Don't shoot, I'm disabled | Hacker News Reader

Don't shoot, I'm disabled

bbc.co.uk

225 pointsbb101253 comments

For those of you reading these things thinking, "Oh, I don't know anybody who has had this happen to them. This could never happen to me or anybody I know".

11 years ago, Steven Fountain, a friend of mine, a programmer / systems administrator I met when I was working at Napster who suffered from schizophrenia was shot to death by police in Campbell, California. He had called the police in a moment of confusion and despair.

I had just interviewed him for a job at a company where I was working two weeks earlier, and was trying to convince my boss to hire him even though he was quirky, not quite realizing how bad his emotional state was until talking to his ex-gf at the funeral.

http://www.mydeathspace.com/article/2007/11/09/Steven_Founta...

Edited for clarity and date accuracy

I think the biggest problem is their training. I was on a base police detail as a temporary duty for about a year and I often see things like this and the police act exactly as the training I had taught. The "force escalation" went ask -> tell -> make, and they try to instill a paranoia that everyone has a concealed gun by default and should be treated so. I think I have the old training manual laying around somewhere still.

Training about recognizing and handling disabled persons should be mandatory, I received none. Also, clearly what is considered "deadly force" should be re-evaluated. Injecting someone with sedatives without knowing their medical history definitely seems like it should be on that list.

One of most disturbing things I remember from the training was an instructor telling us "It doesen't matter what really happened, what matters is how you articulate what happened."

> Training about recognizing and handling disabled persons should be mandatory

Sure, but in this case, the man's ability level doesn't even seem relevant.

Officers see a nonviolent man taking a shower. No weapons seen by officers. No weapons reported in the 911 call. Man is naked, also suggesting nothing concealed. Man is acting unusually but does not appear to be harming himself and is not uttering any threats to officers.

Yet a team of armed and armoured law enforcement officers think they are at risk? They respond with electric shock, physical force, and injecting drugs!

The ability level of the man is irrelevant. These are thugs and I think their problem may be deeper than gaps in their training.

What if they were telling the truth and they really thought they were helping him?

That's sort of my point. I was responding to the "training" comment.

So if those officers genuinely believe that their armed and armoured team needs to electrocute, subdue, and inject a naked man in the shower who posed no apparent threat in order to "help" him then they are potentially beyond training.

I think there's a good chance they were trained to do that.

Yikes. If that's the case then trainers and everyone up the chain needs to answer to the community (i.e. who they ultimately serve and protect) on this one, then.

Thank goodness for 1) body cams on police, and 2) shared footage so we can have this conversation.

They most certainly do not serve and protect the community.. That is unless by community you mean "law enforcement community". They do indeed serve and protect their own gang quite effectively.

That is plausible. Especially if we assume that "helping him" meant ending the situation as quickly as possible. They probably hoped to drop him off at the next hospital to deal with.

Mental issues take time. Often you just wait for the person to recover. When you rule out that option, only force is left.

Then they are too stupid to be in the business of helping people.

Or they were trained that helping people means making them compliant by any means necessary so they can be brought to the hospital safely.

That's not what they did. They brought him to the morgue.

You know, where I grew up, it's very simple: if your actions directly result in the death of another human, you go to jail by default. "I only wanted to help" is a weak excuse, and "I only wanted to help by injecting a drug" gets you a longer sentence. As it should be.

I agree. I'm not saying that the police who did this were right or that they shouldn't be punished. I'm saying that with better training the kid might not have died. The idea that police could be trained to kill fewer people doesn't mean that they're currently not at fault when they do kill people.

Note that the police didn't inject the drugs. The paramedics did that. The police just held him down for that part.

It makes me sad to see that is the current culture of US police force. It would interesting to know why and how the European and American cultures have grown apart so considerably on this matter. I think in 19th and 20th century we were both pretty blood-thirsty although I'm not sure were the American police force then already considerably more accustomed to use lethal force. Now it seems that it's such an integral part of the American police officer's identity that the stereotype already feeds itself by people expecting them to behave that way and them in turn behaving as they expect them.

Of course in the US the people have more guns so police for sure has more reason to fear for getting shot but the use of lethal force still seems excessive.

A lot of this comes from the "SWAT-mentality" that began infecting police forces in the 70s and 80s. The police went from a community organization to a paramilitary one.

Look at the rate of police gettig murdered on the job in America and compare it with Western Europe. That may play a role in the divergence.

The most import thing that is not taught is deescalation.

It is vital for Police to take control of a situation but instead they general yell and shout increasing the tension between parties turning a controllable situation into chaos.

Many people to not respond well to threats and shouting.

A while ago my car got hit by car that had run a red light. It was a huge impact without any warning and I was pretty shaken (probably a concussion). When a cop asked me for my license I couldn't really compute this request and gave him random stuff from my wallet. He started shouting "Sir, show me your license" which I understood even less and kept giving him credit cards and library cards . Thank God another cop came by and pointed calmly to the thing in my wallet they wanted to see.

I can't even imagine how confused I would be if I had people yelling at me while I am in the shower.

My training required shouting in all of the drills. The reasoning that was given was that it was required to make sure any and all bystanders and recording devices heard you clearly so there would be evidence that you followed procedure and that they did not follow commands.

Perhaps this is now outdated with the introduction of body cams but I would bet it is still taught that way.

"The "force escalation" went ask -> tell -> make, and they try to instill a paranoia that everyone has a concealed gun by default and should be treated so."

That's in line with what I saw when I was military police during my German service and had to interact with American MPs. Their strategy was often (not always) to go in directly and if anybody resisted they immediately applied force. Us Germans on the other hand did almost everything we could do to avoid force. It was definitely a noticeable difference in attitude. The Americans also spent a huge amount of time on the shooting range whereas we got there maybe twice a year.

We desperately, desperately need improved non-lethal deterrents for our police force in the U.S.

This always has seemed like an enormous industry for someone out there to disrupt.

The story already opens with an unarmed man in the shower in his own home being repeatedly tased.

If your problem is you're punching people in the head too often, the solution isn't to wear soft gloves, it's to stop punching people.

How to achieve that is still a matter of debate.

I read the gp comment as basically: desperately needing improvement through the entire non-lethal ‘stack’. This would include new training materials, R&D for better equipment, and so on.

The person in the first story was "non-lethally" tazed over and over, 15 times before being dragged out of the shower and injected with multiple sedatives. Any "non-lethal deterrents" applied that aggressively are still gonna kill people.

And if they don't, they should be regarded as "cruel and unusual punishment", colloquially known as torture.

Seriously, policemen who repeatedly fire a tazer at their victim, rendering him unable to control any of his muscles (including the sphincter), while screaming "STOP RESISTING!!", should be locked away indefinitely.

tasers aren't considered "non lethal", they're "less lethal", because yeah, they kill people all the time.

if somebody is advocating "non lethal" tools, and you start in on tasers, you're not even on the same page.

My point was that if the police are going to act so aggressively, it won't matter how cuddly their tools are. Pillows aren't generally considered lethal, but if you suffocate someone with one....

You don't need more non-lethal deterrents, you need to educate your police officers about how to deal with a human without shouting and threatening.

And nope, no industry needs to be disrupted, no industry needs ignorant individuals without domain knowledge to reinvent the wheel or replace human interaction with a machine interaction, 5 star ranking system and all your personal data sold away.

Deescalation training and aligning incentives with good outcomes should be put in place before technology solutions are called for.

I feel like the default should be "this person is mentally unstable and might have a weapon" instead of "this person is a potential enemy combatant". Then again, the whole justice system could use an update in that direction.

While I do agree, I’m curious how you think that might alleviate some of these issues (specifically)? Wouldn’t a mentally unstable person with a weapon still be considered a high risk threat? Potentially even more so than a combatant, as police aren’t necessarily equipped to understand mental conditions.

My thinking is that it implies officers will be training to respond to people that can't or won't listen to reason, or have limited ability to feel pain or comprehend instructions. But this is all armchair speculation. How do they deal with this kind of thing in other countries?

You are making excuses for feral animals who used a cattle prod to torture a naked, unarmed man before proceeding to poison him. And your instructor is part of the problem and should be wearing orange, not a police uniform.

Contrast this to how Croatian police handled a recent case where a man suffering with PTSD blew up his own house with a propane gas tank and was threatening and attacking with a billhook. The man was in such a delirium that he resisted the police for 12 hours, even after suffering third degree burns on 70% of his body. He also injured two policemen. [1] They finally managed to overcome him with a taser, but only after hours of trying to negotiate!

One policeman was severely cut on his hands and needed stitching. [2]

More images [3].

[1] https://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/drama-u-opuzenu-muskarac...

[2] https://slobodnadalmacija.hr/dalmacija/dubrovnik/clanak/id/5...

[3]https://zadarski.slobodnadalmacija.hr/forum/clanak/id/565826...

> She says both they and the law enforcement community have made the case that Ethan would still be alive if he had just followed instructions.

Statements like this are so sad to read because of the sheer lack of empathy it demonstrates. It’s pure victim blaming and the implication is that someone deserves to die for essentially making a mistake, or not even being aware of it.

What does it say that this is both accepted and also that those involved (the police) have literally zero patience for people who can’t read their minds?

Why is it okay that you get an expedited death penalty for something as minor as not following instructions? These self-same people would be begging for leniency in that same situation.

Empathy aside (which I agree is quite depressing), I've seen enough videos where multiple officers shout conflicting commands (put your hands up / get on the ground). In that case, it's impossible to comply. What do you do then?

And then of course there's the implication of "comply or die", which is also a huge problem on its own.

I think you're still looking at empathy there. We shouldn't be putting it aside. We're all human.

How do you not get shot to death by a cop when he can't even tell you what he wants from you? And why the fuck does he have a loaded gun when he doesn't even know that answer himself?

One thing I find consistent in these stories is prolongation and for me I assume that the cop doesn't have a fucking clue what he's doing. Why would you fire a taser at a naked dude in a shower fifteen times? Why would you unload your gun at a black guy and leave 16 bullet wounds within him?

When you're looking at the stories about solving murder, if the detective saw that the dead woman had 16 bullet holes in her or 32 stab wounds, they'd be assuming a crime of passion. Because that's a lot of work to make someone dead, way above and beyond. You don't accidentally squeeze your trigger that many times.

So is it possibly the case that these civilian deaths are all crimes of passion committed by the cops?

They are crimes of cowardice committed by mean-tempered bullies pumped up on steroids with an itchy trigger finger and very nearly complete immunity from prosecution and a lack of discipline beyond a paid vacation pending an internal "investigation."

The justification for this always comes down to a sort of 'it's dangerous job and I have to protect myself'.

It's interesting to note, then, that police officer is not a dangerous job compared to, say, taxi driver.

It wouldn't surprise me if most deaths on the job for police were car accidents.

So this justification is truly moot. The public should know so as to shape further the opinion of officers.

Here's data from labor stats on deadly jobs:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

Those loggers put their lives on the line every day to bring us lumber!

The leading causes of death for officers almost every year are car accidents and medical emergencies such as heart attack, etc. Death as a result of being killed by a suspect is always 2nd or 3rd.

I've actually looked into the numbers about a year ago, over half of the injuries and fatalities were reported as the result of car accidents.

There's a difference between being killed by bad luck in an accident and being sought out and murdered.

