Rick, I like you a lot, and you are a smart guy and you know buttloads about automobiles and machinery, but with respect I disagree with you here. I don’t just watch fencing, I am an experienced fencer; I fence with A-rated fencers and I know how fast they are. And I contend that any cop should be able to empty his magazine into one at the distance they were working with. Consider too that this was not a nice open piste but a cluttered living room. Fencing looks fast in its context when the fencer is prepared and everything is working right. Real life is crazy-fast and the guy with the gun is always going to win.
FWIW you’re thinking of sabre, not foil. You could hold a foil like that, but you’d lose really badly. A smallsword (which a foil is based on) has no edge, only a needle point. Here is a picture of one of my favourite real smallswords.
“Now, let’s not go pointing fingers about who broke into whose house and who shot who, and we should just agree that it was a terrible, unavoidable tragedy.”
The guy never had the slightest opportunity to comply with the police demands. Their first shout of “get on the ground” occurred right as shots were fired; the next, after he was dead. If that’s the best the police can do in this type of situation, then this type of tactic needs to be discontinued. I don’t care if there was a mountain of heroin in the next room. If you don’t see a gun and a suspect is not moving toward you, your first instinct shouldn’t be to kill them. At the least, that officer should be charged with manslaughter and never be in the lawful possession of a badge or firearm again.
That dead guy could have been any person posting here, had the SWAT team come into their own home in the middle of the night. That he was a drug user is completely irrelevant.
The police broke into the victims house, with a search warrant, and shot him. I didn’t think that was contested. Thanks for clearing up something that wasn’t an issue at all.
I won’t speculate on what would have happened if it had actually been a sword, but people armed with firearms have definitely been grievously wounded or killed by people armed with thrusting or slashing weapons.
The real world isn’t a video game and killing is never cut and dry or easy. I can say from personal experience, human beings can continue being threatening long after being filled up with bullets. Things would probably be easier for everyone involved if guns and death really did work like they do in video games, but the truth of the matter is it is usually a lot uglier with a lot more suffering. What that all means is, just because you can be reasonably sure you could pump someone full of bullets doesn’t mean you have any degree of certainty over whether that will eliminate them as a threat.
On the flip side, sometimes healthy high school teenagers will fall out of the back of a pickup truck parked in a school parking lot and die on impact. Sometimes people shot in the leg will bleed out and die very quickly, sometimes a punch to the head will be fatal. Then sometimes a bullet to the head won’t. There’s no way to speak with certainty about someone’s ability to kill someone else in a given instant.
Also, in Baltimore last year or so a guy did actually defend his home with a sword. I believe it was a katana (I would assume a genuine carbon steel blade and not a stainless steel replica), and he essentially slashed once at the burglar and it severed his hand and cut into his chest. Burglar fell over and went into shock and was dead by the time emergency workers arrived.
I will say that my first thought on this whole situation is that no-knock warrants should only be issued when there is a reasonable belief that they are necessary for the health and safety of the police serving the warrant. I don’t agree with the current public policy stance that they should be issued just to protect evidence.
I don’t believe a no-knock warrant is never justified, I just don’t think it is good public policy to issue them anytime you think someone might be prone to flushing evidence. There are some search warrants that must be issued, and that would be in situations that are intrinsically very dangerous for police, for those I can see justification for issuing a no-knock warrant. I don’t know everything that went down here, but it looks like if the police had actually done their jobs properly they never would have needed to do anything that they did–they would have grabbed this guy coming or going into his home and then searched the place. They weren’t going into a building they expected to house a large criminal operation protected by armed guards, they were wanting to search a residence that to their knowledge had one resident who they could have detained outside probably any day of the week maybe even multiple times in a given day.
Once the events went down, I do think it’s difficult for me to see how the police would actually get convicted of anything. The SDMB is notorious for having a lot of shrill, foam-at-the-mouth types when it comes to any police action. In the real world a real jury is going to have at least several jurors that intrinsically respect police and intrinsically disrespect or even detest drug users, let alone drug dealers. I think it’d be a very difficult case to prosecute and win conviction, for that reason alone I’m not surprised no charges have been filed.
