5 ms·

Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even be

• downrightmike 2mo ago
  The process is the punishment
• Someone1234 2mo ago
  Same reason why so called "Swatting" is largely a non-issue outside the US: Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it. Contrast that with most other countries, where police are trained to respond and only escalate based on the findings/as the situation unfolds. This training is supposedly for "officer safety." But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields, and the vast majority of deaths are from traffic accidents or health issues while on the job (e.g. heart attack/stroke), not gun-related. So it is more likely a cultural issue within the profession.
  • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
    Police in the US should respond to the hilt because the likelihood of the suspect being armed is significantly higher than any other country...
    • quietsegfault 2mo ago
      If it’s so dangerous, perhaps we should find a way to better control the danger of firearms.
      • Barbing 2mo ago
        Yes and in the meantime, respond with all available resources? (pretending my parents, wife, children are police officers and posting from that perspective, but do not like taste of boot nor Flock - just thinking logical on the ground procedure accounting for broken larger system)
        • nemomarx 2mo ago
          Try pretending your wife and children are in a car being pulled over for a drug inspection and think from that perspective. Or to have their papers checked to make sure they're not illegal aliens, whichever you prefer.
          • Barbing 2mo ago
            Great point, not fair for them to need a lifetime of therapy. So there’s a happy medium. I don’t know why the first thing that comes to mind is calling in for backup and having a cop in a mascot costume get out, with body armor and a completely concealed weapon at the ready underneath. They cheerfully chat up the adult driver, say hi to the kid & give a sticker, and once they assess it’s safe they can move onto the next call while the uniformed officer comes to discuss the situation. Doesn’t help the adult much though I guess, we’d know about the concealed weapon. … btw maybe sending a drone or a robot actually came to mind first, but those solutions are uncomfortable - OK w/a million caveats maybe (Instead of posting something so stupid I could’ve left it at I hope there’s a happy medium!)
      • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
        Yes, firearms themselves present a clear and present danger by themselves. I'm sure once you make laws to control them, the firearms learn to stop being dangerous.
        • kittoes 2mo ago
          Why does this always have to be binary when any amount of gun control is suggested? It's simple math: if me didn't manufacture so many guns and didn't make them so readily available then there will inherently be less danger... this isn't even debatable!
          • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
            That is obviously true... but also a fairy tale hypothetical, and we are in the real world. So the question is, what's the solution, right now? Not 200 years ago.
            • kittoes 2mo ago
              A fairy tale? The UK, Australia, and Brazil all have something to say about that claim. In developed countries, the United States is an extreme outlier so why pretend this is a completely unapproachable problem? Our constitution itself gives us a blueprint because it states, in no uncertain terms, a "well-regulated militia"; not "each individual citizen".
              • genewitch 2mo ago
                I notice you put a semicolon there. You forgot to put the rest: > the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. what does "the people" mean to you?
                • iamnothere 2mo ago
                  Not the OP, but if I had to guess, they probably imagine that it means the nation as a whole, embodied by its government. You know, as in “The People’s Republic of North Korea.” (If anyone wants to alter the 2nd so it’s more in line with their views, there’s a clear legal path. Pass an Amendment or call a Constitutional convention.)
    • nemomarx 2mo ago
      They still die less often than pizza delivery drivers even with that. I think they could eat the extra risk in traffic stops.
      • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
        I would prefer less people die, actually.
        • nemomarx 2mo ago
          If it comes down to it, I would prefer an officer die compared to an innocent civilian mistakenly die because a cop was scared or already had their finger on the trigger. Their job is to serve the public, accepting some level of risks is part of this. "About as risky as low paid delivery work" doesn't seem unreasonably high to me basically. Most cops die in car crashes, not being shot by potential suspects as it stands.
          • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
            More police are shot and killed every year than people who were accidentally shot by police. Imagine if they didn't approach every high-risk situation with guns drawn. There would be orders of magnitude more officers killed.
            • genewitch 2mo ago
              This is not correct. to the best of my memory, no year since the 90s has had more than 100 or 200 total officer fatalities in the line of duty. Police routinely kill 3 people a day. it's a pretty high bar to say that all three people the police kill every day were warranted. most line of duty deaths involve not wearing a seatbelt.
              • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
                This is where I think you're wrong. The vast, vast majority of people killed by police are warranted. People routinely threaten officers' lives with guns, and get killed for it. It's unfortunate, but it happens. People aren't just getting shot by police for no reason regularly.
    • giantg2 2mo ago
      Most police in the US don't overreact to the presence of a weapon during traffic stops or pther routine interactions. Many states could have around 10% of people carrying a gun, making armed interactions quite common.
      • M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
        I completely agree. My point was that they should always be prepared for the worst.
  • skinfaxi 2mo ago
    > Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it. Citation needed.
  • bad_haircut72 2mo ago
    Devils advocate here but your argument is that they should change their safety policy because the job has great safety statistics? What if they change tactics and danger goes up?
    • giantrobot 2mo ago
      That's not Devil's advocate, that's just foolishness. First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution. Second, their instant escalation does nothing to keep them safe. If anything it makes them less safe.
