There’s also just a whole lot of overlap among the “police are good guys doing hard work” crowd and the “I have not actually had a cop bully me” crowd. This is true in the US and also in Canada, which has huge problems with policing but is arguably less acute than the police violence situation in the US. These one off prosecutions of police misconduct are good things, but to get “real change” they will need to provoke a much broader acceptance among the privileged class that police are a serious problem. NY Times articles that carefully choose their words to underplay the role of cops in a senseless death don’t help.
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A person being in the line of fire behind the guy he’s aiming for would be a consideration he’d have to make, sure. But then you’ve got the eminent threat that’s in the foreground, and he’s going to be understandably focused more on that. A split second decision where you’re taking action against someone who you perceive to be beating someone to death with a heavy lock, well, there’s only so much time you have in that situation.
if the split second decision is impossible to make, even for trained personnel, it is all the more reason to limit the lethal option as a matter of policy.
draw the taser first. draw attention of the assailant away from the victim. no idea if there were two officers or just one, but tactically one might be in a better position to neutralize in less risky fashion. as grotesque as it is, shooting at the foot or at the hand with the bike lock might be preferable with spray bullet possibility, when officer doesn’t perceive a pointed gun.
is any of this even being trained for? or is it all warrior mindset shoot to kill doctrine?
I’m not sure what’s being trained and of course think more use of force training is necessary. I think this is LAPD, who from what I’ve read have made great strides in being a better police department since the Rodney King days. But my point is that we really don’t know enough about the situation to pass judgement and should wait to see what the situation was. You can think of different situations where the use of a firearm is more or less reasonable and still have everything fit into the sparse details we get from the news stories. The guy could be built like an NFL linebacker and the cop could be a woman, alone and half his weight. The guy could be 130 pound meth head and there’s four cops on hand. The first instance there might not have been much of a choice and in the second one they could probably just have tackled him. We don’t really know enough now, but we will.
Me trying to suss out “nonsense fact”
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not pulling another rodney king is a low bar, and also 25 years ago. scratch that 30 years ago.
not talking about this officer specifically, but reviewing the current regulations and changing them should favor a better outcome for this type of situation. precisely with the factors we are discussing right now. it does not appear to be safe whenever an officer pulls a weapon. that tells me they should pull it less often, and be more scrutinized when they do.
Sure, of course. But you have to balance that with the difficulty of having to make a split second decision in a life or death situation.
it is the exact opposite of a split second decision to change the rules of engagement and train/equip for them.
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Of course. But my point is that we really don’t know how well this officer was trained, or how reasonable or unreasonable his or her actions were here. So there can always be better training, and I’m in favor of that. But then in the end it’s going to come down to a split second decision. Which training and equipment and ROE all impact that, but it’s still something that happens in the blink of an eye.
Conceded.
I disagree. You said split second repeatedly and now blink of an eye. Someone getting beaten with a metal object is a threat to their life but it doesn’t necessarily mean the only defense is to shoot immediately, especially if the officer shoots so fast he doesn’t even hits his target.
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I dunno man, split second and blink of an eye are synonymous to me. I didn’t mean any difference between the two if you interpret that differently. I agree that the assault in question may or may not justify deadly force, we just don’t know at this point. The body cam video is going to be released on the 27th.
The appropriateness of using deadly force and the prudence with which it was deployed are, again, separate questions. It’s possible that the officer fired once and the bullet killed both the suspect and the girl. Unlikely, but possible given the news reports I’ve seen. It’s possible the officers fired 43 rounds and hit the suspect 3 times. I don’t know which happened and suspect it’s somewhere in the middle.
And I disagree with both descriptions. Someone getting beaten with an object is not on the same level as someone about to pull a trigger. The latter is a shoot ASAP situation, the former might not be. Taking a couple of extras shouldn’t make much of a difference.
Ah, I see, I thought you were saying I was creeping down a rhetorical road, that split second is a little longer than blink of an eye.
I agree that getting beaten with an object might not represent an eminent threat to great bodily harm (probably the legal standard, but IANAL), but it also could. I’m just saying let’s see what happened, which we will in a couple of days, and go from there.
cool-cool. right-wing extremists privacy is higher priority than freeze peach journalism.
If by privacy you mean attorney-client communication, then probably yes.