Thank you DinoR for your response - a lot of good info.
Yes, the article I cited specified the risk when having the weapon already drawn.
mc
I don’t think there is a good option. Dealing with armed, dangerous, crazy people doesn’t always work out well.
You could try to deal with it yourself, and run the same risk as the police of getting stabbed. I don’t think that’s much better. The guy was determined to commit suicide by cop.
How do you fix an impossible situation? You can’t, it’s impossible. How do the cops fix an impossible situation? Same answer. Being suicidal and crazy sucks for everyone.
Regards,
Shodan
If your only concern is the well being of the armed mentally ill person then your options are very limited, and rightly so. When something like this happens the main concern should be everyone elses safety.
Fortunately, folks like Shodan are just factually wrong. As we win more minds (and more lawsuits), police departments will change whether the reactionaries like it or not.
The *problem *has been that we get a controversial police shooting caught on video about once a week. Maybe not quite that often, but it feels like it.
For the most extreme cases, it has gone to prosecution, and a conviction for the officer is so seldom it basically never happens.
The police departments involved sometimes review the shooting. They almost always conclude they did nothing wrong.
This is why there were some violent protests on campus and some police vehicles were burnt. Everyone knows that with the Georgia Tech shooting, the department is going to find, after ‘investigation’, that they did nothing wrong. “he was asking for it, and we didn’t have to try to subdue 1 mentally deranged individual with a pocket knife with 4 cops. I mean, he might be a teleporting ninja assassin!”
The officers who actually pulled the trigger might have to find a different department to work for, however, they won’t have anything on their records or any difficulty in finding another job.
That’s all correct. In fact, in most departments, the majority of officers fired for misconduct are re-hired in the same department.
The mechanism of change by lawsuit isn’t criminal prosecution. It’s civil. When a big city pays out millions upon millions of dollars (as they often do in these cases of excessive force and ADA violations), they change. Slowly but surely, they are changing.
But the main driver isn’t lawsuits. It’s BLM. They are getting new DAs elected and changing the way jurors think about cops. I suspect that, in a decade or two, it will actually be possible to convict cops of crimes and fire them when they are merely incompetent. And when that time comes, we probably won’t have to, because they will all have adopted policies that substantially cut down on police shootings–which is what major departments are already doing.
In the US, police are not expected to take any risks whatsoever. If someone fifty yards away wields a vegetable peeler in a threatening way, the police will empty their pistols into him and then plant an unregistered gun on the corpse. They literally get away with murder and have been doing it for decades. As was said earlier, if your loved one is having a mental breakdown, the very last thing you want to do is call the cops because they will not hesitate to gun him down. Tasers stay in the squad car, the only tool they bring to the scene is a gun.
It’s always kind of funny to read things like the above and have Richard Parker tell me that I am the one who is factually wrong.
Regards,
Shodan
Someone else also being wrong doesn’t necessarily make you right.
If it makes you feel better, BobLibDem is even wronger than you are.
What do you folks think might be going on in the head of the crazy person?
a) meaningless static because like duh, mentally ill
b) I wish to kill people. You, you resemble a person, you’ll do. Hahahahah. drool
c) I’m scared and confused so talk nice to me and reassure me and we’ll be fine and I’ll cooperate.
d) You are a threat. I won’t hurt you if I can avoid it but you people are dangerous. Don’t make any threatening moves, don’t do anything remotely coercive, don’t try to control me, or I’ll have to assume you’re going to do bad stuff to me and I will reply with sufficient force to address the threat that you represent to me.
.
.
.
What did you put?
Sometimes c is the correct answer but d is your best bet. Notice how close it is to the police officer’s OWN mindset! Unfortunately, the police officer generally doesn’t negotiate with the crazy person as if crazy person were another LEO or equivalent, for some odd reason. They’d do a lot better if they did. And if they assumed that to the crazy person THEY, the police, are the ones who look like crazy people, potentially dangerous folks brandishing lethal weapons and approaching slowly but deliberately and acting like they’re very much considering doing things coercive.
The ideal thing would be to call other folks with a psychiatric diagnosis who are part of this person’s mutual support network. That of course presupposes that this person has a mutual support network composed of other folks who have had a psychiatric diagnosis, and hindsight won’t help you much if no such support network exists. But you want people who’ve been there themselves before, who aren’t freaked by this person being like this, and who won’t treat this person like their brain and its contents are meaningless static. It’s not that we all understand each other the same way non-schizzy /non-manic etc people do (we often don’t) but we do have stuff in common.
I sure as fuck wouldn’t call a police officer.
While this is great advice if your grandparent / aunt / brother is acting crazy, in the case in the OP, the crazy person called the cops on himself, and amped up the situation as much as possible by claiming to be acting suspiciously and having a gun.
Shodan, reading your posts above, can I surmise that your position is that it is not possible to safely deal with a crazy person armed with a close range weapon who is not charging without using a firearm.
