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What I think is more horrifying, is the use of deadly force in general. For example, based on a quick Google search, 41 police were killed by shooters last year

What I think is more horrifying, is the use of deadly force in general. For example, based on a quick Google search, 41 police were killed by shooters last year, while roughly 1,000 civilians were killed. Police should not be using deadly force unless necessary, 41:1000 seems like some pretty bias reactions on the side of police. The reason different races are shot at different rates can be based on anything including racism, likely hood to commit an offense, which race is more likely to have mental disease, whether or not it's more difficult to identify facial structure. Blaming race outright is kind of silly, it's trying to simplify a multi dimensional problem that needs all of it's dimensions to reach a conclusion.

ksdale 10y ago
I'm not sure what the "right" number is, but you would expect that someone trained to use a weapon would "win" in the majority, if not the vast majority of cases. The ideal ratio would be zero police deaths compared to a much smaller and truly unavoidable number of civilian deaths, but even in that ideal case, the ratio would be incredibly skewed toward civilian deaths, so perhaps this number doesn't tell us much.
andreyk 10y ago
Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance: "Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies." Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.
- adamors 10y ago
  Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.
  - hueving 10y ago
    So assume all police are lying and the people fighting them had good intentions?
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      Always assume those with power over you are lying to you. It's sort of a reverse Pascal's wager.
      - crusso 10y ago
        Then we should get rid of all police?
        eropple 10y ago
        "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. But, for an example of how we can counteract the likelihood of those in power lying to the people they serve? In urban and suburban areas at least (rural policing is a little bit of a different thing), consider a twofold approach: 1) Provide body cameras that cannot be turned off while in uniform under any circumstances (sew them into the uniform top?), with draconian penalties in any case where they're disabled or obscured in the field. Multiple battery slots to allow hot-swapping, a low-battery warning informs dispatch, all of that. Allowing your camera to go offline is a strict-liability federal offense; the only disproof is another officer's video evidence that an assailant removed the camera from the officer. (This is not a cheap tool, and it does imply that officers should be dispatched in pairs or more. I am OK with that. We should be willing to spend money for better policing.) 2) Remove all weapons that are not less-lethal from beat police. Batons, tasers, OC spray. You can kill someone with these weapons, but it takes a hell of a lot more work (and it's harder to obfuscate when a suspect has surrendered and is complying than when you can shoot them to death at range). If you need someone with a gun, you should be calling in backup dispatched directly from a station.
        10y ago
- nrb 10y ago
  In the age of smart guns that only the owner can fire, why is "he was reaching for my gun" a valid reason?!? How many wrongful death lawsuit settlements does it take to retrofit or replace the existing firearms?
  - modoc 10y ago
    Because smart guns aren't even close to 100% reliable yet. A "false negative" locking you out of operating your weapon at a key moment will likely mean your death, so there's a VERY high bar for adopting new mechanisms like smart guns. The iPhone has probably the best, affordable, fingerprint sensor out there, and yet if ever time it failed to unlock (wet skin, dry skin, dirty skin, oil on your skin, etc...) you might end up dead... you wouldn't want to trust it..
- Malice 10y ago
  > Deputies say There are very strong incentives for the Deputies to paint themselves in the best possible light in this situation. I would go as far as to say there is literally no value in what the Deputies say happened. Video of the incident, uninvolved bystander reports are what's needed.
  - mod 10y ago
    Bystander reports are often worth about as much as a deputy's report. People can't remember how things actually happened.
    - eumoria 10y ago
      This is exactly true even people with the best intentions trying to explain exactly what happened in an unbiased way will still screw up a ton of things.
      - pixl97 10y ago
        aka: eyewitness testimony is unreliable because our memory rewrites our memory every time we access it again, our current biases affect how we remember it next time.
  - ashark 10y ago
    A couple weeks back one of the officers involved in catching (and ultimately killing) the San Bernardino shooters gave an extended interview on NPR. AFAIK there was nothing about the incident that anyone's got a problem with, where the police are concerned. He defaulted to using language so biased that it amounted to lying anyway. Every single time an officer fired in his story, they "placed rounds downrange", while the shooters invariably "fired indiscriminately", even when that was plainly not true from his story (he proceeds in one case to name a target and state that he's certain they had opened fire, in that case, specifically to shoot a given officer, which is the opposite of indiscriminate). It seems like he was so set on using a kind of template for biasing anyone listening against the accused that he couldn't turn it off, even when that language made what he was saying plainly incorrect. This is in a case where he wasn't trying to defend himself or any other officers against accusations of wrongdoing. If you pay attention this kind of thing is really common when cops discuss events. Biased language that can easily slip into outright lies is built into police culture, even when there's not (direct) pressure to lie.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