That’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that the perception of risk seems to be greatly skewed in the minds of officers and the public alike. About 50 officers die each year at the hands of criminals. This is compared to them killing about 1000 citizens on average each year. Reports would seem to suggest they kill more unarmed citizens than officers are killed at all.

Not certain how many officers are injured compared to citizens injured.

From that 1000, you would need to separate out the people who 'deserved' a police killing, due to legitimately threatening the lives of the public or of the police officer.

That’s difficult since the investigations are usually not available to the public and mostly rely heavily on the officers account. Certainly another area we need to do much better.

Any time you call a man with a gun to your location and they have immunity to shoot you based on their fear, you run the risk of being shot.

Lately it seems that risk has grown.

Lately it seems that risk has grown.

I have no evidence, but I feel that it only seems the risk has grown because technology has made it harder to cover up. I think as it gets more attention, the risk is going down.

Modern training techniques focus heavily, almost pathologically, on maintaining Officer safety and controlling the situation. Training techniques, like the Tueller Drill reinforce the notion that everyone is a threat and should be treating accordingly.

There is very little training on de-escalation as it's incompatible with Officer safety and often requires an Officer to relinquish control of a situation. And unfortunately when dealing with people who have mental health issues, you're often not in control of the situation and neither are they.

I see training as the most important thing to change to address the shootings that many of us, outside of law enforcement, see as preventable.

I have two brothers that are CHP. They have never discharged their weapons at an individual, but talking to them, this attitude of their personal safety being the most important part of how they handle a situation, makes it very difficult for them to understand how police actions can actually create the danger they are claiming to want to prevent.

And it's not necessarily that the techniques being taught are wrong, just the context of how they're presented. There's a distinction to be made between Officer Safety and personal safety.

There's also the unfortunate reality that practical techniques like securing your sidearm or anticipating a threat can be misconstrued as threatening or intimating and can often escalate a situation.

There could also be some benefit to providing some training the public on what to expect and how to behave in the presence of a Police Officer. I was pulled over when I was a teenager and I immediately started digging in my glove box for my insurance card and registration. When I pulled them out and turned to my window I was greeted by the Officer's gun in my face.

There's also a lot to be said for training Officers on how to deal with the public and de-escalate situations. I was the victim of a public assault and while I was waiting to be interviewed by the Officer conducting the investigation, another Officer casually approached me. She acknowledged that I was upset, fidgety, and gesticulated when I spoke. She provided some consultation and advised me to keep my hands at my side and speak slowly while being interviewed by the other Officer.

Take the guns off the officers, watch their skills at de-escallation improve instantly.

Really? I feel the risk has grown. Based on numerous cases, cops have realized that getting filmed killing an unarmed person pleading for their life barely impacts their career, much less their freedom.

This is why we need facts and numbers, because media stories only give us a glimpse of it, without putting it into context.

Yes, the problem is bad and it exists. But we need more facts to see: Is it getting better? What's working to prevent it?

To this point, I've looked for (and failed to find) year-over-year statistics for murders by police. I agree with the parent that technology is revealing existing problems in greater light. Whether or not the problem itself is getting better or worse is a separate issue.

The reason I feel it has grown is in my almost 5 decades of life I have seen police go from peace officers to law enforcement. I have witnessed the changes.

It used to be when a kid did something wrong there was tolerance for his youthful ignorance and he was allowed to learn from his mistakes without having a criminal record. Now zero tolerance has stopped the pouring out of beer with a stern warning next time parents / legal matters would be involved.

Law enforcement is the mission. It is not a good mission because it is actually disrupting a peaceful society.

I wish we could bring back the peace officers and the mission of keeping the peace using laws instead of enforcing the laws at the cost of social peace.

It's true that local police have become much more militarized over the past decade or two. Trickle-down military-industrial complex, so to speak.

Radley Balko is a writer who's covered the issue thoroughly: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...

I just think it's pretty clear by now that the primary driving factor for police criminality becoming a political issue is that very many members of the socio-economic underclass now have internet-connected video cameras on them at all times.

The police (or authorities) don’t seem to be keen on counting.

https://govtrackinsider.com/there-is-no-federal-database-of-...

But others are

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_i...

And this is really the problem. If we don't capture the statistics we won't know and we won't be able to change things or try to change things. I don't know why they won't institute a reporting program. Even the CDC doesn't collect statistics (which would come from hospitals or the coroners)..

This seems like a common refrain for most bad things these days, but I doubt it's true in the case of police killings. At the very least, it seems inarguable that related trends like police militarization have drastically increased.

One reason could be - anabolic steroid use.

Most people after a specific age find it incredibly very difficult to maintain a physique of low body fat/no belly and muscles along with a stressful job and les hours available to yourself.

They end up using steroid. There is something called RoidRage. Once my best friend nearly beat me up badly, i figured all his muscular appearance with low body fat was owned to steroids.

That could be a factor, but by and large I don't think that law enforcement puts much of an emphasis on staying fit from what I've seen.

Roid rage is mostly made-up: https://examine.com/nutrition/what-is-roid-rage/

That's another terrible aspect of this: "it seems ...". There are still no official statistics of police-involved shootings in the US, so we have no "official" way to show whether police-involved shootings have increased over time, or who it is affecting most.

"Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not collect these data either."(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...)

In 2013, Fatal Encounters (https://www.fatalencounters.org/our-visualizations/) was started by a single individual to collect statistics of police killings each year. Interestingly, part of the inspiration was an article from 2011, talking about how police may be killing more disabled people than necessary: https://www.pressherald.com/interactive/maine_police_deadly_...

In 2014, Deadspin (https://deadspin.com/were-compiling-every-police-involved-sh...) began a crowdsourcing effort to document police killings. Soon after, The Washington Post followed suit (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...).

In 2015, The Guardian started collecting its own statistics in The Counted (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police...).

Mapping Police Violence correlates and visualizes statistics from three different databases (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata/). An updated 2017 report is here: https://policeviolencereport.org/

Whether the trend of police killing people is increasing or decreasing depends on what numbers you pick, as they vary in collection methods and sources. But one thing that hasn't changed is that black people are disproportionately affected. The 2017 PVR notes "Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed."

I did not see statistics specifically related to whether someone was disabled. However, the 2017 PVR notes that "Most killings began with police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported". In addition, "1 in 5 people with a gun were not threatening anyone when they were killed. [..] If police did not kill people who were not posing a threat with a gun, there would have been 638 fewer deaths this year — a 57% reduction."

District Attorney John Chisholm went so far as to rule that "there was no basis to conclusively link Mr Trammell's death to the actions taken by the police officers" - WTF did I just read??? I can't believe it.

I honestly feel like Prosecuters, Juries, District Attorneys, Judges, Sheriffs, Mayors and Govenors are afraid of their police departments.

The way these investigations and prosecutions go remind me a lot of the mob investigations, where it took the feds to really take them down.

Every municipality is different, and at different points in time, but I think this is an overlooked part of all of this.

I think its greater than just a "blue shield" or sense of camaraderie with officers, I think there is fear. And I've seen circumstances where that's valid, such as when Adrian Schoolcraft was dragged out of his home and thrown in an asylum by fellow police officers just because he showed up late to work that day and they got paranoid he was going to out them.

One thing that pisses me off as excuse making is "training/ lack of training to blame" for travesties as a complete abdication of responsibility. I mean if your babysitter got frustrated and beat your kid with an electric cord you wouldn't accept lack of training as an excuse! It seems to be gussied up "Just following orders."

Making matters worse is the farcical double standards where ignorance of the law and operating based on feelings is the standard for them and perfect knowledge of the law and situation regardless of circumstances for everyone else. Shooting someone breaking into their house after being flashbanged - both disoriented and threatened leaves one liable for murder because they should have known the intruding guy in black who never announced his presence while deafened and half blind was a cop. Meanwhile if the police empty multiple magazines into someone who is reaching for a wallet because they didn't know for sure jt wasn't a weapon and felt threatened and never get so much as a grand jury indictment attempt. If we all operated on the fear for life standard it would be a bloody paranoid anarchy of preemptive assassinations - proving how fucking stupid it is for anyone. Feelings are always an absolutely terrible basis for laws.

Attorney John Chisholm went so far as to rule that "there was no basis to conclusively link Mr Trammell's death to the actions taken by the police officers".

Perhaps he didn't watch the same footage I did.

The officers in these situations are (in the US) supervised by elected officials: the sheriff, DAs, and mayors.

The next time they are running for re-election, take out an ad with scenes from the relevant videos, with words to the effect that, if you vote for this individual, you are talking responsibility for their actions.

Sure, it'll be a bit expensive, but anyone can do it.

We aren't powerless, we aren't helpless victims. If we're really upset by their actions, we shouldn't act like we are helpless.

Ranting on an internet forum is useless.

>Ranting on an internet forum is useless.

You just said that voting can change things. Wouldn't it logically follow that ranting on a public forum, which people can read and be inspired to vote by, is very useful?

Voting can change things (and publicly embarrassing elected officials works, too), but I doubt any of the people reading these comments live in the voting districts of the officials involved in the cases in the article. Even if they are, I doubt they're more than a tiny minority. And even in that case, well, preaching to the choir and all that.

Even ranting on a forum local to those areas is unlikely to do anything useful---when was the last time your mind was changed by an editorial, much less a comment down in the crazy-text.

The power is in the votes of the legendary John Q. Public, who has either never heard this story or caught 30 seconds of it as a sad tragedy that could not be prevented. The effect we need is to force them to stand up and say, "I'm ok with this kind of collateral damage." Or not.

>Voting can change things (and publicly embarrassing elected officials works, too), but I doubt any of the people reading these comments live in the voting districts of the officials involved in the cases in the article.

You seem determined to believe things without evidence.

Happened in Sweden as well. A person with Downs syndrome with a toy gun got shoot down recently.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6020997/Police-shoo...

> "What is the state of mind for a law enforcement officer that they would literally intervene physically with someone with Down's syndrome to the point of their death?"

Maybe they are not used to not being able to enforce their will? People with the mental capability comply and sue later.

Addressing your quote and leaving aside the cases where officers may have serious character defects and going for a view of an advocatus diaboli:

I can imagine that once officers have started to apply force, they're caught in continuing it - because if they have used force, they cannot just go back one step of escalation and say "Yeah we tried beating this person, it wasn't effective and not a good idea, so we did more talking". The obvious follow up question of any kind of oversight would be "Why did you use force in the first place?".

They will have to justify their use of force no matter the outcome but it will be harder if it was in error. If it is ultimately successful, I can imagine the justification is way easier.

So maybe the partial but strict oversight due to documentation and the now tolerated use of 'non-lethal' means and physical force create a perverse incentive to continue to escalate. E.g. if an officer suddenly realizes they've gone too far, the easiest way out is to look for any sign to end the situation with a reason to blame the victim, in extreme cases ending up with a victim who cannot make a statement anymore.

this is what I can't believe. Three people thought violently taking down a man with Down's syndrome was a reasonable thing to do.

Not one went to the manager and said: "he's not hurting anyone - leave him be"

One question that all the systemic issues boil down to is: Do police departments want people of high moral integrity? Does any organization really want those? Or is it best to have people that only show just enough to not incite too much public scrutiny?

