Not faulting the police in this as he was coming at them with a potentially deadly weapon. I really have to wonder though, why they couldn’t taser him or use some other method of stopping him. Why is gun play the only effective answer in these scenarios?
[One-armed man voice]
And that’s why you don’t threaten the Police with scissors!
[/One-armed man voice]
From the Washington Post:
I’ve seen clips of police shooting down perps with bean-bag guns. I think something that requires close-up use (pepper spray; nightsticks) would expose the officers to being stabbed. In this case, the guy wanted to die and repeatedly asked the Cops to shoot him. Who knows what someone in that frame of mind would have done to an officer who approached him with a hand-held device?
Replace ‘scissors’ with ‘butcher knife’. Really, they are both just as deadly. Sadly, I think this is just another case of SbC. Football team, hmmm, way wild speculation, but maybe a little steroid rage thrown in for good measure?
A lot of these less lethal techniques are also very much less effective in taking a person down. It’s all well and good to want them to use a taser, but if the taser fails to stop him (and they do fail) one of the officers gets stabbed. In a situation like this, you don’t get much time to see if the taser works, he’s charging, he’ll be on your ass in a second or two.
If I was a cop, I don’t think I’d be happy to know that a crazed young, healthy, strong man can charge at me with a deadly weapon and my only defense is a taser. If he’s unarmed, I could see the taser route, but armed with dangerous weapon?
It clearly is, but you have to wish the cops hadn’t obliged. I know how shoot to stop works, but killing the guy seems unnecessary.
The key word in the story is “charged.” The cops had a split second to act, and non-lethal force is contra-indicated when being charged by a maniac with a knife. Marley, if you know how shoot to stop works, then you know why he is dead. 4 cops, a minimum of 4 bullets.
Remember that a lot of police departments have a rule that if the situation isn’t serious enough to shoot to kill, you have no busiiness shooting them at all.
I’m not trying to start a debate, just saying that this may have against department rules.
Oops. That post above should read “…this may have been **against **depratment rules.”
Seriously. When will people learn “Do not threaten people with guns”?
Don’t run with scissors.
by penalty of law.
That’s what my mom always told me. And she probably would have told me “don’t run towards police officers with scissors while raving like a psycho,” but she probably never thought it necessary.
I joke, but I do feel bad for the kid (while not blaming the cops one whit, based on what I read). What must have been going on in his tortured mind?
:smack:
One of the problems with nonlethal methods is that you have to be trained for each one that you carry in most jurisdictions. You are qualified on you taser, on your pepper spray, on your beanbag gun, on your rubber bullet launcher, etc. Also, nonlethal is really more like less lethal. As a veteran of an unruly college campus, I’ve seen first hand the damage that nonlethal methods can use. I think Boston killed a woman a year ago or so by a rubber bullet that happened to hit her in the head. Tasers are sometimes lethal, pepper spray or mace are sometimes lethal. And, they are all less effective than a gun with real metal bullets. There was a recent death by cop near here and the local chat forum came up with a 21 foot rule (YMMV) of a distance in which someone can rush you and stab you fatally before you can pull your weapon and fire to prevent the stabbing. In that situation, the cops waited too long, one was biten and one was stabbed. Basically, you are at a disadvantage if you let the person wielding a knife (or scissors) within 21 feet of you.
Maybe its because my dad was a police officer and I know lots of LEOs, but I hardly ever question the decision to shoot a suspect. If you look at it from their POV, they know that someone is acting crazy, that they may have stabbed one or more people, and that they are not responding to reasonable discussion. Then they make a sudden move and you have to decide to stop the guy or have someone explain to you family that you won’t be coming home. I choose the other guy’s family every time.
If I understand this correctly an officer spent 35 minutes trying to get the youth to drop the weapon while 3 other officers were acting as backup. I’m guessing they had their guns drawn already so the logical thing to do was shoot low. They had a mini firing squad who had 35 minutes to target the kid. Hell, a sniper could have been used to take a leg out at a very safe distance.
I’ve been in the position where a bar brawl breaks out and bottles are used. It’s easy to put yourself in a compromising position in a very short time period. Personally, I might be willing to use a night stick against a short knife under the right conditions but it would have to be one where I was REALLY confident of the outcome.
I think this is an incorrect assumption. I’m not in law enforcement, but my understanding is that when cops are in a tense situation such as the one described here, there will be one negotiator, and the rest will be visible, but non-threatening: That is they won’t have their weapons drawn and trained on the suspect. They are an attempt to provide a visual deterrence to escalating the situation, not escalating it themselves.
This kid sounds far enough off his nut that while I am sure that all the officers were tense, and ready for action, none of them wanted to be in the position of providing the reason for him to escalate the situation to an attempted attack.
At which point, when the attack does materialize: You go for a center of mass shot. As others have pointed out, the cops will have, normally, one shot to stop the attacker. While a live, but wounded attacker would be the best outcome - the cop’s goal in that sort of situation is to put the attacker down on the ground, anyway he or she can.
To respond to astro’s original question: One might hope that this incident will give the county the kick it needs to decide whether it wants to equip their officers with tazers or not.
I don’t think you would say this if you were a cop. There was a case in NYC where a Sergeant shot a man with a knife, several times, yet the man still managed to reach the cop and plunge the knife into his heart, killing him instantly. I’m with the cops here: If confronted by a suspect weilding a weapon who menaces you, shoot for center mass.
Many officers aren’t allowed to carry nightsticks anymore since they might beat someone with it and as handy as flashlights are, they aren’t nightsticks.
Not to mention we’re not talking a little pair of paper cutting scissors. Nine inches-that’s like sewing shears, or pinking shears. Very long, very sharp.
Based on what was reported my opinion stands. 35 minutes of negotiation is ample time for 4 grown men to deal with it. The odds of 4 people shooting the legs out from an assailant are pretty good when they have the luxury of siting the target. That’s my opinion based on the report, which is the only thing I have to go on. Any other “what if” scenarios are for another discussion.