Seems to me this is what the Taser was made for. Someone said he had been Tasered once - well - do it again.
I know there is a 21ft rule they teach cops. That is, the distance it takes someone to close on you and stab you before you can shoot them is ~21 feet. (It’s really scarey to watch training videos of how fast that can happen.) But some fat dude on hilly terrain is not going to get to you while you already have your gun out and aimed. Even if he was waving knives around he wasn’t an immediate threat.
Still the way they write the laws to protect cops, its damn hard to get them called out for a “bad shoot” if you actively whip out a weapon. If this was a private citizen they would be looking at jail time and a civil case.
Compare US and UK policing. If you’re not in the UK and you’re unaware of it, look at the recent story of the murder of Lee Rigby Two terrorists deliberately murdered a randomly chosen off-duty soldier outside a barracks. In a most unusual case, the two of them then stood over his body in the street, clearly armed and dangerous, and in a street of civilians. Armed police responded and shot them. They shot them quickly and efficiently, with few rounds and without killing them or even majorly wounding them. They then applied first aid and apprehended the suspects.
Now if we’re to have armed police, that’s how it should go. Proportionate and necessary force was used, to resolve what really was a hazardous situation for the public. No more force was used than necessary, and when it had been used, they stopped applying it. This is how it should go, if it has to, not this redneck hobo-coursing for sport.
If you are in a group, armed with long arms and recent training, you have a massive tactical advantage. You can have a standoff and you can move from that to an arrest with little chance of anyone needing to shoot anything. To think that the only tactical option the police had, even for a suspect armed with a knife (the police chose the distance, and the numbers) was to shoot them immediately dead is firstly just plain stupid from a tactical standpoint, and secondly immoral in failing their duty to not kill citizens (“Serve and Protect”?) when not necessary to do so.
Five officers, tasers, bean bag rounds, a police dog and stun grenades are not enough to subdue a single man with two knives?
Just for comparison: German police shot 8 people to death and injured 20 in 2012. Exactly 36 shots were fired at humans - in the whole of Germany, a country of more than 80 million people. (link below, german)
Reading such things strengthens my opinion that in the US human life is cheap. What are your civil rights, your freedom of speech etc., your constitution worth if you can get killed willy-nilly without repercussions by the government. The US society has it’s priorities wrong. The human right to life and bodily integrity is the most important right and it’s treated as the least important one in the USA. Dead people don’t have any rights.
Interestingly, US police are trained to always shoot to kill if they are using firearms. Police in European countries have been known to shoot to wound. I have seen interesting arguments between people with law enforcement experience on opposite sides of the Atlantic about this. The Americans say that you should never fire a gun at someone you don’t intend to kill, as even “shooting to wound” is often lethal, while the Europeans think the Americans are killing people unnecessarily.
I don’t think it is a training issue- some of the people who said that “shoot to wound” was on their escalation of force ladder were people whose law-enforcement training had been for guard or military-police duty as conscripts. I would be somewhat surprised if a Danish (IIRC) army conscript had more law-enforcement training than a US policeman- they’re only there for 12 months, and have to train to do other things as well.
It is, however true that in Britain only a few officers who volunteer and go through specialist training carry guns. So I imagine a British firearms officer does have better firearms training than a typical US policeman.
Given the general standards of police marksmanship (range time costs money, and ‘pistols under pressure’ produces severely mediocre results more or less regardless of experience, while heavier weapons have both image problems and massive tissue damange potential), I’d be inclined to treat anyone shot and not killed as a nice bonus, certain irreparable injuries probably excepted; but raise my sternest skepticism eyebrow at ‘attempt nonlethal force with firearms’ as a general tactic.
If you have sufficient leisure to achieve a reliable nonlethal-but-disabling shot with a gun, you are almost definitely still at the point where using one would be excessive force. The trouble is how quickly some cops voluntarily rush to get there.
Concern troll fails again because there is no way to know what will get you shot. Raise your hands or not? Stay on the ground or stand up? Turn toward the officer or not? Say something or not? Smile or look upset? Stop being deaf, diabetic, having a stroke, needing a cane to stand, wearing earbuds, and carrying things in your hands? “Come here!” or “Don’t move!” when the policeman is shouting both? There are examples of people being shot, choked, tased, pepper-sprayed, etc. for all of these things. I just watched a video of a man in diabetic shock getting kicked through his car window and another of a paralyzed man getting pulled out of his wheelchair and slammed face first into the ground. Booyah, right?
I’ve read the descriptions and watched the video and I see this a bit differently. The man was told to lay down so, like any of us, rather than lay down facing downhill over some rough rocks, he turned around to lay down and that’s when they shot him… in the back.
“You’re right, I hold the police to higher standards than ordinary members of the public. I expect the police to put themselves at some risk of injury, rather than shoot dead a member of the public, like that gentleman in the video even if the person they’re trying to arrest is mouthy and threatening.”
The police were at risk of being stabbed to death, so they shot their attacker. You write like you’re soft and have no real experience with life-threatening violence. Congratulations on avoiding it, by the way. So, let me drop some facts on you:
Sergeant Dennis Tueller, of the Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department wondered how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover 21 feet (6.4 m), so he timed volunteers as they raced to stab the target. He determined that it could be done in 1.5 seconds. A defender with a gun has a dilemma. If he shoots too early, he risks being charged with murder. If he waits until the attacker is definitely within striking range so there is no question about motives, he risks injury and even death. The Tueller experiments quantified a “danger zone” where an attacker presented a clear threat.
I’m not going to follow your fallacy of moving the goalpost, with regard to the knife-wielding threat “trying to exist.” I would win, and you would move the goalpost, again.
[quote=“Cat_Shannon, post:33, topic:26636”]
I have noticed one common thread in the arguments against my perspective, here. None of you seem to care if the men and women who volunteer to protect your communities suffered any injury, or are in the least concerned for their welfare[/quote]
You’re right, I hold the police to higher standards than ordinary members of the public. I expect the police to put themselves at some risk of injury, rather than shoot dead a member of the public, like that gentleman in the video even if the person they’re trying to arrest is mouthy and threatening.
_ “that attacker” _ → that innocent member of the public
_ “those who volunteer” _ → those who are paid a salary to protect the public
The function of the police is to resolve those kind of situations without loss of life - if they can’t do that they must be stripped of their privilege to wear the police uniform and to hold firearms, they must be jailed for manslaughter, which is clearly what took place.
There’s the subsidiary issue that the man who was slaughtered by the police was causing no actual problem other than trying to exist; he was being harassed under a law banning “illegal camping” that could only affect homeless people. You can imagine that being homeless is stressful - he’s probably hungry - given the correlation between homelessness and mental disease, he could well have been suffering from a condition such as schizophrenia and therefore not fully comprehending the situation that he found himself in. Shooting the man dead was the wrong response, the people who did it need to be brought to justice themselves, and the system that places the guns in the hands of those morons needs to be reformed so these events can never be repeated.
If I’m not mistaken, that shotgun with the yellow furniture appears to be Taser International’s X12. It only fires Taser’s own electrified rounds. The shotgun firing the beanbag rounds has what looks like a strip of yellow electrical tape for
Why was the officer with the less lethal option behind the officer with a rifle?
That’s feel good fuzzies. PR. Legally they are under no obligation. If you’re screaming your head off you’re being murdered in your house, he/she is under no obligation to bust into your home and save you. This is one reason why some people take an interest in their self defense.