A certain malleability is a basic requirement to work in an organization and whoever runs counter to the culture will not have an easy time and may have a very short career. Putting the immediate company / working group goals before certain small qualms about how things are supposed to run and how they actually run is a common occurence. The formal requirements are met by clever documentation.

It's even hard to have a competent and integer police force in an environment where it's highly unlikely that a person the officers interact with has a gun. Even in that environment lethal or crippling accidents happen, though maybe not as amplified in number by the exterior threat of firearms in the populace. But and an esprit de corps (and a kind of brotherhood between executive and judicial branches) still prevails.

In Germany for example, the young officers are the ones who have to go on riot control duty for weeks, because they're physically up to it - that's something that I'm sure will at least subconsciously color a person's view of the civilian public, if pushed hard enough.

Even if they did want policemen of high personnal integrity, the lack of consequences for the bad ones (it's painfully obvious that a badge is a licence to kill consequence free at least once, as long as you're smart enough to do it to a minority) means people for which such a situation is attractive will flock to the profession.

Tests and interviews can only weed out so many of them.

Also specific to the US is the multitude of law enforcement agencies, meaning one bad cop fired from his jobs is very likely to be able to be hired in another agency, as long as he escaped condemnation, which they usually do...

By making the position attractive to would be killers, and not having an efficient mechanism to get them out of the system for good once the issues are identified, it was pretty obvious what would happen...

> A certain malleability is a basic requirement to work in an organization and whoever runs counter to the culture will not have an easy time and may have a very short career.

This is part of what civil service procedures and the unionization of police is supposed to solve. You're supposed to be able to stand up for your principles, and prove to the governing body (Civil Service) that you were justified, and part of the union's responsibility is to watch from the outside to make sure you're not railroaded. Instead you end up with CS commissions disqualifying applicants who admit to smoking pot 12 years ago when they were in high school.

Unfortunately, current police unions spend more time attacking the public on behalf of corrupt police officers than defending principled police officers against employers who ask them to immoral things.

Police unions really need an overhaul.

In Germany, police unions lobbied against the introduction of unique identification numbers on the armor of each riot control officer at protests. Before, there were only numbers/markings identifying a squad. Maybe in the future, with better computer vision and cameras, citizens can actually gather data about the effectiveness of such measures and compare across different regional implementations.

In general, no, the police force wants malleable officers who are not too smart.

Literally went to court because potential officer tested as too intelligent, and they thought they wouldnt get their training money back.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-court-ruled-you-can-be-too-...

That's a stange argument. In USA a victim with a gun (or anything metal) is an easy justification for police killing ciivilians. If more civilians pulled guns out, police would kill more civilians. Unarmed victim martyrs are the only tool the public has to generate political will to push back against violent policing.

But nobody is really pushing back. From the article:

"No officers were prosecuted."

Moral outrage is inferior to guns, cattle prods and poisonous injections.

Deaf people are being shot by the police, too. Being a Swiss Deaf I wonder whether it's risky to travel to the US and rent a car.

Realistically, you'd be in more danger just driving a car. In Switzerland. Let's not get too melodramatic.

My heart goes out to all the victim's families, as these are all very tragic. I have a brother with down syndrome and reading the story about Ethan and how the situation played out sounds exactly like how it could play out with my own brother, heaven forbid he ever ends up in a similar situation. While I agree the shoot first ask questions later methodology is not the best, I think education surrounding common mental handicaps/disabilities would go a long way to helping officers better understand the situations and better equip them to judge the threat level of situations. I can attest that people with down syndrome can freeze up and easily experience a paralysis through analysis as they are put in confusing and unfamiliar situations, especially once someone starts shouting commands at them and they are not sure what do. Just knowing this simple fact and general behaviors surrounding people with down syndrome/mentally handicapped would give officers the knowledge to know "hey person has x or y disability and is acting this way because of z, this is a non threatening situation." It's almost ironic to me, where a profession that's main job responsibility is dealing with all different types of people all day isn't required to know any more specific social dynamics or behaviors surrounding them. I think requiring a psychology/sociology for police officers so they have a better understanding of human behavior might help in this regard.

EDIT: Grammar.

Any child who's learned electricity in class knows that water and electricity don't mix.

With a taser, the entire idea is to electrocute the victim. I don't think it was the water that killed him.

A Taser is not designed ("entire idea") to injure or kill with electricity. It's designed to temporarily incapacitate, with a side effect/risk of injury or death.

"Temporarily incapacitating" someone in a wet, slippery area with very hard surfaces seems like it might have a high risk of going wrong. Article even says he had broken ribs.

Or maybe it's designed to inflict as much pain and humiliation as possible without permanent harm. Because that's how it's actually used by the police, to punish their victims for disobedience.

No, the idea isn't to electrocute the victim. The whole point of it is to as far as possible give a non-lethal shock. If you're going to electrocute someone it would be easier to just shoot them with a conventional firearm.

I know that "electrocute" was originally a neologism meaning "execute with electricity," but for decades at least it's meant "put more volts through a person than they'd prefer." People commonly say "I electrocuted myself" if they get a stinging zap while installing a lightswitch or something.

The original meaning is a popular bit of trivia in today-I-learned circles right now, and it's historically interesting, but you should know it doesn't reflect common usage.

The poison is in the dose. A taser electrocutes you, in theory not with enough power to cause cardiac arrest. If I get a non-lethal shock I'm still being electrocuted.

The term "electrocution" means "death or serious injury caused by electric shock", "electric shock" being the thing a taser is designed to create.

They're obviously not designed to cause death or serious injury so in this case saying tasers are designed to electrocute people is probably not appropriate (depending on how cynical you are about the western world's increasingly militarised police forces). It's far more accurate to say a taser is designed to deliver a "non-lethal electrical shock", and make a note of the absurdity of expecting non-medical personnel to consistently deliver painful electrical impulses to a person without killing them.

At any rate; the amount of energy the taser attempted to deliver was exactly the same as every other taser; however, due to the significantly decreased resistance of moist skin, the voltage drop across the body was a lot lower than the "normal person" the taser is designed to hurt therefore more energy made it to the victim's heart, thus killing him.

... This comment got a little more political than I expected. Sorry about that.

I'm fairly sure that an electrocution is specifically a death by electric shock, although I suppose at this point we're just arguing semantics.

No, if you survive an electric shock, it's not electrocution.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/electrocution

The dictionary hasn't caught up with current usage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18167369

Yes, I'm aware that in casual speech, "electrocute" is often used as a synonym for "electric shock."

However, in a discussion about tasers of all things, I think it pays to use the more classically correct definition. Saying that a taser is designed to electrocute you but not kill you simply invites confusion.

I'm not a prescriptivist, but I'd caution against the opposite fallacy as well. It's very useful to have distinct language for receiving electric shocks and for dying as a result, as it is to distinguish between getting wet and drowning.

These are deeply disturbing. Given the sheer number of police killings and the repetition of the same odious frivolous justifications one can only conclude there is no desire for a more humane police force.

The problem is not only the police but a justice system that seems to justify brutality and arbitrary killings. This not only sustains the cycle of violence but 'normalizes' police executions and police officers who think they can kill at will and be protected. This is a dangerous level of power to give to the police in any civilized society and none accept it.

To the victims this is a police state, there is no accountability and no justice and forgot any rights their right to life can be extinguished in seconds with no consequences and accountability. This is not the behavior of a civilized state.

Sgt Corey Nooner had many other choices concerning his safety. Why is it so important to stand ground? How about warning shots? What sane person would attack a police officer pointing a handgun with just a knife?

Technology (Bluetooth beacons/app) is being developed to help stop some of these tragedies:

https://thevitalsapp.com/

"The Vitals™ app enables safer community interactions by allowing individuals with visible and invisible conditions and disabilities to create and share a personalized digital profile with authorized first responders via a secure, mobile app – improving real-time communication, reducing the risk of misunderstandings, and promoting greater independence."

A number of cities are piloting this.

No, I shouldn't have to share more information to be treated like a human, the cops should be better trained.

No matter how much training they receive, policemen are not going to be about to make psychological diagnoses in the heat of the moment. They need to know upfront that the person in question has schizophrenia so that they can apply appropriate behavior. (And that's the part of the training that needs improving, then.)

Then maybe they shouldn't shoot first and ask questions later.

In the linked article the police knew he was unarmed, and I'll, and had been told by neighbours that he was not violent, and they saw that he was not violent, but despite that the police helped him so hard he died.

I'm sure there's no way this could be misused. Perhaps training the police to not shoot people on sight might be a better solution?

Next stage: "We couldn't possibly know he was not dangerous, so we shot him just in case. He really should have registered with The Vitals™".

Brilliant idea, really.

The article cites several cases in which the officers involved were made aware of their victim's disabilities, but they continued to kill them anyway.

> She says both they and the law enforcement community have made the case that Ethan would still be alive if he had just followed instructions.

> But therein is precisely the problem - his ability to follow instructions. Ethan, like Adam, did not have this ability.

I find it disturbing that in the US, in practice, penalty for failing to comply with officer instructions during an arrest is a legally enforced death sentence. This seems a recurring theme in this kind of stories.

Especially horrifying when they tell you they will shoot you anyway if you fail to comply with contradictory instructions, like in the case of Daniel Shaver. Even without any disabilities, you can't survive those encounters without being a pro at Simon Says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/0...

> If you make a mistake, another mistake, there is a very severe possibility that you’re both going to get shot. Do you understand?” Sgt. Charles Langley yells before telling Shaver to “shut up.”

> “If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it,” Langley says.

> “You do that again, we’re shooting you, do you understand?” Langley yells.

> “Please do not shoot me,” Shaver begs, his hands up straight in the air.

> At the officer’s command, Shaver then crawls down the hallway, sobbing. At one point, he reaches back — possibly to pull up his shorts — and Brailsford opens fire, striking Shaver five times.

> According to the police report, Brailsford was carrying an AR-15 rifle with the phrase “You’re F—ed” etched into the weapon. The police report also said the “shots were fired so rapidly that in watching the video at regular speed, one cannot count them.”

So a bully psychologically tortures his victim, kills him and in the end, is acquitted of murder... The mind boggles.

one officer was yelling directions, the other officer shot him

the officer yelling directions was prosecuted, and that obviously failed because he was not the one shooting

not sure how to prosecute that, or what procedures in Arizona are available

So they were in collusion and should both be prosecuted. If there was a will to prosecute feral police officers, there would be no practical difficulty.

Holy shit, that guys a psychopath. That really gives you a picture, he was acquitted as well. Tells you everything really, it is undoubtable that the legal system is utterly corrupt, at least in this instance.

It reminds me of another incident recently where someone was swatted. As far as I remember the person was sitting on his balcony smoking a cigarette when when police decided to shoot him from across the road. Here is the video, it contains the call itself to keep context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0l6kwbglA4 . You could say they had a little more justification in this one, but is well, horrible.

Wow.

If local/state attorney generals refuse to investigate, this can and should become a federal investigation, that now includes the said attorney generals too - or so I understand.

Can any lawyers chime in?

"I have to make sure I go home to my family at night,"

Well, in that case- maybe don't become a police officer?

I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard a fireman, or a doctor, a rescuer, a lifeguard, etc, say that sort of thing - "my first priority is to go home safely tonight". That doesn't mean that they're expect to sacrifice their lives in the line of duty, it means they're expected to risk their lives, to save someone else's (the doctor, if you were wondering, because they can easily catch something nasty).

