# Lawmen go berserk...again. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 28, 2003, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313 "2003-08-28T23:40:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Cheesesteak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cheesesteak/32/3694_2.png) [@Cheesesteak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheesesteak)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/61 "2003-08-29T18:54:07Z")
World Eater, in my link the pic is on the right side of the page, second paragraph, it may be under an advertisement… You can minimize the ad to see the picture. ---
**Author:** ![Mullinator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Mullinator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mullinator)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/62 "2003-08-29T18:55:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Cheesesteak \* > \*\*Not to say the LEO shouldn’t have retreated first, he should have, but let’s not act like that peeler is a teddy bear on a stick. \*\* There’s money to be made off of that idea. ---
**Author:** ![GaWd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f08c70/32.png) [@GaWd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GaWd)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/63 "2003-08-29T19:10:31Z")
> [@](#): > > Think they will call and try to re-schedule for a more convenient time? Depends on the rights of the police to be there on a welfare call. That I’m not sure of. I’m assuming that you’re correct and no matter what the woman did, since someone was suspicious enough to call the cops out that they have a right to be there. Sam ---
**Author:** ![World\_Eater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f04885/32.png) [@World\_Eater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/World_Eater)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/64 "2003-08-29T19:20:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Cheesesteak \* > \*\*World Eater, in my link the pic is on the right side of the page, second paragraph, it may be under an advertisement… You can minimize the ad to see the picture. \*\* See it, thanks. Doesn’t look like something I would want waved at me, sharp or not. ---
**Author:** ![GaWd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f08c70/32.png) [@GaWd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GaWd)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/65 "2003-08-29T19:25:10Z")
But it also doesn’t look like something that requires the use of deadly force to deal with, World Eater. Had calm heads prevailed, things could have been different, from what has been made public about this case. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/66 "2003-08-29T19:44:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by GaWd \* > \*\*But it also doesn’t look like something that requires the use of deadly force to deal with, World Eater. Had calm heads prevailed, things could have been different, from what has been made public about this case. \*\* Its very easy to second guess from your warm comfy chair, looking at a photo of the object under good lighting. ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/67 "2003-08-29T19:48:20Z")
Today Situation in Nashville. Domestic dispute in a work place. Wife dead, Negotiations, suspect commits suicide. Story isn’t over until the evening news hashes and rehashes, repeats adnauseum, and Saturdays paper publishs post mortem. Who cares? Family of deceased, parents, siblings, children. All branches of governmemt that will not have to deal with suspect, public defenders (greedy defense lawyers that lose an oportunity to get a case), tax payers who will not have to pay taxes for prosecution and defense, court costs, jail costs, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/68 "2003-08-29T19:50:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by GaWd \* > \*\*But it also doesn’t look like something that requires the use of deadly force to deal with, World Eater. Had calm heads prevailed, things could have been different, from what has been made public about this case. \*\* I’d never seen one of those until I followed the link. If someone I didn’t know had one of those in their hand and was gesticulating in an agitated manner I probably would have been a bit nervous. As for retreating, the officer was only 6-7 feet away when this happened. That’s almost within touching distance. Marc ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/69 "2003-08-29T20:10:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RoundGuy \* > \*\*Reeder, you are a fucking moron. > > Three cops, and all three shoot at the same time, and you think there wasn’t an imminent threat? > > You do this shit on purpose, don’t you… \*\* I agree that **Reeder** has drawn far too many conclusions from the evidence in this case, and it looks like “suicide by cop” to me. A very sad situation all round. But i did just want to add one thing: Four cops fired at the same time during the Amadou Diallo case. ---
**Author:** ![buttonjockey308](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bcef8e/32.png) [@buttonjockey308](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buttonjockey308)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/70 "2003-08-29T22:37:11Z")
Hope no one minds if I drift back to the OP, but…Reeder, what if, and this is just conjecture, but what if the police officer was the only thing between this knife wielding knucklehead, and you? You watch him get tasered (once we know of for sure) and nothing happens. You’re frightened, but believe the officer will stop the oncoming attacker. He hits the offender in all the right places, but the guy just won’t stop coming…now here’s where things get hairy. Does the cop shoot the offender to keep him from killing you, and possibly him, OR does the cop get his mace out, and try a different less-than-lethal tactic? The only way to go? Shoot and kill the offender. Period. In this case, and admittedly we know precious little about the entire incident, the reaction was spot-on. Police officers make critial decisions in seconds that many people (including my fellow dopers) have to debate and ponder for hours upon hours. To assume that officers enjoy having to take the life of another person is not only asinine, but offensive. They’re doing something for you, that you cannot do for yourself. Like it or not, we’re here to protect you, sometimes from yourself, sometimes from others, and in the act of protection, sometimes things can go human, real fast. Mistakes can be made, poor judgements undertaken, certianly reeder, you’ve made a mistake now and again, or over-reacted, or done something that was difficult and unpleasant, yet still right and proper? ---