Outside of the courtroom, my opinion is the police officer was trigger happy and shouldn’t have shot the guy. I do not think the police lied to a judge, and from all that I’m seeing people in this thread are either deliberately misstating how the warrant was obtained or are confused, but there doesn’t appear to be anything indicating deception was used to acquire the warrant. I think people who are saying the police officer should be charged with murder (and premeditated murder–which in many states is a higher class of murder with greater penalties) don’t know the definition of premeditated murder.
Do I think the police officer should be punished? Yeah, in my gut I feel he acted negligently and should be punished as appropriate for someone who commits involuntary manslaughter / negligent homicide / whatever the statute is called in the state in question. However, in the real world people aren’t convicted and sentenced based on my gut. A prosecutor would have to establish the specifics of the negligence and convince a jury that the police officers negligence was serious enough to justify a conviction. My understanding is that in most jurisdictions the negligence has to be egregious to uphold a conviction. (i.e. there is a difference if I plow through a school zone at 50 mph and kill a kid and going through 5 mph over the speed limit and killing a kid who trips and falls under the wheels of my car.)
These high-octane raids make it so, though, or at the very least make it far more likely than a more sedate approach. The police created a situation that was vastly more dangerous than required and I’ve yet to hear any good reason for it except the lame notion that the drugs might get flushed. Oooooh… flushed… big deal.
I wasn’t talking about the emotional / moral aspects of “deciding to use lethal force.” That is very often not hard or easy, but instinctual when it is done by police or soldiers (where the emotion comes in is after the fact.) I more meant that it’s physically difficult to cease someone’s life through violence, I’m not saying it’s hard to pull a trigger, I’m just saying that sometimes things can keep being alive even with several large bullet holes in them. (And sometimes not–my point being you never know how much it will take to bring something or someone down.)
Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit, I take it? The part being contested is whether we should assign blame for this death (“point fingers”) to the people responsible.
Hey, congratulations, but I don’t care. It wasn’t necessary for the police to create the situation where putting “several large bullet holes” in someone was called for. I’ve no objection to using lethal force when necessary, and I recognize that even a wounded person can pose a danger, but why where they in the house with guns drawn in the first place (and “they had a warrant” is not sufficient)? What danger were they expecting? When executing the raid, did they give the resident a chance to surrender? Was there any danger at all other than what the police brought in with them?
Okay Bryan, let’s look at this a little differently…
If we remove the tragic results from this particular case, would you still have a problem with the cops breaking into the suspected drug house in the middle of the night?
If they had arrested the guy for having the paraphernalia and empty meth packages, without harming him, would you argue the entry and arrest was improper?
They are the motherfucking police. They’re supposed to be in charge. “Oh, things got out of hand; dangerous times” is the excuse that they are least of anyone allowed access to. If they’re scared, they should get dogs and not sign up to be the people with Protect and Serve on their shirts. Their job is to execute the search warrant without fucking killing anybody; is that really that god damned restrictive? They’re relieved from the second responsibility to the extent necessary to avoid themselves being killed, and no further. And even under those circumstances, they better be really really sure they’re in danger.
Being a police officer is a tough job, no question. Scary, often thankless, dangerous, all that. But that is not an excuse to shoot a guy on sight because he has a golf club. It’s certainly not an excuse to shoot a guy you weren’t even looking for, who hasn’t done anything wrong, and from whom you had no reason to be expecting a risk before you broke into his home, just because he has a golf club several paces away from you in the dark in his own home that you just broke into.
The OP asks a really good question. Under any circumstances are you willing to allow that the police officer has a fucking responsibility to keep his finger off of the trigger? An actual person is dead for reasons that he had very little control over. To the extent that he had control over them, he behaved in a very reasonable way. They shot him dead for it, when under the circumstances their job is to do anything else.