The police officer who made the comment shot a szhizophrenic woman who was holding a knife (that's all we're told about that case). So presumably he shot her because he was afraid she'd stab him. Presumably, also, that was part of his training.

That is very dangerous. Giving someone a gun and telling them that when their live's in danger their priority is to come out of it alive, is dangerous for everyone around the person with the gun. Because the easiest way to make sure you "go back to your family" when you have a gun and the crazy lady is holding a knife is to shoot her dead. I mean, duh.

I should also probably point out that I think this is a peculiarly US thing. I doubt that anywhere else in the developed world police officers are adviced to shoot first and ask questions later, or in any case, as a first line of defense.

They definitely tell lifeguards and firefighters and first responders that their "first priority is to go home safely tonight".

If you have a small group of people who can help, and a much larger group that need help, it's critically important that your helpers don't get themselves killed by being reckless with their own lives.

The overuse of force by police in the US is terrible. It's a combination of bad judgement, bad training, and no repercussions. But that's fully separate from the fact that "keep yourself alive" is a core tenet of all the jobs you listed.

There is a huge difference between “keeping yourself alive” by not going into a burning building that there is a huge risk that you won’t come out alive and you won’t help anyone and shooting an unarmed person just in case they might be carrying a weapon.

As a police officer, they signed up for an increased risk of death (even though statistically it’s not that dangerous). I as an African American, didn’t sign up to be shot just because I “look suspicious” for living in a predominantly White neighborhood.

I am extremely sympathetic to this view. I think it's hard for some people to appreciate how others are policed, because they have not experienced it first hand. I have lived in all sorts of neighborhoods, and in some I was repeatedly searched, restrained, and detained. I had broken no law, and I have never been charged with a crime. Not everyone can simply avoid interacting with the police by virtue of their behavior, and interacting with the police is dangerous even when one is trying to be compliant.

> Not everyone can simply avoid interacting with the police by virtue of their behavior, and interacting with the police is dangerous even when one is trying to be compliant.

Yep. If you haven't been in this situation, there really isn't anything comparable to having each word spoken and action made taken as a immediate threat by an officer with a gun who is visibly high from the adrenaline rush they got from the situation.

Did you get shot?

Look, what I'm saying is I would never expect a fireman to say "I didn't go near that burning house because it would have put my life in danger", or for a doctor to say "I won't treat this Ebola patient because, dangit, Ebola". The people in that kind of job put their ass on the line to save other peoples' bacon and accept that their job carries a risk. They won't actively try to harm another person (a person, btw, they're supposed to protect) to avoid getting killed.

Imagine a lifeguard who bonks a panicked swimmer on the head and lets him sink, because "when they start panicking they can pull you under, so it's my life or his". That would be completely mad, wouldn't it? You'd expect the lifeguard to be trained to deal with that sort of thing wihtout having to kill someone they're trying to save in the first place.

And like I say, obviously, nobody expects, or asks those people to lay down their lives in the line of duty. But they're there to handle dangerous situations that not everyone can handle.

Right? That's what the police are there for. If someone tries to rob the bank, they're supposed to stop the robbery. It's a dangerous line of business. Of course they shouldn't get killed while at it, but if the best they can do to keep alive is to execute everyone around them, they shouldn't be doing that job. They're supposed to be cops, not Judge Dredd.

> (a person, btw, they're supposed to protect)

Do you suppose maybe the officers' intent was to protect the person who called them?

I'm not happy this happened, and I think some blame can be put on the culture of police officers using violence as a solution to many problems, but I also think a lot of blame can be put on the culture of people-not-knowing-their-neighbors.

I would want to know more about my neighbors before calling the cops on them, even if they did some crazy thing like walk around the hallways naked or yell or scream.

>> Do you suppose maybe the officers' intent was to protect the person who called them?

The officer's stated intent was to go home to his family that night. That's what's bothering me. He didn't try to explain his actions in terms of protecting the public from a potentially dangerous individual, he put it in terms of protecting himself.

So what's going to happen if you give a man a gun, tell them "protect yourself first" and send them in a situation where someone might put their life in danger? I think it's obvious- they'll shoot the person putting them in danger. To protect themselves.

They generally do not give lifeguards, firefighters, and first responders firearms and instruct them to kill the survivors if they feel like their life is in danger.

They don't tell them to directly kill anyone. Because very few people attack firefighters.

Indirectly, however they do recommend that. If the burning building is very dangerously unstable, firefighter SOP is not to enter to try to save anyone who might still be alive (nor permit others to do the same).

It's not very often those people are being attacked on the job though, seems like the right analogue would be training on when to let someone in danger die. Having went through lifeguard training the very clear message was that if you feel unsafe in a situation or can't subdue someone who's dragging you down you preserve your own life first.

I don't understand why people are typing on this thread as if the officers shot this man to death with bullets. It seems disingenuous.

"Tragically, Magdiel never heard the police commands - because he was deaf. During the stand-off, neighbours shouted to the officers to tell them this, but they shot him anyway."

They also express it that "now we've got N+1 victims we have to rescue, and one less helper."

I suppose I've never thought about a lifeguard intentionally drowning a panicking swimmer (or preemptively drowning someone who appeared not to be abiding pool rules) because they wanted to ensure their own or other's safety.

Likewise, firefighters are tooled for survival in the environments they're expecting to work. Police share more of their tooling in common with robbers and kidnappers than with lifeguards or firefighters, who we don't regularly see them killing others.

If we made regular police white glove, non-lethal social servants and only minimally armed them (or not at all), would this decrease violent escalation? We'd need to treat mental health crises as medical situations and have an armed response division trained in deescalation, but I think the current belief in us vs them and commonplace sanctioning of deadly force are wounds on our society that need to be healed.

I've been reading (and watching) content on both sides of this to gain a better perspective.

Firemen definitely do also have a mentality of no unecessary risks -- which, yes, is a little different. But there is a mentality of 'I want to go home tonight.'

Cops risk assesment is a different situation than rescue -- it's a matter of intent. In a rescue situation, there's uncertaintiy in the physical environment. In law enforcement, the risk is that the subject actively wants to hurt you.

Also, society in general has become more risk averse.

One thing I have a better appreciation for now is how fast a situation can turn bad for a cop. There's an ex-cop who has a youtube channel under the name Donut Operator who breaks down cop videos. It has opened my eyes to why cops react certain ways in certain situations. It has helped me understand better when a shooting is justified -- or unjustified.

Still, I think as a society we've swung too far into moving the risk onto the citizens -- and the most vulnerable take the brunt of it.

>> Firemen definitely do also have a mentality of no unecessary risks -- which, yes, is a little different.

Yes- unnecessary risks. Some risk is inevitable when you're doing that kind of work- putting out fires, rescuing swimmers in distress and so on. And those people put their lives at risk as a matter of course.

A while ago I got my ass pulled out of a very, very hairy situation by a lifeguard. He basically put himself in the same mess I was in to pull me and a friend out. I remember looking at his face and it was obvious he didn't know if he would make it out alive. If that guy was a police officer trained to put himself first, he'd have kicked us back in and saved his ass. Instead, he waded in some really bad waters and pulled us both out.

Obviously, I'd never ask the guy to risk his life for me and my friend- but he totally did. That, for me, puts all that "I have to go back to my family" stuff in a very negative perspective.

Yeah, as a police officer you need to make sure you go back to your family- you need to make sure everyone goes back to their family.

Well if that society supports the Second Amendment it has made a choice. Acceptable collateral damage.

That's certainly true in a limited sense. We are accepting collateral damage from the second amendment. No doubt about it. People are dying from the availability of guns.

The great bet of the second amendment, though, is that those deaths are far fewer than the deaths that would occur if our government were not regulated away from tyrant and towards liberty by the threat of an armed populace.

I firmly support that bet.

You've been downvoted, but you're not wrong... I've heard that precise argument made by gun control opponents more than once, usually after the latest school shooting.

Take a look at a UK police officer tackling a disturbed person with a knife. Ordinarily they won't have a gun, so that is no use. They have a baton, a stab vest, maybe a tazer and cs spray. Most importantly they have a radio on their ear and can call for help and they have training. UK police officers are not routinely killed by knife wielding mad people. So no, you don't need to shoot sick people just to make sure you get home tonight.

That's why last year three men with knives on London Bridge were able to stab 5 civilians to death and injure dozens of others including stabbing 4 police officers, stopping only when other armed officers shot and killed them. [1]

This was only a few months after the similar attack on Westminster Bridge in which a man stabbed an police officer to death, and then was shot and killed by a nearby armed officer. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Westminster_attack

That is nonsense.

1) Those were armed terrorists intent on killing people. Not a mentally disturbed person (like the article we are discussing).

2) The areas you are talking about are some of the most heavily policed areas in the UK. The police around Westminster are armed with MP5 sub-machine guns and assault rifles and are highly visible. Yet it is a public area, so yes you could walk up to one of them and start stabbing before one of his colleagues machine gunned you to pieces.

So what is your point? You can arm the police to the teeth, and a determined attacker could still kill one?

> Those were armed terrorists intent on killing people. Not a mentally disturbed person (like the article we are discussing).

And the police deal with both, including trying to distinguish one from the other.

> The police around Westminster are armed with MP5 sub-machine guns and assault rifles and are highly visible.

The dead cop did not have firearm.

> So what is your point?

The opposite of yours. Police need to be armed.

> The dead cop did not have firearm

But was completely surrounded by those that were armed to military levels in large numbers.

Yeah, but it is different wielding a knife then a gun. You have to be up close and personal with that. Whilst with a gun you can be far away. Apples and Oranges.

And don't look at one individual case, look at the cause why this keeps happening.

The police force is trained that there is a high possibility that there is a gun. So how are they going to go in there? With guns drawn of course.

That is the difference. The knowledge of you might getting shot is enough to be trigger happy about everything. Especially when your training says the same thing.

But then it's not enough changing the training of the police force, whilst civilians still wield guns. Disarmament needs to happen on multiple levels.

And another thing, yes there are cases where it is fairly simple to tell if you are in front of a disabled or mentally ill person then a nutcase high on crystal meth. And these are just cops, without any training in the medical field to tell the difference and they go in already on edge. No wonder bad things happen.

The guy in this article wasn't wielding anything. He was naked and empty handed in his own shower.

>> there are cases where it is fairly simple to tell if you are in front of a disabled or mentally ill person then a nutcase high on crystal meth

What are you trying to say here? It's OK to kill unarmed drug users, but not unarmed crazy people?

I don't think it is OK in either case and I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I live in the tenderloin and walk everywhere, so I get approached by aggressive people who are acting weird and scary everyday. So far I have never even considered shooting them.

Sorry, that should have been "not fairly easy to tell apart". Anyway, what I wanted to say is, that it's not good to compare the UK and the US in this context.

In one country where gun crimes and mass shootings are rampant and are close to be every day part of life and there is the other where most of the crimes are knife, or acid attacks and are rarely fatal.

Anyway, I think there is a link between the US gun laws (or lack of them) and police brutality. Where every scenario has the possibility to go wrong, they just developed a habit to shoot first and ask questions later. Where police training revolves more around preparing to use your gun and defend yourself then actually solve the situation without violence. But whilst there is a high chance that every scene they go to will have guns involved, they're not going to change their behaviour, or training either. And this will bring more brutality from them as their not going to take chances.

