No it isn’t. It’s a bunch of professional sounding words surrounding “I thought he had a gun”. You even say it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a gun as long as it could be “construed as a deadly threat”, which is more professional sounding words meaning “I thought he had a gun”. Nothing in that big narrative you wrote justifies killing a person other than “I thought he had a gun.”
That was evident.
I’ll answer around all the straw that you are bailing here.
Right now, if a guy steals your car at gunpoint, what is your next move? Did the police prevent it, did they protect you from the gun? What are the chances that you actually get it back?
Your next move is to file a police report for insurance purposes, and that person needs a pen, not a gun.
Sounds like a call to CPS would be in order. We had a very recent story about a person that was upset about the noise in their neighboring apartment, and they claimed that it was domestic abuse in order to get the cops there sooner. The cops ended up shooting the guy when he came to the door, and made his significant other watch as he gasped his last breathes.
I’m always hearing that you shouldn’t rely on the cops for protection. In most places, the neighbor will be able to keep beating on your wife and kids for quite a while, maybe a couple hours, before a cop arrives to take a report.
As is the idea that such a proposal has been given.
Exactly, you just described exactly what we mean by “Defund the police.”
A threat, like an someone pointing a modified airsoft gun at the cop or a civilian, that’s a pretty decent looking threat, even if it turns out not to be.
A threat, like a person reaching into their car when asked for their driver’s license? Not so much.
Once again, more straw than substance, but I would say that, if it means that occasionally a criminal manages to get a shot off first, then yes, it is a risk that the officer’s should take, rather than to shoot anyone that might possibly have a weapon.
To the rest of the straw you have piled on, no, because no one has actually said any of that.
except this part:
Yes, because a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. Just because someone is a suspect does not mean that they have actually done anything worthy of arrest, much less death.
There is a difference between a suspect and an active threat. A suspect is someone who may match the description of someone who stole a candy bar from the drug store, and yes, their safety should come ahead of that of the officer’s. They may not even be the thief, much less a threat. The officer is the one who is creating the dangerous situation in that case, and so should bear the greater danger from it.
Someone who actually has a weapon and is using it is not a suspect, they are an active threat, and should be dealt with by the least lethal means at the cops’ disposal to end the threat. Sometimes the least lethal means will end up being lethal, sadly.
Yes, absolutely. That is the entire point behind proactive policing. Now, if you take that away, does it even things out? Probably not, as poverty does tend to increase crime, and so the more impoverished areas probably do have higher crime.
But, by going out and looking to find someone to arrest for something, you are going to find something to arrest them for. We had a guy that was shot recently where the crime that he was stopped for was improperly riding a bicycle. Tell me the last time that happened in a middle class neighborhood to a white person that lived there?
How many stop and frisks went down in the suburbs, rather than near low income housing? If you are stopping and frisking people in one area, and not in another, you are going to find more people holding onto contraband in the areas that you are stopping and frisking them then in the places that you are not.
80% of the calls are not coming from those areas. Most of the people in those areas know very well not to call the police, as the police will just make things worse.
Correct, he has to write a long winded narrative, at the end of which, he says, “I thought he was going for a gun”.
Of course he is going to claim he felt his life was in danger, and create a narrative that justifies it.
Any movement can be construed as a deadly threat.
Yeah, it calls for a reasonableness standard, which is reasonable.
But, it is interpreted by the cop’s peers and colleagues, so has become more and more unreasonable to anyone who is not a part of the blue brotherhood.
Just FYI, if you call CPS around here to say someone is actively beating their kids, they will tell you to call 911. That is going to get the quickest response, and it will not be hours later that the police arrive. And even if CPS were available that quickly, they definitely won’t got out without police in that kind of situation. Intervening in active violence is not their job and not what they are trained for.
Moderator Note
Please don’t make personal comments like this in this forum.
Just a note to remember to remain civil.
To begin with, there really isn’t much point in trying to convince someone who actually believes that cops should allow a suspect to get the first shot off to change their mind but I don’t have anything else to do right now so, why not?
I am not throwing straw. I am trying to follow your logic. Remember, I’m addressing those who want to abolish the police completely.
“Your next move is to file a police report for insurance purposes, and that person needs a pen, not a gun.”
How do you file a police report if there are no police? What if you can’t afford the kind of insurance that will replace your car? Who tries to find the carjacker, possibly recover your car and bring him to justice so that, maybe, he won’t do it again and others might be dissuaded from the same behavior? You? How about the carjacker actually shot someone? Without police, I’m asking how society responds.