You can’t argue that it can’t be done - see that video above where British cops subdue a man with a knife.
Your argument is not using the gun on someone armed with only melee, or even totally unarmed and naked, suffering a mental breakdown (several of those shootings) exposes the officer to more risk.
I can’t trivially prove it one way or another. I will say that since a dead person poses no risk, and a ranged weapon beats any other weapon, most likely you are right. The risk from a low threat person is even lower if the person is dead.
One flaw with your view is that you have absolutely no empathy and don’t believe it could ever be you or someone you care about who could have a mental breakdown.
Another flaw is, where does it stop? If someone is just wearing a hoodie while black at night, shouldn’t the officer just open fire right away? Encountering possible criminals is dangerous. Kill em before they can kill you.
Get a 911 call about someone who has a gun. The moment you see them, start shooting, even if the gun is not apparent. After all, guns are dangerous. If I were a cop, I wouldn’t want to go to a scene where a citizen has a gun. The thought of being possibly shot is frightening.
The messed up thing is both scenarios above have happened. Several times in the last few years.
There’s one problem with this approach. British police have a lower death rate than American police. Part of it might be less people with guns. Part of it might be the style. There is a different model of policing called “policing by consent”. It’s hugely different in a bunch of ways. But the fundamental problem is that when police openly kill people and it’s caught on video, other people feel less moral objection to killing police. And criminals who kill police can’t be stopped by trigger happy cops, because if someone *actually *wants to kill an officer, they shoot first from ambush.
This is kind of what bothers me about all these shootings. Maybe criminals are just stupid or crazy, but if I had a weapon and wanted to kill a cop, I wouldn’t do it after they already could see me and had their hands on their weapons. That’s a death wish. I’d pick a moment when I had the advantage. And I am pretty confident I’d get the first kill. They would no doubt hunt me down afterwards and kill me, but the first shooting would go in my favor.
Yeah, true… I meant that for Miller, mostly, who asked “what does a person do when their noncompos-mentis loved one has a freakout” (somewhat paraphrased)
Not because I think I’m a good fighter, but because it’s trivially easy to point a rifle at someone with their back to you and get a hit, with minimal training, and rifles with 30 round magazines are basically available over the counter in most U.S. states.
The only way I see criminals killing cops besides by ambush, which is going to go in the criminals favor, is when police corner an armed criminal. This is where violent, kick in the door methods can backfire. I don’t think British police use that method very often, I think they try to be more civil about when they need to arrest someone. If you give an armed criminal a moment to think it through and calm down, with the police staying behind cover at a distance, nobody has to die.
My thought is that if cops keep killing people openly without consequence to increase their safety, there is going to be pushback. Eventually, relatives of their victims are going to start sniping officers from cover and you basically have an insurrection.
No, you can surmise that it is not always possible safely to deal with a crazy person armed with a close range weapon.
It can be. It’s just more risky.
That’s arguing from emotion. So what if it’s me who gets shot? If I am presenting a danger to the police and the public, it doesn’t make any difference if it’s me.
:rolleyes: Come on now - don’t you think there is a significant difference between someone wearing a hoodie, and someone advancing on you with a knife screaming “shoot me”? I’ll give you a hint - it’s the reasonable fear of the imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death.
There is no logical way to get from “the cops shot a crazy guy who was threatening them with a knife” to “the police routinely shoot black men for no other reason than they were wearing a hoodie in public”. That’s not really a thing.
Cite? What percent of police who were killed by intentional action by a criminal were shot from ambush?
Correct - the guy in the OP had a death wish. So he threatened the officers (and reported himself as having a gun) to make himself as threatening as he could. That’s why he kept coming towards the cops with a knife. I decline to believe that if they had let him within arm’s reach, he would not have made himself even more of a threat - by, for instance, stabbing someone. And, as I said before, finding out if he was serious with “let him get close enough and we’ll know for sure” doesn’t appeal to me as a matter of police policy.
Regards,
Shodan
Your compassion for the mentally ill is duly noted.
I’m sure they will. There’s more or less no legal danger for cops shooting suspects in the line of duty.
He was walking slowly towards with his arms at his side. The cops easily could have countered that with the highly technical technique commonly known as backing up slowly, as they had been for at least a minute or two. You have watched the video, right? It’s very difficult for me to believe that someone could watch that video and describe the guy as making “himself as threatening as he could”.
LOL! That line was a suggestion for how one ought to treat the police, not the mentally ill. 
With a knife, screaming “shoot me”, and after reporting himself as carrying a gun.
While the cops plead with him to stop, drop the knife, “nobody wants to hurt you”, etc. Which he didn’t do.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan, like I said. You are exhibiting no empathy at all or ability to even understand others. Countless internal failures in a person’s mind could prevent them from being able to correctly respond in this situation. That’s why they call it mental illness, not mental play-acting.
You have yet to establish any reason the police officers couldn’t have simply backed away. Sure, if the victim had actively chased them down, well, fine.