Have the police stopped carrying batons/nightsticks?
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There, I watched someone die to check, thanks.
No, they weren’t rushing in any reasonable sense of the word. They were walking at the same slow, lethargic pace as they had been the whole video.
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Was the officer being threatened? No? Then what is the justification for deadly force here? Failure to follow orders? Nope… Contempt of cop.
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They still use them. Loaded into magazines. In a gun. And they’re made out of lead.
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Note… the top picture is from GSU, not tech. Just FYI.
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You could start by using they/them in a grammatically correct manner. It’s really not hard. The singular “they” is already a staple of modern English in all sorts of situations where “he/she” and its equivalents are needlessly cumbersome. If there’s ambiguity in a given sentence, swap the pronoun for their name (look, it’s a singular “they”!) and move on. Your remarks would be less unwieldy and no more poorly understood when written thusly:
While I’m willing to use the pronouns that they are more comfortable with, because this is not the type of asshole I am and I recognize that they had a personal challenge I cannot fathom, I find their choice of “they/them” unfortunate for a slew of reasons and probably won’t reliably be able to. More likely I will construct my sentences in a way that foregoes the use of pronouns for any of them by using their names or describing each they when referring to them.
Okay, you’re not the type of asshole who intentionally misgenders people. But apparently you’re fine with calling a suicidal trans person “deeply disturbed” because they had “difficulty coming to grips with the reality of things” (what “things” would those be? Grammar? The non-existent gender binary?) and think they had some sort of self-aggrandizing persecution complex which means we don’t have to use the pronouns they wanted us to use to describe them. Gotcha.
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A recent update via the AP indicates the cop was pretty new, and so probably really inexperienced dealing with any kind of confrontation at all. Not excusing. More criticism of training.
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“People fail, to the level of their training” is a mantra I heard growing up.
How can we teach de-escalation? How can we teach a fuller definition of situational awareness that is less tactical maybe?
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Things would not go well if the police came to my house and asked if there were any weapons. I firmly believe everything can be used as a weapon (of varying effectiveness) and if I was running on adrenaline I would probably glibly say yes.
But to your point, it does seem silly that for a medical emergency the priority of the police is their own safety and not the people they are called to help. It seems more and more they seem to only serve and protect themselves.
Police culture needs to change and as many has pointed out that starts with better training. I would just like to add that professional psychological support would be helpful as well. I think more mentally stable police would be better for everyone.
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‘“Nobody wants to hurt you, man,” an officer says.’
Then… don’t? I get that they made at least some effort to de-escalate the situation, but nobody forced them to shoot. There were lots of other options and they weren’t in imminent danger. Which makes me wonder why they even bothered trying to talk the student down if they weren’t actually going to make their best effort to avoid shooting. I think I know the answer, and I don’t like it.
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The problem as I see it, is the current generation of police being obsessed with their safety over that of everyone else. If often people have to die because of this obsession, they’re okay with it.
It would be helpful to find the cause of this as I don’t think that they were so terrified.
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In this case we can’t ask Scout. 
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This.
Also, with more than one cop on the responding call, a bit of “I’ll grab the knife hand, you take care of the rest” would have gone a long way as far as a hand to hand response, or even with a tonfa/billy club.
Or pepper spray. Hell, even a taser.
So no. I think that this could have been handled without giving the guy what he wanted, and endangering everyone else in the area as well (i.e. using a gun).
From what I’ve heard elsewhere, this guy left multiple suicide notes, so he wasn’t there to hurt cops, he was there for the cops to hurt him. I’m betting that some de-escalation, and maybe some sitting down to talk to the guy could have gone a really long way… Maybe not, but we’ll never know now.
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BTW: y’all realise that those mass-shooter “shelter in place” protocols give the police the authority to lock down any campus at whim?
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Yes, and from St. Louis we need to add Old White Ladies Wearing Red and White.
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