Sorry, but you aren’t presenting a coherent argument here. You, here, concede that it is a potentially stabby weapon.
That’s the excuse right there.
Yes, the police may well have acting very, very wrongly. But you haven’t demonstrated that yet. Until you actually cough up some evidence, you’re just howling at the moon.
I didn’t see anywhere that the kid weighed 90 lbs? (Other than here) That seems far too little for an 18 yr old.
It’s in MSNBC’s headline.
Maybe they’re really, really, really, hella busy. Like busier than you could possibly imagine. So busy it just makes good sense to shoot anyone slowing you down. We’ve all had days like that at work.
It wasn’t in anything in the OP tho - I guess he had also read the MSNBC thing too and just didn’t link to it. Shrug.
Yeah, police ought to receive special training and equipment if we’re going to expect them to do something other folks who don’t have those things can’t.
I don’t have enough information to form an opinion yet, but that’s never stopped me from posting. I used to work in a dorm-type hospital for emotionally disturbed children, from about age four to eighteen (them, not me). And when I say “disturbed,” I mean really, really disturbed. This was pretty much their last stop. We had a twelve year old girl who required four grown men to restrain when she went off. If she’d had a screwdriver, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. We had quite a few we learned never to turn our backs on.
My experience there gave me a great respect for the physical prowess of disturbed children.
As a matter of fact… I just read this article the other day. Linked from it is this document, which says from 2003-2009 4813 people died while being arrested, of those 2931 where ruled to be homicide by law enforcement personnel. Other causes of death were, in order of most important to least: suicide, intoxication, accidental, natural causes, and unknown. From this site, during the same time period 1090 police officers died in the line of duty.
In a word - very. Until you have been in their shoes, don’t criticize the cops.
Does that work for others, too, or just the cops? ‘Until you have been in the President’s shoes, don’t criticize the President’. Or – ‘Until you’ve been in a woman’s shoes, don’t criticize a woman’.
Or are you just full of crap, and it’s actually appropriate and reasonable to criticize police officers when they have acted inappropriately?
Did the article determine how many of these murdered civilians were presumably innocent, as apart from genuine criminals?
In any case, that’s a 3:1 ratio of civilians vs. cops killed. I’ll allow the numbers to speak for themselves, TYVM.
I don’t follow you. As was pointed out upthread,
Wilsey doesn’t figure he needs special training or equipment to handle the situation; why, he “would have” disarmed the madman himself, if only something something.
I’ve mentioned here before that when my mother-in-law was in the hospital prior to heart stenting surgery, she developed ‘ICU delirium’ (on top of the Alzheimer’s she was beginning to have) and thought she was in a hotel. That was fine until she decided she was going to check out, and hospital staff tried to prevent her from leaving. Then my sweet, low 100s weight, too frail to walk their dog lest she get pulled down the street, 3 major blood vessels around the heart blocked, late-70s mother-in-law turned into someone requiring 4 staff members to subdue her, and 4-point restraints until the sedation kicked in. I have zero doubts that if she had a table knife from her meal or something, she could have seriously hurt someone.
Do not underestimate the potential for people affected by mind-altering drugs or mental disorders to be extremely dangerous, even if their physical condition might not make them imposing.
That being said, if the situation played out as in the ‘we don’t have time for this’ claim, fuck that cop. But we have only scattered reports so far.
I agree. I was a medical lab tech in another life; once kids were about two years old, you couldn’t physically hold them down and take their blood against their will. Cops aren’t doing fine work like trying to take blood, but a struggling human being is STRONG! Add mentally ill and armed into the mix, and I am also not going anywhere near that scene.
I will also add the caveat that the third cop on the scene does sound like he is very much in the wrong, if things happened the way the father says it did.
If office workers could tase each other, we would never stop being tased.
In America they were all innocent civilians. Unless they were being led from the courtroom to the hoosgow to serve their time. * Kisses * 
One of the primary pieces of equipment that a police officer has is a gun. That doesn’t mean that the police are always justified in using their weapons, but it does mean that when you call them, you know that you are bringing deadly weapons into the situation.
No they aren’t.
I would have to agree with this. I would say no more than 29.999% of cops are evil. The rest are just human beings who make mistakes, are sometimes incompetent, abusive and thuggish.
Innocent vs. criminal is not relevant here. The question you want to ask is how many of those killed were behaving in a manner that endangered public (or the officer’s) safety.
Our local police department has a written procedure they follow anytime a cop discharges their weapon in the line of duty. This procedure is written by … elected officials. Maybe the problem there is with who is getting elected.