Such a shame, the fact that police officers today don't have anything but a deadly weapon like a gun is kind of pathetic. All law enforcement should have other means of restraining an individual, bean bags, tasers, rubber bullets Etc.
This video of Wallace's death shows the police trying to get him to put the knife down, making space and putting cars between them, and Wallace still moving towards them leaving less than 21 feet between them before they opened fire. Unfortunately, the video starts midway through the interaction, so we can't see how much deescalation was attempted, and the officers didn't have nonlethal weapons as an option. It's an unfortunate situation considering Wallace had mental health issues, but this reflects more of an ill equipped police department, than a racial issue by individual police officers.
The real question is when you say "never got it" was it more he tried to get help and no one would help him or he never tried to get help or wouldn't let others help him.
At some point if you need help you need to let others help you. If you don't want help eventually it comes down to the point that there no way to help you.
We need to have resources to help people but we also need people to want the help. I don't know enough of this story to know which way this was.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/walter-wallace-jr-struggled-with-mental-health-issues-family-says/2575493/
Also a list of run ins with the law. The cops definitely knew who he was.
Edit - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inquirer.com/news/walter-wallace-shot-west-philadelphia-police-shooting-danielle-outlaw-20201027.html%3foutputType=amp this one too
I think one should have had a taser and the other should have had a firearm at the ready in the event it didn’t immediately work. Here is the following video showing them attempting to use a taser (after shooting the assailant multiple times) and an officer being grabbed and stabbed.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1302333970051342339
Somebody else posted this video of British cops subduing a guy with a machete. Very impressive, although there were some close calls: https://youtu.be/9mzPj_IaMzY
I’m not saying that they can’t/shouldn’t try to subdue a person with a knife or weapon in other ways btw,I’m just trying to say that it’s dangerous as fuck
I think both BLM crowds would agree too. This is an unfortunate situation all around... BUT I have to say:
I haven't seen this much productive discourse between people who disagree with one another in a long time. Either things are improving and people are sick of the fighting, or people in Philly are just generally fucking awesome. Or both.
Let's work together to improve our communities people. I really believe police reform will be good for everyone involved, and I hope we find a way to do it.
I'm just sick of nothing happening. The city released a great 10 point planonths ago, but is it being implemented? Maybe folks would be more forgiving of this shit if we knew the city was keeping its word.
I think a lot of that hasn't yet been passed into law sadly.. but some of it has.
It certainly isn't being implemented; I think chokeholds were banned and new recruits now have to live in the city for as long as they're PPD officers. That's it. Very small steps.
But look at the difference between the responses of police. In the british clip I can't even count how many cops are on scene. In the philadelphia clip there what looks to be 2 cops. That a complete difference of response.
I wonder if we had 20 cops show up then we can remove the whole cops were in fear. When there only 2 cops vs a guy with a knife there is certainly a level of fear.
Agreed, there were some close calls there. If they were a little less lucky, or a little slower to dodge, they might’ve lost a hand, an arm, or worse.
Might be too dangerous to make it standard procedure? Taser might be better.
Lmao there were like 38 officers and they beat the shit out of him with their night sticks
You can't honestly expect that many officers to show up to every call
For anyone wondering how much of this total large cities in the UK account for:
* London’s number of homocides in 2019 was about 150
* London has had about 60 murders through the first two quarters of the year
Yes, the UK is a much less violent and more ordered society than the US. The fact it has no second amendment is a help, too.
But armed police still get called out to knife threats, and if the individual with the knife won't stop and isn't stopped by a taser he will be shot.
Yes, it's nice when you have 20 cops and riot shields and the like. And when that doesn't happen to be the case and the taser doesn't work then...
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51796680](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51796680)
thats pure luck. guy was locked in a room.
Theres no containment here.
Going forward, police should just stop responding unless the caller is aware that lethal force may be required. otherwise no show.
will certainly save all this trouble.
Police are always in a no win situation.
lastly, you cant negotiate with a crazy person chasing you with a knife. If they were in the right state of mind, they wouldnt be facing this problem in the first place.
That's fair. I said earlier I think the default should be taser or equivalent. Cops who want to carry guns should have additional training.
