Two things. First, this is not a regular occurence. There are millions of encounters like this practically every day across the country, and a tiny number of them result in incidents like this.
Second, playing devil’s advocate for the cops, the police spent three hours negotiating with this guy, who is a known violent offender.A person who has attacked police officers, and slashed people with knives. He threatened the officers earlier in the encounter, and refused to get on the ground so they could safely take him into custody.
I’m sorry. I don’t care if crazy cop threatening knife guy has “agreed” to come along quietly, if I’m a cop, I’m not getting within 10 feet of that guy unless he is clearly unable to harm me.
but this is a regular occurrence. consider that this only came to light because of the functional helmet cam. consider that there is always a fresh example of police brutality, among what is certainly an exponentially greater amount of undiscovered cases. consider that even when discovered, this is publicly declared justified despite evidence to the contrary.
he may be a violent man but why was the non-lethal option used as a last resort, after they had disoriented him with a flashbang and shot him to death with his back turned to them? it seems the bean bag gun was used more as a long distance poking stick than as a non-lethal option to end the confrontation.
i value the safety of officers over criminals, but when there are no safeguards or punishments at all for killing them, we encourage them not to take even the slightest iota of imagined risk and simply nuke everything from orbit just to be sure.
I found some data (warning .pdf) page 3 has what find to be the most relevant part.
From 2003 to 2005, average # of homicides by law enforcement - 365, one per day. That’s pretty regular. However, we also have 300 million people in this country, so your chances of being killed by a cop are a bit worse than 1/1,000,000, which is pretty slim.
It also mentions the number of assaults upon law enforcement officers over that time, about 58,000 per year. This means, if you actually assault a cop, your chances of being killed by a cop is 1/159. You may think that’s too high, but cops are not nuking it from orbit to avoid any imagined risk. They get killed too, about one a week, pretty regular.
The killers of Lee Rigby in London wanted to commit suicide by cop (cite: http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26357007 This mentions that the lead killer wanted to die. This is based on what he said on video after he attacked the off-duty soldier). They failed and it’s good that they did.
Suicide by cop is not as easy as it might sometimes seem.