I’ve read stories of this happening dozens of times. Every encounter goes about the same way, implying common training.
Here’s one of the more recent of such encounters. They killed a georgia tech senior who was suicidal.
A mentally ill person is always armed with either nothing, or a knife. They don’t have a gun and are usually acting irrationally.
Police stand a distance away and order the suspect to drop the weapon and surrender. The individual refuses. Maybe they just stand there, maybe they put their hand in a pocket, maybe they wander in the direction of the officers.
Instead of deploying a taser, pepper spray, or retreating, the officers gun the suspect down. The internal investigation will basically always clear the officers and juries will not convict.
The thing that outrages many people is that while it is true that it is possible to lunge forward extremely quickly and stab someone, there are usually multiple officers present, and the shooting happens before any such lunging. The actual risks to the officers generally appear quite low when these encounters are caught on video, and there are numerous videos from other countries of these encounters being concluded peacefully.
The common element is usually disobedience of authority. Since authority is being disobeyed, the suspect is to be shot.
Disobedience is highly alarming to police officers in a conflict situation…
But appearing to be dangerous, to them or to others, is the crisis point. If you’re disobedient, and then make a sudden move, you stand a really good chance of being shot dead.
Certainly procedures need to be reviewed and revised to deal with the mentally ill, but there really is a limit to how much misbehavior can be tolerated. Suicide by cop is a little like suicide by freight train: there isn’t a whole hell of a lot that can be done to prevent it, if it’s what the guy really wants.
No it’s not typical. Police defuse massive numbers of situations each year. It’s primarily the ones where people end up dead or badly injured that are considered newsworthy and thus which people hear about.
If policies are changed such that fewer mentally ill people are shot, but more officers are injured or killed, would you consider that a net positive? I would not. If someone gets hurt, I would prefer it to be the criminal.
Yes, that’s kind of the idea - shoot the crazy person before he lunges, not after.
No, because the person presents a threat of lethal force to the police and the public, and refuses to stop presenting such a threat - that’s why he is shot.
That’s disgusting. We’re not talking about mentally ill criminals. We’re talking about mentally ill people in general who may be dangerous, but only to themselves. You’re talking about them as if they deserve to be killed because of their illness. As someone who has autistic tendencies, I can imagine someone who is more affected by it to be unable to comprehend the danger that they face disobeying a police officer’s order given that I often misjudge dangers of things I say in certain company even if I know not to mess with the police. It’s unfortunate that such a large percentage of the population thinks like you: that if you aren’t like me, you should be shot.
Schultz kept advancing toward the officers. You can’t wait until the knife is actually driving toward you to react–police officers and no one else has that fast a reaction time that would avoid injury in that scenario (except of course in the movies).
There’s a video linked in the OP where 2 cops in England take a knife wielding suspect down without guns. It is possible to do it reasonably safely, and the English police force have a lower occupational death rate than American cops, at least overall.
The old-style training on the subject was that someone brandishing a knife near you was a threat to your life, and if they disobeyed an order to drop the knife, you were supposed to shoot them.
The new-style training is that someone with a knife near you is a threat to your life, so you should not stand so close! You then decide what to do based on a whole array of circumstances, principally featuring whether the individual can be safely contained until the situation can be de-escalated. Often it will be. Sometimes it won’t be, and you’ll have to use force, but at least you’ll have given the person a chance to live.
So it depends on which book you mean.
As for cops getting killed, I don’t think it’s safe to assume that de-escalation training will create more risks to police and bystanders. If we’re just speculating, it’s also possible that de-escalation will result in less injury to police and bystanders because things get, you know, de-escalated. In general, it’s safer when no one gets shot.
So, literally what he was doing? I’m as anti cop as they come but it seems ridiculous to me that people think crazy armed people who attack others should not be shot.
I asked the question in the pit thread and will ask again here.
Don’t most police officers carry tasers? And why in the world wouldn’t police officers have shotguns that fire bean bag rounds in the trunks of the squad cars?