He allowed the situation to continue to escalate, which in my view seems like bad policing. I agree however - that’s not a crime he can be convicted of.
All he had to do was to reach for the waist band of the girl’s jeans while her back was turned to him and drag her down on her ass. Surely a grown man could have done that without having to escalate to drawing a gun.
Easy to say, I realize, when you can replay the video in slow motion from the safety of a keyboard. Still, I worked as a door man in a bar while in college and I know that there are often opportunities that present themselves that you can quickly react to in order to diffuse or control a situation from getting worse.
Never been a cop though. So I’ll shut the fuck up from further Monday morning quarterback commentary.
the officer also was yelling, get down, get down. it appears it was in warning to get people out of the line of fire, before the shots were fired.
Thanks. It’s extremely hard to tell from that what really was happening, but it sure looks like she was actively trying to stab somebody, so deadly force was definitely justified. That doesn’t mean it was necessarily the best course of action, of course.
I’d be interested to hear from a cop on this, but I suspect this is the case. Going hands-on against someone else holding a knife is pretty risky.
Taser, maybe?.. IDK.
An interesting case study in reactions.
My wife is more conservative than I. She heard about this from social media, and her reaction was “the officers are being unjustly criticized - they were saving other citizens.” She told my son and I, and we both had the reaction of “The officers were wrong by using deadly force.”
I think this falls under the “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything is a nail” situation. If the officers are not trained in other methods of disarming a suspect, de-escelating a situation, etc., or are trained with “Your life matters, so if they have a weapon, shoot them”, then they will pull out their gun. If they are trained in hand-to-hand combat, risk assessment (can I come from behind and disable the assailant), or other possible solutions, then they’ll act differently. This may be a case of “defund the police” (i.e. send in someone to control the situation, not someone to boot heads); this may be a case of needing better training; this may be a case of needing police that put the needs of society as a whole ahead of their own personal safety.
But then how could he shoot her?
Cop uses his authority to molest kids. When arrested, he gets a low bond. Sticks in the Judge’s craw.
Lexington. Home to all that is fucked up.
“A prisoner in a county jail shall be required by the sentencing court to reimburse the county for expenses incurred by reason of the prisoner’s confinement,” it states.
The reason for the prisoner’s confinement is police\prosecutor misconduct and incompetence.
The black man was in his car, driving away.
If you watch the video there doesn’t seem to be time to rely on a taser to do it’s job. If the taser doesn’t strike home or doesn’t incapacitate the girl right away she’s going to stab the woman in pink. On the other hand, firing a gun like that in close proximity to the other people is pretty risky. There doesn’t seem to be any great options for the cop in this situation.
Well the police in Britain usually don’t carry guns. Few criminals do either. But a fair number of criminals carry knives.
Here’s a video comparison of dealing with criminals with knives in Britain vs the U.S.
They call it his “14 month sentence” but it looks like he was never actually convicted of anything. Which makes one wonder, why did it take them more than a year to find nothing?
Yep, a person died, and the shooting went exactly as intended by the cop. Ultimately, knives just aren’t that good at killing people, not nearly as good as guns.
Bottom line, the chances of everyone surviving the day is a good order of magnitude (or two) better if the cop chooses a non-bullet response. That includes the person being attacked with the knife, she was in FAR more danger from the cop than her attacker.
I’m going to pushback a bit on knives not being very good at killing people, that isn’t actually true. They aren’t as effective as guns–which are basically the top tier for lethal hand held weapons, but knife wounds can be terribly effective and devastating depending on where they hit the body.
The Columbus shooting at least for me is a lot more questionable than other recent high profile police shootings. For one, it’s prima facie justified legally–it is considered lawful to use deadly force to protect your life or the life of another, and basically court precedent as far back as we’ve had courts would find a scenario with an assailant on top of another person swinging a bladed weapon at them, the victim is in peril of losing their life.
I would also add that the time in this shooting was horribly compressed, the officer showed up and had to make this decision in less than 10 seconds of getting out of his car. I’ll also note in that very brief window, until he realized the one girl was trying to stab the other, his first instinct was to try to calm people down and defuse the situation which to me speaks well of him and his attitude. He clearly became very worried and concerned when he realized the assailant was holding a knife and trying to stab the other girl, and was right on top of her.
This is even dissimilar from other “cop shoots person with knife” incidents where the police had a reasonable path to deescalate, by for example backing up and keeping distance and etc. There have been shootings of knife wielding assailants in the United States where I feel the police (who in those situations were the only ones in peril) could have backed off and given the knife wielder room and time to calm down while maintaining a secure perimeter–but in those situations the knife wielder was not threatening anyone else and could be easily kept at a distance. In this scenario the cop is faced with a literal split second, life or death decision about what he needs to do about a person potentially being murdered in front of him.
It is not realistic for American police to be unarmed, we are the most armed society in the world and one of the most violent. It is also probably not realistic for our police to be as experienced and well-trained at dealing with knife assailants as police in a country where knife crime is the most common type of weapon crime, and where the police receive extensive training and experience in handling it.
I also think in a time of so many high profile incidents where cops behave incredibly badly, I’m hesitant to start Monday Morning Quarterbacking on stuff that really comes down to “maybe he could have done something different, but he acted legally, he was acting to protect the life of another person.” I think policing in general is improved by looking at any situation and trying to improve the response to it, and I think there are lessons to be learned here, and maybe police in America do need to receive some more high level training on strategies and techniques in knife situations like this. But this to me is just not at all similar to the vast majority of “controversial police shootings” in the last 7-8 years in which the cop clearly was in the wrong.
I am not sure what the controversy is over the Columbus shooting. Should the LEO have let her stab the other woman? The way I look at it, the LEO saved the life of the woman who was about to be stabbed.
I carry a 9 mm everywhere I go. If someone is about ready to stab me, should I not stop them with my gun?
Agreed–I will say however that there have been other incidents in the last few years where police have used the fact someone had a knife (or stabbing implement) as justification to shoot them when it really wasn’t. I think that and the general high tensions around policing mean a lot of people are no longer willing to give police any benefit of the doubt.
There was one case in which a disturbed homeless man had a knife in a parking lot or abandoned lot, and a group of police were there to deal with him. They told him to stay back and he advanced on them (but was still a considerable distance away), and they opened fire and killed him. In that scenario I do think police could have tried to back off, use a TASER etc–they had time and options. This wasn’t a guy charging at them 5-10 feet away, he was a good distance back.
There was another incident where a young man with mental health issues was being violent with his parents, they called the police. A cop rolled up, jumped out of his cruiser and starts screaming at the guy, who has a screwdriver in his hands. At least as I’ve heard the story related the young man wasn’t imminently attacking anyone but he wasn’t listening to police commands. After a brief period of time the cop shoots and kills him. In response to the parents being upset and screaming at him for shooting their son, he says something to the effect of “hey you called me, I don’t have time to waste on bullshit.”
Are you required to stick around while police execute a search warrant on your home? If not, WTF?
But even if it comes out that he was fleeing from an imminent arrest due to something the cops found (or he knew they would find), WTF anyway? How is your first response to a fleeing suspect to fire away? Could you, I dunno, maybe call it in and have another officer pull him over?