You wanna throw in a couple “sheeple” references while you’re at it?
That’s because people here aren’t walking around armed much of the time, so the police aren’t facing a potentially lethal threat with every encounter. Also, far fewer people here have the attitude that the cops are the enemy, not the people protecting you from the enemy.
Don’t want to get shot? Don’t provoke the guy with the gun. That applies to both “sides”.
I’m not sure if this is satire or if you’re serious. Presenting overwhelming force is not the point, or at least it shouldn’t be. All we want is compliance with the law, regardless of whether we get that with gentle persuasion or batons and bullets. You keep focusing on what happened after the homeless guy allegedly laid his hands on an officer’s weapon, but the question is, how did the police handle the encounter up to that point? How did they approach an unarmed homeless person and then a few minutes later get to the point where he was grappling for their gun? Was his death worth whatever petty crime they were going to arrest him for? Were their tactics the best fit for the situation? Did they escalate the level of violence with their presence?
Even if you don’t value the life of this guy, police shootings are expensive. More often than not the officers involved are placed on paid leave, lawyers get to rack up the hours, there are panels to determine whether the shooting was justified… the city would probably have saved money if they’d blocked off the street and called in mental health counselors to talk to this guy for the rest of the afternoon.
Did you read the article? The police were not the aggressors. They were speaking peacefully to the man when he initiated physical violence against them.
Trying to shake someone out of their own tent is “speaking peacefully?”
Trying to speak to the suspect is speaking peacefully. They’re not the ones that chose to escalate the matter.
[Moderating]
get lives, if you don’t stop spamming that website, you will be banned as (wait for it…) a spammer.
This is an official warning.
[/Moderating]
Your cognitive dissonance is truly astounding.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother this august subforum with the deaths of thousands of citizens.
Because he grabbed for it.
The guy who grabbed the gun and got shot was a suspect in a robbery. Are you saying that robbery is a petty crime that should not have been investigated?
And the police didn’t “escalate” any violence. The homeless guy initiated the violence.
"Security footage from the homeless shelter was described by the Associated Press, reportedly showing the suspect push over another person’s tent and then engage in an argument. "
Then when he went and tried to hide in his tent, the police tried to roust him from it and he attacked them.
But crazy people are still crazy. Imagine that.
Regards,
Shodan
So how is it that Western Europe manages to NOT kill even 1/1000 the number of mentally-ill homeless that the U.S. does? Don’t say guns. The mentally ill homeless can’t afford them, and almost never have them.
Guns.
It’s absolutely precious that you believe that.
Would you like to provide a cite, or was this just even less well-researched than usual for you on this particular topic?
DEA celebrates Black History Month…by arresting a Harlem drug dealer and tweeting about it, tying it to said celebration.
So they try to take them from police officers…often with sub optimal results, but thats the cops fault because they dont subscribe to the magic get lives descalation methodology (yet to be defined as more than some kind of handwaving) that magically calms people in the middle of psychotic episodes.
When’s the last time you heard of someone dying in a mental hospital during a psychotic episode or just general freakout? It rarely happens, because
-
Nobody who is looking for excitement or the chance to kill people applies to mental hospitals
-
Those employees have the training they need to deescalate those situations.
The problem is that, when we shut down those awful state-run mental hospitals in the 1980s, we didn’t train the NEW first responders to these situations with mentally ill people–the police. The cops used to just deal with criminals. Now the mentally ill (and drugged-out people as well) are becoming a bigger and bigger issue. We traded awful state hospitals for a different problem, that of mentally ill people getting occasionally shot, instead of handled with compassion and understanding.
First responders have always dealt with the the mentally ill, problem is, first responders get a few minutes, a patient in a psych facility has already been assessed, identified and efforts made to properly medicate them. The staff has a pretty good idea what to expect from them, and in many cases understand that patients needs very well.
From the perspective of an Ex-EMT I understand what you are asking for, but operational reality in the field throws a whole bucket of curveballs. I have been involved in dozens of situations forcibly restraining someone who was having some kind of bad trip or was mentally ill. There is no simple litmus test in the field for differentiating a very drunk violent asshole from a some flavors of mental illness. EMS folks are generally the “helpful” types and I have seen 20 year veteran paramedics with no better solution than to tackle someone and hope for the best.
I would be very curious to see examples of actual methodologies for handling a situation like the LAPD situation upthread considering physical overpower and tasering were ineffective. Don’t just say “deescalate” thats not an answer any more than “work smarter not harder”.
If you had to assemble a workshop training police officers in de-escalation methodologies, what would they consist of?
If those methods require more than a few minutes, how should they deal with situations evolving in seconds? Monday morning quarterbacking many of these situations is easy, dealing with them in person is usually far less clear cut.
What do you feel is a minimum criteria where a police officer should be allowed to use lethal force? Never is not a realistic answer.
Same as for anyone else–whenever no nonlethal action will not stop the situation. Yeah, that’s not a very precise answer, but how in the world do you think non-experts can predict all possible scenarios?
All we can do is look at particular situations and give alternative actions that we think any reasonable person should have chosen to use, even in the moment. And if we can do that in a convincing way, we’ve established that lethal force was not the only option and thus improperly used.
As for your other questions, unfortunately a lot of this stuff requires paid access. I just know they exist, since they are used in clinical settings.
Why didn’t they use pepper spray? When did that go out of fashion? Now it’s tazer, then bullets.