Yes American cops don't miss an opportunity to amaze the world... (and make people believe that USA is the less secure place in the world to behave like this).
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.