Yes, on the one hand while watching the video I kept thinking “why are you acting like such a freaking weirdo? Just get out of the car with your hands up and it will be over sooner.”
Somehow while watching the video, it put me on the side of the cops in that I was getting annoyed by this freaking weirdo kid. And then I realized—that’s exactly why this happens.
Yeah maybe the kid was high—I think he said he had smoked something—or maybe he was out of his mind. But no one deserves to be killed—or even badly hurt—just because of that. He wasn’t actually a danger to anyone. He was just being inconvenient.
But you know what, dealing with inconvenient situations is—or at least, should be—the cops’ job. Their reaction shouldn’t be the same as mine—an untrained bystander. They should be trained to deal with exactly this situation and make sure everyone comes out okay.
I’m also not sure that it was primarily the fault of any particular cop either. The whole system has failed everyone.
It’s not unknown for tourist guidance material here in Europe to warn visitors to the US that American police can be unpredictable and violent, and if you’re not very careful they will attack you over what most people would consider small transgressions. I’ve seen this in a few different publications and other sources, and I’ve been asked about it face to face. Basically, this is the widely understood perception of the police in the US.
Given that context, it’s unsurprising that a foreign visitor would panic upon finding himself surrounded by increasingly unreasonable cops. It’s a self-fulfilling prediction.
I’m not remotely defending the appalling way the police behaved here, he wasn’t any threat to the cops while sitting in the car, but I don’t think leaving would have been appropriate. He had crashed his vehicle, but it looked as though it could still be driven, and he was agitated and perhaps altered. Based on the video, I would have suspected a mental health issue or drug use. I think there was a duty to get him off the road and into medical care.
Surely, the time to tell him to drop the knife is before subjecting his body to involuntary muscle tightenings? No, at that point he couldn’t save himself: It literally was not a thing that it was possible for him to do.
Well, when police find a car in a bad spot, with an upset driver, they do have to do something. That’s fair. HIghway safety is part of their mandate.
But I don’t include smashing windows, firing bean-bags, tasing, and five pistol shots at close range in the category of “to do something”.
Interestingly, the Vice article includes this bit:
Colorado State Patrol contacted the officers on the scene and asked what “their plan is", adding “if he’s committed no crime and is not suicidal, homicidal, or a great danger, then there is no reason to contact him.” Despite hearing this, officers continued to try to get Glass out of the vehicle.
It’s unclear where exactly they live, but apparently the kid had triple citizenship: American, British, and New Zealand. The implication is that he was not really a “foreigner.”
I think they may actually live in Colorado. Some stories refer to him as a “Colorado man” and his parents as “Colorado parents.”
Horrible messaging about ‘defund police’ aside, this is exactly the situation that it is meant to solve. Some funds that go to the use police for all situations philosophy should instead be used to have multiple options available. When all you have is a ‘cop hammer’ then you have to view everything as a ‘cop nail.’
The guy did have an accident and did say something about smoking something. So I say they did need to have contact with him to see if he was intoxicated.
In the old days when we had a subject refuse to exit their vehicle like this we would spray OC into the front air vents or through any open crack in a window. They’d come out right quick, coughing and rubbing their eyes but the effect is temporary.
They don’t allow us to use it for noncompliance anymore. But this guy had potential weapons and it would have been a better option than the one they chose.
I first came across the article in a New Zealand source I follow, which is why I used that in the thread title. Subsequent articles have indicated the American connection and possible residence.
There are several prongs to the mental health problem in the US. Absolutely it is woefully underfunded in most of the US. No one would like more help in that area more than cops. With the agencies that are available the “call us back when he’s actively trying to kill himself or others” attitude doesn’t help. Although it is partly understandable due to staffing issues.
But when there is an armed non-compliant subjunct who do you think the mental health workers call? Do you think they deal with people like that? No amount of funding will change that.
I think it must also be said that in this situation, an ordinary untrained person with common sense could probably have tried talking to this kid to calm him down without escalating and scaring him and without any significant risk to themselves. Knives make me nervous, sure, but if you’re standing by the hinge of the driver-side door, it’s not as though the kid could easily jump out and be on you in a fraction of a second - the opened door would automatically be between him and you. Am I being an armchair quarterback here? I think I’d have felt quite comfortable talking to that kid leaning on the hood by the door hinge, with a cop standing well back, just in case. So why not one cop talking quietly and calmly to him like that, with everyone else backing right off? And if it looks like a kid with maybe a mental health issue rather than a homicidal master criminal, it takes as long as it takes.
So it’s not just that funds could be spent on training other professionals. It feels like the cops are being actively trained out of sensible calm behavior when it’s appropriate into paranoid self-preservation and escalation.
True, but you can also have different training for police, to ensure that drawing a gun isn’t such a common occurrence. De-escalation is something police can be trained in, even when facing an armed individual.
And, the legal system can be open to convicting police officers who use excessive lethal force, even in the case of an individual who is armed, without any doctrine of “qualified immunity”.
In the killing of Sammy Yatim in Toronto, who was armed with a knife and threatening passengers on a street car, the officer fired three shots, then made a “split-second decision” (to use the common phrase) to fire six more shots.
Yatim was already dying from the first three shots and immobile.
The jury convicted the officer of attempted murder. He was sentenced to six years.
I just watched most of the 1 hour video. IANALEO but Christian Glass had two small knives. He might have been more heavily armed, possibly a gun, and the police need to keep themselves safe from that possibility, but Christian Glass had at worst, in terms of what the LEOs actually observed, a knife in his hand and another nearby in the car. The knives were apparently small. Several LEOs had pistols drawn.
To me based on that video it was the LEOs who escalated that situation and ultimately used unreasonable force to subdue Christian Glass.
