Video of police shooting man in St. Louis (near Ferguson, MO)

I sit corrected, but that indicates he is a danger to the public as well.

Again - if you are crazy enough to attack police to get them to shoot you, then you are crazy enough to attack someone else to get the police to shoot you.

Regards,
Shodan

But what if the training was very good but being of the minority of cops that are just asshat bullies we now denounce any and all cops who do not act as the cops do in the UK & AU? What about all the time ( which are seldom reported ) that the US cops did just as good as the cherry picked examples of UK & AU cops?

What makes it possible that there is no asshat cops in the UK and AU? What about the cops in Iceland?

Another question. In the US, if it was policy to not shoot but to negotiate at any questionable conflict, would it take before the bad guys figured out that they could draw their concealed firearm & fire from 21 feet or whatever distance the police were not allowed to fire from and that they must always present a tazer first before drawing their guns? :rolleyes:

Bad guys are not that smart or would not deliberately try to set up such a safe way to remove the cops sent to stop their misdeeds? :rolleyes:

Talk about straw man and the opportunity to have threads like this makes it almost irresistible to force the police to operate in just that manner. :smack::smack:

This guy didn’t attack police, he stepped towards them. And he didn’t even step towards anyone else.

You want the police to take as accurate the person who is calling 911 to be giving true & accurate information to the point that they do not need to hurry, wait for an ambulance so they can get the crazy ( which they know from the 911 caller that does not leave a name much of the time. ) or to react to an armed man with talk and to make that determination while on the drive to the location?

That should be their training?

Do not get out of the car ready for thew worst but get out expecting to see what the 911 caller said was accurate? That is what they were hired to do in your opinion or it should be?

Could this or any occurrence that has or will be incurred be handled better? Sure. No argument. But every one? Who decides, you a week later or the man that see’s his wife killed because the cops tried to talk and passed up several chances to shoot the perp?

Oh, we are only talking about this one incident. But we are going to make a mandatory change and requirement to modify all training across the nation to reflect this?

Were these cops in this incident to quick on the trigger? Maybe, but not so much as to be called down for it IMO. :p:p

After being told not to do that " he stepped towards them." With a knife in his hand.

He made it clear by the way he did it, all that maneuvering before stepping towards the officer that he was not stepping towards them in any innocent way.

If he was stepping towards me after that kind of maneuvering I would not call out the police to not worry, it was an innocent move & he means me no harm. But the nay sayer’s in the thread would? Okayyyyyyyyyyy :rolleyes:

I’m not usually a fan of the police in these circumstances, but when there is a guy with a drawn knife walking towards you and refusing to stop, a police officer or any other free person should have the right to kill him.

I can’t believe that some of these comments would suggest that an officer (or a citizen) should have to suffer a stab wound because it is better than a death on the other side. That might objectively be true, but the best way to keep from dying: don’t walk towards anyone with a knife drawn. Should you have to be in the hospital and recover from a stab wound to save the life of some other idiot who attacked you? And that is assuming the knife isn’t planted straight into your heart.

This shoot was legit.

I’m not saying that, nor is anyone else. I’m saying that there were other options besides shooting the man. We know this is the case because police departments in other countries have handled armed and deranged men, including men who lunged towards police with a blade in hand, without shooting them or putting anyone at risk.

At least they handcuffed the perp after the threat was minimalized.

Guns at 21 feet are realistically lethal. Knives at 10 feet (failing circus throwing uber skills) not so much.

The questions raised by the “nay-sayers” as you call them, are not if the antagonist could potentially present a lethal danger to the police or to the public, but whether the police response was as minima

Guns at 21 feet are realistically lethal (raised gun at 21 feet, blow their fucking heads off I won’t complain). Knives at 10 feet (failing circus throwing über skills) not so much.

The questions raised by the “nay-sayers” (as you call them), are not if the antagonist could potentially present a lethal danger to the police or to the public (clearly the potential was there), but whether the police response was as minimal as it could have been.