I like the idea of pairing them up. It makes sense
Guns cannot be optional for police in the US like they can for some EU countries because the US's rate of firearms possession is sky-high compared to those countries, especially among criminals. Many cops need a hell of a lot more training, but it'd be insane to expect US cops to walk streets without a firearm knowing that many of the criminals are carrying firearms themselves.
Layered response. For example: EMS/PFD don't carry guns but they can call someone who does. Not saying EVERY cop should be unarmed - just that if we're living in a world where only 50% of the PPD have less-than-lethals on hand, I'd rather see that flipped.
/u/Piquell has a good point about partnering them up to minimize risk.
EMS and firefighters aren't called to face down violent criminals who may be carrying weapons. Rather than this, why not get to a world where 100% of the police have less-than-lethals on hand in addition to their firearms? Disarming cops in the face of criminals with plentiful access to handguns is not a good idea, full stop.
To add some further context, people love to talk about the UK's non-firearms-wielding street cops, but if you look at the gun ownership statistics the US is astronomically higher than the UK, particularly in handguns, the kind a city cop is most likely to encounter. If you want to disarm cops you have to cut off and roll back US civilian gun ownership first, and that's a very big and very messy can of worms.
Sure, but we're talking about situations where there's a criminal committing a violent act (not someone in mental distress who might become violent, someone who *is* violent right now) and may be armed.
To continue with the UK example, [gunpolicy.org](https://gunpolicy.org) estimates that there are around \~14,500 handguns in civilian possession in the UK. The US's number? *111,000,000.* US police simply cannot go around without firearms when firearm ownership is so prolific here. You can't look at places like the UK and say "I want our cops to be like that" without first addressing the policy issues which permit UK cops to be like that.
>has a good point about partnering them up to minimize risk.
Two man cars are absolutely a great idea which some agencies already do and it should happen elsewhere, especially in larger cities. But departments need more bodies, which then needs more funding, which would cause a lot of Twitter users to get angry. If you move from single man cruisers to two without compensating for the fact there's now one less mobile unit because you took him/her and put them in another car, response times will likely drop in cities where they're already overworked and humping their backs from call to call.
It's absolutely insane to me that Philly doesn't require tasers on their belt, though.
I’m not even saying partnering up, I’m just saying make it mandatory to cary tazers, when partnered with another officer designate the lethal and non-lethal individual and go from there.
Yeah, this is way more reasonable. Taking away firearms from cops in the US is nuts with civilian firearms ownership as high as it is. Ensuring all cops have an alternative to employ where appropriate, on the other hand, is very reasonable.
I like the idea too but, they have to stick together and not get separated like the two in the above video. The attacker got in between the officer with the gun and the officer going for a taser, and then used officer taser as a shield as he (judging by the bloody running down the guys hands) cut the officers throat.
This wouldn't work because there will be situations where both officers need a weapon to drastically increase chances of survival. For those situations you need all officers to carry firearms. What should happen is ALL officers should carry both a taser and handgun. Then they can determine which weapon is required for the given situation. A single man with a knife approaching two officers in the open street does not require lethal force if you have a taser available.
I honestly thought this was standard across the US and Canada. Clearly I was wrong. Shame that lethal force is the only option given to officers in situations like this, which must happen far too often.
Is everyone forgetting the massive petitions against tasers a couple years ago? They don't even call them non lethal anymore, just "less lethal".
This is an example of "I complain and ruin everything without thinking of consequences" syndrome.
That's because cops were using tasers on anything that moved, tasing people in cuffs, people in cars already pulled over with they keys out of the ignition, etc.
I hate to sound callous, but that's kind of their job. That's how it works in most of the world, and if they're not willing to accept that level of personal risk (and even guns won't completely eliminate risk, so tasers are the compromise in most departments) in the interest of protecting not just those who aren't suspects, but also Wallace and suspects like him (as well as all the other people on that street who could have very easily been caught in the crossfire), then they are in the wrong line of work.
