I somewhat agree with this, but unfortunately that is in the job description. I feel like maybe 20 years ago I would have more sympathy, but the police, in general, have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes.
You can’t beat “blue lives matter” nonsense and pro-cop propaganda on social media (as many police do) about how you are heroes when you don’t put up when the time comes to be a hero. I have a friend from high school who became a sheriff, and I had to mute his facebook for the amount of insane cop-aganda going on there.
Guy was a coward, one of the many things a good cop is not.
I am sure that the majority of cops would not do something like that, but this guy needed to have his badge taken away. You have to live up to the badge when the time comes.
It’s not machismo. It’s the damn job he was hired to do. Rushing in all mall-cop badass is machismo. A cop responding to a shooting in progress is an expected and (supposedly) trained-for event. He can be scared. He can hesitate to assess the situation. What he shouldn’t have done is cower while terrified and let the killer go to town on a crowd.
I’ve been in combat. I was scared shitless. I still did the job I was trained to do.
But you were also trained by a system that was specifically designed to overcome natural reluctance to engage in that kind of situation.
Despite the militarized gear, most cops are not trained in the same way as our military. Going up against a dude with a ton of machine guns is likely not something they trained for, unless they are on a special task force.
Running into that kind of situation would take uncommon heroism, and the reality is that not every cop is a hero like that.
Yes, and that gets him a little more consideration, but at the end of the day he failed to execute his basic duties as a cop, which is to not go all panic sideways and let someone fire for minutes into a crowd. No one here is asking for action hero nonsense or for him to go to prison. He did a shit job, and should’ve been fired. He’s now been fired.
Edit: Also, to be frank, most cops get a ton more firearms, emergency response, and procedural training than the average Army infantryman.
I’m not sure that this is true for normal police officers. For local officers, they are generally only going through academy training for around 12 weeks, and that includes all the law enforcement training too. But you know better than I what kind of training you went through as an infantryman.
Now, state troopers? Yeah, those guys are at the academy for 6 months. And frankly, state troopers tend to be much more competent than local police, and you rarely see them involved in stupid crap.
I would venture to guess that all cops are trained to deal with an armed assailant, and not just someone with a handgun or a hunting rifle. The “ton of machine guns” should be pretty much par for the course after the North Hollywood bank robbery 20 years ago. This is the United States with its utterly insane lack of sensible gun laws, and any police training that doesn’t take into account situations like North Hollywoods and Las Vegas would be incomplete.
How exactly was it unprecedented? We had the night club and Tech not long before it. It’s not as if cops don’t know, and haven’t known, for decades about the type of guns and how many bullets they might encounter. Wasn’t that supposedly the reason they kept asking for military type gear, because they were out-gunned?
It not something any average person is expecting to encounter, but cops are absolutely trained how to deal with danger which includes someone armed heavily. They know these guns are out there. It’s not a surprise at all that these guns are out there.
If they can’t respond appropriately in stressful, dangerous and unexpected situations, they shouldn’t have a badge. It’s that whole spiel mentioned above, first responders, going towards the danger when everyone else is running away from it. It takes something unique to be able to do that, and unless they’ve had their head under a rock for years now, they know our mass shootings are escalating.
At a hundred percent, no I don’t think there is a guaranteed way to make sure every single cop can handle a situation like this but maybe the first step is not taking individuals who maybe weren’t up to the task with the military. Also, don’t hold onto them for a couple of years after you figure out they couldn’t handle it. And be absolutely upfront on what the expectation of the job is because if you have one group going around telling everyone their number one job is to come home each night, and you have another group saying, do something… those two things don’t often work together. Nobody wants body bags, not from the police, first respondents or the general public, but two of those groups know the risk when they sign up for it, or at least they should.
So we determined years ago that the police officers are not to stand outside of schools while children are systematically hunted down and murdered. Sounds like we expect responses in nearly all mass shootings so the message needs to be clear and upfront about what they’re expected to do, for them, for their families and the public. Every step of the way should be clear with that message, policies, training, and the ability to let them go when they do not perform.
I would be curious to know this as well. I’m not necessarily disagreeing. Perhaps I don’t know enough about the specifics. But how is a gunman barricading himself in a room with lots of guns unprecedented? Is it because he was in a high-rise? Was it the way he set up cameras to watch approaches to his room? His use of bump-stocks? What was unusual about Las Vegas that would excuse an individual policeman’s failure to do his job? I’m not asking to be snarky, I’m honestly curious how the police in this day and age might not have trained officers to deal with the situation.
So you think it’s unprecedented simply based on the number. What will make the next one unprecedented?
75 dead and 500 wounded, 80 and 550… like what number makes it so high that it’s unlike anything before it so we can now call it unprecedented when the next one happens?.. or is it really just the same thing but someone found an opportunity to increase their kill count?
I am going with the latter. There is no tech here. We didn’t suddenly put a lot more people in places we didn’t have them before… it’s not as if it’s the only large unarmed gathering we’ve ever had. The only real change in this situation is this sicko got an opportunity and fair amount of missteps expanded that.
The guy killed 58 people and wounded 422 more because this coward didn’t do his job. Probably could have saved at least some of those casualties. The police can’t have it both ways. #BlueLivesMatter, all cops are heroes, etc, but they should also be given a break when they fail to do their job?
Yeah, and the means by which he achieved that number… Namely, having an entire hotel room full of stockpiled rifles, with bumpstocks that turned them into fully automatic weapons.
And don’t forget his vantage point over a massive crowd. Frankly, I think the issue here isn’t that he’s unprecedented; the issue is that he was effective. But I still don’t understand what part of this is outside the boundaries of modern police training.