If the 1000 are all drug dealers defending their stash, it seems justified. In fact, I'd encourage that ratio to get as low as possible, so many many more drug dealers are killed than police. If the 1000 are all innocent elderly grandmothers, I'd want the ratio as high as possible. Everything in between depends on the makeup of those 1000 people. How many of those 1000 pulled a gun on the cop?
- dalore 10y ago
  Innocent until proven guilty. Judge, jury and executioner in one.
- astrocat 10y ago
  This sentiment is quite common: "I don't care if 'bad people' die. Fairly or unfairly, doesn't matter - they're bad people." I would equate this to "I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide. Only bad people have things to hide, and if their privacy is taken away, so what, they're bad people." If you can understand why privacy is a 'Good Thing', or better, a Human Right, then you should be able to comprehend why extrajudicial killings are a Bad Thing, or better, a violation of Human Rights.
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    There's a limit to how presumed innocent people can be. If all 1000 people were involved in a shootout and fired on the police first, then it's not unreasonable that they were killed. If it makes you feel better, there are contexts where your right to privacy should be suspended too. If the police see you kidnap a child and put him in your underwear drawer, it seems like there should be a procedure for them to violate the privacy of your underwear drawer without needing to call a judge. And if there were 10,000 privacy violations nationwide and all of them were well-documented emergency circumstances, I'd hesitate to even call it a problem(or at least, not a problem with the police's behavior; there's clearly a childnapping problem).
    - astrocat 10y ago
SEJeff 10y ago
The number one thing that kill police in the US is suspects disarming them and using their own firearm against them.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Hrmm. FBI says: Of the officers killed in 2014, most (46) were killed with firearms. Of these, 33 were killed with handguns. (A breakdown of the types of weapons used in these slayings is provided in Table 29.) 6 officers had their weapons stolen.
  - mod 10y ago
    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/officers-feloniously-killed https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/officers-fe... Source
thenobsta 10y ago
I think a great follow up to this is, what would these numbers look like if the majority of police didn't carry guns? I'm not sure how you'd get a sense of this though. Maybe data from other countries and comparison of security guard death rates. Both of these ideas are long shots.
- gervase 10y ago
  I did some (very quick) comparisons to Britain's police force, which for the most part is not armed. I ignored the confounding effects of the illegality of guns, assuming that most hardened criminals will be able to get one anyway (a convenient assumption, since I wasn't sure how to account for it any other way). British police are significantly less likely to be killed, or to kill, than U.S. officers. However, they are also much more likely to be assaulted, and injured in those assaults, than U.S. officers.
  - knz 10y ago
    What role does a land border with Mexico play in that though? Many of these shootings happen near the southern border - are the police more aggressive because of the proximity to the cartel violence?
Bedon292 10y ago
I have to wonder how many of those civilian deaths prevented police deaths? Obviously we have seen plenty of news about bias and wrongful deaths of civilians, but how many of the rest were life saving defensive uses of deadly force? I don't actually know the answer, but I would think that contributes to the bias of the numbers.
- gervase 10y ago
  I was wondering the same thing, and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to get a feel for that. Surprisingly, when compared to British officers who (for the most part) are not armed, providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, percent-to-total. I did make several gross assumptions, such as only counting deaths and not injuries, and that 100% of US police officers are armed and 0% of British officers are, but for a rough calculation, I think it's okay. (Note that British officers are much more likely to be assaulted, and injured in those assaults, than U.S. officers.) If I had to guess, it could be because the presence of guns (on both sides) tends to escalate the situation. For example, regardless of whether you're a police officer or a criminal, you're naturally going to be much more likely to shoot if you believe you are about to be shot yourself. If British police officers CAN'T shoot, then potentially British criminals are less likely to shoot them, because there's no need to do so - just knock them over the head and then run away. This is purely speculation on my part, of course, but it seems plausible, does it not?
  - woodchuck64 10y ago
    > providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, I don't find that surprising at all. The glaring omission in the posted article is accounting for prevalence of guns. It would make sense that more unarmed people would be shot in an environment in which guns are more common.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Surprisingly, when compared to British officers who (for the most part) are not armed, providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, percent-to-total. The question becomes, does the arming of officers cause the lower survival rates, or does the violence level cause both the arming of officers and the lower survival rate. (I suspect that arming officers is a big contributor, but the correlation alone doesn't tell you the causal relationship.)
ap22213 10y ago
