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I am all for the pilot program so long as the politicians pushing for this are charged as accessories to any crimes committed against the people they are going

I am all for the pilot program so long as the politicians pushing for this are charged as accessories to any crimes committed against the people they are going to put at risk. This is the very definition of insanity. In other words, ignoring reality and pretending that a fantasy in someone’s head is real. My father in law is a retired cop. One of the most harrowing stories he tells is about when he and his partner entered this four unit apartment building. The kind where you open the front door and there are four doors along a short hallway. The call was for yelling and screaming (a loud argument) from one of the units at 2:00 AM. They opened the front door (unlocked) and stepped into the hallway to look for the apartment. That’s when someone comes out of one of the apartments and immediately fires a gun towards them, emptying the entire clip. His partner got shot twice. He was grazed once. The guy ran off. Other cops arrested him later. The vast majority of people are good. We don’t have cops to hand lollipops to kids playing at the park. We send armed cops into the worst possible situations and expect them to be buddhist philosophers. Sorry, that’s not the real world. Not when your job requires you to engage with multiple people a day, any one of whom could kill you. Those of you who think you can philosophize with someone intent on killing you should take a weapons martial arts class to understand reality. Having done so myself for decades I can tell you I don’t want anyone with a knife any closer than 16 feet, maybe 20. Even someone relatively slow and without training can bridge a 20 foot gap and kill you with a knife before you know what happened. People (and politicians) love to voice opinions about this stuff and yet none of them are willing to put their lives on the line as part of the experiment they propose. I’ll have respect for them when, armed with a candy bar and good intentions, they go face someone who could potentially kill them. We’ll see how long their plans survive contact with reality.

giantg2 6y ago
Those politicians are on the same level of people protesting police shooting a suspect chasing them with a knife. Those are the same type of people saying "you should have shot him in the leg" and other crap.
- deleted 6y ago
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asah 6y ago
That's awful... but by your own description, the police were no better as first responders in this particular situation.
- robomartin 6y ago
  I think the mistake you are making is one of interpretation. In did not share this personal anecdote to make a qualitative claim. Not at all. How could I? Someone calls 911. Two people go to the address in question and somebody empties a clip into them before any contact takes place. If anything the message is: Do not send unarmed people because they could die. My perspective is admittedly simplistic: I have no problem with someone proposing to send folks without guns to try to deal with any random 911 call so long as it is THEIR skin in the game. It's easy to send others into potential life or death situation when there are not consequences whatsoever for the person making that decision. As I said in my post, and I'll repeat here, taking a weapons martial arts class is quite humbling in that you quickly realize just how dangerous encounters with someone intent on doing harm could be.
mithr 6y ago
That sounds like a terrible situation. It's also completely anecdotal, and doesn't really contribute one way or the other to the validity of this pilot's approach. The point isn't that there are never any cases where armed police response is appropriate -- but rather that the vast majority of cases don't require one. > The vast majority of people are good. > We send armed cops into the worst possible situations > your job requires you to engage with multiple people a day, any one of whom could kill you These statements are exactly the point. The data shows that the vast majority of people involved in 911 calls are also not "the worst possible" people -- but police today are trained to consider every situation as if it were "the worst possible situation". And the data shows that this is not true in the vast majority of cases. No one is claiming that there is no risk, but rather that despite popular belief, the data indicates this risk is in fact not constant enough to justify armed, worst-possible-sitation response as the default. In addition, as your anecdote illustrates, in some cases even sending an armed police response isn't enough, and they get shot anyway. Programs like these can't solve for these edge cases -- what they do is recognize that these are edge cases, rather than the norm, which is the opposite of the approach taken by much of the police force today, and by your comment. Just as one piece of data from this very article: > The NYC, Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco test programs are all modeled after Eugene, Oregon’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out in The Streets (CAHOOTS) program, which has been in place since 1989. In 2019, it responded to 24,000 calls for service, less than 1% of which required an additional police response. So no one is claiming that there is never any reason to call for armed response -- rather that it's only needed a very small percentage of the time. Can this program potentially completely eliminate any and all shootings, or terrible situations like the one you described? Of course not. But the data does indicate that in the vast majority of cases, armed response is more likely to make things worse, not better. Other cases definitely exist, but are the exception.
- robomartin 6y ago
  > The point isn't that there are never any cases where armed police response is appropriate -- but rather that the vast majority of cases don't require one. The point is even simpler than that. Let's say a cop deals with 10 contacts with random people for equally random causes every day. That's 200 contacts per month or, roughly, 2,500 per year. Let's say only 1% of those encounters involve someone intent on doing harm to the officers, carrying a deadly weapon or willing to do anything at all not to get arrested. That's 25 potentially deadly encounters per year. Imagine having a job where performing your job might get you killed 25 times per year. That's no joke. And so that game, the gamble, the proposal, is to send out someone other than police officers to some cross section of calls. Fine. Good idea. The question is: How do we predict what side of that 1% each call will be on? In the case of my father in law, the call was like hundreds, if not thousands, of calls they had handled during their career. And yet, they came very close to being killed. In other words, we are proposing to send ill-equipped people to a potential life or death situation nobody is able to predict. That's where I come out on the side of: If you want to propose that (not you personally, a general "you", a politician, activist, whoever) then you better be willing to go out and take those calls before you send someone else out to do it. That, to me, is honorable. Anything else is fake virtue signaling while playing with someone else's life. I think a leader must include this as one of his or her guiding principles: I will never ask you to do something I am not willing to do myself (or have not done myself). That goes from sweeping the floor to asking someone to walk into a potentially dangerous situation that could cost someone's life. It's easy to ask someone to clean vomit off the floor when you don't have to do it.

