911 call -> Dispatch unarmed City employee, typically a social worker, who specializes in the relevant situation, population or neighborhood.
Goal is to assist the individuals involved, to be compassionate instead of punitive, to get to the root cause of the issue.
There is still some kind of armed security backup for the social worker’s protection in situations that do escalate.
Shootings are a very real and somewhat regular occurrence in the US. Here in Germany, it's literally not an issue people worry about. When was the last time you saw a gun anywhere in Germany? The majority of Germans would probably say in the holster of a policeman or possibly someone they know is a registered hunter.
Indubitably, the crazy amount of guns coupled with a tendency to romanticize them leads to policemen being more on edge and willing to pull the trigger -- because worst case, you have an armed loon in front of you that might just shoot first. The initially suggested idea of sending an unarmed civil service guy to de-escalate some situation sounds great in theory, but honestly I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to talk sense into an armed loon.
The fact that the above poster estimates there to be a thousand rightful shootings for every wrong one should really warrant the question of why there are a thousand shootings in the first place. That is not the norm.
There was a shooting in February https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanau_shootings. Germany is also in the top 25 per capita for civilian gun ownership http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...
Perhaps consider reading "how to lie with statistics".
55 of those were against unarmed people, and a further 29 were against people with toy weapons. So 84 of those were undeniably wrong.
334 shootings were against people fleeing the scene of a crime (by foot, car or other). I can't see any way that shooting someone fleeing the scene of a crime is not a wrong shooting. Perhaps legally, it is allowed, but I find that hard to morally justify.
200 of those shootings were people with mental illness, and I would question whether the police approach of shouting commands and waving guns exacerbated the situation. I will concede, though, that being mentally ill doesn't automatically make it a wrong shooting.
173 of those shootings were against people with knives. I would frankly expect police to have better solutions than shooting someone with a knife. Again, I can't say how many they could have resolved peacefully because I'm not going to read all the reports, but that seems high.
This is all to say, I think 100 rightful shootings per wrong shooting is high. Even if we only count unarmed or toy weapons as unjustified shootings, it's far closer to 10 rightful shootings per wrong shooting.
> 55 of those were against unarmed people, and a further 29 were against people with toy weapons. So 84 of those were undeniably wrong.
What makes you believe that these were all undeniably wrong? Are you operating under some sort of Wild West moral code where you can't shoot an unarmed person? Reality is not a movie. If somebody twice your size is choking you to death, would you pray for a gun to stop them with, or say "he doesn't have a weapon so I'm not allowed to shoot him because reasons, guess I'll just die then"? I'm baffled that people continue to repeat this nonsensical thinking constantly.
People who have toy weapons and are shot by police are frequently shot because they did a very convincing job of making the toy look like a functional firearm and handling it as if it is real and they intend to shoot the officer with it. Could be suicide-by-cop or being stupid and assuming the cops will back off if they act scary enough, hard to say. Many imitation firearms are difficult to tell apart from the real thing even up close and calm in good lighting. If somebody is acting like they want to kill you and pulling what looks like a gun, you would be foolish to second-guess whether it is real, and you will be too slow and will likely be shot if it is real if you take the time to wonder.
Some of the people who are completely unarmed are also shot for similar reasons. Someone may not actually have a gun, but if, on a traffic stop, they stop suddenly in an unexpected place, dash out of the car while staying low and moving towards cover while trying to pull something out of your pants, you would be foolish to assume they don't have a gun.
Many situations similar to these can be and are de-escalated by skilled officers. Sadly, some situations are just hopeless, and some officers are not as skilled or patient as they could be.
Note also the reverse: If shooting someone who is unarmed is always wrong, no matter what they were doing at the time, is shooting someone who is armed always right? The police do encounter many armed individuals, and often manage to resolve the situation without shooting them. The situation and what the suspect is doing is what matters for justification, not what they are armed with.
> 334 shootings were against people fleeing the scene of a crime (by foot, car or other). I can't see any way that shooting someone fleeing the scene of a crime is not a wrong shooting. Perhaps legally, it is allowed, but I find that hard to morally justify.
Usually the legal standard is something like the police can only fire a gun at a "fleeing felon" if they can justify that his continuing to be at-large is a serious danger to the community. Sounds all right to me. I haven't reviewed all of those cases, but I'd bet that most of them are a lot more justified than you are imagining.
> 200 of those shootings were people with mental illness, and I would question whether the police approach of shouting commands and waving guns exacerbated the situation. I will concede, though, that being mentally ill doesn't automatically make it a wrong shooting.
