All they got to do is set their phasers on stun. Come on man, it’s not that hard. I seen Captain Kirk do it on TV lots of times.
I understand all of that. I am a veteran of the military and served in the first Persian Gulf War. Granted, I didn’t fire my M-16 while under duress, but…I still think that not only could police officers make better decisions when shooting someone (it was a 15 year old kid charging them with knives, no?) but that police departments should implement more training in terms of better quick analysis of a potentially lethal situation and look for a fast, non-lethal solution.
Especially when they knew it was a kid with knives. Not some AK-47 spouting gangster. From the article, it sounds to me like not only did the police have an accurate understanding of the circumstances, but they knew they were dealing with a teenager beforehand.
There was no need for this kid to die, however, I completely understand the role of police and the fact that sometimes you simply react to a situation. Your training is supposed to guide your immediate, impulsive reactions, and I think they possibly could have done a better job here.
Of course, I’m going by a media report, so I don’t know what really happened.
And mostly, if you shoot someone like that in the legs, except maybe when they are on PCP or something, yes, it will subdue them because they can no longer advance on you (but they will live, which is a better alternative).
I just think that shooting for center mass in this situation (as reported) was extreme. Maybe not. I would love to hear the policeman’s side of the story.
Anyone want to jump in and say what the marksmanship requirements are if you are a LEO? Do you just have to put your bullets in the general vicinity of the target?
I don’t think anything I’ve read linked to in this thread is as inflammatory as the account I heard recently on…I think it was on the NPR show The World (I subscribe to a lot of current events podcasts and get them mixed up). A correspondent from Greece said that witnesses reported that the policeman first insulted the boy with epithets that she couldn’t repeat on the radio, and then exposed himself. The boy then threw a plastic bottle at the policeman, who responded by shooting twice. Witnesses disagreed as to where those two shots were aimed exactly.
Ah ha, I found it. It’s about 4 minutes long.
Are you kidding? It’s freaking December. weather.com says it’s 63 degrees in Athens.
That sounds nice, really.
You have to remember that there is a serious political element to this too.
Greece has a very large left-right divide, with a strong anarchist movement, mainly centered around the colleges. ATM the right-wing government are weak, and the riots may force them to exit government, which is why there is such an effort to keep the riots going. The trade unions are planning to strike over the next few days, which will further damage the government.
Alot of the motivation for the riots is to change the government.
Only just seen this thread, but let me add a couple of points (as one of the few / only Doper to live in Greece).
People are right to point out the importance of the dictatorship under the colonels and the student massacre at the Polytechnic in '73, but these are just ongoing events in a story that goes back as least as far as the Civil War. This immediately followed WW2, and loosely was between royalists and communists, but more widely between the right and the left. If not caused by, it was at least exacerbated by British and American meddling. It can be seen as the first battle of the Cold War (and saw some of the first wide-spread use of napalm). Terrible atrocities were committed by both sides. The country has yet to come to terms with this or close the door on its history.
People are also correct to say that the country is in a bad way (although where isn’t?) Bad economy, corruption scandals (the government along with the Orthodox church seem to be acting as a property development company) etc etc.
Add to this that the Greeks are very passionate about politics (they invented it, after all!). The average Greek is far more politically aware than most other countries I’ve been in.
So yes, Alexis’ shooting, whatever the details, was merely the spark that lit the fuse on many underlying tensions.
ETA I should add that the rioters, and certainly the looters, form a minority of the protests - although they gather almost all the headlines. Much of the protesting has been entirely peaceful, and has involved people from all walks of life and age groups.
These things are just sparks that set off long smoldering discontent amongst a large populace. The riots after the Rodney King thing were more about the conditions in South Central.
The Greek youths were particularly upset about the poorly supported educational system.
I understand that some states have statewide standards, but where I am (Washington state) it is up to the individual department.
Our rangemaster does a variety of different drills and qualifications. For a basic PPC course (just stand and shoot at the silhouette), he usually requires a minimum of 80%, with no rounds off the target at all.
Of course, what you can shoot at the range really doesn’t translate to what will happen when your life is on the line. It helps by training your muscles to react a certain way, but accuracy always drops a great deal in a real shoot-out.
Possibly because they’re not trained marksmen? Just because cops carry guns it doesn’t mean they spend any significant amount of time using them. I wouldn’t expect a beat cop to be an expert marksman any more than I would expect a cabin steward to be an expert fireman. Part of the job, but something they train for now and again rather than all the time.
If the average cop takes a shot at someone’s leg in a stressful situation they’ll almost certainly miss. Even if they do manage to hit them, chances are it will go straight. Either can result in a dangerous ricochet. I’d hate to get killed because a cop 600 yards up the street either didn’t want to go for a chest shot.
One thing that comes to my mind on such riots (and similar lones, like the regular scheduled ones on 1 May in Berlin and selected other large German cities): we can be proud of our modern, democratic societies.
Really.
Throwing rocks and firebombs at police armed with guns shows a charming degree of trust in the state. Especially in those who profess themselves anarchists.
