A person had suffered cardiac arrest and wasn’t responsive. We sent an electrician who fixed an ungrounded electrical outlet in the room, but the victim still died. The electrician did their job superbly.
I thought when this came up in “controversial encounters” the article said something about him fleeing. In this one, we do have
Which isn’t exactly fleeing, but isn’t all that threatening either.
I mean, virtually none. He wasn’t about to sprint at them.
It was obvious that whatever was going on, this guy was in a mental health crisis of some kind. He needed help, not bullets.
Did you miss the part where he was crawling around on his stumps?
If the officers thought he was a threat, they not only need to be fired for their cowardice, they need to be put down for nap time with milk and cookies.
Yeah, I knew one officer personally – he was married to one of my sisters. They met while she was a dispatcher for the university force he was part of. He retired after 25 years with various departments and she discovered that he has control issues; they got into several arguments, particularly regarding how they raised their kid.
The divorce was really messy but she and their son are much happier now.
There’s something obvious here I’m missing. Limited mobility doesn’t make the knife any less sharp.
A double amputee crawling around on his stumps cannot truly threaten a law enforcement officer with a knife because …
~Max
They’ve got functional legs and can easily keep out of reach of a legless guy with a knife.
Ah, but the news report alleges that the individual threatened to throw the knife. Is that not sufficient for lethal force? (Factual question. I admit ignorance.)
I thought, what if they just stayed out of throwing range? Or waited for specialized equipment (shields)? But then how would they contain him?
~Max
I don’t think a thrown butcher knife represents a lethal threat. I think he’d have to be extraordinarily lucky to do more than scratch someone with a thrown butcher’s knife.
No. Have you ever tried to throw a butcher’s knife with any accuracy? Have you done so from the ground?
They were truly in more danger of a ricochet from one of their bullets hitting one of them than they were from their victim.
Yes, they could have done that as well.
How could they possibly contain the guy crawling around on his stumps, you mean?
This guy wasn’t a danger to them. He was an inconvenience. There was no chance that they would be injured by him, but there was a decent chance that they would have had to spend longer than they wanted in detaining him safely.
So, when I say they were cowards, that’s taking them at their word that they were scared of the paraplegic crawling around on the sidewalk. But, in reality, the problem is that they were lazy and corrupt. His life meant less to him than the bother that he was giving them.
Having thrown knives for fun, I would agree with this. I’m lucky to stick two throws out of 6 with throwing knives on a dedicated range. With a butcher knife, at a moving target, who will stay at a distance, and with no feet? No way.
A thrown rock would be more dangerous.
Did he really threaten to throw it? Did he really threaten the police at all? Oh right, the police said he did.
Fair, but the point is, even giving them every benefit of the doubt, they were still unjustified in the shooting.
I watched the videos. You can’t see much because they were at a distance and there were things like vehicles and street signs obscuring much of it. (They were both taken from vehicles on a nearby street.) From what I could see, he was walking away from them, but also kept turning toward them as if to threaten them, or maybe even just say “leave me alone”. It’s hard to say if he was fleeing or not, but he didn’t seem to be going after them either.
And he wasn’t crawling. He was actually walking. Not fast at all, so avoiding him would have been easy; it looked like he was moving as fast as he could but it was at a normal walking pace at best. But he was more mobile than you might expect from someone without full legs.
I agree with you that shooting him looked like something they did because they were fed up with his failure to cooperate but while he was armed, they didn’t want to get close enough to restrain him. And they tried to taze him but that didn’t work for whatever reason. “Just shoot him because we want this over with,” is a terrible conclusion to draw, it should be criminal.
I haven’t thrown knives, so this was the obvious thing I was missing. Thanks! I had just assumed a thrown knife could easily cut into say, your face or neck. Now that I think about it, only the one edge is sharp, it’ll be turning in the air, and it’s likely not going to cut deep if at all unless expertly thrown.
~Max
Out of curiosity I looked for videos of people throwing butcher knives. There are a couple demonstrating that it can be done, but these are people who for years trained in knife throwing. It’s very tricky because it’s not balanced at all for throwing. The heavier end is the handle and often that’s the end that will hit what you’re throwing at unless you use proper techniques.
Also, even the experts were only throwing the knife from a very short distance from the target. We’re talking 7-8 feet away.
…this thread has taken a tangent into knife-throwing that certainly wasn’t intended, however perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with how discussions about policing are framed in the United States.
From the other side of the planet, its kinda shocking that anyone could even consider that the shooting of Anthony Lowe remotely justified to the point we are arguing about the effectiveness of knife throwing. How even did that become part of the conversation?
The police aren’t even routinely armed where I live. And in the UK, where they have to deal with a lot of knife crime, they typically handle it like this:
Those are videos of police apprehending men with knives that are charging at them. The videos show Lowe barely being able to run away, facing away from the police for most of the interaction, the police able to put plenty of distance from him if they liked and clearly in no danger of the “21 feet rule”.
Police being injured or killed by knife-throwing subjects is so vanishingly rare that a casual google search brings up a single incidence in the Singapore three times, a guy in the UK in 2015 who threw knives (not a single knife) at the police, then stories about a man being arrested for throwing knives at trees in Canada, plenty of stories about knives being thrown at police and nobody being injured, but not much else.
