What’s clear and imminent mean to you if it applies to something that might not ever happen?
Then by definition there was no hurry. If the situation had changed and he’d become an immediate threat, they could have acted at that point.
The same reason that we try to talk down hostage takers in any situation - to save lives if at all possible. The fact that we’re saving him from himself doesn’t negate the principal, although I suspect it’s here that we fundamentally disagree.
You’re right, he could have rushed any number of seconds later or not at all, which is precisely my point. If he doesn’t rush, they’ve saved a life. Maybe he needs meds, or detox, or therapy over someone who died or some wrong done. Maybe he just needs a little time in jail. My point is, it might have been possible to save his life if they hesitated. Another point where it seems we, and other users ITT disagree, is that the police weren’t in imminent danger until he actually charged. It would’ve been all to easy to back off to the magical 21 feet, secure the perimeter, and wait him out.
They didn’t do all they could, and some people feel that they should have. If it takes courage to do that, then yes, we should expect them to have courage.
Police officers regularly put themselves in harms’ way in order to perform their jobs. This doesn’t mean that they should recklessly expose themselves to harm any more than a fireman should run into a burning building without protective clothing and a SCBA rig. Firemen follow training and use protective equipment so that they do not also become victims and create an even greater burden upon fellow firemen.
Police officers are tasked with maintaining order and enforcing the law, not providing personal protective services or accepting grievous injury to prevent anyone else–especially an attacker–from being injured. If you want someone to protect you, you should hire a bodyguard.
Striking moves with both a classical ‘billy club’ and its modern successor, the ASP telescoping baton, as well as the ubiquitous PR-24 baton are discouraged by most departments due to injuries to suspects. In the current litigious environment, it is frankly better to kill an aggressive subject than to simple injure one, and so departments tend to de-emphasize disarming techniques also put an officer at risk, further compounding liability.
I don’t know whether this shooting was justified or not, and based upon the parsimony of information available here, neither does anyone else in this thread. It may be that the officers acted consistent with policy and rational self-interest, or that they panicked and fired prematurely. It is easy to second guess the circumstances from a remote location, especially if you have never been in that position. It is much more difficult to be on the spot and having to deal with an unstable, threatening individual, which is a scenario that the average person rarely if ever needs to deal with.
Stranger
Shit, don’t Toronto cops carry Mace? There are any number of stand-off, non-lethal measures out there that cops carry every day. The kid died because the cops fucked up.
Things like this make me think more and more that the police should be either trained to SEAL level or disarmed.
A shameful incident. “To protect and serve” used to mean something.
I’m confused here… if someone is about to stab me, why am I sketching women who’s employment I’m about to terminate? Any why am I firing them? Were they too difficult to render properly for some reason? Or am I about to be stabbed because I’m sketching these women? :dubious:
It still does… just, it now means the opposite of what it once did; now they protect and serve themselves instead of the rest of us.
Incredibly bad hypothetical situation: Bad guy with gun fires at people. This bullet will hit someone, and that person will die. Should the police officer allow an innocent civilian to be shot, or should he place himself in harm’s way to protect them? Does he protect, or does he do nothing? If the latter… why is he there at all? To mop up afterward, it seems many people are saying here; let the ‘suspect’ do his thing, we’re just here to take him to jail afterward, or kill him without putting ourselves in harm’s way. Is that really why we have police?
In case you can’t tell, this sort of thing makes me very, very angry.
What qualifies as imminent danger? I’d say an armed man, advancing towards you with a deadly weapon at a distance that takes less time to cover than the amount of time it takes to stop him definitely qualifies.
The video starts with the incident already in progress, so it isn’t clear how long the police have been communicating with the aggressor, but the first 37 seconds consist of the officers demanding that the aggressor drop the knife and surrender, which was ignored.
At 37 seconds he begins moving towards the front (exit) of the bus, knife still in hand. The top of the steps is obscured from view, but the first shot is fired at the 39 second mark, presumably with the suspect at the top of the stairs. 3 shots are fired over the span of 1 second, at which point we can assume the suspect was initially stopped.
Five seconds go by, then the police fired 6 more shots over the span of 5 seconds. If we give the police the benefit of the doubt, they were reacting to a still-armed suspect continuing to move. Total time elapsed since the first gunshot is now 10 seconds.