Agreed. But, it could also be a training issue. From what I understand, police departments do not have enough funding to adequately train their force. I believe around here (Northern Virginia), the police are trained to shoot if the situation seems 'threatening' (subjective). However, recently a couple of notable cases (that I know of) seem extreme. 1) police responded to a teenager who was threatening suicide. Apparently, the teen raised the knife, and the police shot and killed him. 2) police responded to a Costco employee that was acting erratic. The employee raised a knife, and the police shot and killed her. As a tax-paying citizen, I would rather the police are trained to first try to diffuse the situation, then try to neutralize, then shoot as last resort. It seems instead that they panic and shoot immediately.
- modoc 10y ago
  I agree 100% that police could use more training, and more skills around defusing situations, people management, and frankly hand to hand combat. That takes budget and you CAN help this process along in your town! Please do keep in mind, for folks who lack this training, a person with a knife can very easily injure or kill and absolutely poses a deadly threat (to the officer or nearby civilians). The old metric is the 21 foot rule (if your gun is in your holster a person with a knife who is 21 feet or closer can kill you before you can defend yourself with your firearm) so if you are within 21 feet of someone with a knife (acting erratically, raising a deadly weapon, etc...) then you are SUPPOSED to have your gun out and ready. That said it should be at a low ready, not pointing and shooting... I'm not defending the police in those incidents, I don't know enough about the details to defend or attack their actions from here. But I feel like people very often forget that most police are under-trained, and put in life threatening situations that most people commenting have no real experience with.
- newman314 10y ago
  As a taxpayer, you should also ask questions about what you are getting for your money. Simply throwing money at the problem isn't the solution. http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article2573210.html http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article2573210... There are plenty of examples where police in other countries are taught to de-escalate rather than escalate as a first order so it's a shame that this does not happen here.
tptacek 10y ago
Unfortunately, incidents are virtually certain to recur so long as the first line of monitoring and compliance policing is performed by armed officers. In short: we must disarm most police officers. The Castile shooting occurred at a stop due to a broken tail light. Consider: the city of Chicago uses cameras to asynchronously ticket red light violators. Running a red light is objectively more dangerous than driving with a broken tail light, but Chicago will allow you to continue driving unimpeded after doing so. Further, consider: any number of other violations in Chicago --- expired plates, bad stickers, poor selection of parking places, failure to pay parking fees, outstanding warrants on your car --- are performed by parking enforcement officers who are not armed. Chicago also routinely deployed traffic direction officers who are themselves not armed. The police force we have today will not allow itself to be disarmed. The realistic medium-term answer to this problem is not to change the culture of existing police --- we should do that, but we should be pragmatic about how far that will get us. Instead, cities that want to reduce police violence should stop hiring assault officers, and begin programs to replace them with monitoring and compliance officers who will accept jobs with a description that includes doing the work unarmed. Smart cities should find ways to offload monitoring and compliance work from assault officers onto unarmed officers. Police forces can be disarmed through attrition. Cities are incentivized to do this anyways: assault officer hires come packaged with intractable pension problems. New job descriptions don't. Consider also: "armed" and "unarmed" isn't binary. When approaching Philando Castile's car to inquire about the broken tail light, the officer was by default no more than 20-30 seconds away from being able to fire a bullet into Castile. Smarter public policy can increase that delay from 20 seconds to something far greater. For instance: general-purpose patrolling assault officers can be (are, in fact, today) issued rifles and shotguns stored in their trunk. Those officers can remain armed; just, not with handguns, and not wielded by default. Modern assault officers are in a double bind. They're routinely required to work in high-crime neighborhoods, often minority-dominated, and thus subjected to constant cognitive strain: they're put into contact with far more minorities at work than at home, and those minorities are sampled from a cohort anomalously likely to include criminals. Further, assault officers are acculturated and in fact trained to believe (irrationally) that routine job activities, like making traffic stops, are among the most dangerous things that can be done in America. They're stuck in a vicious circle of cortisol spikes and negative reinforcement. It is not reasonable to expect them to safely handle continuously-available firearms. I suspect we'll discover that confrontations between unarmed officers and armed suspects are less dangerous than confrontations between armed officers and armed suspects. Most (not all) suspects who shoot at cops aren't doing it out of spite, but instead of out self-preservation. Regardless, I think we already know what would happen if we reconstituted police forces to be 20% assault and 80% compliance, down from 90% assault: far less police violence, far fewer shooting incidents, less expense, and a greater civic recognition of the real risks of policing. Disarm most police.
crusso 10y ago
What percent of the 1000 was engaged in criminal activity that endangered the officer or others? The raw ratio of deaths doesn't tell us much.