“Sounds like a call to CPS would be in order.”
You are going to call someone with an MSW to confront someone who is committing violence upon another? Really? I wouldn’t want to be your neighbor.
“I’m always hearing that you shouldn’t rely on the cops for protection. In most places, the neighbor will be able to keep beating on your wife and kids for quite a while, maybe a couple hours, before a cop arrives to take a report.”
Sounds an awful lot like, “Many people are saying…” and its a not-very-artful dodge of the question. If there are no police, what do you do? Don’t count on your neighbors to come to your aid. They are too busy calling a social worker.
I have no problem with “defund the police” where the meaning of the term concerns taking some duties away and giving them to other, more appropriate, responders. Trump and his followers would have you believe it means, literally, doing away with the police. “Defund” is a convenient buzzword that fits nicely on signs. People assign their own meaning to it which makes it a useless term.
Your so-called “long winded narratives” are detailed reasons explaining why an officer acted as he did. This is what the law requires. In my burglary hypothetical, do you think the cop was justified in shooting or not? Why?
“A threat, like an someone pointing a modified airsoft gun at the cop or a civilian, that’s a pretty decent looking threat, even if it turns out not to be.”
“Once again, more straw than substance, but I would say that, if it means that occasionally a criminal manages to get a shot off first, then yes, it is a risk that the officer’s should take, rather than to shoot anyone that might possibly have a weapon.”
“To the rest of the straw you have piled on, no, because no one has actually said any of that.”
You just did. Well, which is it? Do they wait to get shot at or not? The standard is not “might possibly”. Its what is reasonable under the circumstances as the officer believes them to be.
You tell me, in detail under what circumstances should a cop shooting someone be justified? That is the title of the OP. Write it as though it was going to be the law.
Do you think criminals in other countries are “less bad” than criminals in the US? Has American exceptionalism gotten us to the point that we think our bad guys are just more evil and awful than anywhere else?
Is that your contention?
As that is not what I said, what I said was that it is possible that sometimes a criminal may get the first shot off. There is a subtle, but I think very importation distinction there. One that, if ignored, would lead one to come to some very erroneous conclusions.
And that really is pretty much no one. You are either talking to yourself, nutpicking, or attributing things to people that they have not said.
At most, it has been said that an ideal world would not need cops. That’s not the same thing, as all of us know that we do not, and will probably never, live in an ideal world.
You have to file a police report because that’s what insurance requires. If there were no police, then obviously, you would file it with the relevant agency, the BMV or whatever is most appropriate. And once again, it would not be that there are no police, but that they would be doing policing things, not taking reports of stolen cars.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/stolen-car-recovery-damage
About 20% of cars are recovered, with a third of them severely damaged. about 12% of car thieves are caught.
Many cars are stolen because the owner left the keys in them.
Most cars are recovered by them having been abandoned by the people who took them out for a joy ride, not be intense police detective work.
If you don’t have comprehensive insurance, then your car would not be replaced. But, most likely it won’t be recovered either, and if it is, you will still often be out money to repair the damage.
So, lotta maybes in there.
With a much smaller and better trained police force, the few instances of violence in car jackings would be better dealt with.
If car theft is a big problem, then having an agency that deals with car theft would make sense. Those do not need to be the same people that respond to bank robberies.
Nope.
It’s not “many people are saying.” It is the hew and cry of gun advocates all over. If you are saying differently, then you should bring that up with those who say that a gun in the home is the only defense, and that you should not rely on cops.
Okay, so then you have no problem with the movement, you just have a problem with how those who are against the movement have framed it.
Take it up with them.
No. He didn’t see a gun.
There is a recent story about a man who was being arrested by cops for improper bike riding, and he chose to try to flee. In the process, he dropped a gun. They opened up on him, killing him. Were they justified?
They don’t need to wait to get shot. They do need to wait to positively identify something that either is, or is intended to appear to be, a gun. Your refusal to understand that difference is not the same as me not explaining it.
By law, not all that much different. They should have a reasonable fear for their safety or that of the public. By practice, that standard of reasonable fear should be higher than it is. Not, “I thought he had a gun.” but, “I saw a gun, in his hand, that he was brandishing threateningly.”
When you can justify the mere fear of a gun, then it becomes much easier to blur that line. Where people get shot for reaching for their wallet when the cop asks them for their ID. Or people get shot for misunderstanding conflicting orders.