The police slowly move in as a group, then suddenly at the 61 second mark, all suddenly pull back - he was still perceived as a threat, now 22 seconds since the initial gunshot. All the while they continue to shout commands to drop the weapon, meaning he was still armed and still presenting a possible threat.
The officer who eventually ends up using a taser enters the frame at the 71 second mark. Given what has already been discussed in this thread about not all police in Toronto having tasers, is it possible that this was the first appearance of someone with access to a taser?
The taser shot comes at the 87 second mark. It is followed by the police finally moving in, presumably in response to him finally dropping the knife - 48 seconds after the first gunshot.
1 second for the initial stop. 10 seconds for enough of a stop to cease fire. 48 seconds total to become a non-threat. Hollywood tells us that just 1 trigger-press from a hero instantaneously drops a villain, but that just ain’t real life.
The average human runs at just over 24 feet per second. In the video, it seems the police are a bit closer than 24 feet away, although the aggressor would have had to navigate the stairs and work up to speed from a walk, so he was probably at least a couple seconds away if he decided to go for an all out kamikaze charge.
We’ll never know if the perpetrator intended to charge, or if he was just pacing around at the top of the stairs. Perhaps if the officer had waited just one more second, the kid would not have charged and the situation might have resolved without a fatality. But if the armed criminal who refused to drop his weapon and was advancing towards the officers turned out to be intent on attacking, given the distance between them and the amount of time it takes to stop an attacker, there’s a good chance that the hesitation would have gotten somebody cut or stabbed, and an almost certain chance that the attacker would have gotten into close range where shooting becomes problematic due to the chances of hitting another officer with a stray shot or a shoot-through.
It was an unfortunate decision but not an easy one. I certainly would never want to be in a position to make a 1-second decision between killing a man or gambling that the he didn’t really mean me any harm while advancing towards me with a deadly weapon. Signing up to make that kind of decision in service to the community shows plenty of courage.
Which people? Posters are refering to incidents in both the USA and Canada. There’s no reason to assume that public opinion would have the same feelings in both countries (maybe not even in two different provinces). Take the example of the UK, where officers typically don’t even carry a firearm (wouldn’t know about tasers). I doubt Londoners would have the same view as Texans.
Many police here in the UK do carry Tasers, and there have been a few of the typical incidents with them.
Generally, they’re not expected to shoot people; they’re supposed to have some training and be capable of doing things without making threats of deadly force.
You actually think a policeman’s job is to jump in front of a bullet for you?
It isn’t.
His job is to arrest the bad guy with the gun. That alone is dangerous enough, without magnifying the risk by deliberately putting himself in harms way when it isn’t strictly necessary to do the job.
In terms of this incident, the cops with Tasers or beanbag rounds should have been front and center, and they should have closed the bus doors until the guy dropped his knife. There’s no excuse for them to not have non-lethal weapons on hand and use them when the perp is somewhat controlled.
Isn’t it?
The job of a police officer is to put himself in danger so the rest of us don’t have to.
I’m not saying they should go out and deliberately get shot. That’s just ridiculous. Nobody could get paid enough to do that.
I’m saying that they’re there to protect the rest of us.
If an officer is willing to stand by and do nothing while an innocent is in danger, that officer is not doing his job.
Are you saying that an officer, witnessing a potential murder, should NOT advance? Should stand by, waiting, in safety until after the innocent is harmed, and only then move forward once the danger is passed?
That sounds like cowardice to me. That is not the type of person I want to pay to protect me.
There is a huge difference between being cowardly and being brave, and between being either of those and being stupid.
I don’t want stupid police who get themselves shot. But I also do not want cowardly police who put their own lives over those of those they are sworn to protect. Too often we hear stories of situations which, in retrospect, show officers who immediately move to protect themselves at the first sign of danger, by using deadly force. And in a lot of these situations, had the officer been brave enough to NOT immediately use force, innocent people would still be alive… even if it meant that the danger for the officer was increased.
A police officer who doesn’t want to be shot at shouldn’t be there in the first place. We pay them to place themselves between danger and ourselves. If they cannot do that without shooting everything that moves, perhaps we should rethink the entire concept of police.
Is my basic concept wrong? Do we not pay police to place themselves in danger, to protect us with their presence, to risk their lives to save the lives of others? Or are they just there to take the survivors (if any) to prison without risking their own safety?