Jesus. You’re a cop. If the guy’s a killer swordsman, you know what? Take a little bit of a risk. Let him take one step before you blow him away. If that’s scary to you, if you can’t deal with that level of danger before you resort to killing people, quit your fucking job. When the apparent odds that the person can kill you are that low, your job is to play the numbers and if it comes to it, get killed rather than start shooting. I mean, otherwise, when a bloody and incoherent person runs up to you on the street, you can shoot them in the head at 50 feet because maybe the zombie movies have come true after all. That’s about the level of gravity of the threat we’re talking about.
Yes, there is still a problem, because the method of executing this warrant would have resulted in the death of an innocent party at some point in the future.What I am saying is that this policy is high risk, flawed, and so when an assessment is made whether or not to serve a warrant in thie manner then this should be explicit in the papers and the specific means to reduce the risks to everyone concerned should also be made explicit.
The justification for this method of serving a warrant should be a lot more robust too.
What you do not know, and I also do not, is just how many near misses there have been.
The risk could have been reduced if tazers had been used, and we also need to consider if this form of entry was necessary at all since it was possible to observe the house and arrest the suspect when they left it.
The entire policy of obtaining a warrant, risk assessment, justification and the use of deadly force are soo so flawed that this needs to be reviewed, along with the performance of the individuals who should face charges for their negligence at the very least.
What’s your deal? If you’d actually read my few posts in this thread you’d note I wasn’t defending the raid, and actually explicitly said that not only do I not think this raid should have happened I don’t support no-knock warrants except in a rare subset of instances. I guess your lack of reading ability has caused you to note a small part of what I was saying and project some loud mouthed response at it, grats.
Unlike you I like to look at the whole issue, instead of just spouting the same thing over and over again mindlessly. As I said in my original post, I think the raid shouldn’t have happened. I think the raid should never have been approved although I recognize it is currently widely practiced policy to allow these raids, my position being we need to rethink that as a society.
My point about the difficulty in killing someone was only made in direct response to something Una Persson said, namely that in the real world a guy with a gun will always beat a guy with a sword. I was just pointing out that in the real world people don’t fall over instantly like the enemies in a first person shooter, and in the real world people with guns have been harmed or even killed by persons with stabbing or thrusting weapons. Of course, in our scenario the person who was shot was wielding a golf club, making that part an aside. I’m not sure if you’re stupid or just new to conversation, but sometimes in conversations brief asides will come up when things are said that take the conversation in a slight tangent. They’ll be discussed briefly (or sometimes at more length) and then the main conversation gets rolling again. People who are familiar with human conversation are typically familiar with this fact, idiots like yourself apparently are not.
I agree that changes would be beneficial. However, we need to remember that these no-knock searches have been sanctioned by our society, the highest courts and presumably, the U.S. Constitution. They are probably here to stay.
Less that lethal weapons would be a great improvement, except when the officers unknowingly confront a room full of AK-47 armed dealers. Sure, that’s the extreme. Finding a point where lethal vs. non-lethal force is required for a particular event would be a matter of hindsight only.
Any system should be dynamic and constantly reviewed with an eye to making it safer and more effective and designed to avoid these tragedies. No one is arguing that this isn’t necessary.
In a world where I was the one setting policy I’d basically say no-knock warrants should be issued in these scenarios:
Warrant must be executed at a certain time, due to the needs of the investigation. It must be demonstrated that executing the warrant at any other time would cause material harm to the investigation.
The time when warrant must be executed coincides with a time frame in which person(s) are expected to be in the location being searched.
Situation is such that any persons resident at the address cannot be detained outside of the address at some time prior to executing the warrant without causing harm to the investigation. Ex: say there are 7 people living in a house used as a meth lab, the 7 people are never all out of the house at the same time. If the police just tried to detain each person as they came and went, it could cause suspicion by the persons still inside and they may start destroying evidence or arming themselves in expectation of trouble.
It is determined that there is a greater than average probability that any persons inside the residence will defend it violently in response to a normally executed police search warrant. Examples: It is known or suspected a person with a violent criminal history will be inside the location being searched. It is known or suspected the location is a “Major Criminal Enterprise” and thus by its nature innately likely to be defended by violent force."
All of the above criteria would have to be met to issue a no-knock warrant.