Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation.
I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.
Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?
The police rule by fear. I’ve never broken the law and yet Im really affraid of cops in the US. I know I should not have a reason to but can’t help but be intimidated by their tactics, their orders, their demeanour. And I act like a scared ghost anytime I get stopped by them: I am afraid that if any answer I’d give them might make them punish me with one more more tickets.
2) Because there is no such thing as shoot to wound. If you've gotten to the point where you're shooting at someone they need to be dead. Any bullet holes in your body are potentially fatal. Especially the famous leg shot; damage to your femoral artery will kill you extremely quickly.
2. Have you ever shot a gun? Have you ever shot a pistol? Now to simulate the Andrenaline dump run few sprints then try again. You CAN NOT shoot to disable this is not a Hollywood movie, it does not work. Most people can’t hit anything past few meters away with a pistol.
Gun is not a taser or a nightstick. It is a lethal weapon and should only be employed when you have a reason to kill.
Where do you aim if you want to "shoot to incapacitate"?
No such place exists on the body. Even using small, low-powered rounds like a .22 rimfire short carry extreme risk of death no matter where you aim.
The answer is more simple. Don't pull out that gun unless what the person is doing warrants death. I don't know that attempting to apprehend a DUI is worth killing someone over. If you're responding to a domestic violence situation where someone's running around with a knife though, it's likely that a gun isn't a terrible consideration.
I think the real issue is getting in the competitive zone. "I'm not going to let this pero beat me" instead of considering if the cure is worse than the disease.
I just want to answer your question about shooting to kill vs incapacitate.
The first part of the answer is that nobody should shoot anyone who they don’t reasonably believe is trying to kill them. This applies to citizens or police. Generally it is the standard applied in citizen self-defense scenarios.
The second part is that shooting isn’t that easy or effective. Certainly not how it appears in the movies. It is hard to hit a 6” moving target in a stressful situation, even at relatively close range, and would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops. Added to this, there is no reliable place to shoot someone that will incapacitate them without also being likely to kill them. Surprisingly many people will continue to fight after being shot, so even if the cop had the ability to ‘shoot them in the leg’, for example, they would still be at risk of being killed by an aggressive adversary.
In addition, any responsible use of firearms has to take into account the environment. Handgun bullets are still lethal hundreds of meters from where they are fired. When cops miss their targets, bullets can and do kill bystanders, or ricochet or fragment and cause injury to people not even in the line of fire.
So the guidance to anyone using a gun in self defense is generally to shoot for the ‘center of mass’. This is primary because hitting the central nervous system or vital organs is the only reliable way to stop someone, but also because it’s impractical and unsafe to aim anywhere else.
None of this is meant to justify police shootings. Quite the opposite. I am just explaining why every gun use is necessarily a lethal encounter.
If a politician suggests “shooting them in the leg”, the one thing you can be certain of is that they are completely incompetent on this topic, and can not be trusted to improve matters.
Generally agree apart from this - if cops don't have training to be expert (or at least above-average good) shooters, then that's a failure. We've read tons of articles about militarization of US police. If they have budget for armored vehicles, for sure they have budget for (very cheap but quality basic) 9mm ammunition for practice.
That's really all we need to know to demand radical changes to police culture, if not the entire concept of ubiquitous armed police forces.
Most armed folks are taught that when you draw a gun it's to neutralize a threat. To neutralize is to completely eliminate the threat.
Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license?
Something like 'Don't pull your gun out and point it at someone unless you intend to shoot and kill them. Anything less than that needlessly escalates the severity of a situation by introducing a weapon.'
The idea being that if you pull out a gun and don't use it, all of the sudden you have increased the potential for violence, exposed yourself as armed and willing, lost the element of surprise, and given potential assailants the idea/opportunity to match your use of force. Thus, "shoot to kill."
One problem is that guns are tools for a task, and when you pull out a tool, you want to leverage it as efficiently as possible. Maybe the answer isn't to use the tool differently, but use a different tool entirely.
The real reason they shoot to kill is because they don’t want the victim to sue. A dead man never sued, their families have a lower chance of getting anything though that has started to change with so much footage.
Absolutely, I was taught this in my self-defense shooting class. The question of kill or not kill doesn't enter into it at all. We were trained to neutralize the threat, full stop. The effect on the future health of that threat doesn't enter into it.
And this makes sense when you understand that gunfights don't happen the way you see on TV. There, when someone is hit with a bullet they fall down and stop being a threat. This is not how the world works. In the real world, unless their circulatory system or nervous system is taken offline, they will continue to be a threat. Even if they've been hit through the aorta or femoral artery or something that is likely to be fatal, it'll take a minute or two at least for the effect to occur, and in the meantime, they're going to keep trying to kill you.
Some people have mental issues and normally they twitch a lot. And cops claim they were afraid for their lives, it’s the easy license to kill. I find that barbaric and no wonder we see so much backlash against the police force!!!
In Long Island a higher ranked cop would retire after 20 years with a pension of 500k, and in Long Island they really don’t do anything. While that, a new recruit in the Bronx would start at salary of 40k with poor training and lots of headaches. Seems like we need to reform the police!
