2936

Agree, and I’m also interested in the question raised by @KevinC above: what do countries with frontline cops who don’t carry guns do when one citizen tries to stab another? I don’t think the answer is nothing, but maybe it is.

2937

Again, it’s an uncommon situation. Even cops will tell you that they generally show up after the crime has been committed. I wouldn’t read too much into broad policing from this particular incident. Personally, if I’m going to get stabbed in the next few seconds, I think shooting the stabber is an acceptable solution. I wouldn’t fault a sniper for shooting a hostage-taker that had a gun to my head, even if he wasn’t showing immediate signs of shooting me.

2938

If it were not for the fact that American cops will shoot someone who might only be within 5 or 10 feet of a knife, rather than wielding one with intent to do harm, it might be easier to let this go. The question remains: how are American cops trained to deal with this rare scenario, and how are other cops trained to deal with this rare scenario?

2939

True, a question certainly worth answering, though I would be even more interested in areas where they handle it differently and the cops do have guns.

2940

Well, as the Sergeant Major always told me, the things you do in training you will damned sure do in combat. That American cops kill many more citizens per capita than do cops in comparable countries is surely an artifact of training.

2941

I think it’s possible that this isn’t the right case to generalise from. Hard cases make bad law and all that. Because, as people have already pointed out, incidents in which police arrive in time to prevent an attack between a suspect and a third party are always going to be pretty rare. Almost all confrontations are between armed police and citizens.

How do the UK police handle these things? They tackle them with the weapons to hand, and hope that the stab vests work as advertised. But while knives are less lethal than guns, there has to be a measurable number of cases where a non-lethal response failed to save a life that a lethal response would have. And it would be impossible to know in advance which was which. So the officer on the scene forced to choose between the two options is being put in an impossible position.

2942

I think that’s fair. It’s more just that it was the case at hand that gave rise to a lot of questions for me.

2943

Isn’t it literally not the police’s job to stop crime? Given that, the application of deadly force to prevent a crime in progress is very much an outlier.

2944

They can’t be legally held responsible for crime occurring, in that they aren’t obligated to stop all crime. But I think that most folks would expect police to stop criminals who are trying to kill them.

2945

I’m not very familiar with this (the police in my family all retired many years ago) but I can give my best guess since you’ve now asked twice.

In this particular scenario the call mentioned threats with a knife. If available an ARV might have been despatched (especially given the sensitivities around knife crime), or failing that a tazer trained officer. I think that in either case in this situation a tazer would end up getting used, but I’m not at all familiar with the training - it may be that because of the lower reliability of tazers AFOs might feel it is necessary to use their firearm - but they would have to explain why it was necessary (not just reasonable) to the IOPC and potentially a court. I suspect they are encouraged to err on the side of less lethal except in cases where they are facing a firearm.

When the police aren’t expecting a knife it’s back off, de-escalate, and try and get backup to surround the knife wielder with riot shields and barge them to the ground. Failing that if there is a threat to life the only real option to try and prevent it is pepper spray and follow up with a baton and trust the stab vest, but frankly I think most officers are understandably unenthusiastic about that option (I think knife crime has played a big role in changing minds in the force to equip more officers with tazers). In this kind of situation I think as you say someone does just end up getting stabbed.

This feels like kind of an atypical situation and might be a bad starting point for arguing about more general principles.

2946

Thank you for the info!

2947

This is my position I think, but I’m not sure any other option in this specific scenario even exists.

Like someone with a deadly weapon in the act of using said weapon in range of their target… the only thing that exists that is likely to stop that is a firearm. If he was much closer maybe something like a baton could work, but at that point you’re talking about fencing someone with a deadly weapon in many ways and very few people in the modern world are trained for hand to hand combat with melee weapons.

Not that it matters because he wasn’t really in range to use a baton nor did he have time to deploy one anyway.

2948

Unfortunately, most people are wrong. I apologize if I’m the only person in the thread that didn’t know this, but I found it both very surprising and quite furious.

Courts have repeatedly ruled that police and the government in general have no duty to protect you from harm.

Warren v. District of Columbia

In Warren v. District of Columbia, two women called the police after hearing intruders attack another woman in their home. Police assured them that help was on the way. Police never showed up. The two women, hearing silence, thought police had arrived, and went downstairs to help their friend. The intruders were still there, and all three women were repeatedly raped and assaulted for hours.

In siding with the government, the court stated that it is a “fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.”

This was covered by Radiolab in a rather amazing story [which is where I learned about this originally], where a man was attacked by some crazy homocidal guy on the subway, and the cops were in the next car over looking to arrest said crazy person. The cops LET THE ATTACK HAPPEN and the random guy was stabbed multiple times in the head, and somehow overcame the attacker before he was flat out murdered. Only after the stabbed man subdued the attacker did the cops emerge from hiding.

I mean, there was a guy with a knife stabbing people in the next subway car. It was dangerous! Too dangerous to go charging in.

Worth a listen (there’s also a transcript if you prefer to read).

B.A. Parker: The man told Joe, “Listen, I was part of the grand jury and I’ve got to tell you something. When those police officers testified, one of them told us, while you were there, rolling around on the floor with Gelman–”

Joe: He said, “I started to come out, but I thought he had a gun, so I closed the door and stayed inside.” After we heard that, we got furious. He goes, “The whole group of us we all looked at each other like, “Did he actually just admit to not coming out to do his job and leave the subway full of people with a spree killer?”” He said, “After that,” he goes, “I had to tell you.” I’m sitting here going, holy shit. They left a spree killer, a known spree killer, a spree killing fugitive on a subway with probably 20, 25 people.

2949

If you’ve heard about police “warrior” training but weren’t totally aware of just how depraved it is, some clips.

2950

Here’s a different angle of the Columbus shooting. Man, this whole situation is batshit insane.

2951

That whole situation is FUBAR.

Cop arrives and is walking towards a group of people that look like they are just standing around in a driveway. Then suddenly a girl gets decked out of nowhere and another girl (and guy) in full-on attack mode. The girl brandishing a knife for crazy stab time against another girl holding a dog…WTF!

2952

Yes, the “warrior training” nonsense goes a long way to explaining how the officer’s first instinct in this situation was to fire four shots. That’s not an attempt to stop her, that’s a very clear attempt to make absolutely sure she died.

2953

No one was shot thankfully, but punching a handcuffed woman in the face repeatedly? Anger issues, much?

She was known to the officers and was bipolar/schizophrenic per neighbors interviewed in the video.

2954

It’s really not. One shot, despite what you see in movies and TV, is not enough to reliably stop an attacker from doing whatever they’re in the middle of doing. Many times, the rush of adrenalin while attacking is enough to overcome the shock of being shot with a 9mm, especially if you’re hit in a non-critical area. As I wrote upthread, soldiers and police (in the US) are trained to fire center mass (the easiest target) and they are trained to shoot until the threat goes down.

You can certainly say that a threat being neutralized with this training equals shooting to kill, but that’s a consequence of the gun being the most reliable and trained-on tool in the officer’s toolbox for this situation.

2955

I feel like we’re basically saying the same thing here - the training they receive encourages them to immediately go for the kill.