> Anyway, what I wanted to say is, that it's not good to compare the UK and the US in this context.

Actually many people in the UK argue against routine (fire) arming of the police because it creates an arms race with criminals. I am saying that the police having guns is part of the cause of why the US has more gun violence.

Thank you. I misunderstood your comment entirely.

It is also a bogus argument. In the UK police deal with knives all the time and the cops don't have guns. Only an elite swat like unit has weapons but not the day to day bobby. I'm pretty sure UK cops want to come home every day as well.

Yeah, but the UK doesn't have gun crimes, mass shootings in schools, in music festivals or in a park. For a common civilian it is really hard to get a hold of a high caliber gun. In the US you just walk in to the closest gun store and get one.

Or as the American youth does, just grab your parents gun and go on a shooting spree.

You're concerned about the symptom of a deeper problem: lack of consequences for trigger-happy police.

The courts and police are on the same team.

I'm still waiting for a convincing Third Amendment challenge to the militarization of the police.

"This kind of people (criminals), you cannot treat them as if they were normal human beings, ok? We can't let policemen keep dying at the hands of those guys," Bolsonaro said on TV Globo's main nightly news program. ""If he kills 10, 15 or 20 with 10 or 30 bullets each, he needs to get a medal and not be prosecuted."

Add Brazil to the list. I'm sure it's not a US only thing at all.

The US has its issues but nothing to complain about in comparison to Mexico or Brazil.

50,000 murders a year - that's a low intensity war.

You don’t realize you’re talking about a completely different victim here? Do you think he’s talking about schizos?

Time and time again, even without the "threat" (as perceived by police officers that mentally incapable people are unable to follow commands strictly and promptly) of dealing with a "difficult / defiant" subject / suspect, the police officer's actions never seem to mirror their words.

They use commands to confuse, disrupt, provoke, belittle, and ultimately trap the subjects in a situation where they have no "good option". Their inability to parse the irate and rushed officer's commands almost always seems to wind up in the use of excessive force in these cases where a subject is injured extensively or, worse, murdered in cold blood.

Bad training and a culture of "Us versus Them" is only part of the issue. I think the majority of the issue stems from police quotas. Even the most weary and well-meaning officers have to meet quotas. If they aren't bringing in 4 felonies or finding 1 suspect with a gun on them in a given month (NYPD statistic, will supply source below) they are first pressured from above by superiors with verbal warnings. After a verbal warning the punishment turns into marks on the officer's permanent record which can prevent an officer from upward mobility or landing a position in their desired unit.

That means, to me, that in a situation where an officer who has no reason to go overboard with a subject isn't given 110% respect, the subject doesn't "submit to the officer's power", and the officer sees, hears, feels or perceives anything but certain cooperation and submission that the officer now has "incentive" to make the subject one of their, minimum, 4-monthly felonies.

There is a light bulb that goes off in an officer's head. If they haven't met their quota for the month as they approach a subject they have the added weight of needing to "make the grade" for that period. There is a code for a subject that isn't in need of anything more than a written citation (ticket or warning) and there is a code for a subject that needs to be hauled into the police station to be jailed. If the officer is below their quota and the subject gives that officer any reason to view the situation as anything above a written citation than it is actually in that officer's best interest to escalate, provoke, stoke, prod, and push a subject to the point of the situation becoming one that requires an officer to lock that subject up.

These officers are human, yes. But the blue line, the quotas, the inability for "good cops" to report "bad cops" without their career trajectory or possibly even their career being ruined, and a bunch of other non-crime related characteristics are fueling the growing rift between ALL CITIZENS and law enforcement officers.

The Mayor needs the police to be tough on crime so they can report to the citizens, State, and Federal government that the crime situation is improving in their district. The Police Chief needs to ensure that his officers are meeting quotas, making enough arrests to meet whatever standards have been set, and make it so the Mayor can give those press conferences and cite those numbers that show improvement in order for the Chief to justify the Federal and State budget endowed to that precinct / police department. Each officer is expected to bring in a certain number of felonies per month or find one subject with a gun on them (or more, obviously) in order to meet their quota for the month in order for their Chief to make the Mayor happy.

When a police officer is a rookie there are certain assignments that are reserved to them. One I've heard of that's common in New York City is when people in a building report the smell of a dead body. There are lots of elderly people in rent controlled apartments and homes that pass away each day of the year. From the moment a call is made and a body is discovered an officer needs to stay with the body until the medical examiner / coroner shows up to take the body away in official capacity. Like I had said, this job and others like it (less desirable, more rule based than anything type jobs) are reserved for two types of officers: rookies and officers with any amount of experience who do not meet quotas.

When officers do not meet their quotas they are given the lowest jobs on the totem pole as a display of punishment. If they continually miss their quota numbers it will disrupt not only their upward trajectory in their career but it will also effect their ability to schedule and take their earned time off. Officers who fail to meet quotas will purposely be given the least desired stretches of time off, usually never coinciding with the days they've requested.

All of this incentivizes officers to target subjects who appear to be criminals which often means they are targeting individuals who haven't committed any crimes. If a citizen calls the police for something and it's later found out that the person who called, even if they were not committing any crime or doing anything illegal, if they have a criminal history it is in the police officer's interest (due to quotas) to escalate the situation to the point where they can justify hauling that subject in and thus adding another number to their monthly expected arrests / felonies / quotas.

If people can't see the discrepancy here, if people can't understand how the dots connect, if people try to equate this to things like, "they shouldn't have been doing anything wrong if they didn't want to be arrested, hurt, MURDERED!", than I really don't know what to say.

People blindly defending police or, worse, blindly blaming people of color or anyone who meets an unkind fate at the hands of over-eager officers is part of the problem, in my honest opinion.

I'm a law abiding, non-violent, non-criminal (never been arrested), and for all intents-and-purposes model citizen.

Every police encounter I have (even as a white citizen of the US) always goes one way for certain: I hold absolutely still unless instructed otherwise and I completely submit to the officer. I feel completely helpless. I feel completely in the control of the officer. I feel like if that officer is having a bad day or I incidentally irk that officer that I will be the benefactor of whatever negative perceptions that creates -- regardless of anything I did prior. It's all up the officer in that moment and I feel and somewhat know that even if the entire ordeal is recorded (with video and audio) that at the end of the day it's still my word versus theirs and the entire court room is on the same payroll as that officer.

There's nothing good about this situation. The entire thing makes me sick. I have friends of every race, nation, and creed and I can't even begin to imagine the way they are made to feel in similar situations if I feel so helpless and at the whim of the given officer.

I don't wish that feeling on ANYONE! Even my OWN WORST ENEMY! It's not human, it's not normal, and it breeds the type of feelings people talk about when innocent people are attacked by a foreign military. All it does is create grudges, the quest for revenge, and enemies for the police.

AND THEY WONDER WHY SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THEM AND THE WAY THEY DO THINGS!

Thanks for tolerating my post but lately things have reached a boiling point in my life with people I know and love being mistreated. I caught this interview yesterday, by chance, while not going out of my way to look for it and it was extremely enlightening. I urge each and every one of you to watch this video IN IT'S ENTIRETY! I also urge you to research more about the NYPD 12 and what their mission and message are, even if you don't agree with anything I or they say or stand for.

This effects each and every person on American soil, regardless of any personal characteristics you may possess. Thank you for your time.

----------

Sgt Edwin Raymond On Police Quotas, NYPD 12 & Says He Was Denied Promotion (Youtube Interview with HOT97 Radio Station, New York, New York on October 4th, 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzR2pkWgVU

> I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard a fireman, or a doctor, a rescuer, a lifeguard, etc, say that sort of thing - "my first priority is to go home safely tonight".

I mean, I've definitely heard firemen say that or express a similar sentiment. Much of their training involves not taking risks even to rescue someone because cowboy fireman tend to turn one casualty into two.

I've heard similar things from lifeguards, but it's usually stated that the idea that their goal is for everyone go home safely. Lifeguards typically carry the buoy because they train to save people by giving them that. They train not to swim up and grab someone in distress, but to give them a buoy. That prevents the victim from attacking the lifeguard or clinging to them and drowning both of them (which happens when people panic during a rescue).

Don't get me wrong; I 100% agree that a police need to de-escalate more often instead of immediately resorting to physical or violent responses. I agree that militarization of police only serves to emphasize police vs citizen mentality that leads to escalation. I think they should use better judgement with high speed chases as well as confronting individuals. But to argue that "keep yourself safe" is something that only police teach is complete nonsense.

> I should also probably point out that I think this is a peculiarly US thing.

It's also relatively irrelevant. The US has a lot of peculiarities due to it's culture and history that make it difficult to compare it to the average western European country which is almost universally what this comment means. That's why it's always followed up with some comment about "the developed world" or "the first world." "Why can't you be more like Sweden/England/Germany/France?" Because we're not any of those countries.

Yes, the US has problems with violence. It's not a secret. Our violent crime rates are very high even though our non-violent crime rates are typically much lower than other developed countries. No, we're not happy about it. This is not something we can magically fix by changing a few laws. Crime is a culture problem and an economic problem, and those are both very hard to fix.

Think of it like this. Have you ever seen the streets in China or India? How chaotic and out of control all the drivers seem with no respect for more regimented and safer driving? You don't fix that by copying Germany's driving laws and signage and applying them to the roads. That won't actually change anything. To change that, you have to change the driving culture. You've got to get people to believe that they need to change. That's extremely difficult to do because you've got to get everybody or nearly everybody to do it. It takes a very long time to change culture like this, and the larger the culture, the longer it takes to change. And changing something like driving laws or whether or not you use a recycling program for waste is much easier to change than fixing endemic crime or endemic violence.

American cops are cowards of the highest degree. They can't even subdue a naked man in a bathtub without tasers? I mean such cowardice deserves a medal and much more offensive terminology I'm going to refrain from here. Instead they murder an innocent man and when held accountable use the bullshit excuse that they were trying to help. How fucking disgusting. The neighbor who called the cops also deserves blame. He lives in America and should have known that calling the police in any situation is likely to make it worse. But ultimately it's these officers who know nothing about helping others that murdered him for no reason other than that's what they are trained to do. I guess we're still far, far away from holding such cowardly scum responsible for their actions. Maybe one day we'll care enough about our own citizens to police our police and hold them to higher standards than everyone else rather than lower. I'm not holding my breath for it though. In many ways they are a symptom of our hateful society.

One more thing is the reason why the neighbor called the cops. Oh no, a naked man! Babbling nonsense! Help, I'm victimized, someone help!

That reminds me of one of the few times I was in the US, in my undies in my motel room, minding my business. I guess the blinds were still open, only covered with a white curtain, and some middle aged woman must have seen me. Immediately called hotel security on me. People in the US are obsessed with seing anything naked it seems.

One more thing is the reason why the neighbor called the cops. Oh no, a naked man! Babbling nonsense! Help, I'm victimized, someone help!

The article doesn't say that the neighbour felt victimised.

If I had a mentally ill neighbour that started walking around naked and talking about the devil, I'd call the police too. They are probably trained in first aid or CPR and methods to de-escalate any situations. It's a reasonable way to get help in a situation you may not be trained to deal with.