ksdale 10y ago

I'm not sure what the "right" number is, but you would expect that someone trained to use a weapon would "win" in the majority, if not the vast majority of cases. The ideal ratio would be zero police deaths compared to a much smaller and truly unavoidable number of civilian deaths, but even in that ideal case, the ratio would be incredibly skewed toward civilian deaths, so perhaps this number doesn't tell us much.

andreyk 10y ago

Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance: "Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies." Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.

adamors 10y ago
Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.
- hueving 10y ago
  So assume all police are lying and the people fighting them had good intentions?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Always assume those with power over you are lying to you. It's sort of a reverse Pascal's wager.
    - crusso 10y ago
      Then we should get rid of all police?
      - eropple 10y ago
        "Get rid of all police" is the sort of reductio ad absurdum silliness that brings this discussion down. Don't do that. But, for an example of how we can counteract the likelihood of those in power lying to the people they serve? In urban and suburban areas at least (rural policing is a little bit of a different thing), consider a twofold approach: 1) Provide body cameras that cannot be turned off while in uniform under any circumstances (sew them into the uniform top?), with draconian penalties in any case where they're disabled or obscured in the field. Multiple battery slots to allow hot-swapping, a low-battery warning informs dispatch, all of that. Allowing your camera to go offline is a strict-liability federal offense; the only disproof is another officer's video evidence that an assailant removed the camera from the officer. (This is not a cheap tool, and it does imply that officers should be dispatched in pairs or more. I am OK with that. We should be willing to spend money for better policing.) 2) Remove all weapons that are not less-lethal from beat police. Batons, tasers, OC spray. You can kill someone with these weapons, but it takes a hell of a lot more work (and it's harder to obfuscate when a suspect has surrendered and is complying than when you can shoot them to death at range). If you need someone with a gun, you should be calling in backup dispatched directly from a station.
        10y ago
nrb 10y ago
In the age of smart guns that only the owner can fire, why is "he was reaching for my gun" a valid reason?!? How many wrongful death lawsuit settlements does it take to retrofit or replace the existing firearms?
- modoc 10y ago
  Because smart guns aren't even close to 100% reliable yet. A "false negative" locking you out of operating your weapon at a key moment will likely mean your death, so there's a VERY high bar for adopting new mechanisms like smart guns. The iPhone has probably the best, affordable, fingerprint sensor out there, and yet if ever time it failed to unlock (wet skin, dry skin, dirty skin, oil on your skin, etc...) you might end up dead... you wouldn't want to trust it..
Malice 10y ago
> Deputies say There are very strong incentives for the Deputies to paint themselves in the best possible light in this situation. I would go as far as to say there is literally no value in what the Deputies say happened. Video of the incident, uninvolved bystander reports are what's needed.
- mod 10y ago
  Bystander reports are often worth about as much as a deputy's report. People can't remember how things actually happened.
  - eumoria 10y ago
    This is exactly true even people with the best intentions trying to explain exactly what happened in an unbiased way will still screw up a ton of things.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      aka: eyewitness testimony is unreliable because our memory rewrites our memory every time we access it again, our current biases affect how we remember it next time.
- ashark 10y ago
  A couple weeks back one of the officers involved in catching (and ultimately killing) the San Bernardino shooters gave an extended interview on NPR. AFAIK there was nothing about the incident that anyone's got a problem with, where the police are concerned. He defaulted to using language so biased that it amounted to lying anyway. Every single time an officer fired in his story, they "placed rounds downrange", while the shooters invariably "fired indiscriminately", even when that was plainly not true from his story (he proceeds in one case to name a target and state that he's certain they had opened fire, in that case, specifically to shoot a given officer, which is the opposite of indiscriminate). It seems like he was so set on using a kind of template for biasing anyone listening against the accused that he couldn't turn it off, even when that language made what he was saying plainly incorrect. This is in a case where he wasn't trying to defend himself or any other officers against accusations of wrongdoing. If you pay attention this kind of thing is really common when cops discuss events. Biased language that can easily slip into outright lies is built into police culture, even when there's not (direct) pressure to lie.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