Discussions about these things just started popping up on NPR and other sources. They brought it up on themselves.
I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?
That's nonsense. Evidence is never excluded because it doesn't tell the whole story. If that were the case, admitting any evidence at all would be a rare occurrence. Rather, each side in a case tries to piece together their version of the story with the evidence that is available to them. Generally speaking, evidence is only excluded if it's unreliable (e.g. hearsay) or irrelevant.
Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes.
De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.
Because there is no place to shoot that will simply incapacitate everyone. The policy is generally shoot to stop the threat not to kill per se. There are many instances where a person will take many rounds in potentially fatal spots and continue like nothing has happened.
> In this free-for-all, the assailant had, in fact, been struck 14 times. Any one of six of these wounds – in the heart, right lung, left lung, liver, diaphragm, and right kidney – could have produced fatal consequences, “in time,” Gramins emphasizes.[1]
[1] https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one...
There's a larger issue, though. All laws ultimately are enforced by people with guns who will do violence up to and including death if people don't comply. Some laws are less likely than others to result in death (e.g. drug laws vs. securities fraud), but "is this law worth killing for?" is a question we all should ask when considering what the law should be.
Are there instances where doctors negligently kill their patients? Absolutely.
That does not mean we need to "radically" change doctor culture, if not the entire concept of doctors performing surgeries with sharp objects.
The RATE is abuse is more important than the mere existence of abuse.
These emotional comments have lost touch with logical thinking. The media is driving people crazy.
Sure you can, it's what the vast majority of police forces in developed countries are doing all the time [0].
That way they also don't end up shooting innocent bystanders, which is apparently quite a common thing in the US [1] [2]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ge...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in...
No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs).
Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing.
Edit: Spelling
No, it's not that simple. Police escalation itself can put innocent people in harms way. The police can shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders. Escalation can provoke a criminal to start shooting and kill innocent bystanders or police. That's not to mention the now better-documented situations where the police escalate against someone who's not a threat and murder them in the process.
You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.
> You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.
There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unsourced) statistics. If you want to reason from statistics, they have to be measuring comparable situations, which yours are not. Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].
Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply. For instance, Philando Castile was armed, but clearly should not have been shot by police.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
So what's an acceptable rate for the murder of PoC due to ongoing systemic racism and abuse of authority at the hands of the Police?
When considering whether or not the use of deadly force was justified in a given situation, the lack of a weapon isn't the trump card indicating the force was not justified that many people think it is.
Even the best handgun shooters in the world are unlikely either to be reliably be able to shoot to incapacitate.
It just isn’t a capacity that handguns have in realistic use cases.
The primary reason police need more training with firearms is so that they become less afraid of them and more generally competent and confident.
That will give them more capacity to exercise better judgement in when they actually need to shoot.
Of course it depends a lot on the training and whether it is aimed at increasing or reducing their fear levels.
> Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].
The question at play as I understood it is whether, being in a dangerous situation as a bystander, you should call the police knowing that they may respond with lethal force. If someone, even someone you know, is posing a threat to you, then the police pose much less of a threat by several orders of magnitude. Yes, police are imperfect and occasionally kill bystanders, but they kill less bystanders by far than people killed through criminal acts.
This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.
Which brings us to the Philando Castile case, in which he was not threatening anyone. He was stopped for a traffic incident.. not waving a firearm around, not because someone was panicking. The police officer who shot him was wrong, and that's why he was charged and faced trial.
> Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply
It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person. If we are interested in those cases where the police acted wrongfully instead of just those cases in which they acted at all, then that number is important. Yes, there are cases where someone armed is unjustly shot, those cases are obviously more rare.
[^2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Look, obviously there are some rare situations where de-escalation is not possible, like the North Hollywood Shootout, but it sounds like you're saying that the police should come in guns blazing whenever they think a suspect is threatening lethal force. That's obviously wrong. Police should try, to the greatest extent possible, to avoid shooting anyone. Whenever possible, they should de-escalate the situation, which refers to stuff like this:
> De-escalation more broadly refers to the strategic slowing down of an incident in a manner that allows officers more time, distance, space and tactical flexibility during dynamic situations on the street. Applying these specific skills increases the potential for resolving the situation with minimized force or no force at all, which reduces the likelihood of injury to the public, increases officer safety and mitigates the immediacy of potential or ongoing threats. A reduction in use of force incidents also reduces community complaints, promotes the perception of procedural justice and, most importantly, promotes resolution of events with the public’s compliance. [1]
Here's one case of what not de-escalating looks like, and the kinds of police attitude problems that are at play here:
> “Last week, there was a guy in a car who wouldn’t show me his hands,” the officer said. “I pulled my gun out and stuck it right in his nose, and I go, ‘Show me your hands now!’ That’s de-escalation.” [2]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-applauds-a...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/long-taught-to-use-for...
If the threat of a taser is a threat that warrants lethal force in self defense, the police are reaching for them far too quickly when they deal with people who are non-compliant. It takes very little provocation for most police officers to deploy their taser. I believe they are almost always used against unarmed people (armed people get shot, not tased).