Except in America.

> Except in America.

That's the thing, something in the US doesn't square. Either you have the police being first responders and focused on deescalation and help, or you have some other agency responsible for such calls where violence has absolutely no place as a solution.

In my country, if a situation needs a calm de-escalation by professionals, we call the police. If someone needs shooting, we call the police. Somehow they manage both roles just fine.

That was my point, I think police in general is focused on de-escalation and helping people who are in a dangerous situation. The whole point is to keep things calm and orderly through perceived safety. In the US the order through fear aspect seems a lot stronger.

This. For every stupid situation made worse by a cop there was some self-righteous jerk that called them there.

That said, these are rich people problems. The cops don't have the resources to spend responding to bullshit in non-rich communities and even if you call on a slow day they still don't want to set a precedent of responding to bullshit.

Of course, as always "the rich" are the real enemy here. Somehow.

A crazy naked person is definitely worth calling the cops over. I actually did this a couple years ago. I was in West Oakland and my next door neighbor was outside one morning, babbling (and occasionally yelling) about Jesus. I went out and asked him to go inside. He yelled, "Oh my God you're Jesus... ", continued babbling, jumped on top of a car, and started trying to rip the windshield wipers off. I asked him to go inside again and he pulled his pants down and started doing the helicopter. At that point, I called the cops. They showed up in about a minute and wrestled him to the ground. He fought back like crazy, trying to bite and spit. They got him cuffed after about 20 seconds. Then EMTs showed up, injected him with what I assume was haldol, and took him away. He was held for psych eval for three days. When he came back, he behaved totally fine.

The news doesn't report stories like that, where things go right. You'll only hear about the controversial cases where cops totally fuck up, either due to malice or incompetence. But almost every time, things go right.

To be fair, if you see someone wandering naked and confused outside their home they probably need help. Some well-meaning people may call a non-emergency line to get that person help, rather than out of fear.

The biggest issue is the American public that fetishizes this job so much. A lot of people have such an erection for "TOUGH ON CRIME" policies, and they'll just let cops get away with whatever they want.

People are really gullible, too. So any time a cop murders a defenseless and un-armed American citizen, the news and the police will start to throw out propaganda that will make the victim look bad. "The victim was in a gang--look at them throwing up a gang sign on an old Facebook picture they posted! They were wearing a hoodie, at 2am! They had a criminal past!" As if any of that justifies the murder of a person by a shitty and violent police officer.

It's completely enraging, but there's not much to be done about it while "TOUGH ON CRIME" idiots continue to vote and the politicians that are voted in continue to empower their armed lap dogs.

oh, right, that's why the US is on my no-go list. thanks for reminding me, had almost forgotten!

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not nationalistic swipes, which lead to just the kind of threads we're trying to avoid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was about to protest, but then saw the thread that did follow... You're probably right, I'll try to think a bit more before I post. Sorry .

I remember when I was a kid in the late 80s my father used to badmouth the Soviet Union for its lack of civil liberties. He told me many examples (all of them out of his head), about how bad was the life of the citizens under the soviet state.

I cannot remember any story as horrendous as those that I read in the linked article.

Maybe that's because the story in the linked article happens to a vanishingly small proportion of the populace but life under the Soviet Union was terrible for a huge proportion.

For it to happen at all is worrying. Western Europe is a demonstration of how to police a populas without shooting at them on a daily basis.

Absolutely agreed, but that does not invalidate my comment nor validate enriquto's.

Don't worry, it's only dangerous here if you're a woman, a person of color, non-Christian, an immigrant, disabled, poor, live in a city/town near industrial plants, need medical care, a senior citizen, are LGBTQ+, a sex worker, an addict, or live near natural disasters.

White males make up the largest portion of people shot by police. [0]

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

32,658 people were killed by terrorists in 2014. Does that mean we're more likely to be killed by terrorists than by police?

Of course not, because that was terrorists killed around the world. There's more people living around the world than in the US. In the US, only 3,046 people were killed by terrorists between 2001 and 2014.

More white people get killed in America because there are more white people here than black people. But adjusting for population, more black people get killed in America by cops than white people. Three times more. I provided tons of links (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18168217), you can see for yourself.

Though blacks are 8 more times likely to commit homicide than whites.

If you assume probabilistic independence (which you probably shouldn't), that means that a black murderer only has 3/8ths the chance of being killed compared to a white murderer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

Then why aren't white males on your list?

Because it's a list of things that makes it risky to live in this country, not just people getting shot. I list several groups without gender or race, and white males can still be in those groups. But just being a white male in and of itself isn't risky. That's the least risky group.

And that's just factually and verifiably false.

I'm perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise, if you have any evidence. Can you provide me a single metric of a societal risk to white males more than any other group, adjusted for population? (That is to say, a risk that is caused by society and isn't health/genetic related, like prevalence of disease)

The link I provided clearly shows that white males are second only to black males in terms of how likely they are to be shot by police. My point is that excluding white males as victims of police violence or framing the problem as something that does not affect white males helps no one.

So, because it's not helping white males, it helps no one?

I don't think it's helpful for anyone to essentially make a statement saying "the US is a dangerous place unless you're a white male"

It's just a divisive thing to say and I highly doubt it's true.

Well first off, if you doubt it's true, all you need to do to disprove it is to provide a single example of white males being the subject of more risk than any other group by population, in any metric, that isn't genetic or similar. I haven't found one. Again, they are certainly included in risk-prone groups, as I listed, but as far as I can tell, not as the sole members of a most-risk-prone group.

Second, the whole point of all of this is to look at who is most at risk. Yes, white males do encounter risk. But that's not what's important: what's important is, who is most at risk? The answer, in the apparent absence of evidence to the contrary, would appear to be "not white males".

It's usually at this point, when someone says that this is divisive and not helpful, that we get to "All Lives Matter".

Black Lives Matter was explicitly intended to only point out the risks of being black in this country, in order to raise awareness of those unique risks, and to try to reach some social justice. This had the unfortunate side effect of shining a light away from white people's problems. White people still had problems, and they still wanted people to care. Some white people even felt personally attacked by Black Lives Matter. So white people found the phrase divisive, and made up a new phrase to take the focus away from BLM's core issues: All Lives Matter. "Don't worry about only black people's problems, because I want you to worry about my problems, too."

It may make white males feel that it's divisive, but really it's just difficult to accept that other people may be more in need, in one aspect or another. The goal of all this is to focus on the groups that are at the most risk, acknowledge them, and try to address their issues.

The US is dangerous no matter who you are. It's just that in every category of risk, it's less dangerous if you're a white male.

> Well first off, if you doubt it's true, all you need to do to disprove it is to provide a single example of white males being the subject of more risk than any other group by population, in any metric, that isn't genetic or similar.

White men are subject to more risk of being shot by police than black females.

White men are subject to more risk of being shot by police than white females.

White men are subject to more risk of being shot by police than any female of any skin color.

> It's just that in every category of risk, it's less dangerous if you're a white male.

False. The largest prediction for high risk for being shot by the police is social econimic status. Second largest predictor is being male. Third largest is african american skin color. Poor black male has the highest risk, and rich white female the lowest risk. White male as an demographic has higher risk than the average (50%) in the US population because the trait "male" is a larger predictor to risk of being shot by the police than the trait "white".

I don't think you're going to make inroads with that poster. I don't think they're posting in good faith. The account is less than a day old.

That may be true, but the OP is talking about risk, so you need to compare those figures to the population breakdown. The risk experienced by a white person (representing 45% of those shot by police and 72% of the population) is significantly lower than that of a black person (22% of those shot by police, 12% of the population). Similar story for other minorities.

Yes, proportionally black males are more likely to be shot by police than white males. But pointing out that in GP's list of all the groups that need to be wary of police, the one most shot by police in absolute numbers is absent.

Because it’s irrelevant when we’re talking about the risk of being a member of the group?

In terms of "risk" they're second only to black males. Women, on the other hand, regardless of race, are extremely unlikely to be shot by police. So why are they on the list?

Oh, I see, reading your previous comment again – you interpreted it as a “list of all the groups that need to be wary of police”. It’s not that, it’s just about “danger” in a broad sense.

Broadly speaking, white males are second only to black males in terms of being targets of violence in the United States. That's all violence, not just the police inflicted kind.

It’s true that police militarization is a problem for everyone. The fact remains that any particular person of color is more likely to be killed by police than any particular white person is, and that’s a meaningful difference in the lives of persons of color.

That's not true. Asian males, for example, are much less likely to be shot by police than white males. Or are they not people of color?

That’s true and probably because the framing of the debate is mostly along the lines of race when income is probably the best indicator and most minority groups with some exceptions are disadvantaged in the US.

That's not the case the parent is making, however. The parent is saying that the risk is disproportionately greater for black males and/or other minority groups at large.

Some people may think you are joking. This is not a joke.

Here is an exert from one state in Australia's police force review from 1994.

This took place _24_ years ago. Even though it was so long ago, it seems to directly reflect issues mentioned in the article.

For the TLDR crowd:

* Too much force was being used by police

* Mental illness was a factor in some shootings / use of force (4%)

* Standardised training for all police members

* Safety first approach taken:

* - Safety of offender is included in that approach (officers first, public next, offender third)

* - Contain first, avoid confrontation, avoid force

* - If needed only use minimum force required

* - Forced entry only as last resort

* All police undertake mandatory 5 day mental health training

* Police to take refresher mental health training every 6 months

* Any use of force - from minor (forced fingerprinting/cuffing) through to major (riots) - to be placed on register for tracking

* Increased trends noticed in force register will be addressed in 6 monthly training

-------------------------

3. Project Beacon

The establishment of Project Beacon followed a number of shooting incidents involving the use of firearms by the Victoria police. Between 1987 and 1994, officers were involved in operational incidents which resulted in the deaths of 29 offenders or suspects. Police were required to attend 15 to 20 incidents per day where use of force was employed and up to three "critical incidents" per week. A critical incident is defined as "any incident requiring police management which involves violence or a threat of violence and is, or is potentially, life-threatening". By mid-1994 this trend became the catalyst for fundamental change in operational safety tactics and training within the Victoria police. Expert analysis revealed that a number of factors may have contributed to this increase; namely, a feeling of vulnerability within the police force, a desire on the part of the community for instant solutions and a belief within the force that "there was no one else to solve these problems".

It was also felt that this trend was in part contributed to by the de-institutionalisation of patients with mental illness in Victoria in the early 1990s. Six of nine fatal shooting incidents in 1994 by police (and one in 1995) involved persons with a mental illness. Statistics revealed that such persons were involved in 44% of all critical incidents reported to Project Beacon between October, 1994 and December, 1995. It was further noted that persons with mental illness were involved in approximately 4% of all "use of force" incidents, i.e., where force is used or threatened by or against the police. Emotionally disturbed persons attempting suicide and/or self-mutilation constituted a further 3.5% of use of force incidents. In general, a significant number of emotionally disturbed persons and people with behavioural problems, who may not have had histories of mental illness, regularly came to the police attention.

A number of reviews, both internal and with the assistance of international policing experts, were undertaken in an attempt to identify solutions. On 6th April, 1994, the Commissioner of the Victoria police, Mr. Neil Comrie, wrote to all commissioned officers emphasising the philosophy that "the success of an operation will primarily be judged by the extent to which the use of force is avoided or minimised".