**Author:** ![coosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@coosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coosa)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2003, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/71 "2003-08-29T23:18:08Z")
FWIW: My brother-in-law has 30+ years experience in law enforcement. While I’ve not independently verified his information, he says that: 1. Very large and/or obese people can sometimes resist multiple ‘taserings’. 2. People who are in a psychotic state and/or doing various types of drugs (PCP was given as one common example) are often resistant to multiple ‘taserings’. 3. Persons who are physically fit and participate in activities that often involve quite a bit of physical pain (football players and rodeo cowboys were two specific examples given) are sometimes resistant to multiple ‘taserings’, especially when under the influence of alchohol and/or drugs. Perhaps someone with better qualifications will contradict or add to this information, but I thought it was worth considering as part of the taser discussion. ---
**Author:** ![UncleBill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/d26b3c/32.png) [@UncleBill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBill)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2003, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/72 "2003-08-30T15:36:16Z")
The argument of four cops shooting, so they all must have seen the threat does not hold up. Three cops on a scene, they all have slightly different views, one cops fires (justified or not), and the other two HAVE to assume that he/she saw the threat. Once the situation goes from talking and/or pointing weapons to actually shooting, the dynamics change A LOT. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SoulFrost \* > \*\*Three policemen fired fifteen shots at my former co-worker, [Marquise Hudspeth](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/11/eveningnews/main558226.shtml). He was struck eight times in the back because the policemen thought his [celphone](http://www.unknownnews.net/0730-3.html) was a weapon. > > That’s all I’m gonna say about that. > > -David \*\* I saw the video of that shooting. Stunk to high heaven in my opinion. The man was of no imminent threat to anyone at the time of the trigger pulling. Walking away from officers. Disgusting and perverse. The dao bao situation was different, in my opinion. It was happening within the radius of the police where Bad Things Happen. If the cops didn’t have the weapon pulled and pointing at the lady, she CERTAINLY could have lunged with it in plenty of time. With the “weapon” out, it would have been a close call. The cops made a judgement call that she was an imminent threat. They were wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Doc\_Nickel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5fc32e/32.png) [@Doc\_Nickel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doc_Nickel)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2003, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/73 "2003-08-30T19:25:31Z")
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned the Rodney King incident- Ol’ Rod took two taserings, with one officer noting that he didn’t appear to react to the second one at all. And was still standing. Tasers are not magic, they’re not even good sci-fi, and they’re damn sure not a nice, clean, _Star Trek_ phaser where you fall unconscious with no wounds or injury. All they are, are devices to apply an amount of electricity small enough to be adjudged fairly safe, yet large enough to stun, or at least inconvenience, an opponent. Now the “fairly safe” measure needs to take into account a 90 lb Vietnamese woman, and a 280-pound muscular black man. A voltage sufficient to stun King effectively, could well have killed the vietnamese woman. And conversely, a voltage low enough to stun the woman might not have been felt at all by King. And yes, an adjustable setting has been thought of and dismissed already- it was found that the officers tended to use the maximum setting in all cases, since the idea is, of course, to incapacitate the attacker as quickly as possible. Few suspects can be tickled into submission. Further, I note that additional “non-lethal” means _were_ used in the Rodney King case- he resisted two taserings at least, and I’m not sure about pepper spray. He had been ordered to lie on the ground at least once, and at least once jumped up off the ground to lunge at police officers. At that point at least one officer would have been fully within both his rights and his training as an officer, to shoot King in the center of his mass until he ceased being a threat. But the officer resisted doing so, and switched to an alternate nonlethal means to incapacitate the suspect. Yes, I mean they took out their nightsticks and commenced clobbering the bejezus out of him. Don’t act so horrified- that’s _exactly_ what **GaWd** and others have already suggested happen in both these other cases- the OP and the vietnamese woman. IE, go for a taser. Taser doesn’t work? Go for a spray or an impact weapon. And look where it got them. Two officers (wrongly, in my opinion) jailed, riots, lawsuits, years of court proceedings. I’m quite certain that, had an officer managed to get his nightstick out and swing it effectively in a small apartment hallway, the hue and cry would be just as large, and using the same terminology- “police brutality”, et al. Cop walks in, woman’s not doing anything threatening, cop smacks her with a nightstick. Those filthy pigs. Yes, some cops are bad- they’re violent people, have short tempers. But the vast majority of them are just like you and me, rational, normal people, who happen to be asked to jump in the front lines- to chase down the mugger, to defuse the domestic violence spat, to investigate the “man with a gun” call, to mop up the blood when some guy uses a knife to register his displeasure with another man. To an officer, death can come quickly, without you ever seeing it. An article I recently reread (Massad Ayoob in _Guns_ magazine) was an expert witness in a case where two officers killed a man in the street holding a lever-action rifle. The witnesses- wife and mother of the deceased- said one thing, cops said another. In court, Ayoob used an electronic timer with a button- the rifle muzzle was resting on the button, pointing at the floor. The timer started when the button was released, and stopped when it ‘heard’ the shot- in this case, when the empty, primed cartridge snapped. Ayoob raised the rifle and fired into a blackboard at waist height- the timer registered something like 0.31 seconds. _One third of a second_ for someone to raise a _rifle_- not a small, light handgun- and fire. It’s been proven several times that a man can cover a distance of 21 feet and mimic a stabbing motion in less than one and a half seconds. How close was the vietnamese woman? As for the “vegetable peeler”, go ask a prison guard what kind of weapons they regularly confiscate from inmates. Sharpened toothbrush handles. A fleck of razor blade embedded in a melted plastic fork handle. A chunk of heavy wire sharpened by rubbing it on a bare concrete floor. Or, to make a better point, how about the “box cutters” that did so much damage a couple of Septembers ago? Most of those have less than an inch of exposed blade. Can you glance at some unfamiliar device and tell, in less than a _third of a second_, if it is in fact dangerous? If a suspect is holding _anything_, that “anything” can be a weapon. How about if she had been holding a screwdriver, a far more common implement used to break into a locked door? Wait, didn’t somebody else mention something about a screwdriver in this thread? Then everyone would be screaming that she’d “been killed for holding a screwdriver”. I’m not trying to “justify” the actions of any of them- officer **or** suspect/victim. But the cop’s job is dirty, mean, dangerous, and statistically, it has a very good chance of getting you killed the _one_ time you let your guard down. Things like this are a shame, sometimes a mistake, and all parties should try to reduce their number. But as long as we need to have a cop come by and do something- remove a drunk, talk out a hostage situation, clean up after a bar fight, catch a robber, whatever- and those cops are taken from the population at large (meaning some will be brilliant, clever and compassionate, and some will be heartless bastards) then this sort of thing is going to happen. ---
**Author:** ![Jaade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/dfb087/32.png) [@Jaade](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jaade)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2003, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313/74 "2003-08-31T00:37:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by GaWd \*You’re right. Shouldn’t have used the term. > > Anywho, here’s just one article on the shooting: [http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/6321944.htm](http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/6321944.htm) > > Various quotes: > > It was less than a minute, entrance to shooting. The term **“brandish”** has been used, not threatened, nor advanced upon, Etc. > > While I think it takes less than a miunute for an Officer to survey the situation, there certainly should have been much more care involved in this. > > The above sums up my opinion quite nicely. > > Sam I do not think this means what you think it means. Brandish: bran·dish (br²n“d¹sh) tr.v. bran·dished, bran·dish·ing, bran·dish·es. 1. To wave or flourish (a weapon, for example) menacingly. 2. To display ostentatiously Both of these stories are sad. A young man is dead. A young lady is dead. In both cases, the man and the woman were both holding large, shiny objects that appeared to be deadly weapons. When I read the first post and saw “vegetable peeler” I was thinking WTF?? Then the second link was posted. Ok, I have a vegetable peeler in my house, but it looks _nothing_ like that. It’s about the size of my hand, including the blade. In the first case, a boy is threatening to kill himself, after arguing with his parents because he’d been caught drunk. They call the cops, to take him to a treatment center, because he had a problem before. He is hit twice with a Taser and either goes down and is shot (come on now, how plausible is this _really_??) or keeps coming towards them and is shot. In the second case, a lady with apparently little to no understanding of the English language, calls the police to her house to unlock her bedroom door. They are actually called in by someone else apparently, because either her 3 year old or 4 year old is wandering the street alone. The police come in and she’s waving around something that looks like a cleaver, and (I’m guessing) yelling at them in Vietnamese. Ok, police officers are human beings, the same as you and I. They have families, they bleed and can die from the same types of injuries that kill us normal people. Yes, they are trained to talk to people in sticky situations, yes they are trained to evaluate the situation quickly. Being good at doing this isn’t the same as being perfect. Knives can be thrown. Knives can put your eye out. People are killed and hurt every day by things that one wouldn’t call a conventional weapon. [soapbox]Cops do a hard, often thankless job for a public that is too quick to criticize and too frequently turns a blind eye to the losses on their side. How often are threads started where a cop was killed in the line of duty with two or three pages of posters crying out against the criminals?? Not nearly enough.[/soapbox] Cops make mistakes, cops are not above corruption, not infallible. > [@](#): > > GaWd: > > But it also doesn’t look like something that requires the use of deadly force to deal with, World Eater. Had calm heads prevailed, things could have been different, from what has been made public about this case. It is a shame…and it’s a shame that two people of supposedly reasonable intelligence didn’t realize that holding a knife out to a cop could have deadly reprecussions. Don’t say that they didn’t know better. I’ve never been in handcuffs (~coughs~ Err…well…under arrest that is), I’ve never seen the inside of a jail cell, or been in the back of a police car, but I know you don’t point a weapon, any kind of weapon at a man with a gun. ~J [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lawmen-go-berserk-again/198313.md?page=3)