Of course not, the LEO should have stopped the attack, the question is how.
The real question is if you’re fighting someone with a knife, do you want a nearby person to start slinging bullets in your direction? Do you think those gunshots make you safer? As opposed to, say, the other person tackling your assailant from behind.
You realize that’s actually an option. It isn’t a choice between gunfire and hiding. I’ve watched plenty of videos of cops grabbing people from behind and bodyslamming them, delivering concussions and broken bones, but I guess they only do that to unsuspecting unarmed people who are literally not a danger to anyone. Preferably when there are 2-3 other cops there to back them up.
If that person is a police officer he should order both to disarm and surrender, if one of them is actively attempting to kill the other, however, he has to take immediate action.
Is the goal to safely stop the attack or to use your gun? You have every right to defend yourself and others, but the question is what is the best way to do so. We’ve fallen into a mindset that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if some people are classified as nails because of their skin color, that’s a real problem.
The officer sees someone with a knife and someone with a gun threatening each other, and all their attention is focused on each other, so they may not hear/understand what the officer is saying. Who should the officer target? Who should the “good guy with a gun” target?
I agree with this, and with the points you made about this particular incident. On the one hand, I think that we have to hold police to a much higher standard regarding their training, their incident responses, and their use of force. On the other hand, we need to realize that they do, in fact, sometimes end up in situations where firing their weapon might be the most logical and reasonable alternative among a number of choices, and that it’s sometimes the case that a less-than-ideal choice is also maybe the right choice. I think it’s at least arguable that this was the case in this particular instance.
When I started the first volume of this thread, way back in 2014, I said in the OP:
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with debating the borderline cases like this one, and I also think it’s fair to hold the police to a high standard of judgment and competence, but in split-second cases like this, when there’s little time to think, and where a third party’s life is in imminent danger, I think it’s reasonable to cut the cop some slack.
If that’s true, and I think it probably is, I think that part of the reason is not just that police so often make bad decisions in the field. For me, my growing cynicism about policing, and my reduced willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt, has just as much to do with how law enforcement–individual cops, police departments, and police unions–respond to bad outcomes, and to criticism of police. So often, the blue wall closes and there’s no willingness at all to concede that someone fucked up.
This is especially true of police unions, and of the most vocal police officers. Some departments, to their credit, have started to take a more reasonable approach, often pressured by city councils, state legislatures, and the public. But a big part of any police reform effort is going to have to be convincing many cops in the rank and file, and their police unions, that it is in their interest, and part of their public responsibility, to get their incompetent, racist, or just plain violent colleagues off the force.
Here’s a thought-Perhaps it would help if all the “good guys with a gun” wore a white hat, so the cops and the other “good guys with guns” would know who to shoot?
I don’t know that this cop should face much in the way of disciplinary action. He made a split second decision based on his training.
But I agree with the point I think that you are making here that this should still be used as a “teachable moment”. That the cop following his training resulted in a much more negative outcome than if he had had different, better training.
We can sit back and say, “He should have done this or that.” and that doesn’t change what did happen. However, it may change what happens the next time there is a similar circumstance, hopefully for the better.
I mean in that situation like I said, he should order them to stand down and try to defuse the situation. If they are both actively attacking one another with deadly weapons I’m not sure there is much of an easy answer. This isn’t what happened in Columbus FWIW, so seems fairly hypothetical. In your scenario you use the term “threatening” not “attacking”, police should always try to defuse whenever possible, that gets much harder in a situation when potentially deadly force is in active use by one person against another.
This isn’t my hypothetical-This is Crafter_Man’s, created when he said “I carry a 9 mm everywhere I go. If someone is about ready to stab me, should I not stop them with my gun?”. I asked what another “good guy with a gun” should do if he sees a person with a knife and a person with a gun going at each other, and you reworded it to turn the third person into a police officer. Fair enough, I guess…but I wouldn’t mind an answer to the question I originally asked, also.
The public definitely does need to evaluate each of these cases on its own merits, and base our impressions on the evidence.
These incidents … these killings … all fall on some long continuum with “totally justified” on one end and and “totally unjustified and unambiguously criminal” on the other.
When I think of George Floyd and Adam Toledo (Chicago – 13 y/o) and Ma’Khia Bryant (Columbus – 16 y/o - knife), they strike me as vastly disparate cases.
I also think about one of the many great scenes from “A Few Good Men,” and am reminded that there are lots of options besides imprisonment and acquittal, when the situation warrants:
And that’s the sort of thing that leads to bench warrants, that leads to arrests and detainment.
I’m not a huge fan of having a bench warrant out over an unpaid traffic ticket, but when you weren’t even aware that you were ticketed, much less doing anything to merit one, it can destroy someone’s life, even get them killed, because some cops thought it would be fun to break the law.
Bryant would have definitely killed the girl in pink had that officer not acted, look at that video. Not to mention the girl that got kicked in the head by that guy. The fact that she was 15 or 16 years old doesn’t really matter. She attempted an adult action and suffered an adult consequence.
Of course if the police weren’t there and Bryant had killed the other girl, we would have never even heard about it. No protests, no congress people speaking out, nothing.
We don’t really know what led up to the video, it’s not very descriptive. As it was the girl who ended up dead that called the police to report a fight, it is likely that she is not the one who brought the knife, nor the one who initially wielded it. If she had taken the knife from the other girl, and was now in possession of it when the cop arrived, it’s not really that “She attempted an adult action and suffered an adult consequence”.
Since you are so cavalier about the taking of her life, can you explain why she called the cops only to assault someone once they arrived?