Yup. I'm not a mental illness expert. Maybe some more cases could be successfully talked down by somebody with more skill. A lot of cases already are though, but they don't make it into these numbers. It would be nice if we could help everybody with mental illnesses in a better way, but unfortunately, some of them are just completely off the deep end, doing terrible things, and can only be stopped with lethal force.
> 173 of those shootings were against people with knives. I would frankly expect police to have better solutions than shooting someone with a knife. Again, I can't say how many they could have resolved peacefully because I'm not going to read all the reports, but that seems high.
You would expect wrong. I think you better watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upxfo_jBrDE There's a bunch more that show the same idea.
It's been tested a great many times that an attacker with a knife can close roughly 21' of distance and still stab a defender with a holstered handgun before the defender can draw and fire at the attacker. Note that the linked video considers the defense a "success" if the defender is able to get a round off at the attacker before getting hit with the knife, but guns are not death rays, and an attacker who has been shot, even multiple times, can still stab you to death before they have to stop or slow down.
> This is all to say, I think 100 rightful shootings per wrong shooting is high. Even if we only count unarmed or toy weapons as unjustified shootings, it's far closer to 10 rightful shootings per wrong shooting.
100 or higher is likely to be closer to reality for any reasonable definition of justified. Unless you do silly things like make blanket assumptions that any shooting of an unarmed person is unjustified.
The violent US model of presuming crime is about "saving innocents" is dramatically at odds with the US's exceptional mental health crisis -- which forms the basis of most of its community policing issues.
The lack of universal healthcare around mental health is a catastrophe. It's remarkable how tolerant US society is to overwhelming amounts of untreated mental health problems.
Yes, "saving innocents" is the whole point of policing.
Part of the context of that has to be a pretty systemic UK-wide issue affecting public institutions where child-abuse was ignored. It's not clear that heavy-handed policing, in that context, would lead to a different result. It certainly wouldn't in many high profile cases, where police had been strongly encouraged to ignore the issue.
For the UK, class is the defining structural issue, not race. Journalists and the police have typically protected and respected the upper-middle.
That's interacting here with a police oversight in an usual way
As we have seen, more than a few of them work in law enforcement.
I'm particularly worried that if this was voted on prematurely - before they were ready to deploy their new solution - that there might be some retaliation from the existing PD until the decision takes effect.
I'm also worried that "comminity-lead" implies a more political law enforcement organization. After all, sometimes what is "right" is not what is "popular" and I would hope that an officer is more concerned with the former.
I'm from Minneapolis. This was necessary because the MPD has been out of control for a long time, but I too am curious what the actual plans for replacement are, or if this is just a restructuring.
Why is this so relevant now? We all see technology making advancements that are beginning to eliminate the need of human labor, a development that is majorly significant for those who subscribe to these theories. Recently, Andrew Yang's campaign focused on this merely factual development, bringing the idea to the forefront as a national discussion (this was extremely prescient and needed). Anarchists and communists start from this observation and conclude that eventually mankind's needs will be met without man himself exerting any labor.
In this view, once technology ensures all of mankind's material needs are satisfied, man will be left to engage in leisure and the creation and enjoyment of culture, art and literature, in a final utopian mode of life called "Full Communism". In this final state, the theorists envision no nations, no borders, no private property, no needed labor, and no "tyranny" of any man over another. That is, the goal of this final state is that no one individual will have any authority over another individual: here no man is a king and every man is a king. This is their conception of "freedom" and thus anything apart from this is "tyranny".
The theory is rooted in idealism, refusing to settle for the world as it is, but insisting on the world as it, in their view, could or should be. Subscribers to these theories adopt almost these exact words for themselves as a badge of honor or rallying cry. The practical problem with all of this is the inconvenient fact that, no matter the year and no matter the environment, man collectively refuses to act as they imagine he does. There remains perpetually some variable the theory cannot account for.
The theoretical problem with all this is an incorrect conception of authority. Nature abhors a vacuum; it happens to be likewise with authority. Eliminating the police does not eliminate authority. Because man seeks power, there is always someone who will take charge; the only question is whether those not in power have any right to recourse. Without an organisation that has a monopoly on the legitimate employment of violence (ie, the police), whichever group (in their terminology: "affinity group") is the most violent is the de facto authority. The theorists involved see nothing about the current system distinct from Hobbes' suggestion regarding pre-society, "In the state of nature profit is the measure of right". They think we are in that state of nature and the status quo forces have just happened to have, as a gang, clawed their way to the top. Believing the current system is nothing more than the outworking of an arbitrary thrashing-about, meant to impose arbitrary will, they see nothing wrong with eliminating it and beginning an even more scrappy and perpetually incomplete process.