On 19th September, 1994, Project Beacon was established and involved the standardisation of training so that all officers were trained to the same level of competence. The core principles of Project Beacon inform the response to every incident and the planning of operations which may involve any potential use of force. These core principles may be summarised as follows:

* "Safety First — the safety of police, the public and the offender or suspect is paramount.

* Risk Assessment — is to be applied to all incidents and operations.

* Take Charge — effective command and control must be exercised.

* Planned Response — every opportunity should be taken to convert an unplanned response into a planned operation.

* Cordon and Containment — unless impractical, a cordon and containment approach is to be adopted.

* Avoid Confrontation — a violent confrontation is to be avoided.

* Avoid Force — the use of force is to be avoided.

* Minimum Force — where the use of force is to be avoided, only the minimum amount reasonably necessary is to be used.

* Forced Entry Searches — are to be used only as a last resort.

* Resources — it is accepted that the "safety first" principle may require the deployment of more resources, more complex planning and more time to complete".

The primary principle of Project Beacon is "safety first". The safety of the police officer is paramount, followed by the safety of the public and the safety of the subject. Mr. Shuey utilised the example of a doctor attending a collision to treat a patient: "the doctor wouldn’t stand in the middle of the road to do the treatment of the patient because he would be exposing himself to the risk of being run over by a car". If the police officer is in a position of security, he or she will be more competent and capable of handling the situation. If a police officer is not involved in anything which is unsafe, he will have a clearer perspective of what is happening and be able to deal with the situation accordingly. If you expose a police officer to a "kill or be killed" situation, the risk of a fatal confrontation increases.

A significant objective of Project Beacon was to assist police in dealing with persons with mental illness, emotionally disturbed individuals and persons with behavioural problems. Project Beacon, in collaboration with the Victoria Department of Health and Community Services, developed a comprehensive integrated approach for dealing with such persons which was incorporated into police training courses. The training involved video scenarios and role-playing and in December, 1995, a video called "Similar Expectations" was produced. It offered a range of methods for dealing with persons with mental illness, and provided advice from mental health experts. The video received widespread acceptance in law enforcement and mental health agencies and was automatically incorporated into every police officer’s training; it was not confined to the training of those who participated in dedicated negotiators courses. Further training programmes were developed by persons with expertise in psychiatric mental health with the assistance of a police psychologist.

8,500 police officers, student and operational, were placed on an initial, five day training course complemented by mandatory two-day refresher training every six months. It is now part of ongoing training of police officers in the state of Victoria. Training for the Special Operations Group is rigorous and ongoing, taking place on most occasions when its members are not involved in operational response duties.

A "use of force register" is now maintained by the Victoria Police. Use of force incidents range from the forcible obtainment of fingerprints and handcuffing, through to riot situations. All such incidents are recorded in the register. This enables the police force in Victoria to track the number of incidents where force is a factor, and enables trend analysis in relation to the type of force and weapons that are used. This acts as a "catalyst" for the next six months of training. The information is analysed and if there is an excessive increase in crimes involving firearms or knives etc., the training in the following six months will be highlighted in that direction.

I doubt this is as much of a problem of the police officers as the American legal system.

Surely the cost of a movie ticket is better settled in a small claims court than with police intervention and a criminal case. The theatre would have surely got their money even without going to court, now they get nothing instead. It's perverse, just like debtor's prison, which is still practiced in the United States.

I think the police officers in these cases are mostly just acting out what the legal system expects them to do.

Eh, I'm not sure there was a "criminal case". The cops were working as security staff of the place, not on duty; seems reasonable that they would have a word with someone trying to break the movie theater rules. It's the escalation from "having a word" to "forcible removal" to "on the floor not breathing" that is absurd.

They stil acted as if there was. But the worst thing the kid could be accused of is being in breach of contract for seeing more screenings than indicated on his ticket.

Besides, it would make a lot more business sense to take it as an opportunity to sell more tickets rather than to remove him.

Telling that, submitted at the same time, this story has one sarcastic comment, thile the story of a police officer selling information on the dark web has an actual discussion.

What does it tell? Frankly I can't think of anything to say about this. It only fills me with sadness for all involved.

Perhaps that HN is a rather tech-focused community, and that the other story has more relevance to most users? Or perhaps that it's a more unique story, as depressing as that thought is.

My inner cynic believes OP meant to imply that HN values technology over human lives or something similarly disingenuous, but that might be uncharitable. It could just as easily be a reflexion on the frequency of stories in this vein, that they've become commonplace, or similar.

The other story appeared on the front page 30 minutes earlier.

Yet this story now has more comments (though it's about the same if you exclude this meta subthread).

> All police in the US are, of course, armed. There is also the very real prospect that they could face criminals who are, too.

While I doubt it is the sole issue, I wonder how much of the United States' absurd frequency of police killings is due to its massively pro-firearm policies and sentiment. Can police lethality be significantly reduced without fundamentally changing opinions on gun regulation?

> Can police lethality be significantly reduced without fundamentally changing opinions on gun regulation?

Yes. Start giving the officers and the organizations that represent the officers (departments, unions) good reasons to kick out people who are a high risk of shooting people unreasonably.

Mandatory individual liability insurance would go a long ways. Holding police to the same standard as the rest of us would also go a long ways. Pretty much anything is better than nothing.

Cops shoot people dead in situations where normal armed citizens wouldn't even think about pulling a gun. Seriously, I can't even begin to convey how massive the double standard is here. Stuff that's justifiable when the cops do it would be an instant manslaughter if not murder charge for a regular person.

Unnecessary police killings are one of those areas where pretty much everyone pro-gun and anti-gun agrees that guns aren't the problem, it's hothead officers who don't de-escalate and pull the trigger at the drop of the hat that are the problem.

  pretty much everyone pro-gun and anti-gun
  agrees that guns aren't the problem, it's
  hothead officers who don't de-escalate

I don't think it's realistic for America to get rid of guns.

But it seems to me a lot of American police practices that make de-escalating hard come from officer safety concerns, which come in part from the availability of weapons*

Pointing your gun at someone from 20 feet away and not getting closer until they lie face down on the floor is probably great for officer safety - but not exactly conductive to non-shouted conversations or de-escalating.

* Of course knives are also an issue, so a gun ban wouldn't eliminate the problem even if such a thing was possible.

I think when the police's top priority is to get home to their families rather then protect and serve... That speaks volumes.

The danger of being shot every time they get a call to a scene is very real. This creates the mentality of shooting first and asking questions later.

Hot headed officers?! In a country where everybody can own a gun there is a real fear of getting shot. The only worse profession is to be in the army.

Surprisingly other countries have armed police as well, but somehow they wont pull the trigger that often then the Americans. Wonder why... Oh wait, maybe because there is a minuscule chance of being shot by another person?

No, it is not just the risk inherent to their job.

In France, the police officer, since the Paris attack, got more and more power, and can now carry their work firearm outside of service.

Since this decision has been made, the number of people shot by a police officer (in or out of service) has increase by +54% in one year.

But their job didn't get any more dangerous, there is no significant increase in firearm possession or, globally, criminality between 2016 and 2017. Nothing at least that would be close to a +54% increase in one year.

But, on the other end, officer are more and more protected and usually don't even end up in court, even when they blatantly violated the police instruction.

This tend to show one thing, that I thing have been proven time and time again: Give more power to someone and none of the responsibilities that should come with it, and you get people who will abuse their power over and over again.

EDIT: Source for the +54% (in French): https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2018/06/27/le-...

EDIT2: The +54% is the increase in firearm usage by the police, not the number of people shot.

There are certain government reactions which are nonsense, I agree. Like the reaction to 911 in the US and creating the massive hysteria around airport security, which failed miserably, but still nobody does anything about it. I am not justifying stupid laws and decisions made by governments here.

I am not an advocate of how the police and law enforcement works in the US, bit I see the relation why it works like that or at least what would be one of the main causes of it.

Whilst people are crying about giving less control and force to the police, there is no counter measure on the civilian side regarding the ownership of guns in the US.

>The danger of being shot every time they get a call to a scene is very real. This creates the mentality of shooting first and asking questions later.

>Hot headed officers?! In a country where everybody can own a gun there is a real fear of getting shot. The only worse profession is to be in the army.

>Surprisingly other countries have armed police as well, but somehow they wont pull the trigger that often then the Americans. Wonder why... Oh wait, maybe because there is a minuscule chance of being shot by another person?

Oh piss off. The danger of being shot is not nearly what the training videos and boot-lickers will have you believe. Cops don't even crack the top ten for dangerous jobs. As far as well paying blue collar jobs you can get with a highschool diploma goes it's one of the safer ones. Teenagers with light machine guns have no problem working under far more restrictive rules of engagement than the cops have. I think the cops can be reasonably expected to hold their fire until they see a gun or get charged by an armed individual. At the very least they have a responsibility to not unnecessarily escalate situations. This isn't a guns issue, it's an officers too eager to use force issue (as can be seen with how they use tasers and pepper spray).

Thanks, but why don't you piss of instead?

Also by the time you see a gun, it's already too late. Have you thought about a second, maybe?

If a person has the intention to shoot a police officer, he wont hesitate to do so. Maybe that's why they don't like to wait until they see a gun? Or do you think the raging person will ask politely first, if he can shoot at them or not?

Maybe you should think about both sides in a situation? Maybe understand how a situation can escalate quickly into a shooting spree? And maybe that's the reason why officers don't risk it at all and rather shoot first?

At the end of the day, they are people too. If you can't understand that then why don't you go and be a police officer and show us idiots how it's done.

> The danger of being shot every time they get a call to a scene is very real... In a country where everybody can own a gun there is a real fear of getting shot. The only worse profession is to be in the army.

Police officers aren't even in the top ten most dangerous professions [1]. They rank far under such notoriously dangerous jobs as "Grounds Maintenance Workers". According to that source, the BLS, "Police officers incurred 51 homicides in 2016". That's not nothing, but let's not blow it out of proportion to push our views.

Additionally, if a police officer can't handle the stress of a potential threat inherent in their job without killing citizens, they're not qualified to do their job. You mentioned being in the Army being a worse threat than being a police officer. How are Army personnel handled when they are involved in an unjustified shooting?

1: Warning PDF https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

Yes, there are probably a lot of people who aren't fit to be police officers equipped with weapons. But how many civilians are in the US who aren't fit to have weapons and they still have them? And then the police officer has to deal with them.

Let's not take into account other work injuries OK? It would be similar to say, that cars can kill people, why don't we ban cars then? It is their job to go to scenes where is high chance of being shot. You can't say that of a construction worker can you? Also they have safety measures which are getting better as we learn from mistakes. How does that even translate to the police? Every situation is different, every person acts different.

> I think when the police's top priority is to get home to their families rather then protect and serve... That speaks volumes.

No, that's not a problem, that's everyone's priority. But if shooting innocent citizens got policemen into jail, which is far from home and their family, they'd probably think twice about using guns, cattle prods, or poisonous chemicals.