      • embedding-shape 2mo ago
        > First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution Fun fact; apparently that's just like a local police force's motto (LAPD's originally), and not a national policy for all law enforcement in the US. While reading about this some days ago, I came across this: > The phrase “To Protect and to Serve” originated as the motto for the Los Angeles Police Department before being adopted by departments throughout the country. The popular phrase has turned out to be quite misleading. Through a series of former decisions, the courts have affirmed that the police have no legal obligation to prevent harm except under specific circumstances [...] The Supreme Court upheld the precedent set in DeShaney and affirmed that State actors, in this case police departments, have no legal duty to protect - https://guulr.com/2021/05/10/a-review-of-to-protect-and-serve/ https://guulr.com/2021/05/10/a-review-of-to-protect-and-serv... I think overall the motto is simply a marketing term today.
    • c22 2mo ago
      This would probably be both expected and preferable. The way they currently act often puts the public at huge risk in exchange for officer safety. Given the police are trained professionals who chose their own occupation any added risk should fall on them.
    • Draiken 2mo ago
      Do we take into account the people they handle in those safety statistics? I'm pretty sure we don't. A guy got shot after being swatted not so long ago and that would be a data point with no injuries for officers, masking the real victims.
  • WillAdams 2mo ago
    The problem is, this behaviour and training fails the legal standard of a presumption of innocence which should guide such.
    • twister2920 2mo ago
      it's not exactly a great time in American history for the 14th amendment
  • stickfigure 2mo ago
    > But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields You don't think that has something to do with the exact policies you are objecting to? They call them "high risk stops" for a reason.
    • cwillu 2mo ago
      You'd have a point if any other western country had police work in their top-10 most dangerous fields, but they don't.
      • stickfigure 2mo ago
        Like Mexico, our immediate neighbor to the south? Policing in Mexico is ~100 deaths per 100,000 compared to 11.3 deaths per 100,000 in the US. 100 deaths/100,000 is on par with logging workers in the US, which is the #1 most dangerous field. Do better research.
        • cwillu 2mo ago
          Congrats on finding the outlier.
          • stickfigure 2mo ago
            I didn't have to walk far.
  • nonameiguess 2mo ago
    I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television. Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade. As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard. These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.
• M3L0NM4N 2mo ago
  I think the police should especially have guns drawn if they are pulling over a car owned by a murder suspect. It is reasonable enough to assume the driver is the suspect. If they PID the driver as not the suspect, holster up, no problem. Police always have guns drawn for any felony stop as an officer safety precaution, no reason to not when you have a high risk suspect.
• giantg2 2mo ago
  Not to mention fake and stolen plates are a thing.
• consumer451 2mo ago
  I am currently in the countryside, outside of the USA. I speak to folks about the USA sometimes, and guns come up. We are known for that. They think they want them. I get it... they do sound cool. I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun. That reality increases the chances of bad things happening due to human factors. "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a twitchy wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!" Sometimes, this seems to wake people up to the reality of ubiquitous firearms. Please note, I am not making judgements here. These just seem like facts.
  • skinfaxi 2mo ago
    > "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!" Why would every speeding pull-over become a wild-west situation? If possessing a gun is a right, then mere possession is no reason to suspect criminality is afoot.
    • Barbing 2mo ago
      What if you assume 1 in 100 are going to be dangerous? Only rarely does the driver say “I’m not going back to jail!“ when they have warrants out. If you inspect rollercoasters I figure you could probably be pretty lackadaisical on the average inspection. If you don’t take each one deadly seriously though and there’s no way of knowing when it’s important to, maybe it comes flying off the track, so you follow your checklist each and every time without exception. (So glad I’m not employed to or in a position where I need to own weapons.)
      • skinfaxi 2mo ago
        When in enemy territory, the military looks at civilian populations as potential enemy combatants. Police are not supposed to view everyone this way as they are in their communities and not enemy territory.
        • 2mo ago
• stickfigure 2mo ago
  We don't the details of the flag. In general cops err on the side of protecting themselves from danger and I can't fault them for that. How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide? Obviously someone made a mistake here but I'm not sure this has anything to do with Flock. The car had an "APB" out. We want cops to pull over "wanted" cars, right?
  • AlotOfReading 2mo ago
    It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police treat every situation as a potentially dangerous engagement, they're actually actually increasing the likelihood that dangerous engagements occur.
    • stickfigure 2mo ago
      I agree, but "this car was used in a homicide" is pretty unambiguously a high-risk stop.
      • 8note 2mo ago
        of course, investigation rather than ai psychosis would show that the car has not in fact been used in a homocide
  • aftbit 2mo ago
    If I were going to approach a vehicle whose driver was suspected of homicide, I would do so in a very obvious, slow, and non-threatening manner, probably without obviously being a cop. The last thing I would want to do if someone is potentially a hair trigger threat is give them a surprise and cause them to start shooting. Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. If we're going to live in a surveillance state, use the damn surveillance for situational awareness. Right now, the cops just get a hit like "APB - Homicide" with no retrospective analysis or attempt to verify. It's essentially an unverified tip - they should use some expertise and tools to try to validate it before they commit. But they don't, because there's no cost or penalty to them for overreacting, and there's a risk if they underreact. It's really an incentives problem. I don't know if the right spot to address it is with the individual officers or the department, but someone should have some huge liability for this mistake.
• micromacrofoot 2mo ago
  We've given a bunch of people hammers and impunity for using the hammers and ask why they keep hitting people with them.
• mywittyname 2mo ago
  That's what their training requires and if they don't engage that way, they will be reprimanded.