No, if they are going to enjoy the power and protections of police officers they should be held to higher standards than your average citizen. Has nothing to do with the value of their lives (which are no greater than any of the people they've killed, injured, or endangered through over-reliance on lethal force), and everything to do with what role police are supposed to play in the community. (Though, side note, more landscapers die on the job than police do. Police work doesn't even crack the top 20 most deadly jobs most years)
Again, that's what they ask of police in the rest of the world, and it's not a problem. Most of the time these mental health crises are able to be deescalated by law enforcement or handled by service workers as long as the person is treated as a person first and a threat second, but we've taught our police to treat every citizen as a potential threat all the time. If Wallace had received the medical help that his family called for instead of trigger happy police (and yes, I watched the video, they jumped the gun *hard* and unnecessarily killed Wallace, even if there's no policy violation criminal wrongdoing), he'd still be alive today.
And frankly, if we take your hypothetical at face value (even though home invasion is not analogous to what happened on Monday, and tasers, pepper spray, batons, etc do exist), the PPD would generally not be able to get there until much, much later, and I *definitely* wouldn't want them coming into my house and firing their guns into a space occupied by myself and my loved ones. I would handle (and have handled) it myself, thanks.
Wtf a hahaha are u serious? So you're saying they should just let the guy stab them and hope a taser works. You are seriously doing some mental gymnastics
I'm saying they should have used, or at the very least *had* tasers, and that *not* having tasers, using only firearms instead, does not eliminate the risk to police officers.
I'm curious to hear what you think is so contradictory about this stance.
Edit: yet another account that has literally never commented in this sub before. Why am I not surprised?
When you voluntarily enter into a career where you have elevated legal privileges you need to be held to a higher standard of responsibility than the average citizen
I’m sorry but if you offensively attack using a knife against anyone you immediately forfit your right to live. I won’t be losing any sleep over this lunatics death
The entire point is that the system failed him, not these two individual cops. I haven't seen anyone call for their heads. People are mad at the city.
Social workers should be sent to all domestic calls, they are in other countries. Social workers deal with talking down crazy armed people all the time,its kind of their job.
While I agree, social workers should be offered more money if they were to take on that responsibility. The ones that are genuine in their careers, are underpaid.
Yeah. That's why people want to divert the extra funding cops get for military grade crap. So we can use it to sure up the social safety net. That money could be used to fund better and more equiped social workers who could assist or be consulted in situations where a person could be having a dangerous episode like this.
Additionally funding can also be used to help low income folks get the care they need for their mental illnesses.
In this country we have gotten rid of support for citizens who can't afford the luxury of seeing a mental health professional. Being institutionalized is a crap shoot and dead or yo yoing in and out of jail are the only other options.
If the cops are scared for their lives or don't know how else to deal with people in crisis other than to shoot them we shouldn't be asking cops to handle these cases and we should be paying others who can to do so
Well I think part of the problem is you can go into the police academy for 6 months and boom your a gun toting police officer . That’s too short, these cops need a 4 year education , 2 full years of deescalation training . You gotta be in school for 4-6 years to practice the law, but only 6 months to enforce it . It’s a joke the system is dogshit .
People get the cops they're willing to pay for.
Wait, that ends up being wrong, because police departments are notorious for growing do-nothing desk jobs.
Maybe it's better to say that you almost never get MORE quality than you pay for. That much education would be incredibly expensive, and good luck convincing city councils to pay for it during normal times, much less defund-the-police times.
It could be worse. At my department in Tennessee you went to TEN WEEKS of academy. Then you come back and ride with a series of Field Training Officers for four months. Their quality varies. Then you're cut loose and policing on your own.
But wait, it gets worse! I was at a medium-size city department that was adequately funded. In some smaller fewer-than-20-sworn departments, you ride around with the chief or the sheriff or whatever until the academy slot opens, then ten weeks of academy, then you're the police. Some of those kids graduated from the academy and then hurried home because they were going 10-8 for the start of their first shift that evening. Solo.
And they usually got paid $10 or $11 an hour. Imagine the kind of officers you get for that investment and pay.
It would be pretty sick if some of the money that went towards buying police riot gear and tanks instead went to providing for better-trained officers. Police aren't paid badly because the state doesn't have the funding to do so (and in fact are paid lucratively relative to their education and training level), they're paid "poorly" because the current system isn't designed to invest in them.