When that happens, and can be proven that the cop was in the wrong, sometimes the cop is fired and even prosecuted. But leaving that line so close to what is considered reasonable, when a fleeing drunk driver gets shot because they are holding a discharged taser, and that is justified, then it becomes easier for a tragedy to occur.
Also, if a cop does not attempt to deescalates a situation, and instead increases the tensions until something happens that justifies their use of force, that too should be on the officer. If they appear as a threat to someone, and that person responds out of fear for their own life and safety, and that justifies a cop to kill them, then something there is pretty messed up, and needs to be addressed.
I mean, if the entire reason that someone is willing to try to shoot a cop is because they are in fear for their life from the cop, then we have a much bigger problem, and we can’t just put the cost of not addressing that problem on the public.
And this of course, is only talking about cops shooting suspects, not when they harm or abuse them in other ways. If someone shoots at a cop, because the last encounter they had with a cop resulted in them being beaten and detained for no reason at all, and they would rather take their chances with a shootout than to go through that pain and humiliation again, then I’m not saying that they are in the right, but neither is the society that they are forced to live in. Even someone who is willing to try a shootout rather than go back to jail for a violation is telling us that something is pretty fucked up with our justice system that we should be paying attention to.
So, you want specifics. A cop sees a gun (or something that is intended to appear as a gun) that is in the hand of someone who is in a confrontational interaction with the cop or with someone else, and that gun is being brandished in a threatening way. That would justify shooting them. (If you want a law, talk to a lawyer. Demanding that a poster write legislation is not exactly a good faith ask, and you know that.)
Yeah, there are many changes that would need to be made to many agencies that are charged with public safety.
The current CPS would not be equipped to deal with such a thing, you are correct. That’s one of the things that would need to be changed.
To be fair, we do have a lot of guns.
Interestingly, the venn diagram of people who feel that more guns would reduce violence, and the people who think that cops shooting is justified by the number of guns out there, does not deviate much from a perfect circle.
Maybe by using police officers that have been specially trained in the social work aspects of domestic situations? Kind of like they do in large cities right now.
I think the idea that the average calm and reasoned person can defuse most domestic violence situation is naive. It’s not like talking down an angry customer, unless the customer has been drinking for 3 days, is armed, and is absolutely convinced the shopkeeper is doing his wife.
Domestic violence situation are tricky. Even if the perp is unarmed, you don’t know that he will remain that way. The responder is in an environment that they don’t know, but the perp does. There are often children running around. You may have a victim that is trying to inflame the situation. You may have a victim that will switch sides at any minute.
I always get a little bit of a disconnect whenever I hear about taking money from cops to fund social services. I lived in NYC for a long time. I was a little bit of a freelance do-gooder, as it were and I had friends on the margins.
And I can tell you that once you get past the first police response you get, in New York City at least, what I would politely call a robust social services experience.
Less politely, I would say that once law enforcement gets involved , you will have social workers crawling up your ass for the rest of your natural life. I often advanced this argument to try and keep my marginal friends on the straight and narrow.
I recently replied to a thread here about jury duty. It had me thinking about the case I served on, where a man was suing a charitable organization than ran a homeless shelter. He was mugged outside the shelter after being refused admission because he was intoxicated. The mugger took his phone.
Within 3 minutes of the attack, police officers were on the scene. They did NOT just take a report. They put the victim in their car and drove him around looking for the suspect. They found the mugger, arrested him and recovered his property. He was later convicted.
Then they took the victim to a hospital and got him medical treatment. Social services got involved immediately and got to work. The next morning the man’s family came to pick him up, having been convinced by social services to give him a chance. And it stuck because of the ongoing support the social agencies gave the man and his family.
One reason the guy lost his lawsuit was that he was claiming that the charitable organization was responsible for policing the exterior area of the building and there was not a factual answer to that question. But the rapid and effective response of the city made it hard to argue negligence. I was left thinking that the system worked at least once.
While I do agree that maybe a non-police response is the appropriate first response for certain minor offenses, there is a matter of triage.
For example, there are predictors to a dangerous DV. Intoxication, armed, perp lives with victim, perp is unemployed. But those factors can be hard to ascertain on the phone. Women getting housing assistance often lie about who’s living with them. Men lie after they lose their jobs.
I think reform is needed. I think those reforms need to involve breaking police unions and a 180 degree turn in the police attitudes towards the public. But I don’t think sending unarmed social workers into a potentially dangerous situation is the answer. Training and arming social workers might work, but to me that smells like “we still need the police but we can solve our PR problem by calling them something else”.
