2916

The fact that Europeans may deal with knives in other ways doesn’t mean that they always deal with them with the same level of success as if they had guns. I assume that, at least sometimes, dealing with knives means not being able to save the victim from serious death or harm. Guns aren’t perfect, either of course, but the key issue is was the gun a better tool to try and improve the odds that the aggressor was stopped? I personally don’t know the answer, but I’m not going to jump out there and guarantee the victim’s parents that a taser would have done just as well or better.

2917

I wanted to try to answer some of the questions I had and found this commentary interesting.

EDIT: To clarify, this isn’t meant as an argument or rebuttal to anything, I just thought it relevant to the questions I was asking out loud.

2918

Devil’s advocate, they roll up on a girl with a knife threatening other girls, they think gunpoint should make her stop, except she didn’t, so they shoot. That’s my question, what the hell was so infuriating that she would ignore cops with guns drawn and continue to attack?

2919

I do think we need a core of folks who will do what is necessary in violent situation, you need a SWAT team or the equivalent for those situations, and regular cops need to be trained in riot control, but regular police cannot be trusted with firearms.

In situations where it’s likely to look threatening to officers, call in the heavy squad, but they should have to be called in specifically.

The big issue with abolishing the police, is that what will replace the police will likely be some form of might makes right, with even less accountability. Think privatized cops.

2920

Batons are considered deadly force, and every department I worked with (20 or so) took them away from officers in the wake of the Rodney King beating, a bunch of other beatings and lawsuits that didn’t make the news, and the rise of Tasers (which someone noted don’t always work, the most surprising reason to me being that a lot of people’s nervous systems don’t operate in the frequency a Taser disrupts. You get a solid hit with the darts, hit the button, and nothing happens. Tasers are not ranged shock prods, they generate an electric signal that is an opposite of most people’s natural nerve frequency and interrupt the whole nervous system.)

2921

Yes. Tasers have an inherent issue with reliability and simplicity that influence police training. It’s why they are used mostly in drawn out noncompliance situations than split-second life or death scenarios.

2922

I think you are overlooking the fact that in this case, the attacker was literally already touching the person they were about to stab.

I mean, would it have been better to let the crazy woman stab the other person and kill them?

The attacker was employing deadly force. That’s what a knife is.

Stopping an attacker from using deadly force on another person is pretty much the primary reason for a cop to use his firearm.

2923

Timex, I’m not saying this in a snappish tone but would you please stop talking to people like we’re all a bunch of idiots that don’t understand basic facts of a situation because we have a different perspective or difference of opinion?

I understand what a knife is and that it is a deadly weapon. You literally just quoted me saying knives can kill or do a lot of damage. This is broader than this one particular incident, there’s a wider issue where US police forces seem to fall back on deadly force very quickly as opposed to a last resort. So when there is talk of “She had a knife, therefore she was shot”, I wondered how other countries that don’t have police gunning people down every day handle it, because surely they do. And surely knives in other countries are also deadly weapons.

2924

That’s interesting regarding the batons, thanks for the info!

2925

I think the unusual circumstance here is that the police were actually there BEFORE the assault happened. If it had been girl with knife and just cops around, they might have taken a different approach (assuming she didn’t immediately attack them.)

2926

I mean, this is very clear, and a perfectly reasonable question. To go further, if the function of the police really is to protect and serve the public, then their trigger for using deadly force ought to be very very hard indeed; it’s their job to take risks in order to safeguard the lives of citizens, even if that means risking their own life.

It ought to be like the idea of innocent until proven guilty, where in theory you error on the side of a guilty person walking, rather than on the side of an innocent person being convicted. Yes, I’m aware that isn’t how the justice system works in practice, but that’s the theory. As applied to policing, we ought to err on the side of risk to a cop rather than risk to a citizen.

So when people say you can’t expect a cop not to defend himself with deadly force when he’s attacked or even just frightened, I think the answer is yes, you bloody well can, if in fact there are other alternatives that spare the life of the citizen.

2927

But I’m asking you what your opinion here is, and what the basis is.

If we both agree that the knife in question is a deadly weapon, and it was being wielded by someone who was already in range to use it as such, then what is the option for the cop?

That person has to be stopped, immediately, right? Otherwise another person is going to die. The cop has a responsibility to intervene on behalf of the person who is about to be stabbed.

But we aren’t talking about some abstract notion of the use of force. We are talking about this, particular case.

In this case, this seems to me like exactly the right time for a police officer to use their firearm. Another person is about to get killed. In a lot of ways, that’s the ONLY appropriate use of deadly force by a police officer, right?

She wasn’t shot simply because she had a knife, she was shit because she had a knife and she was literally in the act of stabbing someone with it.

In an abstract sense, there are situations where summertime may have a knife and not be presenting an imminent danger, but this case doesn’t seem to be that.

2928

Agreed. In this case, though, the cop wasn’t the one in primary danger, and I don’t think the cop acted out of fear for his own safety. I believe the split-second choice he saw was “stop knife person” or “let knife person stab other civilian” and as I already said the training was to use the go-to tool to get a solution - the gun.

2929

This could very well be. I haven’t watched the video, and I don’t really want to, but I can readily imagine situations like that where the cop is acting to save a civilian.

2930

I think this incident can be summed up as the use of deadly force to stop the stabbing in progress was justified, but it really would be nice if there were other options.

2931

My opinion is that US police forces seem to resort to lethal force a lot more frequently than in other nations. This is often explained as being caused by the fact that more people in the US are carrying firearms, so therefore response from police escalates. This situation was different in that a gun wasn’t involved.

Here we have a situation where there is a confrontation between two people, the police are called, and one person assaults the other with a knife. Especially in countries without as easy access to firearms, I have to imagine that assaults with knives or other similarly dangerous weapons also occur there. My understanding is that most police in places like England are not typically equipped with firearms, so I want to know how they handle these situations? They can’t just blow the person away and be done with it. So does that mean that these people in other countries just end up getting stabbed? If not, what makes the difference? How do police in other countries handle this situation since they are not killing citizens at the rate US police are?

2932

This is my general sense of this incident as well.

I think you can divide these cases into 3 broad areas:

One group of cases is where the cop was clearly acting criminally/negligently/was out of line in some major way such as the George Floyd or Daunte Wright killings. Those cases require criminal prosecution, although in many of those cases there needs to be systemic reform as well.

The second group of cases are more about systemic failures, too many guns on the street, the fear-centric training of police, multiple layers of systemic racism, and so forth. These cases are examples of why we need major systemic changes to policing and criminal justice in the US, as well as addressing gun laws, economics, and so on.

The third group is where the police acted reasonably. There are circumstances where deadly force is justified, although that should be extremely rare and last resort.

2933

This.

You can look at this video and say ‘yes, the death is unfortunate, but there is a reasonable justification for some use of force here’ while also bemoaning how that force was deadly. There should be ways to resolve this that do not end up with someone dead, and in an honest society we could look at this situation and say ‘the cops actions are justifiable, but as a society is there a way we could prevent this outcome, and were there other actions the cop could have taken that would not have resulted with a deadly shooting’.

This did not appear to be a cop going full Rambo, they were not escalating the situation, this was responding to a bad situation in a way that I’m not going to go especially hard on them for.

But is there another way? There has to be, and we should work to see that outcome more.

2934

It’s easy to believe that very few police killings fall into this category. One need only look at the per-capita police killings by country to see that the US occupies a very strange position in the hierarchy relative to similar stable developed democracies.

2935

Yes, I said use of deadly force should be extremely rare and last resort but one of the big problems in the US is that deadly force is common and often first resort. That’s what we need to change.