I think that’s also a strong element of the cultural divide between Europe and the US here. As obvious from the US dopers responses in this and other threads, in the US a cop shooting a teenager would have been normal occurrence, because the general sentiment there seems to be “A cop has to defend his own life first, and whoever gets shot was probably a criminal to begin with (otherwise he wouldn’t be in trouble with the police)”.
In Europe, the general expectation of the population is that the Police is “your friend and helper” and don’t shoot at the population unless there’s no other solution possible at all. In this case, the accusation towards the cop is that he shot the teenager in cold blood, when his own life wasn’t in real danger. Yes, it’s dangerous to have bottles or rocks thrown at you - but it’s not life-threatening enough to justify shooting people. (Of course, in the US the demonstrants would also be armed and shooting with guns, not simply throwing rocks and plastic bottles).
I haven’t read all the linked articles upthread, but wanted to add what the foreign correspondent said as background several days back:
about a decade ago (!), after serious trouble with the police and brutality and corruption. a decision was made (with a commission) to re-evaluate the role of police in society, the image of itself it should have, to modernize training methods (it makes a huge difference whether you train police in de-escalation or on how to bet batons onto heads when dealing with protests that turn into violence) and generally turn things around, clean up and start anew.
However, none of this happened. Plus when the politicans responsible for the Police now make promises the natives know how widespread corrupt the politicans themselves are, and don’t trust them anymore.
Although we should remember that the German police needed an unnecessary death, too (Benno Ohnesorg) to move onto the new strategy of de-escalation instead of bashing heads.
As a veteran of numerous demonstrations up and down the East Coast, I feel quite confident in saying this has never happened. Where did you get this impression?
It’s interesting how the police go from being friends and helpers in paragraph 1 to being corrupt, brutal, and mistrusted in paragraph 2.
Okay, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek exaggeration. But the impression from both US news and dopers is that a large amount of the US population is armed because they feel it necessary to shoot at everything that threatens them. Isn’t a high number of cops in the US killed each year by being shot at?
In Europe, not many normal citizens carry or own guns. Those who belong to shooting clubs or are hunters are usually the 40-to-60 year olds, who are less likely to go outside rioting. So our police are less likely to shoot back defending their own life not only because they have a different image, but also because there is far smaller chance that the citizens will be shooting at them with guns.
Because in paragraph 1, I talk about the image and general idea(l) in Europe, in paragraph 2 I talk about the current real situation. Of course, there are corrupt cops everywhere, and bad cops. But even with a corrupt bad force, the image of “we don’t shoot nilly-willy at citizens” is deeply ingrained, because otherwise the riots would’ve been stopped with dozens of injured and dead protesters. It’s not that the police isn’t armed with guns, is that even bad police don’t use guns as lightly mentally as US police seems to accept (going by what Dopers say).
Constanze, do you think we live in the Mad Max films, or something? For what it’s worth, living in and near New York City my whole life (which I think many Europeans picture as being fairly similar to its portrayal in, say, Escape from New York), I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real, non-antique gun held by anybody other than a police officer or member of the military. (Well, I have in Israel, but that’s not relevant here.) In areas where hunting is popular, gun ownership is much more common, but people aren’t constantly waving guns around whenever someone insults them or bumps their car while parking.
According to this website dedicated to memorializing US law enforcement officers who’ve died in the line of duty, 51 police officers died due to gunfire in 2006. (The number this year, with a little more than two weeks to go, is only 35.) In 2006, there were about 861,000 police officers in the US, meaning that 0.000059% of them died in the line of duty due to shooting. The website, which defines ‘died in the line of duty’ fairly freely*, says that 153 officers, or 0.00017% of the total police force, died (of all causes) in the line of duty in 2006. While I don’t know where you’re from and can’t give you parallel numbers for your country, do these numbers strike you as being incredibly high?
*Including, for example, an officer who died of a heart attack while jogging with his unit for physical fitness training.
I know that Escape from New York is not real. But I thought that the many Dopers who post about being robbed at gunpoint in New York and other big cities (and dozens of posters chiming in with “happened to me too”), and the many Dopers who say that they carry or own weapons for purpose of self-defence were somewhat representantive of the whole. Skewed a little bit, since Dopers are to a certain degree self-selecting, but not completly atypical as only the NRA members (or only an Amish congregation) would be.
No, they sound low. But I was going by the many news reports Dopers link to when an officer is shot suddenly and unexpected; by those Dopers who are in Law Enforcment advising people how to react when being stopped; to other sites and news about how the wrong movement when your car is flagged down by the police will make it likely that you get shot, because cops will think you’re reaching for a weapon and shoot first, etc.
And I’m from Germany. I don’t have numbers on hand - I would have to dig them up - but from the normal news, it’s very unusual to have guns fired at all. The recent news item in Bavaria is an attack on the police chief of Passau with a knife* (they suspect a right-wing extremist, because he was going hard on them, and had received threats).
- The knife apparently was lying around because the police chief used it to cut Christmas stollen, so the assailant seems to have been badly prepared.
[Hijack]That’s so weird how you always encounter something right after you learn about it for the first time. Just yesterday a girl from Germany at my school was giving stollen to the teachers as a Christmas present.[/Hijack]
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris