To anyone who is wondering why this man was shot, have you seen those pictures of cops that got sliced up by a person with a knife? They are out there and can be found with google. Warning: they are horrifying.
Capability, opportunity, intent. This was a justified shooting.
looks like you don’t get the reference and dismissed that as a strawman. it is not. it refers to the ferguson riots. which was triggered by what was felt to be yet another trigger happy execution of an unarmed man.
at this point the details of that initial trigger is moot. it is the straw on the camel’s back behind the sentiment that the police has adopted violence as a first resort to the slightest sign of perceived threat or lack of displayed “respect”. and in this thread at least, the sentiment seems to hold true as some continue to ignore the options taken by the British and Australian police and focus instead on the dangers of a knife wielding man against armed and ready officers.
Why? Let’s put aside feelings here. Why, as a means of public policy, should we accept norms that cost more, arguably lead to more violence and antipathy, and don’t make the public any safer? We routinely make these trade offs with other jobs, but for some reason people think police procedures should be immune to common sense? We don’t give bouncers or most security guards the wide latitude to kill people when they feel threatened. We don’t allow orderlies and staff at mental hospitals who have to routinely restrain crazy people that luxury. Why are cops so different? There are dozens of jobs more dangerous that pay less. Cab drivers are killed and injured more often. Should we accept them routinely killing unarmed passengers that don’t cooperate?
More importantly, we know about, and have seen demonstrated, alternative conflict resolution procedures that lead to less overall violence without an increase in risk to LE. In the UK, and a few other countries where some LE officers don’t carry guns, they routinely deal with similar situations without immediately resorting to shooting a suspect. Their cops are not put at greater risk, and can avoid putting the public at greater risk by opening fire. Additionally, police departments here that have trained their officers to use less lethal force, or have changed procedures have reduced the number deadly incidents. Why should we not demand that everyone do similar things?
My hypotheticals were meant to illustrate the point that your rather absolutist view that
“it’s been said that the police should accept a certain level of injury as part of their job, if it means subduing rather than killing someone. I don’t accept that”
is a) egregiously extreme, and b) false in its assumptions.
No, looks like you missed the weak point of that hypothetical, which was the 0.5% increase in the total populations’ deaths and injuries, a completely made up number that hypothesizes there are a million or two deaths, a million or two injuries, that we could avoid, if only the cops dealt with violent aggressors in a manner that often put themselves in the hospital. It was made-up math that attempted to create a scenario where Steophan would be forced to say, “Well, I guess with those numbers, I have to rethink my position…” I just made up a different one that leads to a different conclusion. You can make up your own, too.
And if we’re going to oversimplify and reference Ferguson as some sort of national bellwether of discontent with the police, I’ll ask for a cite. I suspect that a majority of Americans approve of the police putting down violent aggressors who create the dangerous situation.
Not in the real world. Certainly in hypotheticals one might construct. “Suppose a single cop would break a pinky finger in plan B, but it would avoid a riot that triggered a worldwide revolution that leaves billions dead. How about that?..”
You going for a whole squadron of straw men?
Your absolutist stance: NO RISK OF LO INJURY WHATSOEVER AT WHATEVER COSTS does not stand up to the least of scrutiny (including the extreme hypothetical that you propose). Perhaps you’d care to qualify it now.
Ah, I see where your confusion led you to a pointless exercise in reductio ad absurdum. Or maybe my confusion–Steophan can confirm.
I read his statement (emphasis added) “… it’s been said that the police should accept a certain level of injury as part of their job, if it means subduing rather than killing someone” to mean a level of risk that many in this thread suggested. Not to put too fine a point on it, meaning that these St. Louis officers needed to accept a level of risk greater than they did for the safety of the alleged lunatic coming at them with a knife screaming to be shot. That’s the point of this thread, right?
You apparently read it to read officers need to accept no risk whatsoever and can do anything at all to avoid said risk (AT WHATEVER COST), which I believe is a ridiculous read, though you have beaten the shit out of that phantom assertion, I’ll give you that.
Cops assume risk walking out the door, a risk that could be avoided by legislating that no one else is allowed out of doors without a special permit. (There’s a reductio ad absurdum for you, free of charge.) Do you suppose anyone holds the position you created, “NO RISK OF LO INJURY WHATSOEVER AT WHATEVER COSTS”? If so, feel free to continue to pound that nonsense into dust.
Yes I did read it that way, because that’s what those words meant.
Still, now we agree that some risk is a necessary and inescapable concommitant to any sane policy, all we need to do is persuade Steophan so that we might have a meaningful and nuanced discussion on the appropriate police response to apparent threats of violence (because right now his position seems to be, threaten a cop: get shot: suck it up).
