2956

Basically, but I do think there’s a tiny differentiator in that you’re statement above reads like the cop maliciously intended to kill a teenage girl. I place the blame squarely on the tools in the toolbox and how we’ve trained the cops to use those tools. He didn’t intend to kill a girl, he intended to save a girl from being stabbed and reacted as his training dictated.

2957

I’m having a problem with how a lot of media outlets that I rely on covered this story (NYT, WaPo, Guardian, NPR) – at least at the begining – and it’s because of this. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the cops got a call about someone with a knife, rolled up, and shot without purpose, cause, or any extenuating circumstances. In fact, the reason I looked into this story more closely at all was due to whoever it was here that posted the camera footage from the cops and commented on how it looked to be by-the-book.

2958

Whereas I’d argue that his training dictates that he treat any threat as an enemy combatant that deserves to be put down, which is exactly what he did. The training itself is malicious.

2959

I don’t know about malicious. It’s dispassionate and results in a lot of needless death because the tool itself is lethal. We need better options for these cops.

2960

Yeah, this story is being covered as though this was a case of a cop murdering an innocent person.

That’s not what happened.

A cop stopped a fucking lunatic from murdering another person. The girl who got shot wasn’t innocent. She was literally in the act of attacking other people.

2961

Completely agreed that we need better options, and to get there we need training with a fundamentally different mindset. This business of teaching cops that they’re at war and the only way to save themselves is to kill the people they’re supposed to be serving is abject lunacy.

2962

I think we mentioned this above here, but this particular case isn’t really a good one to try and extend to cover this larger, mostly correct point.

There are tons of situations where a cop can and should use a less lethal means of taking down a subject.

I’m not sure this is one of those cases. If the cop didn’t have a firearm, or didn’t use it as he did, there’s a non trivial chance that the other person would have been killed by the person with the knife. I don’t think that’d be acceptable.

2963

One of the reasons I was asking how these sorts of situations are handled in other countries the other day is because I want to know if changes in police training/tactics can have an impact here. Not referring to this situation, but we’ve all seen how cops in many of these incidents were responsible for really escalating things and creating an environment where someone getting hurt or killed is more likely.

There was that 13 year old that was shot in the alley the other day. There was a big argument about that that resulted in the thread getting locked so I don’t want to start that again, but there were two things that I think were both accurate:

  1. The cop was in a potentially dangerous situation and made a split-second decision to shoot the kid even though the kid was complying with the order.
  2. Tactics used by police had a role in created the environment where the kid couldn’t comply without getting a shot. For example, the cop was chasing the kid down a dark alleyway with a light on strobe, which makes everything seem faster and more confusing to process. So while you can say “Well the cop had to make a split second decision” and that’s true for that exact moment, I think there’s value in stepping back and asking “Did police actions/tactics help contribute to creating that situation?”. Was it necessary to chase him down a dark alley? Again, I don’t want to start the argument over it, my point throughout all this is I think there is value in asking these sorts of questions and figure out ways we can improve training, tactics used, etc.
2964

I don’t know, the Grossman type warrior training would fit my definition of malicious.

2965

Well yes. Grossman is an asshole, and that type of training is hot bullshit. Thankfully, that’s not a recognized standard in most departments.

I’m just talking about normal range/firearm reaction training.

2966

I like the approach mentioned in this article:

Basically treat police killings like an airplane crashes and do systematic investigation, find best practices, etc.

2967

Thanks, that’s an interesting read. And I see the professor echoes some of what has been discussed:

I also agree with the concluding paragraph of the article:

2968

This is something I agree with. The is far too much conflict of interest for locals to handle it if nothing else.

2969

For what it’s worth, I don’t remember as an infantryman ever being explicitly trained to ‘keep firing until the target goes down’. Firearms training was almost exclusively single target / single shot; i.e. a target pops up for X seconds, you get to fire one round at it, shot gets recorded as hit or miss, next target randomly pops up. I’m sure things have changed, but that was the thrust of training for squad personal arms and for crew weapons. Of course ‘short burst’ replaced single shot with the latter, given their nature.

I get that if a real enemy kept coming after your one shot you’d fire another, but nobody trained that way, and I don’t ever recall being told keep firing until he goes down. That’s my experience anyway.

2970

I was curious about their training, Google turned up this:

The relevant part:

2971

Your recollection is correct. When I originally trained in the Army, it was one shot, center mass, then move on to the next target. That training changed when we were tasked with policing duties in Iraq. Once we weren’t fighting a traditional force on force battle, the training adjusted for the type of threats you’d encounter - lone attackers shooting at you from very short ranges in cluttered environments. The goal being to put them down quickly and overwhelmingly so you could stay alert for further threats.

2972

I would think that there’s also a big difference between shooting someone with a rifle and a handgun. A rifle is going to have a lot more stopping power than a handgun, which is what most police officers are going to be using, just in terms of the kinetic energy carried by the bullet.

2973

That is not 100% true. It has everything to do with the size of the projectile, material and deformation of same, and the square of the speed. There is nothing magical about a rifle other than the form factor allows longer barrel length (generally greater accuracy, but also speed due to longer gas expansion time), as well as stability and support for higher grain loads.

So generally it is true a long gun has more power, because it is safer and easier to use an equivalent grain load on a two handed rifle grip, this is not inherently true.

But granted some wannabe cowboy losing out magnum 457 rounds in a handgun is gonna be lucky not to bust their nose when they shoot it.

2974

Quite a big difference in most cases.

A 9mm’s stopping power is fairly low even for handguns. It’s advantage is a large magazine (and muzzle velocity, which some argue is a negative to stopping power, you generally want a big slow round to impart all it’s energy instead of a small fast one that over-penetrates). Twice as many bullets give or take usually means you get the target stopped even if you miss a lot (and you’ll miss a lot).

Also true, but when talking about guns and ballistics we’re usually talking about the whole package. Odds are you’re not firing 5.56 out of a pistol and you’re sure as heck not doing it in the Army or the like. Just like cops aren’t carrying 9mm long guns on patrol.

2975

Yeah, I just meant that most of the time, rifles are firing rounds quite a lot faster than a handgun, aren’t they?

Like an m16’s muzzle velocity is over 3000 ft/s. A glock 9mm is going to have a muzzle velocity of only around 1200 ft/s. The round fired by the m16 is going to have a LOT more kinetic energy.