Actually, not San Francisco. Danville, in Contra Costa County.
The video of this shooting can be found on this page. I think that this shooting is a perfect example of the type of situation described by @Martin_Hyde a bit earlier in the thread.
In this case, the guy with the knife is in the middle of a large traffic intersection. All the cars are stopped, and everyone except the cop is back at least 50 feet, and in their cars. This is exactly the sort of situation where, once he sees the knife, the cop can back up, call for assistance, and try to calm the guy down. It really does seem like some cops just think to themselves, “If I don’t put this guy down now, I’m going to be here half the day trying to convince him to give up his knife, and I don’t want to deal with that.”
I guess it’s funny to meme, but do you really counter that American police are not better trained in the use of police than British police? Who do not regularly carry or possess firearms at all? Seems highly unlikely.
Except for the person that I was replying to, of course.
Yes, and the discussion is whether this was the most reasonable and reliable way of stopping her.
As has been said, this isn’t Hollywood. Cops don’t always hit their target, bullets don’t always immediately incapacity someone.
Pulling her away from the other girl could have been a more reliable way of preventing her from stabbing her.
As I have said, I don’t think that this officer should face disciplinary action, as he did the best with the training he had. I do think that there is something to be learned here, in better training, to prevent or reduce the tragedy involved in such a situation in the future.
Something like this happened a little while ago in a nearby city (I’m in Europe). The guy was waving a knife in a downtown area, so the police established a couple layers of security cordon, isolating him from the public, and then just patiently waited for him to tire himself out and calm down. It took a few hours, but he was then arrested without incident or injury. The incident made the local news, but otherwise passed without media comment, because no bleed, no lead.
One wonders why American police can’t follow a similar procedure.
I recently learned that just a couple of miles from where I live, a man was reported to be threatening people going in and out of a popular grocery store. He was waving a machete. Police arrived, cordoned off the area, and talked him down.
I understand the temptation to lump all such incidents into the same desired outcome but as we’ve seen each one deserves to be evaluated separately. Sometimes cops get it all wrong, but not always.
Then you might consider not accusing people you’re arguing with of having said things they’ve never said:
Who’s the “you”. No one here (as far as I know) has said what you’re accusing them of, and asking them to defend.
Can I ascribe to you any position I read or heard somewhere? Is that how debate works? Anything I heard anywhere that I disagree with is the responsibility of the person I happen to be talking with to defend as if it was their own position?
I agree that it would be hard to indict him legally, but not morally. It’s entirely possible that this isn’t so much an indictment of the individual as it is the entire department and its training regimen.
This is why people are exasperated to the point of wanting to defund police. When the police are more likely to kill than restrain, that’s “neutralizing a target,” but that’s not protecting and serving. I don’t want my taxes hiring people to kill before checking all of the other mental boxes that need to be checked.
Yeah, it’s time to do away with this sort of blanket protection. I realize that this would make their jobs more challenging, particularly considering how they’ve been trained to use force first, but we’re better off encouraging officers to use their minds before using their weapons.
You’ll get no argument from me. I’m a white guy in Canada, and I think OUR police need to be substantially overhauled. There’s too damn many of them, they’re being asked to do things for which they are not trained, and they’re too quick to rely on their guns.
A unique set of circumstances, to be sure. But I tend to think that Jones would have had the estimable benefit of George Lucas’s testimony, and we can be fairly sure that Lucas would say that the swordsman was definitely planning on murdering Indy that day.
Wow, that cop was amazing. She must have said “Put the knife down” 20 times before she fired, and when she finally did fire it was one shot only – to stop him, not necessarily kill him.
Couldn’t help but laugh when the guy says “That fuckin’ hurts.”
I think he was honestly surprised at getting shot. If it wasn’t for the fact that we’re talking about police using deadly force as an absolute last resort (which appears to be the case here), I’m tempted to say that this asshole deserved to be shot much sooner.
With respect to the Indiana Jones sword fight scene:
We were shooting in Tunisia, and the script had a scene in which I fight a swordsman, an expert swordsman, it was meant to be the ultimate duel between sword and whip. And I was suffering from dysentery, really, found it inconvenient to be out of my trailer for more than 10 minutes at a time. We’d done a brief rehearsal of the scene the night before we were meant to shoot it, and both Steve and I realized it would take 2 or 3 days to shoot this. … I was puzzling how to get out of this 3 days of shooting, so when I got to set I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son a bitch and Steve said “I was thinking that as well.” So he drew his sword, the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job, and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in 5 minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.
