Today in cops gone feral

They have tasers and it looks to me like the time to use one. I'm not excusing the shooting exactly, but something like that moves very fast. They have to make a decision right damn now.

"Shoot them in the leg" is a lot harder than it sounds, and in a general sense you're taught that if a situation is bad enough to pull a pistol in the first place, you shoot center mass till they fall down.

 

Every gun “safety” class I’ve ever attended have the follow mantras:

— only pull your gun if you feel your life is threatened.
— once you pull, you intend to shoot.
— shoot to kill.

 

Interview the girl in the pink. Ask her what she thinks about a cop shooting someone who was trying to stab her.

Maybe the cop should have tackled her or shot her in the butt? OK. But the girl was moving fast and wildly swinging that blade.

 

What if the girl in the pink was the aggressor, but the girl she attacked and got the upper hand? This was always the troubling thing with the George Zimmerman trial. He was the aggressor, he followed that boy. Trayvon was fighting back against a man who stalked him and the man got away with murder. This might be the same scenario; the girl who was killed may have just simply been protecting herself. Yes, why didn't the cops shoot her in the butt? If you're going for center mass, ass is no harder to hit than center mass torso.

 

Having gone through some police judgmental shooting training a handful of times, law enforcement isn’t trained to shoot with the intent to kill. I’ve never heard that phrase used, ever. They are taught to shoot until the threat is over and they are taught to shoot at center mass of the target. While death is often the likely result, the intent to kill is not the goal, ending the threat is the goal. And no one can shoot a gun or a knife out of someone’s hands when you believe your life or other lives are in danger. You can’t wing a suspect. The kill zone of someone with a knife is 18-20feet. At that distance someone with a knife and make contact with someone with a gun and inflict deadly force. That is the training too.

 

If the girl in the pink was the aggressor, the table was turned at that point. And that's all the cop could see.

I'm not defending the cop wholesale. But someone was about to stab someone. This one will be judged a defensible shooting.

 

Maybe the officer should’ve pulled his taser instead of his sidearm.

 

The call to the police was that a girl was trying to stab the caller. The cops get there and there's a girl swinging a knife. They didn't have time to try to find out who was who.

Caveat: I have not watched the video. I usually don't. Her family claims that she dropped the knife before she was shot multiple times. Depending on the how long between the drop and the shooting, that might change my take.

Edit: I watched it but the one I saw stopped with the same knife in hand freeze frame, then you hear shots. You'd need a more complete video to be able to tell much about the final moments before the shots.

 

Maybe the two cops – there were at least two behind her – should have tackled her instead. The girl in pink was getting her leg up in defense, so maybe the knife wouldn't have landed, or hit vital arteries or organs, by the time she was gang-tackled. Who knows.

 

The police are a para-military force and must be constrained on an increasingly regular basis by the civilian authority. Always have, always will.

 

The military takes an oath to die for their country, police do not. Asking the police to sacrifice their lives is not only unreasonable but it’s a sacrifice those they serve do not honor.