I agree with almost everything in your post. The only thing I’m not sure about is the first but, saying that police are specially trained in social work aspects of DV situations now, at least in big cities.
I’m not sure if you’re saying they are adequately trained now. I think they need a lot more of that sort of training. And more trauma informed training in general. I think a greater service orientation, as opposed to a militaristic one, and better screening of applicants to match that orientation would make a huge difference as well.
I can only speak to what I’ve witnessed but you’re right, I doubt the training is consistently adequate and I also doubt that the local precincts properly qualify the calls. And that should be part of the change we need.
But I’ve met with cops with regards to the domestic situation of friends and acquaintances - they gave me advice on what to say to convince women to leave - and I’ve also spoken with SVU detectives regarding the domestic situations in my friend’s homes. I can tell you that the cops I met with were well-trained and knew what they were doing - we just need to get the good ones at the right place at the right time.
That’s great. I hope it’s true elsewhere too. I think training and ability might vary a lot.
And are these specially trained officers the only officers to respond to DV complaints? Are they available in all cities?
I agree. That’s why you would not be sending an average calm and reasoned person, you would be sending someone with training.
These are all reasons why it would be better to have someone trained in dealing with these situations rather than the closest guy with a gun responding.
And sometimes the neighbor lies about why he is calling the cops, and calls in a DV rather than a noise complaint, meaning that when the cops show up, they shoot a guy and make his significant other watch as he bleeds to death.
Those are part of it.
Nor do I.
Only if you insist that that is the case. There are many options. You could arm social workers who deal with high risk situations. You could send along armed people who will are under the direction of a trained social worker. There are many things to do.
But sending the closest guy with a gun to respond to a complaint of an argument is about the worst thing we can do. they will be useless if it is a serious problem, and may escalate a minor disagreement into violence.
Or shoot someone for playing their video game too loudly.
I’m sure that there are many cops who are able to deal with such a situation. Most of the cops that I know seem to b reasonable people who are smart and caring. Not all though.
But, at 3:00 AM, when dispatch gets a call about DV, are these the guys that they are sending, or are they sending the guy who is impatient for his shift to end, who is already fired up over having to dealing with criminals of various sorts all evening?
One of the problems with dealing with DV is that the call only comes once violence is imminent or has already transpired. And that’s because calling the cops is a big deal. Now you are inviting guys with guns who have the power to take away your freedom into the situation. One thing that I have heard about DV is that if the cops are called, then almost always, someone is at least spending the night in jail.
If instead of dragging someone to jail, one of them is offered a night in a safe place, then there may be less tension.
If you weren’t calling the cops, but just someone who is willing to come mediate a fight over who should take out the trash, then it doesn’t need to escalate into having to call armed agents of the state into the house in the first place.
If it seems prudent to have an armed escort or guard for such social workers, then I would not disagree, so long as that person is answerable to the social worker, and does not take action on their own initiative, with the exception of a clear and present danger.
These are not appropriate for DV situations. DV does not refer only to situations that have escalated in the moment into physical violence. If there’s a fight over the trash in a relationship involving DV, it’s not actually about the trash, and mediation is a very bad idea. (Mediation is not appropriate in DV relationships, and increases the danger to the abused person.).
So that is not a solution. The offer of a safe place to stay might work eventually, but how is that taking the place of intervening when someone is actually being beaten? It definitely won’t work if it’s done in front of the abuser.
My point was that if it were not armed men who were going to drag someone off to jail that are being called, then the call may go out much earlier, before there is actually violence involved.
Once violence is initiated or is imminent, then the situation is different, and may need a somewhat different skillset. Still not necessarily the skillset that the tired and cranky officer called in at 3:00 AM possesses or is able to utilize.
Who are you thinking is going to call? What sort of intervention are you thinking of that doesn’t exist now? Nobody thinks it’s great for police to have to arrest someone while they are beating their spouse, but that’s when people call. And there are serious dangers in sending unrequested help.
Yes, make it politically costly to be lazy about this sort of thing. The city attorney should not be settling these cases for convenience sake. Hire more attorneys if you need more. If you pay off the Danes, you will never get rid of the Danes.
With the way the law is stacked, if you can’t defend the cop from the lawsuit, then the cop needs to go.
This sort of note usually works better if you identify what you think might constitute personal comments.