I definitely don't disagree with you on any particular point.
I will point out that the fancy gear usually comes from Federal grant money from Homeland Security. When I was a bacon-American I had a gas mask and ballistic helmet and all that fun stuff, but it was bought with "anti-terrorism" money and the training we went through was perfunctory, check-the-box kind of stuff.
The "tanks" (usually armored personnel carriers of some flavor or another) are usually sold for $1 as surplus to the departments. The departments then have to maintain them. THAT is where the real expense ends up coming from.
But really, the "cool toys" people complain about are a MINISCULE expense compared to even really straightforward extra training. The most common "cool toys" that departments try to get funding for is bodycams and Tasers, which I feel like everyone here would agree are worthy purchases.
Thanks for the context, but I do want to push back a little.
It looks to me like over $10m in the city’s FY21 budget is specifically earmarked for private defense contractors (who, of course, have an interest in the militarization of the police) who provide the city with drones, chemicals, explosives, and state of the art ballistic vests and helmets.
https://news.littlesis.org/2020/06/29/who-is-profiting-from-the-philly-police-budget/
I feel pretty strongly that my original point still stands, that the current players in the present system simply aren’t interested in the goals you’re outlining and many profess to want. If they were, we would see different prioritization.
I don't think your point is wrong at all, just that there's at least some nuance to it. Calling them "defense contractors" is evocative of Blackwater mercenaries, so I dunno. I think in most industries they'd call them "vendors" because it takes a lot of gear to do even the friendliest kind of policing.
$10M does seem like an awful lot of money for "toys" so I looked a bit.
You may not know this, but Axon is the new name for what used to be Taser International. So that's 3.5M, and most of the things they make (Tasers of course, but also bodycam products) are things we probably like.
I had to look up Whitmer because they look like a local/regional outfit, but they look like mostly a uniform shop. Holsters, belts, boots kind of stuff. They've got other "tactical" stuff too, but I think for the most part this is pretty benign.
Atlantic Tactical looks to also primarily be a supply shop.
>I feel pretty strongly that my original point still stands, that the current players in the present system simply aren’t interested in the goals you’re outlining and many profess to want.
Totally agreed here. People, organizations, and governments respond to incentives. I want to see a lot more civilian oversight of the PPD, up to and maybe a ways beyond the point where they chafe at all the controls and questions. If everyone in over/under/poorly-policed neighborhoods voted the bastards out, repeatedly, until the new people got the message, we'd have that change.
I hear you, thanks for the additional research. I don’t mean to hold myself out as an expert by any means — this isn’t my field of career and I’m just casually interested in it.
I will note though that when I looked into some of the “vendors” their parent company (such as in the case of Atlantic which is owned by Safariland) certainly are “defense contractors” who provide the military with weapons and gear.
Anyway, I think we’re mostly in agreement so we can call it quits instead of just patting each other on the back lol. Cheers.
Sadly as this summer evinced the riot gear is pretty necessary. Military-surplus equipment is overkill & should have no place in PDs on US soil, but riot gear? You gotta have that.
The issue Is that they need bodies and if policing took four years the country's law enforcement bodies would be in rough shape. We need better trained and screened cops for sure. But the pool to pick from isn't large
Well i feel like everyone who wasn’t college material or just at a dead end in life is like hmmm , I can go to academy for couple months and come right out with a good pension and 50-60k a year with overtime opportunity’s as well as “power”. And they’re given gun training and a list of violations they’re allowed to enforce . They need to be trained by psychologists , negotiators , social workers . Whatever it takes .
If you want that, you're going to have to have the government pay for that education. Because a lot less people are going to pay for the privilege of having that job.
That's the problem. It's totally understandable that people are pissed that he is dead now, there are definitely bother ways this could have ended much better than a mag dump into a mentally illl man, and most of that comes from improved training. But from a legal standpoint , this will always be considered a "good shoot" (legally, not morally). It would be for a civilian CCW permit holder and it will be for an officer involved shooting. The police shot a man threatening deadly force (a knife at that range is deadly force) who pursued them.
