To be clear, though, this has little if anything to do with the fact that American LEOs have always been armed, at least since city police forces became widespread in the late 19th century. Or is that not the case? Officers didn’t start carrying guns as a result of the war on drugs. They’d always had them as far as I know.
We don’t have an equivalent of jaywalking. Crossing the road isn’t a crime as far as I know.
Correct. But many of the European examples pointed to as examples of better police cultures still carry pistols including Northern Ireland. The German Polizei tend to be better armed than our current US patrol officers (MP5 submachineguns). There was a brief period where there was a similar escalation started by organized crime. It was when we banned alcohol during prohibition. We love our smuggled mind altering drugs in the US. Prohibition didn’t last long though.
The period that’s coined the term militarization is a period where equipment and tactics have changed significantly from just carrying a pistol. Special response teams that look and train like elite military counter terror units have multiplied. Equipment above and beyond the pistol and maybe a shotgun in the car has increased. Individual tactics began to morph. That period started after the threat has significantly grown.
I agree with you that the Canadian numbers are probably incomplete, but as I indicated so are the US police agency self-reported numbers. The thing is that, just like the number of gun fatalities, the difference in the number of police shootings between the US and Canada after adjusting for population difference is so huge that arguing about inaccuracies in one number or another is rather a moot point.
I maintain that the high incidence of police shootings, as per some of the examples I gave, is largely due to the prevalence of guns in general. If someone is being aggressive and there’s a high statistical probability that the person might be armed, police are less likely to put themselves at risk with non-lethal weapons that might not be effective.
I also agree with you that culture is a factor. I read a summary of Darren Wilson’s testimony and frankly it sounds credible to me, even if he might have embellished certain details in his favor. But part of the problem is what seems to be a state of ongoing conflict between the almost all-white police department and a population that is something like 67% black, and which black population accounts for 86% of traffic stops and almost 93% of the resulting arrests. So you have a police department that is predisposed to regard blacks as troublemakers and criminals, and a black population that is predisposed to regard the police as oppressive and bigoted. There seems to have been zero effort made to reflect the community demographics in the makeup of the police department, or to integrate the police into the community as other cities are doing with things like community-friendly bicycle and foot patrols and proactive anti-discrimination policies; on the contrary, the Ferguson police department participates in a DoD program that gives them surplus military equipment like automatic weapons and armored vehicles.
Now add to that hotbed of racial tension and mutual distrust a gun culture that allows anybody and everybody easy access to weapons, and the result should be no surprise. One of the interesting points in Wilson’s testimony concerned why he wasn’t carrying a Taser. He claimed it was just too big and bulky to carry around on his belt, but one suspects that what he was really thinking was that if he was ever in the position of needing a weapon he wanted a serious one and wasn’t about to risk getting himself shot.
I would love to see all of the places that want their police disarmed do it.
I would love to see the results even more.
Good luck, blue cities.
I love how you depict the event in the passive tense “…resulted in Michael Brown being shot” as if it was an inevitable act of nature. How different from describing it accurately as “the cop pulled the trigger – about a dozen times – and shot Michael Brown until he was dead”! What would a European or Canadian cop have done differently? Judging from the overwhelming statistics on police behaviors, he would not have shot him. Is that specific enough?
Kind of irrelevant since that’s not when Brown was killed. He was killed out in the open, shot multiple times at a variety of distances.
I would love to see where anyone in this thread has suggested that American police be unilaterally disarmed. There are so many strawmen in this thread that I could build a straw house out of them.
[QUOTE=Pjen]
It is really worth comparing Police reality shows from the US and UK.
[/quote]
Apart from the silliness of assuming that reality TV is a good gauge of everyday policing, you should have noticed that it is extremely rare on such programs for American police to shoot or otherwise inflict serious bodily harm on suspects, even when they resist arrest and beat on officers.
A number of Brits (at least, those who spend an inordinate amount of time posting about Evil USers on message boards) seem to be appalled about nearly everything.
Well, no wonder my countrymen can’t do that. These days, American exceptionalism is all about our perception of our own incompetence.
I was shocked that the police killed Kajieme Powell, the Ferguson knife wielder, and shocked that Dopers thought the police decision to kill was correct. Is policeman’s time so valuable that spending ten minutes to talk to a crazy man is unaffordable, when he can be killed in one minute? Driving straight up to the kid with a toy and killing him was also unbelievable.
