UK police subdue a man who charges at them with a knife

boing
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Mr. “Expert” Debunker to you! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

in what way?

Except it isn’t. Even if you have a stabbing style knife (the one in the video wasn’t, nor are most), to fatally stab someone you have to stab deep enough to sever a major artery or do some serious internal damage, problem is things like the skull and rib cage aren’t that easy to actually stab through. people raise their arms to deflect stabs making getting a properly placed stab much much trickier then you are imagining.

If someone is brandishing a gun, chances are they have the required base knowledge to use it, unlike fighting with a knife. very few people are trained in edged weapons or even have the right kind of edge weapon. most knives are not made for killing.

They are trained not to in most countries for an even better reason. The 21ft rule is even considered a dangerous myth and called out in US police training literature and only refers to time to draw and discharge 2 bullets center mass, suggesting they unholster their firearm before getting closer to an assailant with an edged weapon. It has nothing whatsoever to do with lethality. The rule is about injury prevention, not which is more lethal, that is a common misconception but is false.

The average number of stabs in lethal stabbings is 8.8, because it really isn’t that easy. Most stab wounds end up being superficial. The mortality of stab patients admitted to intensive care is 5x less then gun shot victims, and the skew ratio of victims of each type of crime that die on site is even greater. These statistics can be looked up.

have you ever seen the kind of muscle and tissue damage a gun shot does from close range? compairing the two isn’t even remotly close. even multiple layers of heavy clothing can stop a lot of knife strikes. a close range shot can liquify tissue and shatter bone.

It actually is, similar to lethal nose strikes. By fantasy I mean that while there is a small small small shred of truth underneath, it has been misunderstood and misinterpreted and the training scenario is grossly out of line with reality.

That is the best course of action, I’ll agree there.

and wrong. more then RIFLES, handguns by far are the leader.

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it isn’t ridiculous or reductionist, it is one of the primary points of contention in most intelligent debates on lethal defense.

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I was always told that a fair fight is a result of poor planning. But that is military thinking. That being said, community policing is necessarily about protecting the community, or it should be. So it is reasonable to use the minimum amount of force required to stop or arrest the suspect. Probably, the person arrested here is normally just a resident of the community, until whatever circumstances led to him taking up the knife. Ideally, once the crisis is over, he will be again.

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That was the first video I have ever seen with police backing away from a threat. If I had 21 feet distance from a threat, I’d be working on getting more distance, not trying to engage.

Defaulting to defense is such an obvious defense that it should be discussed more.

The fact is that not all people with knives are trying to kill you, and treating them as such can make you into the murderer.

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I’d like to see him defend himself against a man armed with a banana.

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“In the US” should be stuck somewhere in the above. I looked on Monday to see where the counts were, and discovered that police in the US this year have extrajudicially executed over 1100 citizens while citizens had only managed to do the same to 68 police officers. “More than they should” strikes me as quite the understatement.

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This is an interesting read:

I Was A Cop In A Country With No Guns: 6 Startling Truths

Also, wheelie bins

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Dear Americans the stick that the man gets hit with is called a “truncheon”. A baton is what you pass on in a relay race.

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That’s what you get when you are dyslexic and can’t reliably make sure that what you have written is what you meant.

:confused: :confused: :confused:

What I actually meant was

Are you saying the police should have an automatic shoot to kill policy for all similar, life threatening situations?

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Over 950 deaths at the hands of the police during the same time period.

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The police cheated. They brought a fence to a knife fight. Running in to that seems to have taken the wind out of the knifeman’s sails.

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Plus points for landscape format. Minus points for hideous video artifacts.

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I heard a sheriff’s deputy say that most people the police encounter are normal people on the worst day of their lives.

It boggles the mind that we made the internet and have robots exploring Mars right now. But when it comes to a guy with a knife, our best idea is to hit him with a stick. That’s a 250,000 year regression in thinking.

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What if he’d had a banana?!?

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Obviously,you deal with it just like you would deal with any other fruit-based attack.

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What happened during the cut 15 or so seconds between the male officer hitting the guy and the female officer arriving to help?

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I was curious and checked the video again. Looks like British bobbies do indeed use a modern telescoping baton instead of the traditional cock-shaped wooden truncheon. Sad but understandable.

baton.jpg772×473 41.4 KB

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That and there are different terms across the Atlantic. For example, unless your flashlight is literally on fire, it isn’t a torch :wink:

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/244530.stm