If the 1000 are all drug dealers defending their stash, it seems justified. In fact, I'd encourage that ratio to get as low as possible, so many many more drug dealers are killed than police. If the 1000 are all innocent elderly grandmothers, I'd want the ratio as high as possible. Everything in between depends on the makeup of those 1000 people. How many of those 1000 pulled a gun on the cop?

dalore 10y ago
Innocent until proven guilty. Judge, jury and executioner in one.
astrocat 10y ago
This sentiment is quite common: "I don't care if 'bad people' die. Fairly or unfairly, doesn't matter - they're bad people." I would equate this to "I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide. Only bad people have things to hide, and if their privacy is taken away, so what, they're bad people." If you can understand why privacy is a 'Good Thing', or better, a Human Right, then you should be able to comprehend why extrajudicial killings are a Bad Thing, or better, a violation of Human Rights.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  There's a limit to how presumed innocent people can be. If all 1000 people were involved in a shootout and fired on the police first, then it's not unreasonable that they were killed. If it makes you feel better, there are contexts where your right to privacy should be suspended too. If the police see you kidnap a child and put him in your underwear drawer, it seems like there should be a procedure for them to violate the privacy of your underwear drawer without needing to call a judge. And if there were 10,000 privacy violations nationwide and all of them were well-documented emergency circumstances, I'd hesitate to even call it a problem(or at least, not a problem with the police's behavior; there's clearly a childnapping problem).
  - astrocat 10y ago

SEJeff 10y ago

The number one thing that kill police in the US is suspects disarming them and using their own firearm against them.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Hrmm. FBI says: Of the officers killed in 2014, most (46) were killed with firearms. Of these, 33 were killed with handguns. (A breakdown of the types of weapons used in these slayings is provided in Table 29.) 6 officers had their weapons stolen.
- mod 10y ago
  https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/officers-feloniously-killed https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/officers-fe... Source

thenobsta 10y ago

I think a great follow up to this is, what would these numbers look like if the majority of police didn't carry guns? I'm not sure how you'd get a sense of this though. Maybe data from other countries and comparison of security guard death rates. Both of these ideas are long shots.

gervase 10y ago
I did some (very quick) comparisons to Britain's police force, which for the most part is not armed. I ignored the confounding effects of the illegality of guns, assuming that most hardened criminals will be able to get one anyway (a convenient assumption, since I wasn't sure how to account for it any other way). British police are significantly less likely to be killed, or to kill, than U.S. officers. However, they are also much more likely to be assaulted, and injured in those assaults, than U.S. officers.
- knz 10y ago
  What role does a land border with Mexico play in that though? Many of these shootings happen near the southern border - are the police more aggressive because of the proximity to the cartel violence?

Bedon292 10y ago

I have to wonder how many of those civilian deaths prevented police deaths? Obviously we have seen plenty of news about bias and wrongful deaths of civilians, but how many of the rest were life saving defensive uses of deadly force? I don't actually know the answer, but I would think that contributes to the bias of the numbers.

gervase 10y ago
I was wondering the same thing, and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to get a feel for that. Surprisingly, when compared to British officers who (for the most part) are not armed, providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, percent-to-total. I did make several gross assumptions, such as only counting deaths and not injuries, and that 100% of US police officers are armed and 0% of British officers are, but for a rough calculation, I think it's okay. (Note that British officers are much more likely to be assaulted, and injured in those assaults, than U.S. officers.) If I had to guess, it could be because the presence of guns (on both sides) tends to escalate the situation. For example, regardless of whether you're a police officer or a criminal, you're naturally going to be much more likely to shoot if you believe you are about to be shot yourself. If British police officers CAN'T shoot, then potentially British criminals are less likely to shoot them, because there's no need to do so - just knock them over the head and then run away. This is purely speculation on my part, of course, but it seems plausible, does it not?
- woodchuck64 10y ago
  > providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, I don't find that surprising at all. The glaring omission in the posted article is accounting for prevalence of guns. It would make sense that more unarmed people would be shot in an environment in which guns are more common.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Surprisingly, when compared to British officers who (for the most part) are not armed, providing officers with guns seems to decrease both their own survival AND the survival of civilians, percent-to-total. The question becomes, does the arming of officers cause the lower survival rates, or does the violence level cause both the arming of officers and the lower survival rate. (I suspect that arming officers is a big contributor, but the correlation alone doesn't tell you the causal relationship.)