I haven't said, it is a problem. I said that this shows the problem. The problem that a police officer is more afraid for his/hers own safety then actually protecting and serving others. For me this shows why US police is trigger happy. Where they are trained always for the worst, where they always expect the worst. No wonder a lot of them can't tell right from wrong. Also, when you have to deal with mentally ill people, in certain cases for an untrained person might be really hard to identify and know the difference between a person suffering from mental illness, or being high on crystal meth and ready to chew your face off.

If the civil population wouldn't have all these guns and gun crimes wouldn't be the top concern in the country, maybe then the police could change it's training to be more calm and helping in diffusing dangerous situation rather then go in guns blazing.

Not going to say, that having guns is the No. 1 cause, but it certainly makes the whole situation worse.

Oh, come on! It's decision theory, plain and simple. As an officer, I have two options: (1) shoot first, (2) talk to the victim. The cost in case (1) is ZERO (well, actually a couple bullets...) and in case (2) it is somewhat higher, because I run a small risk of dying on duty. Since \epsilon > zero, I shoot until the mag is empty, then empty the spare mag, too.

The values in this line of reasoning change depending on whether the victim has a nuclear bomb, a gun, a knife, bare hands, or nothing at all. The conclusion does not. Any small risk is still bigger than no risk.

It is obvious to me, that reducing the cost to the officer who chooses option (2), by taking guns away from citizens, does not work, because the cost won't become negative. Instead, the cost in case (1) has to be increased, and that means prosecuting trigger happy cops as the murderers they are.

Decisions are based on experience. If you are trained to expect the worst and you have experience on that, you will decide for the most favourable outcome for yourself. Not to get killed and pull the trigger sooner as the other person, even without the knowledge of him having a gun or not.

And there is a reason why cops became murderers. So instead finding the cause and fixing it, you say that they should go to jail and end of story?

The problem is, that this is how our current prosecution system works and it fails on so many levels. So why do you think it would work on them? It doesn't make the world a better place and there aren't less criminals because of it. Then why do you think there will be less trigger happy cops on the force?

People still commit crimes even with the risk of getting in to jail. Cops will still shoot people, because they will rather go to jail then be dead. Even if there is no gun, it is much safer for them shooting first and asking later.

> So instead finding the cause and fixing it

The cause for cops murdering innocent civilians is that the cost for doing so is zero. Increase the cost and the problem goes away. Moreover, bad cops are bullies who thrive on bossing people around without consequences. Introduce consequences, and these lowlives who shouldn't be cops find a more suitable profession.

> this is how our current prosecution system works and it fails on so many levels.

It deters me from killing people who pissed me off.

> Cops will still shoot people, because they will rather go to jail then be dead.

And guess what, that's fine. There is probably no perfect solution, you know, the kind where nobody gets shot and no cop goes to jail. It's almost as if the real world requires some sort of compromise. Who would have thought?

> The cause for cops murdering innocent civilians is that the cost for doing so is zero.

Usually this falls under self defence. As far as I know, if someone is on your property and you shoot them, you can say it was self defence and you have the chance to get away with it clean. I heard so many stories about this, like where a guy shot a teenager dead because the kid was drunk and wanted to steal a garden gnome or something.

> It deters me from killing people who pissed me off.

Well, I don't know what your job is, but I presume it doesn't involve guns in any shape or form, or the possibility to go to a place and get shot at. And hey it deters you, but there are a couple of other million people whom it does not. With this mentality we wouldn't have mass shootings and gun crimes at all, not even a simple robbery.

> There is probably no perfect solution

Yup, that is very true.

Anyway, all I think is that the US gun laws are responsible in some extent for police brutality. Take away guns from civilian hands and you can have a much more relaxed and non-lethal approach to law enforcement. This might not work 100%, or it might not work at all, but it would be worth a try. Too many people are shot to death in the US. Sooner or later people get to used to it and then nothing will change.

Lifelong US citizen here.

To people from outside the US, please understand that our police do not go around shooting and handcuffing people all the time. I have never personally known anyone that was wrongfully arrested or abused by the police.

Even in a traffic stop, the key is to be polite and treat the police like human beings. They are understandably concered with each public contact-- American police are killed in the line of duty, sometimes with no warning.

The problem is a political one, and it must be stopped. It' a wedge issue used to divide the voting public, and media sources play to both sides.

If you travel to the US, please do not fear violence from the police. They really are here to 'Protect and Serve'.

I've encountered the police during routine traffic stops in both the US and in France. Things could be a lot better here, here are some differences:

In France they always work as a pair, are cordial and while they make requests within their authority, they use a normal tone of voice. In the US, the tone starts out slighly more elevated but will instantly escalate to confrontational if they don't get their way exactly how they want. They exude a mix of paranoia and authoritative over-compensation, as they stand at an angle behind you when you are seated in the driver's seat (because the likelihood of firearm interaction is much higher and because they are usually alone in the US).

The ones in France will try to keep the interaction friendly and if you drop a pun they will smile or groan, wheras in the US they will tense up, afraid of being played. In general, the police force in the US wants you to suck up to them, thank them, worship them and make them feel like heros. Inside, they are afraid, insecure, untrained in psychology matters and most certainly underpaid for the job.

This is why anybody with mental illness or exerting their rights have a higher likelyhood of getting injured or killed by the police in the US. The force here has forgotten WHY they work and are so afraid of losing control of the situation that they will use force where it's not warranted and hurt a lot of people.

As a side-note, I've only had a few interaction with the police in Beijing and I always saw smiles and a relaxed body language. Even though I knew full well they are being very strict about rules, they didn't lord it over people, just kept things moving fast and professionally but nicely.

Finally, while on the topic of travel, both immigration and security agents are way nicer in Europe. Here in the US they are often heard barking orders at people, not smiling and often looking for a reason to flex their authority muscle.

> because they are usually alone in the US

You can't say "usually" because this is entirely a product of departmental policy, staffing, and the department's budget. I've been stopped maybe ten times in 20 years if you include DUI checkpoints, half that if you don't, and have had a mix of single officer alone, two officers together, two officers in multiple cars, etc.

> wheras in the US they will tense up

How many traffic stop interactions have you had with American police where you can definitively say they tense up at anything? I got pulled over on the way home from a flight lesson and probably spent 5-10 minutes talking to that officer about flight training. But for the most part they just want to issue a warning or citation for whatever you did and get you back on the road so they can go back to their car. Standing next to an unknown car on the highway is the most dangerous position they'll be in that day so I can't fault them for wanting to wrap it up as quickly as possible.

> Standing next to an unknown car on the highway is the most dangerous position they'll be in that day

Who in their right mind stands right next to a car on a highway? Seriously, driving to the next exit or rest spot would be far safer. Didn't they get taught that at police school?

Have you seriously never seen a car pulled over on a major interstate?

Not here in France, no. Cops pull cars over on safe spots: break zones, or petrol stations. (Also, speed on the highway is 130kmph ~80mph)

> To people from outside the US, please understand that our police do not go around shooting and handcuffing people all the time.

Yes, the police shooting "handcuffed" individuals in rare. The police shooting civilians in general is not:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

> American police are killed in the line of duty, sometimes with no warning.

The largest percentage of which is traffic accidents. Between 27 (2013) up to 69 (2011) police were killed nationally in "felonious" circumstances per the FBI. Police shot and killed 987 or more people, but there's poor national data on this (the FBI doesn't track it).

So the police kill about 93% more people than they themselves are killed, and the 987 figure is considered fairly conservative.

> They really are here to 'Protect and Serve'.

Actually they aren't. The Supreme Court and appeals courts in "Warren v. District of Columbia", and "Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales" ruled that they have no such legal duty[0][1].

> If you travel to the US, please do not fear violence from the police.

If that were true why are you offering people advice on avoiding police violence earlier in the post: "Even in a traffic stop, the key is to be polite and treat the police like human beings."

The "key" is to act a certain way to avoid a violent encounter but there's no concern about that in the US?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...

Police shot and killed 987 or more people, but there's poor national data on this (the FBI doesn't track it).

http://killedbypolice.net/ did a meritorious work on this topic.

> the police kill about 93% more people than they themselves are killed

Don't you mean 1330%?

"Of all people killed in police/civilian altercations, 93% of them are civilians"

> that our police do not go around shooting and handcuffing people all the time

As a lifelong UK citizen (well nearly lifelong), I think our police can be somewhat heavy-handed. The first graphic in this piece [0] gives me some cause for concern, and that's just the UK number.

As a regular visitor to the US, with family living there, I find reactions like yours very common and deeply saddening. Sure, I probably won't die next time I go but how is that the bar?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

The article estimates that 163 disabled people alone are killed by the police each year. That's an interesting statistic/estimation that I don't know what to make of.

Of course I think you should treat the police with respect, but the same amount of respect you'd treat your dry cleaner or waiter. Lots of people do jobs far more dangerous than policing, but it would be ludicrous to say "We should treat underwater welders with respect".

As an Australian living in the UK, I can't fathom the interactions with police in the US. I've seen mentally ill people be arrested and it's always been a relatively positive encounter, despite being a horrible situation.

There seems to be this idea that the police need to immediately resolve an issue right here and now using whatever force necessary. Maybe if the citizen is not a direct threat to anyone they should show some restraint and curb their bloodlust and find an alternative way to resolve the situation than electrocuting and strangling a non violent citizen to death (like e.g in the article).

They killed a person because the individual could not hear, now imagine if you are a tourists that does not know the language well, the cops ask you to raise your hands but you think they want your IDs, you put your hand in the pocket and you will get killed.

It seems to me that is better not to go as a tourist in US if you are not good enough in english, if you have the wrong illness or skin color.

As a UK citizen, I have spent quite a bit of time in the US, and offhand I can remember being pulled over by the police three times (once because my tail-lights were not working, and twice for speeding). In each case the interaction was calm and professional, and I didn't feel at all threatened.

However, I suspect that if I were a different colour (and perhaps spoke with a different accent), or if the same encounters had happened in a time and place where the officer already felt stressed, the dynamic might have been quite different.

As a European, it's really sad to see that nothing at all can be done about all this shooting, homicides and let's not forget suicides by means of firearms.

Making the same point, after every major rampage in the US, The Onion runs a piece with the apt headline

"‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

> If you travel to the US, please do not fear violence from the police.

The police (and other uniformed services) are the main reason I would not ever come near the US. I value personal safety more than a few picturesque national parks, and China as a tourist destination does provide both.

The US is beautiful and the people are very friendly, I loved the place. There was a lot of inequality: I've never seen so much homeless people and such nice neighbourhoods together (I visited SF and LA). Shooting happen but the US is so large, at lot of stuff is bound to happen. I do think it's sad that gun violence and police violence are so prevalent but what if this is a symptom and not the root cause?

Opposition to authoritarian violence has you avoiding the US and visiting China? Hmm.

The Chinese are not known to randomly shoot first and ask questions later.

If you actually read the comment, you would see it says "personal safety".

Let me guess:

You're a white person?

And yes, I think that has very much to do with how you're approached by police in the US.

White males make up the largest portion of people shot by police. [0]

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

I don't think you understand how statistics work, and you've pasted this comment a couple of places in this thread.

Let me try one; People interested in technology make up the largest portion of people who have read your comment.

See the problem yet?

I understand statistics just fine. I didn't say that white males are more likely to be shot in proportion to their population. But in terms of absolute numbers, white males are #1 -- so the "unless you're white" comment is both inaccurate and unhelpful to the discussion.

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