And to pretend that these killings are unrelated to the race of the victim is absurd.
OP wants a good way forward? Start by ensuring that police are friends of the community they serve, not opposite-colored haters as is clearly the case in Ferguson.
American exceptionalism is so amusing! A country with 80 million is too small to compare with the U.S. Lesser countries are familiar with “per capita” statistics but we’ve got nuclear weapons, so we don’t need long division! :rolleyes:
During the 2000 Florida recount, a Brit who noted that ballots are recounted by hand in his country was admonished: “You’re from a little country. Do you have any idea how big Florida is?”
Beating a police officer is a very serious offense. Do really you think that in a rational gun-free culture, citizens beating policemen would be a common occurrence? We don’t have video of the Brown-Wilson incident, but if Brown attacked Wilson at all, it might have been due to annoyance at a racist coward hiding behind a gun.
The fact that the American policeis way too trigger happy is made obvious by advices posted on this board. For instance, if stopped by the police on the road, you should keep your hands on the wheel, anounce your intentions before moving, don’t suddenly reach for the glove compartment or your pocket, etc…
Basically, it means that being stopped by the police is considered dangerous and potentially lethal for a law-abiding citizen, even during a routine interaction. Which means that something is deeply wrong.
And sure, there are less weapons around in Europe. But still, the police does face sometimes armed and hardened criminals. And apparently even in these cases, the result typically is that nobody is killed. Even though I wouldn’t know what the police would do in a specific situation similar to that of Wilson, the statistics indicate that dangerous situations or not, people don’t get killed. Which points at an issue of procedures regarding the use of weapons by the American police. This specific case might or might not have turned out differently in an European country. But the fact is that such an outcome is an anomaly in Europe and a common occurence in the USA. And I’m sure that it sometimes happen in Germany, or Japan or wherever that someone reaches for a police officer’s weapon.
The issue seems to be that police is trained to answer to lethal force to any threat. Someone seems to be reaching for something : it might be a weapon, so he might kill you, so you should open fire immediately, and preferably 8 times to make very very sure he’s dead because someone shot only 7 times might possibly still not be incapacitated. People seem to share this approach and expect the police to react with extreme violence to the slighest threat. See the people defending the immediate shooting of a 12 yo because he “reached” for a weapon, and blaming the kid, which seems completely insane to me, especially after watching the video.
Besides, someone asked what the police officer should do if he’s alone and assaulted. I had never payed attention to that but in fact I never see a police officer alone over here, even when it’s the rural “gendarmerie” handing speeding tickets in the middle of nowhere. So maybe the fact the police officer was alone is already part of the problem.
So you demand the right to shoot because shooting is often ineffective?
What you seem to be going for here is the idea that you have the right to shoot until the target is visibly no longer able to move, or has a visible vital organ rupture, or you run out of ammunition.
You’re proving the point that firearms are an utterly lousy tool to restrain a suspect. There are basically two ways to “stop a perp” with a firearm:[ol]
[li]Fire as many shots at center mass as you can in the hope that one will tear open the heart or aorta, and the target will faint from blood loss (and most likely also die).[/li][li]Pull off a head shot. If you’re a good shot, this is both more efficient and more humane. The shot has a decent chance to stun, blind, or kill the target.[/li][/ol]
Wilson apparently went for the “empty your clip at center mass” option, as trained to do. In the process, he kept firing as Mike Brown fell (implying a successful aorta hit) and opened Brown’s brainpan.
What Wilson was doing before, with the firing wildy at two suspects running away, I don’t really know.
Fallacy of the excluded middle, and not for the first time in this thread.
A gun is a hole-punch powered by a firecracker, not a magic device to make people do what you want. And a policeman’s job, whatever you seem to believe, is not actually to blow holes in people who are committing crimes.
You are spouting counterfactual bullshit again, Foolsguinea. The narrative you are clinging to cannot be true, because there aren’t enough bullets in play for it to be true. We know how many bullets were fired, we know when they were fired, and we know how many hit Brown from the front. No matter how many times people like you repeat this idiotic claim, it will never be true.