Because the guy represented a danger not only to himself and the police, but to the general public - for instance, to the person making the video. If he was willing to attack the police to provoke them into shooting him, I doubt he would have scrupled to attack someone else to get the police to shoot him.
And again, they had fourteen seconds’ notice to come up with a solution.
So they get called in on a shoplifting, get out of the squad car, see the crazy with the knife - and then get back in the car and calling for back up and getting out the Taser (if they have one). Can you imagine the reaction if the guy was running around slashing at people while the police hid in their squad car?
Or they get called in on a shoplifting. get out of the squad car, see the crazy with the knife - and draw their pistols and yell at him to drop the weapon and freeze. He comes at them, they warn him again, he won’t stop, and they fire and eliminate the threat. Is that a tragedy? Of course it is.
It just seems a little silly to say, as Marley23 has done, that he is going to criticize the police even if a shooting is completely justified, and then wonder why the police feel like it’s “us vs. them” in relation to the public.
That goes both ways - the automatic assertion that the police handled it wrong and that whatever they did, it shouldn’t have been done, and why couldn’t they have done “something” that didn’t involve shooting, is equally unsupported.
And keep in mind that the evidence, if such exists, has to be relevant. Handling the mentally ill is one thing - knowing on a few seconds’ notice that what appears a routine shoplifting really involves a crazy schizo with a knife and a death wish is another.
Regards,
Shodan
Steophan can speak for himself, but I would be surprised if he intended his words to have the absolute connotations you inferred. I think you misread it, and that no one embraces a policy that would (I think, in your hyper-literal interpretation) permit the police to launch missiles at an inner-city street corner if someone there glared menacingly at them.
That said, while I agree there’s room for discussion regarding what obligations cops have to diffuse a dangerous situation at their own peril, I suspect I set the bar at a different place than you. If he was in fear of his life or serious injury, he was justified in using deadly force. All this “But what if he had done this or that” discussion in the comfort of our living rooms is fine, but I personally cut enormous slack to the guy who is dealing with someone else threatening his life. The world is a complex place, but I do believe that on the whole, the very best strategy for avoiding the deaths of violent aggressors is for those fellows not to be violent aggressors.
i didn’t mind the number, since it was obviously made up. do you not agree that the troubles in Ferguson arose because of the community’s unhappiness with police violence?
That’s an aspect of it, I suspect. There certainly seems to be a lot of anger, and people who feel marginalized. But I also suspect that the beef the good people of Ferguson have with the police is NOT that they sometimes shoot people who go after them with knives.
But they did have more than “a few seconds notice”. It wasn’t called in as a “routine shoplifting”. They’d been told the guy was behaving erratically and had a knife before they arrived. Another big clue it wasn’t a “routine shoplifting” was that the guy didn’t take the stuff and run. He was obviously just waiting for the police to show up.
Should it be that easy and predictable to engineer a police-assisted suicide?
The police should no more have to accept violence as part of their job than I should have to walking down the street.
There may in some circumstances be better ways to handle violence, or the threat of violence, than shooting someone, however, I would rarely condemn someone who chooses that option. All this nitpicking about level of threat is mostly irrelevant.
Should someone attack you, it is reasonable to assume they’re going to do you as much harm as they are able, and act based on that. It’s not reasonable (to put it mildly) to expect people to wait until they’ve actually received a specific level of harm before they defend themselves.
I’d also add that anyone who does anything other than exactly what they’re told when a cop has a gun pointed at them is Darwin award level stupid, and my sympathy for stupidity is pretty low.
So, it would obviously be preferable if the police could restrain and arrest violent suspects, and in the vast majority of cases that’s what they do. But the decision to put themselves at risk should be theirs alone, not that of armchair internet blowhards. If they, at that moment, feel the risk is too great, then there is no wrongdoing by not taking it.
No-one has suggested that, have they?
What else is being suggested when people say they shouldn’t shoot at the threat of harm?
Look, if you are saying that the moment any threat of harm presents itself that the police are entitled to move to deadly force then you need to speak to Stratocaster because he thinks you’re saying something else.
Already done that, and I think made my point quite clear. However, you seem to be thinking I mean “obliged” or “expected”, not “entitled”. The police, like anyone else, should be allowed to defend themselves against threats, and without having to second guess the intentions of the person threatening them, calculating the probability of serious harm, or really anything other than reacting to the threat that’s directly presenting itself.
Now, in the event that it’s absolutely clear that, despite a verbal threat, there is no possibility of it being carried out, of course they shouldn’t shoot. But the idea that you can tell from your chair exactly how serious the threat seemed to them at the time is absurd.
Damn, I was all ready to think everyone bashing the cops in the thread were a bunch of cop hating liberal types or whatever it’s called now; but then I saw the video. That video does not make the police look very well trained.