The TLDR version of this is that Anthony Lowe should not be dead. Police in any other country would have been able to take control of that situation without getting anybody killed.
But in America the conversation inevitably devolves into whatever it is this is. Of course the knife was still sharp. Of course he was still a threat even though he was “crawling around on his stumps.” Of course he was able to throw the knife. But none of that excuses what was shown in that video.
The arrests of the Tyre Nicols five won’t end the brutality and injustice that the police deal out every single day. Because the problem is foundational. This isn’t about the mechanics of knife throwing.
That would be on me. I vastly overestimated the threat of a thrown knife because I know nothing about knife throwing, and so it didn’t occur to me, in any shape or form, what the police did wrong.
I had rudimentary thoughts about using shields like in the first video you posted, but I ruled that out as impractical. I’m fully accustomed to the notion that lethal force is an appropriate reaction to a knife charge. It’s shocking to me that UK police even approached the knife wielding individual in that second video with only pepper spray and a baton. I wouldn’t expect a police officer in the U.S. to do the same.
~Max
Certainly.
Neither. Look you cant claim that policing in America absolutely sucks, when all it is anecdotal, and the anecdotes picked by Mainstream Media as they were “newsworthy.”
That’s true, but IIRC in all of Western the police are usually armed. In the UK they get away with it as few of the perps carry guns. And there was something like 8 or 10? constables there, and they had already cordoned it off so no innocents were in danger.
This is total bullshit.
The The first centrally organised and uniformed police force was created by the government of King Louis XIV in 1667 to police the city of Paris, then the largest city in Europe.
The United States inherited England’s Anglo-Saxon common law and its system of social obligation, sheriffs, constables, watchmen, and stipendiary justice. As both societies became less rural and agrarian and more urban and industrialized, crime, riots, and other public disturbances became more common. Yet Americans, like the English, were wary of creating standing police forces. Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647.
From your cite:
The first form of policing in the South was known as slave patrol, which began in the colonies of Carolina in 1704.
Note that term "in the South". Not America. Just the South. The North had constables and watchmen as early as 1631.
Regarding the history of policing and problems being foundational - I personally have trouble understanding and commenting on such general complaints about police culture because I can’t translate it into something tangible.
Officers should step in when they see a peer beating an individual who is already subdued. Tangible.
Officers shouldn’t have to physically beat an individual to subdue them in the first place. They should use alternative methods such as … . Tangible.
Instructors should not tell LEOs-in-training to shout “stand down” after the fact in an attempt to game bystander’s memory. Tangible.
Academies should not dismiss students for speaking up against their instructors. Tangible.
Prospective LEO hires should be vetted for domestic violence, etc. Tangible.
When it comes to hiring and discipline, the threshold for accusations against police officers should be less than beyond-a-reasonable-doubt. Tangible.
Police should work less overtime. Or we should impose a legislative cap on maximum hours worked per week. Tangible.
For certain non-criminal 9-11 calls such as … the public would be better served with mental health or medical responders than police. Tangible.
If you’re on a jury, don’t assume the police are telling the truth. Tangible.
Police should not engage in racial profiling (or any other practice) that violates an individual’s civil rights. Tangible.
Police should not use deadly force except as a last resort. Tangible.
These particular individuals ought to be fired. Tangible.
I want to know why these individuals acted the way they did, so we can prevent it in the future. Tangible.
Etc.
The problem is foundational. The history of policing can be traced to slave patrols. Police culture needs to change. We need comprehensive reform. All intangible. On the other hand, if you want to draw on history to bring forward a solution, or to predict a future problem that needs to be averted, go ahead.
~Max
…the thing is: the situation with Anthony Lowe was dangerous. He needed to be contained. He was objectively a danger to himself, to the police, and to others.
But consider the existence of things like the “21 feet rule”. Here is a PBS discussion about that.
The ‘21-Foot Rule’: How a Controversial Training for Police is Used to Justify Shootings | FRONTLINE.
And this is how the people behind the website Police 1 (powered by “Lexipol”, that provides consulting services to police departments nationwide) see it in an article titled “Why 21 feet is not a ‘safe’ distance”:
The Frontline article makes a case that:
While the Police 1 article argues that:
They don’t want to make it safer. They want to increase the chances of the suspect dying.
Yeah, but it isn’t just anecdotal. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. The police in America suuuucks.
Nah.
The article is called " The History of Policing in the US and Its Impact on Americans Today" and the article is focused on showing exactly how you ended up with what you’ve got today. Its explicit in the title. When it talks about “tracing the history of policing” that’s in relation to the title, not a chronological retelling. If policing in America followed the same trajectory as it did as the English it would still be problematic, but in a different sort of way. But it isn’t, and the reason why it’s different can be traced back directly to the South.
Perfect! That’s something tangible. If a standard distance is not supported by law or science, maybe we shouldn’t have police rely on it? Sound reasonable to you?
I’m not against tactical exercises that improve an officer’s survivability as well as accuracy when firing a weapon. The other individual’s safety should not be reliant on the officer missing his shot. “They want to increase the chances of the suspect dying” is a jump I haven’t made.
~Max