What account of events are you going on? The lethal shot was not inside the car.
Also, in Missouri, where I live and where Darren Wilson served, I think the appropriate amount of force in that case would look something like this: Use the pepper spray all patrolmen are issued (I have been pepper sprayed at close range, so it’s technically possible). If that seems unwieldy due to blowback, then use your hand-to-hand skills and/or your baton. If you have a taser (Darren Wilson didn’t carry one) you could reasonably use that. If it is somehow the case that it’s easier to take the time and spare a hand to open your holster for your gun than to simply grapple or use pepper spray, then that might be reasonable. But you will have unlocked your gun and made it more likely that it can be turned against you as you try to fire, so that’s only sometimes optimal.
And if an officer were being overpowered and killed someone to escape a dangerous grappling situation, I think most Americans would find that reasonable.
And yet none of this appears to be what Darren Wilson did. The lethal shots were fired at range, at an allegedly surrendering suspect.
As for what Brits do, I suspect they use their batons, that’s what they are there for. Really, your fixation on firearms as the standard tool of police officers seems either ignorant or strangely maniacal. The gun is a tool, but hardly the primary one, even for a corrupt and brutal cop.
Are you arguing from evidence or from authority? It has been asserted by residents of the neighborhood that police did remove at least one bullet from a wall of a building there. Maybe “wildly” is an overstatement.
Your love of the excluded middle is adolescent.
Yeah, I think it is. On my side of the state, officers may drive solo, but they will call for backup for a traffic stop.
Wilson accelerated the confrontation very quickly. If he’d followed procedure, he could have had a buddy show up… to help him kill the scary black man.
Oh, wait, apparently in some precincts, the cops are too stupid to do anything but spit bullets in a hail, even in a group. I forgot.
Seriously, having a partner is not a bad idea.
Maybe. Over here we have a severe problem with gangs. In California Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia control all the Mexican street gangs, and those two groups are at war with each other, in prison and on the streets.
Then there’s black gangs like Bloods and Crips, each comprised of smaller gangs, who are at war with each other.
Then there’s racial wars between Mexican gangs in L.A. and black gangs. The Mexican Mafia has ordered the street gangs to “clean” their neighborhoods of any blacks, regardless of whether or not they are gang affiliated.
In Chicago there’s all kinds of gangs: Latin Kings, Gangster Disciples, Spanish Cobras, Maniacs, Counts, etc.
Many of these gangs have spread far beyond their original territories. Now there’s Nortenos and Surenos in Washington, Texas and Florida. Bloods and Crips are in New York.
We also live in a society where life is considered cheap. We have kids killing kids over a color.
We have harsh sentencing as well, at least in California, like the 3 strikes law and gang enhancements but we still have a substantial gang problem. If that doesn’t completely dissuade gang members, I don’t think disarming police would get them to put away the guns.
I don’t see the cause / effect OP posits, the United Kingdom is a bit of an outlier in that it doesn’t arm its police. Lots of other police forces are generally armed but have a much lower rate of line of duty shootings than the United States.
The primary reason for so many officer line of duty shootings is because we have more armed criminals. That’s really as simple as it gets. Rest is just background noise.
“Allegedly” surrendering is a meaningless term. The preponderance of released evidence and the grand jury ruling suggests that those who have alleged such were not actual witnesses to the event. Even the witnesses most condemnatory of Wilson didn’t suggest Brown was surrendering. They suggested Brown seemed shocked that he had been shot and was turning toward Wilson, but not charging him. Those are the witnesses most condemnatory of Wilson.
To me this goes back to the Zimmerman case, people that don’t know anything about violence assume that being beaten up is a small thing and should never warrant a lethal response. The reality is lots of people suffer life-changing or life-ending injuries from a beating. When you’re a police officer you don’t get to lose a fight, because that likely means the person beating you up can get your gun.
Batons are great when they can be used, but in a situation where you’re already losing a fist fight you’re probably not in a good position to use one. Batons cannot be used to strike the head of a suspect, but instead are to be used for pain compliance. For this reason they are really only tactically useful when more than one police officer is trying to subdue a violently resisting suspect.
A private citizen isn’t required to use pepper spray in lieu of a gun if they can demonstrate they were in fear of bodily harm or death, and neither are police.