I say no. Many reasons have already been discussed above ad nauseum.
Elsewhere, you know that movie trope, the one where the hero has downed the bad guy and turns his attention to whatever he feels is so pressing at that moment, and then the bad guy reappears to start the action all over again? And we say to ouselves, if that was me I would have made sure that that fucker was dead first time around.

But
a) that’s movies bad guys who, as we all know, are indestructible until melted in molten metal
b) that’s when we need to put our attention elsewhere
c) we don’t have a well-trained armed colleague pointing a loaded gun at him

If you explained it to me until Christmas, I would never get why a minimum of nine shots were fired, at least two of which came after the bad guy was clearly down and disabled. Scream at me how naive I am if you want, but short of citing a number of incidents where more than one cop have come to harm from a single perp already shot to bits and prostrate I’m going to believe my naivety is well-founded.

A person can cross ten feet in a very short space of time, someone presenting a knife to me in an aggressive manner at that distance (and further back) is an immediate lethal threat.

Not a great video but this knife-wielding man crossed the distance towards armed police pretty damn quickly and he was significently further back than ten feet:

Seriously tho, why did they handcuff a dead body?

[quote=“Disposable Hero, post:171, topic:696090”]

A person can cross ten feet in a very short space of time, someone presenting a knife to me in an aggressive manner at that distance (and further back) is an immediate lethal threat.

Not a great video but this knife-wielding man crossed the distance towards armed police pretty damn quickly and he was significently further back than ten feet:

[/QUOTE]

“Pretty damn quick” maybe, but bullets pass pretty damn instaneously.

Still, as already argued a number of times, perhaps the immediate confrontation and reluctance to back off contibuted to the “suicide by cop” (note in the video you linked to – the police there maintained a distance, and did not shoot until danger was very imminent (even though it was known that the perp had already gruesomely murdered someone)).

Interesting to note that the perp survived that shooting and went on to be tried and convicted of the murder. Stupid British Police should have finished the job properly, eh?

How long do you think it takes someone to move ten feet, even from a standing start? Bear in mind that, with the length of the knife, an arm extended, and leaning forward you come close to halving the distance he’d need to move, so let’s say 6 feet. Watch the video again, he falls literally at the closest cop’s feet. If they’d waited a second longer, he would have been stabbed.

Could you do anything to ensure your safety in that situation, other than shooting? Unless you’re Bruce Lee, no. Probably the most frustrating thing about threads like this is people who don’t think knives are dangerous.

Seriously? Just in case he’s not dead, and still has access to his knife. I’d be amazed if it wasn’t procedure to do so.

I think you are reading many things into my statement; I myself would not condemn the cops in this situation - that is just not what I think or feel about the situation. My thought upon seeing the video is exactly what I said, the video does not look like something that when shown to most people would look like a well - trained police force. It looks like cops on a hair trigger overreacting to a situation, then, for some reason, handcuffing a dead person they just shot several times at close range.

That is not to say I pass judgement on the police, it is saying that they were videotaped doing something that would make them look bad.

Quote from this link:

“Although both Matix and Platt were hit multiple times during the shootout, Platt fought on and continued to injure and kill agents.”

Bullets aren’t necessarily instantly effective. The officer in the above link was very lucky that her attacker went down when he did.

I wasn’t talking about the initial video, I was talking about your frankly ludicrous assertion that someone with a knife at a distance of ten feet isn’t a lethal threat.

That says rather more about you than it does about me. Eh?

Well i assume the knife would be immediately taken from him as soon as he is down and no longer resisting (before being cuffed). And why not just check the pulse of the limp body laying there, why handcuff him? It may be procedure, im not disputing that but the reasons you give seem shaky.

Outside edit window: Actually I’m not sure of the gender of the officer who was getting out of the car, my recollection was that it was a female officer who shot him.

It doesn’t surprise me that an injured person could pull a trigger, that’s not what this case is about, is it?

Perhaps my ironic tone wasn’t carried by the medium. My bad. So shoot me.