I'm not sure what the cops think this person did but whatever she was accused of this is an absolutely unacceptable way to handle it in the US.
If you asked me this is exactly how I would assume this sort of thing is handled in the US
It's hypocritical to attack the cops that (literally) fight to stay alive without saying anything about the root cause.
> American gun culture has little to do with this case.
non sequitur.
The cops were sent to the house of a middle-aged scientist who was reporting on COVID data. The idea that you need to charge in with guns is far beyond ludicrous.
What, this was so time-sensitive that we couldn't pick her up with a traffic stop when she was out of the house?
At every conceivable junction, the police create dangerous situations and then use the danger to justify escalating them to violence.
It is standard operating procedure to catch online criminals in the act, with the computers booted, terminals unlocked and drives unencrypted.
In general, your premise that police should avoid confrontations with (allegedly) very dangerous individuals, and leave them wiggle room to destroy evidence, is untenable. Clearly, this case is an outlier, but the fault lays with whomever ordered the raid without reason, not with police officers themselves, that performed the raid as any raid should be done in a trigger happy country.
Police deserve no leeway for this: the evidence points to repeatedly creating a dangerous situation (by them) and then shooting the person they've decided is dangerous (because they created a situation they thought was dangerous).
If there is not immediate danger to other citizen's lives, it can wait. And most of the time, it should wait because amongst other thing that lets you actually make a plan.
The only difference in this case is "could be dangerous" is being used as pathetically thin cover for ensuring the lives of a political opponent and their family were threatened.
What evidence is that? Have you gathered the data, performed a statistically significant analysis or can you point to one?
Or perhaps you are inferring your conclusions from media anecdotes and select those cases that best fit your world view?
Which is obviously a limited sample, should I continue or are videos of actual incidents, leading to actual casualties, really just "anecdotes"?
I mean we could go with just this: https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/jun/16/doj-polic... and ask how the hell is this a thing since the starting point is "discharging a firearm in a populated area" and is reported by the DoJ itself as an incredible problem.
But I suspect you can't point to anything. The null-hypothesis here is definitely not "police procedure is absolutely correct". You know, seeing how the literal subject of this comment chain is "police raid on data scientist's house where guns were pointed at her children as part of a politically motivated shakedown for a crime which is by definition non-violent".
i'm struggling to understand this -- are you saying there is no link between 'American gun culture' and the probability of 'there could be a guy with an assault rifle ready to take them down'? in what other 1st world country would the said probability be even close?
In Europe the risk of having someone greet you with an assault rifle is non-existent, because people just can't buy them.
It's also weird that you speak as if being a cop is the most dangerous job when it's not even in the first 10 most dangerous jobs[0].
I never see people that worry about cops lives worry about logging workers' safety, yet they risk much more than a cop.
- [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i...
However, the way the raid has been implemented on the ground is a direct effect of American gun culture, it should have been obvious from the rest of the comment this is what I mean to say, this is the root cause I referred to.
Cops do not create that gun culture, cops do not buy millions of firearms and place them in the hands of civilians, they react to this situation and try to stay alive, as would you, as would anybody in their position.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-23/how-da...
And straight BS on the whole "going into dangerous situations" thing - plenty of professions get required to do that (paramedics, firemen) and manage to be both unarmed and not shoot people all the time.
Firemen, in fact, take every precaution they can before going into a blaze, such as flame retardant suits and breathing masks.
A gun does not stop fire and fire does not shoot back at you, nor has any intelligence to work around predictable defenses. A human has that intelligence, so the only way to safely handle an armed man that does not want to cooperate is with extreme, overpowering violence.
She's the scientist that was fired because her reporting included actual numbers rather than the ones invented by the governor.
They did the same thing to General Flynn, IIRC.
However, from a police procedural point-of-view:
When the subject(s) perceive a threat, it only takes a small amount of time for the adrenaline rush that could make them more dangerous than they typically would be.
Subject(s) that would never usually be a threat can act in ways they don't even expect when they are confronted by something they perceive as a threat.
Even if the first subject is calm, one of the others in the house might react poorly and use whatever is at their disposal to resist or harm the perceived threat.
Let's say instead that a single plain-clothes officer calls or emails asking someone to come downtown, or maybe even comes to a house unexpectedly because they couldn't get in-touch with the person, then asks them to come downtown at their convenience. The subject may shortly after throw the kids in the car and speed off so quickly they run into traffic and kill themselves and another driver. So, when police control the situation, they cause a little more temporary stress in the short-term, but may avoid harm for the individual citizen and the rest of the citizens.
The alternative is a society within which each person acts responsibly on their own, but there are bad actors, and using science to treat or evolve bad actors is:
1. imagined as evil, such as in the fictional works:
Brave New World - example of dual-society, half utilitarian scientist gangbangers and the other half free natives; the reader understands the "evolved" culture as disgusting, scary, and harmful.
A Clockwork Orange - attempt to rehabilitate the psychopath, sex-addict subject, but due to the music choice, the psychopath becomes hurt when they play the music, leaving them where they started- with a psychopath.
2. actually evil in real life, for example: psychological and Eugenics experiments, as well as genocides and holocaust.
In social media bubbles, psychotic elements in the bubble tend to be hushed or hidden; they seem not to exist. In real-life, about 1 in 10 people are not sufficiently altruistic to be trusted to act on societal best interests under duress and about 1 in 100 people are psychopathic to the point of being a greater risk to others on any day of the year.
Even for a fully libertarian society to function, some part of the 90% would have to cover for the 10% and some portion of the 99% would have to cover for that 1% to make things run smoothly. So, we have police. And, if you add wild animals and wide open spaces without assistance into the mix, you understand why the U.S. has the 2nd amendment, and that applies to everywhere because it's meant to cover all cases and likely futures (if disaster happens and infrastructure collapses, we may need to hunt to survive, given the amount of space in the U.S.).
But, I don't want gun violence, and I don't want citizens to be unjustly apprehended.