giantg2 6y ago

Those politicians are on the same level of people protesting police shooting a suspect chasing them with a knife. Those are the same type of people saying "you should have shot him in the leg" and other crap.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

asah 6y ago

That's awful... but by your own description, the police were no better as first responders in this particular situation.

robomartin 6y ago
I think the mistake you are making is one of interpretation. In did not share this personal anecdote to make a qualitative claim. Not at all. How could I? Someone calls 911. Two people go to the address in question and somebody empties a clip into them before any contact takes place. If anything the message is: Do not send unarmed people because they could die. My perspective is admittedly simplistic: I have no problem with someone proposing to send folks without guns to try to deal with any random 911 call so long as it is THEIR skin in the game. It's easy to send others into potential life or death situation when there are not consequences whatsoever for the person making that decision. As I said in my post, and I'll repeat here, taking a weapons martial arts class is quite humbling in that you quickly realize just how dangerous encounters with someone intent on doing harm could be.

mithr 6y ago

That sounds like a terrible situation. It's also completely anecdotal, and doesn't really contribute one way or the other to the validity of this pilot's approach. The point isn't that there are never any cases where armed police response is appropriate -- but rather that the vast majority of cases don't require one. > The vast majority of people are good. > We send armed cops into the worst possible situations > your job requires you to engage with multiple people a day, any one of whom could kill you These statements are exactly the point. The data shows that the vast majority of people involved in 911 calls are also not "the worst possible" people -- but police today are trained to consider every situation as if it were "the worst possible situation". And the data shows that this is not true in the vast majority of cases. No one is claiming that there is no risk, but rather that despite popular belief, the data indicates this risk is in fact not constant enough to justify armed, worst-possible-sitation response as the default. In addition, as your anecdote illustrates, in some cases even sending an armed police response isn't enough, and they get shot anyway. Programs like these can't solve for these edge cases -- what they do is recognize that these are edge cases, rather than the norm, which is the opposite of the approach taken by much of the police force today, and by your comment. Just as one piece of data from this very article: > The NYC, Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco test programs are all modeled after Eugene, Oregon’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out in The Streets (CAHOOTS) program, which has been in place since 1989. In 2019, it responded to 24,000 calls for service, less than 1% of which required an additional police response. So no one is claiming that there is never any reason to call for armed response -- rather that it's only needed a very small percentage of the time. Can this program potentially completely eliminate any and all shootings, or terrible situations like the one you described? Of course not. But the data does indicate that in the vast majority of cases, armed response is more likely to make things worse, not better. Other cases definitely exist, but are the exception.

robomartin 6y ago
> The point isn't that there are never any cases where armed police response is appropriate -- but rather that the vast majority of cases don't require one. The point is even simpler than that. Let's say a cop deals with 10 contacts with random people for equally random causes every day. That's 200 contacts per month or, roughly, 2,500 per year. Let's say only 1% of those encounters involve someone intent on doing harm to the officers, carrying a deadly weapon or willing to do anything at all not to get arrested. That's 25 potentially deadly encounters per year. Imagine having a job where performing your job might get you killed 25 times per year. That's no joke. And so that game, the gamble, the proposal, is to send out someone other than police officers to some cross section of calls. Fine. Good idea. The question is: How do we predict what side of that 1% each call will be on? In the case of my father in law, the call was like hundreds, if not thousands, of calls they had handled during their career. And yet, they came very close to being killed. In other words, we are proposing to send ill-equipped people to a potential life or death situation nobody is able to predict. That's where I come out on the side of: If you want to propose that (not you personally, a general "you", a politician, activist, whoever) then you better be willing to go out and take those calls before you send someone else out to do it. That, to me, is honorable. Anything else is fake virtue signaling while playing with someone else's life. I think a leader must include this as one of his or her guiding principles: I will never ask you to do something I am not willing to do myself (or have not done myself). That goes from sweeping the floor to asking someone to walk into a potentially dangerous situation that could cost someone's life. It's easy to ask someone to clean vomit off the floor when you don't have to do it.