Not gonna happen.
No, AFAIK it has always been the case that you have to obey the legal commands of a police officer. You don’t have to answer questions if you don’t want to, but you don’t get to resist arrest, run away if he is detaining you, or shoot at him.
My sensei, a wise man, said “If he’s got a gun, don’t startle him”. Police carry guns - do the math. If the idea is “it’s my right under the Constitution to pitch a tantrum and any interference with that right is the first step towards fascism”, well, not a lot of people are going to agree with you.
If you act like an adult, you tend to get treated like an adult. If you act like a threatening asshole, you **tend **to get treated as such. Not always, but you don’t lose anything by being a grown-up.
Generic “you”, as I hope is clear.
Regards,
Shodan
Sometimes you do.
Argue all you want but I’m a licensed carry and I’m not about to give any cop any lip. If I have a run-in with an asshole cop we can settle it later in court.
Right. A person is confronting you with a gun and you have a gun, but you are supposed to talk to them?
The police will tell you once to “Drop it or I’ll shoot.” If the gun holder doesn’t comply, they will shoot. It ain’t like TV, where they give you twenty warnings.
Possibly, depending on how that person’s gun is being carried during the confrontation. We don’t have enough information in the article to make a determination.
This is a cartoonish view of the actual problem, I’m afraid.
Few people are arguing that if someone is holding a gun, police are in range of that gun and out of cover, and the person is refusing to drop the gun, that the police shouldn’t be allowed to shoot.
The issues arise when the police unnecessarily confront a person who may or may not be armed, leaving cover and closing distance unnecessarily, increasing the tempo of the encounter instead of slowing it down, and then shoot–very often when the person doesn’t actually have a gun.
Big parts of the problem cannot be solved at the level of policing and must be addressed, if at all, societally–the huge number of easily available guns and the implicit biases that make cops so fearful of black people. But the one part that is amenable to changes in policing is whether the police choose to escalate or de-escalate the situation. Many jurisdictions still train cops to take control of a scene by, essentially, escalating the conflict. Smarter (and more well-resourced) jurisdictions are starting to realize that public safety is better preserved by approaching scenes carefully, attempting to calm down and slow down the encounter, using cover and backup appropriately, and assessing and treating differently people who are having mental health crises.
Can you put this into some sort of perspective? How often does your above scenario happen in relation to how often police confront a suspect or even an armed suspect where they are able to de-escalate the situation or shots weren’t fired? Does your scenario happen, say, half the time? Or does it happen 1 out of 100? Or 1 out of 1000? Or 1 out of 10,000? A million to one? Just trying to grasp the extent of the ‘problem’, and see if it’s a matter of it having the appearance of a ‘problem’ due to a sensationalist media that leads with what bleeds, or if it really IS a problem, no quotes, and something we should deal with more rigorously.
Yeah, this is really wrong and sounds like something from TV.
If there is a reasonable belief of an imminent threat to life or serious bodily injury, police should shoot immediately; there is no time to give a verbal warning. There is no one time “drop it or I’ll shoot” guideline and saying it once doesn’t make it okay to shoot.
It also depends on what was meant by " confronted them with a firearm".
It is very vague, and I would like to see more details.
If they identified themselves as police, and he came out and pointed the gun at them, then they were in their rights.
If they came banging on the door at 2 in the morning, and, just like many dopers here would, he answered the door with his gun in his hand, and they shot him without giving him a chance, then they were not so much.
From the story, it appears they were not wearing body cams, so it is just their word we are going by. Is there any other corroborative evidence that shows that these officers were in a situation where they had reason to fear for their lives?
HA!
We have several video taped incidents (and who knows how many that weren’t) which demonstrably prove this NOT always the case.
And well, incompetence in a “profession” that actually says you can’t be too smart to join, is probably not something to be surprised about, but what is surprising is that there are almost never any repercussions for the officer.
We don’t know how many people are shot or killed by the police, because the police do not track and report that information. Many FOP branches actively fight against such data gathering. We have estimates. They say you are roughly an order of magnitude more likely to die at the hands of the police than to die by terrorism–and that risk is higher if you’re a black man.
But when you’re talking about death at the hands of your own government, I don’t think the rate or absolute number is what determines whether it’s a problem.
Imagine if the German state in 2017 had a problem with disproportionately killing Jewish people. How much would the significance of that problem turn on whether it happens in 1 out of 10,000 encounters versus 1 out of 1,000? Not very much, I don’t think. Any credible evidence of disproportionate killing of innocent Jewish people would rightly be regarded as a problem.
The same is true in the United States, given our history of state-sponsored terrorism against black people and the use of the police as a tool for enforcing racial segregation. People alive today have immediate ancestors killed because of false accusations of criminality stemming for social prejudice and fear of black men. To see it still happening, at any rate or level, is correctly viewed as outrageous.
The US has an long term history of public access and use of guns. If that’s the scenario and I’m a policeman it’s a tightrope situation. Having said this the culture of police response has changed.
A bit ago I was listening to “Dragnet” radio shows from the 50’s and creator Jack Webb was noted (unlike many other police and detective type shows of the time) for being very realistic with actual police procedure and taking the show plots directly from real life cases. In many cases drunk or distraught people and even aggressive criminals with guns would try be talked down and to throw away the weapon in a dialog before shooting started. I’m not saying Dragnet was 100% accurate but I think it accurately reflected the attitudes and procedures of how police dealt with armed individuals. The vast majority of the weapons situations on the show involved white people. As a side note as politically conservative as Webb was IRL he was very anti racial discrimination.
Beyond this as others have mentioned it seems the police (if white) often do not trust themselves to read or understand the the emotional reactions or attitudes of black people or others outside their racial demographic. These days the training is you see a gun waving your way in a threatening manner you kill the wielder immediately. If it’s just being carried you give a very short warning and if it’s not disposed of instantly you are free to shoot as here.
Current US society wants maximum access to powerful, deadly weapons. As long as that is the lay of the land nothing will change.
The police procedures of the 50s does not apply today because the criminals are more bolder nowadays, even suicidal.
This happened last night. No one died.
As far as I’m concerned, you point a gun at a cop, you don’t have any say in what they do to you.
Very well put.
You probably already know this, but just in case some reader stumbles across this post, I wouldn’t want them leaving with the wrong idea. Cover has got nothing to do with it. The police will shoot you pretty much just the same whether they’re behind cover or not.
Point a gun in their general direction and you can expect to get shot, repeatedly, more often than not. It doesn’t much matter if the gun is a toy / unloaded / not really pointed right at them or if they have a bullet proof vest on / solid cover / the whole department backing them up. And the courts, by and large, will rule it a justifiable shooting.
The real problems are;
Training
Societal Acceptance
Court Acceptance
Police are being trained to kill and are, for the most part, not being trained in necessary de-escalation skills. They’re taught to kill threats, not deal with them.
And unfortunately, we the American people, have allowed this to happen and all too often cheered it on.
Cite?
Can you be more specific? Are you saying that they are taught to shoot when there is imminent threat to great bodily harm or death? If so, you think that’s wrong? Or are you saying they’re taught to kill when there is a threat, but not a reasonable belief of an imminent threat to life or serious bodily injury? If the latter, I’d like a cite for that too.
You’re conflating what will happen, what ought to happen, and what’s legal.
But whether an officer sought cover or simply ran out into the street is absolutely legally relevant. Here’s one of many examples of it being analyzed:
The point of cover with respect to de-escalation is that officers tend to be able to think more carefully when they have an object between them and the suspect, whether that object is actually increasing their safety or not.
Another good passage: