in other countries is “a great injustice”. If American cops kill an American, nobody cares.

          Look at what the US has done to protect obviously guilty Americans from facing any type of consequence from committing crimes abroad. Stuff like the woman who killed a motorcyclist in the UK because she was driving the wrong way, or the airmen that killed scores of people by flying into a gondola cable in Italy.

        • lath@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          Own country vs other countries. Doesn’t matter what a US soldier did in other countries, if it can be swept under the rug, it will. Own country, they don’t give a shit.

        • Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
          44·
          2 months ago

          Did someone edit a comment? Or the post itself? Where does Japan come into an article about an airman killed by police in Florida?

          EDIT: I put the em-PHASIS on the wrong syl-LABLE when reading the comment. Never mind.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 months ago

      If this man gunned them down as they came in, it would have been covered by his rights as his life was endangered. It would never go that way on court. That’s when things will change though, when people start killing armed people on their property under their castle/stand your ground laws. If 30 cops in a small enough area suddenly get themselves killed they will use their union to fight for disarming civilians and taking away the 2nd amendment rights/self defense laws, or the judges will stop signing warrants once they start getting sued/disbarred for allowing the cops to enter a dangerous situation they shouldn’t have. Punish the police and the judges, and change might occur. So… never

  • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
    50·
    2 months ago

    I remember many years ago, the AF was charging airmen when some were splitting their tongues. The least they could do is charge these local PD with felonies. Obviously isn’t going to happen.

    What is crazy is the woman he was video chatting with said he heard a knock, asked who was there. No answer. Then a louder knock a couple of minutes later which is when he got his gun and they burst in. It sounds like it was unannounced.

    I hope we get the video for this but Florida is trying to kill all of its open information policies, so we may never get to see it.

    I really hope the cops are charged and convicted on at least manslaughter. Florida is pro-gun but also pro-cop. If the video shows them as being unannounced, I could see people actually being concerned because it could happen to any gunowner at that point, racial bias aside.

    • Hptyhop84@lemmy.world
      12·
      2 months ago

      There will be an investigation by other pigs, therefore they will find him innocent & he will get a paid vacation by the tax payers probably promoted.

  • exanime@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    wait what? the cops were addressing a noise complaint and that, somehow, gave them permission to break into someone’s home? (never mind they got the wrong home to begin with)