Telling. “Fuck this guy”.
Very telling.
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Sadly, nobody official.
OK. I know you like to joke and all, but shouldn’t humor have some connection to current reality? /s
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Due to the lack of data from before living memory, about 1920.
Oh come on. They thought that guy was Bonnie and Clyde. Easy mistake,
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De nada. 
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I know this has been replied to eight times already, I just had to add that the day a British policeman says “truck with guns” I shall emigrate. “ARU”, “Armed response unit”, perhaps. But calling out an ARU for a man with a knife? Unless he has actually stabbed someone and is at large, be a laughing stock down the station.
Our local police force didn’t even send out armed officers to a report of a man with a gun wandering around near the bypass. One of the secrets of successful policing is to defuse incidents.
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I wish you would. We seem to have 17 million idiots who think they voted for it - so instead of being told what to do by a council of 28 countries from the same geographical area, we’re going to be told what to do by the Chinese, the Qataris and the Indians. Which would be funny if so many of those 17 million didn’t share the attitude to non-white people that seems to be part of the US police mindset.
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The guards are pretty similar to the UK’s police in this respect. The frontline force is unarmed, but armed support is available upon requirement. And similar to the UK, the appropriate response to a troubled individual who isn’t posing an immediate (not just hypothetical threat, an immediate threat) to anyone, is not a lethal response.
This difference between “hypothetical threat” and “immediate threat” does appear to make up the bulk of where “us outsiders” think your police actions look crazy. A person with a weapon is a concern, but “possession of an offensive weapon” is not prescribed as “immediate on-the-spot execution”. There should be no lethal response other than to an immediate an active threat-to-life. But in this case, the police acted like there was never any alternative. Someone reported a man with a knife - we must kill him. Strikes us as a little more Judge Dread than reality calls for.
The appropriate quote here is “the Garda Síochána will succeed not by force of arms or numbers, but on their moral authority as servants of the people”. While the Irish generally don’t appreciate being compared to the brits, the guards are a lot less American, and a lot more Peelian.
(I only throw this out there because the direct implication was called for. We might deploy “trucks with guns”. We don’t execute on sight. A lethal response is always, always, always, the final option, never the first.)
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So basically, you’re saying: American cops kill people because we make it an option for them.
I can agree with that. American cops put down so many people, you’d think that the majority of our population are lame horses.
But really, it would seem it’s the other way around and that our cops are just untrained rabid dogs.
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Is he by any chance a dark skinned gentleman?
It’s always an option. It is here, it is there. That, I don’t actually have a problem with.
The important question is what other options are exercised first. From a (vast) distance, the US police seem to operate under a mentality of “we must end this now”. The idea of such an encounter stretching out 15 minutes while a non-lethal resolution is sought, seems alien.
Here, we’d expect the first responders to work to contain the situation, with the goal of diffusing it. More will arrive. Once you have that support, overwhelming the situation becomes an option.
I honestly have no problem with american police being armed. You have enough armed nutters that it’d be silly not to. But at face value, this article/video seems to indicate that lethal force was the first response & foregone conclusion, rather than a defensive move. The first option, and not the last.
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Just examples - but here are two such examples:
I have no doubt that in the second one, if a member of the public was threatened he’d be shot, but they weren’t and he wasn’t.
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Just like this then -
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I was actually going to use that example, but I tend to ramble - so I write my rambling comment, and then figure out which half to delete before inflicting it on others 
In that incident, there were no injuries, the gentleman was arrested under the mental health act, and taken to a “secure mental health facility”. The “wall of flesh” looks befitting of a Benny Hill sketch, but it works.
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Again, why aren’t we training and equipping police with sasumata? Just about every incident of “mentally disturbed man with knife” could be resolved without killing the subject and with minimal risk to fraidy-cat popo. It’s only 700 year old technology.
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This kind of police action is something you’d witness under: Idi Amin, Momo Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and countless other dictators. This is America now, imagine America with Drumpf at the helm. Truly disgusting and WRONG on every level what those cop did to that disabled man.
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Initially read that as Satsuma which can also be offered as a de-escalation device.
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Inadequate enthusiasm in boot-licking can also be a capital offence, but it varies state by state.
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A well-armed asshole with virtual immunity to prosecution.
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