If so, please explain why we have police at all; clearly I am misunderstanding something.
Here, the police have to be frightened, or else they don’t have permission to shoot the offender.
It’s kind of like the Florida “stand your ground” law: they can shoot people if they are in fear.
And they are trained to be in fear, so they shoot people. It’s interesting actually: the history of armed policeman isn’t that long in vic.aus, so I can remember the whole sequence:
They didn’t use to have guns.
A policeman was shot and killed in a rural situation when he stopped a car.
The police union demanded guns.
The police all got guns.
Several police members were shot by other police members, as if you had just given a lot of guns to a bunch of young guys without any training. Eventually there was a review.
They were trained how to use and handle guns to shoot people.
They shot a bunch of people.
There was a review, and an enquiry. They revised the training, and trained the police not to shoot people.
Many years passed. Old people retired. New people were hired. New and different policies were implemented. Society was normalised to the idea of guys with guns hanging around. Ordinary criminals and tough guys started carrying illegal guns (which was not the case 30 years ago).
Now the policy and the training is, you can shoot in self defence if you are afraid. You should be afraid if the offender is crazy and has a knife.
So every now and then a crazy youth with a knife gets shot by the police here. As it happens, they never actually get to shoot guys with guns any more. That only happened in the “we train you to shoot people” phase.
When they did the enquiry and review about the police shooting/executing criminals here, they brought out several foreign experts. Memorably, I remember the American, and the Brit.
The American was asked (leading question) “it’s more dangerous now that you don’t shoot crims”. He replied, no, actually it’s safer, because we were in a situation where the crims shot first in the expectation we would shoot them.
The Brit said:
We teach that in a crisis situation, absence of body is better than presence of mind.
Phnord, I think your basic concept is, in fact, wrong. We don’t pay them to protect us by placing themselves in danger. We pay them to enforce the law, to be the physical embodiment that allows words on paper to dictate what people can do in the real world. I can ignore words on paper that tell me I committed a crime and need to go to jail, I can’t ignore a guy with a gun telling me I committed a crime and need to go to jail.
Sometimes that means they need to confront a dangerous person to stop that person from violating the law, or to bring that person into the law’s control. It doesn’t mean they need to make themselves that violent criminal’s victim in pursuit of some lofty “protect and serve” concept.
There is nuance to the issue. They cannot avoid all conflict and effectively do their job, but they also don’t need to sacrifice themselves.
What a clusterfuck. I see no reason that kid should have ended up dead in that specific situation.
We can argue all day long (obviously) about whether or not cops are required to put themselves in danger in one theoretical situation or another. But the fact remains that in this case, there was no clear and immediate danger to the police. They took the most expedient, least thoughtful action.
If it’s because of the type of training they receive, then they need better training. If better judgement is needed then we need to select cops capable of better judgement. If better cops require better pay, yeah, we should pay them more.
But this situation should not have ended with anybody dying or being seriously injured (kid or police).
Here’s another instance of a cowardly police officer. He should have talked to the suspect or at worst Tazed him instead of shooting him; we pay our police to have courage.
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We don’t know the full details of the event.
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A gun is not a knife.
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The cop in question was alone.
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The cop didn’t kill the suspect.
Based on the facts available to us, he seemed to have acted in a professional manner. Unlike the cops in the OP.
I didn’t see him advance toward them, and not only was he about 20 feet from a crowd of police with their weapons drawn, it wasn’t even 20 feet of level ground. He’d have had to come down the stairs first. A lot of the rest of this boils down to ‘not only did he not listen to them right away, he didn’t die immediately, so they had to keep shooting.’ There are two different questions here: did he meet their criteria as a suspect who needed to be stopped with deadly force (technically he might have) and was deadly force the appropriate way to resolve this situation (from what we can see, it’s doubtful). Focusing on the first question to the exclusion of the second excuses harsh and unjust policing. It’s not right to ask police to take unreasonable risks like swarming a guy with a knife, but it’s fair to ask them to take reasonable risks. Continuing to talk to a guy who has a knife but presents no immediate threat to them or anyone else is a reasonable risk.
Did you link to the wrong case?
I ask, because what you’re saying isn’t supported by what’s in the link.