ap22213 10y ago

Agreed. But, it could also be a training issue. From what I understand, police departments do not have enough funding to adequately train their force. I believe around here (Northern Virginia), the police are trained to shoot if the situation seems 'threatening' (subjective). However, recently a couple of notable cases (that I know of) seem extreme. 1) police responded to a teenager who was threatening suicide. Apparently, the teen raised the knife, and the police shot and killed him. 2) police responded to a Costco employee that was acting erratic. The employee raised a knife, and the police shot and killed her. As a tax-paying citizen, I would rather the police are trained to first try to diffuse the situation, then try to neutralize, then shoot as last resort. It seems instead that they panic and shoot immediately.

modoc 10y ago
I agree 100% that police could use more training, and more skills around defusing situations, people management, and frankly hand to hand combat. That takes budget and you CAN help this process along in your town! Please do keep in mind, for folks who lack this training, a person with a knife can very easily injure or kill and absolutely poses a deadly threat (to the officer or nearby civilians). The old metric is the 21 foot rule (if your gun is in your holster a person with a knife who is 21 feet or closer can kill you before you can defend yourself with your firearm) so if you are within 21 feet of someone with a knife (acting erratically, raising a deadly weapon, etc...) then you are SUPPOSED to have your gun out and ready. That said it should be at a low ready, not pointing and shooting... I'm not defending the police in those incidents, I don't know enough about the details to defend or attack their actions from here. But I feel like people very often forget that most police are under-trained, and put in life threatening situations that most people commenting have no real experience with.
newman314 10y ago
As a taxpayer, you should also ask questions about what you are getting for your money. Simply throwing money at the problem isn't the solution. http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article2573210.html http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article2573210... There are plenty of examples where police in other countries are taught to de-escalate rather than escalate as a first order so it's a shame that this does not happen here.

tptacek 10y ago

Unfortunately, incidents are virtually certain to recur so long as the first line of monitoring and compliance policing is performed by armed officers. In short: we must disarm most police officers. The Castile shooting occurred at a stop due to a broken tail light. Consider: the city of Chicago uses cameras to asynchronously ticket red light violators. Running a red light is objectively more dangerous than driving with a broken tail light, but Chicago will allow you to continue driving unimpeded after doing so. Further, consider: any number of other violations in Chicago --- expired plates, bad stickers, poor selection of parking places, failure to pay parking fees, outstanding warrants on your car --- are performed by parking enforcement officers who are not armed. Chicago also routinely deployed traffic direction officers who are themselves not armed. The police force we have today will not allow itself to be disarmed. The realistic medium-term answer to this problem is not to change the culture of existing police --- we should do that, but we should be pragmatic about how far that will get us. Instead, cities that want to reduce police violence should stop hiring assault officers, and begin programs to replace them with monitoring and compliance officers who will accept jobs with a description that includes doing the work unarmed. Smart cities should find ways to offload monitoring and compliance work from assault officers onto unarmed officers. Police forces can be disarmed through attrition. Cities are incentivized to do this anyways: assault officer hires come packaged with intractable pension problems. New job descriptions don't. Consider also: "armed" and "unarmed" isn't binary. When approaching Philando Castile's car to inquire about the broken tail light, the officer was by default no more than 20-30 seconds away from being able to fire a bullet into Castile. Smarter public policy can increase that delay from 20 seconds to something far greater. For instance: general-purpose patrolling assault officers can be (are, in fact, today) issued rifles and shotguns stored in their trunk. Those officers can remain armed; just, not with handguns, and not wielded by default. Modern assault officers are in a double bind. They're routinely required to work in high-crime neighborhoods, often minority-dominated, and thus subjected to constant cognitive strain: they're put into contact with far more minorities at work than at home, and those minorities are sampled from a cohort anomalously likely to include criminals. Further, assault officers are acculturated and in fact trained to believe (irrationally) that routine job activities, like making traffic stops, are among the most dangerous things that can be done in America. They're stuck in a vicious circle of cortisol spikes and negative reinforcement. It is not reasonable to expect them to safely handle continuously-available firearms. I suspect we'll discover that confrontations between unarmed officers and armed suspects are less dangerous than confrontations between armed officers and armed suspects. Most (not all) suspects who shoot at cops aren't doing it out of spite, but instead of out self-preservation. Regardless, I think we already know what would happen if we reconstituted police forces to be 20% assault and 80% compliance, down from 90% assault: far less police violence, far fewer shooting incidents, less expense, and a greater civic recognition of the real risks of policing. Disarm most police.

crusso 10y ago

What percent of the 1000 was engaged in criminal activity that endangered the officer or others? The raw ratio of deaths doesn't tell us much.