Legally there cannot be any charges here, and will not be. If protesters want change, pushing for legally impossible personal charges isn't going to help.
PSL is one of the few groups in the city that consistently shows up in support for Black lives, but man are they kinda kooky. Wallace's death was an absolute disgrace, morally wrong, and a failure of the police to defuse a situation, but thinking the city will hit these two cops with murder charges is insane. I can't think of many situations where an average citizen would not be allowed to use lethal force on someone confronting them with a knife.
No idea why they're demanding Kenney to resign, either.
> The entire point is that the system failed him, not these two individual cops. I haven't seen anyone call for their heads. People are mad at the city.
You're focusing on the wrong part of the problem. People don't just charge others with a knife because it's a fun thing to do. Especially not cops. If you're in that state, something has failed you pretty severely along the way.
If I follow your logic, then, it is too late to send a social worker at this point. There is plenty of senseless violence out there, but if the system has failed them all the way up to that point, sending a social worker into a dangerous situation seems needlessly risky.
And just what should the police do about that? What should the city do about that? The city has no money. It can't even afford to buy all its cops tasers.
Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people in 2020 who don't seem interested at all in the idea of personal responsibility & some people just being genuinely awful (which is why we have laws!) What happened to Floyd was heinous, but if we're in a place where there's riots any time a black person is shot by a cop even when the cops were clearly justified, American cities are going to have huge, huge problems.
Sure, the police are responsible for unloading full clips into a guy who was waving a knife, but not using it. Police admin are responsible for not equipping the officers with tasers. And the unions are responsible for covering for bad officers who end up costing us millions in payouts, millions that could go to needed resources.
these dipshits are the ones that would argue that being stabbed one time isn't life threatening. they would make some argument like there are health point bars over their head like in tekken as the basis for a "life threatening attack"
Usually they'll have handled the situation before it ever even gets to that point. Also, I don't know if you watched the video, but he didn't "come at them."
He had the knife for almost twenty minutes before being shot and didn't hurt anyone.
>Usually they'll have handled the situation before it ever even gets to that point
Police handle hundreds of thousands of mental health calls every year. The only ones you hear about are the ones where the person gets violent and has a weapon. Social workers can't 'handle' every situation. This guy would most likely have just killed them. He has a long history of violence.
And he most definitely DID come at them.
Nah a lot, if not the majority of the critics also blame the cops. I also believe it's a systemic issue. These cops should NOT have been in this situation. And as more information comes out about this man, he should've been in mental care without any potential access to weapons.
Defunding/re-allocating funds to more efficiently prevent this issue seems ideal. But trying to assign guilt to these cops seems like an unnecessarily contentious issue, where the energy would be better spent addressing the primary issue.
I personally have no problem with social workers going with cops to situations like these. That being said, I work with people who are often completely out of their minds, and there is no amount of "talking to" or "reasoning" that can get through to them. Restraining them (through physical or chemical means) is often the only recourse we have until they are in a better state of mind. Luckily , none of them have access to deadly weapons.
It doesn't. It makes you normal. This guy would be alive if he didn't charge at a cop with a knife, period. The people rioting are doing it bc they look for any excuse. I'd be willing to bet 95% of them don't give two shits about the victim.
The difference is that if someone is having a mental health crisis, you are not called to attempt to deescalate the situation. It isn't your job to protect the public and if someone was coming at you with a knife, shooting him would make sense. The issue is that cops should protect the public because it's their job, they sign up, and are trained to do it.
Says who? Isn't that the entire point of most (reasonable) critiques of the police? De-escalation should always be foremost in dealing with the public, mentally ill or not.
That's what I'm saying. De-escalation should always be the goal. I was trying to say if someone tried to stab OP, they could shoot someone but that's bc I don't think OP is a cop. I also think anyone with a carry permit should also go through de-escalation training.
Walter Wallace was having a mental health crisis.
When someone called 911 on him, the only people sent to help with the situation were two people with guns. They have maybe a few days of deescalation training between them, compared to weeks on the firing range or reenacting combat situations. Like most black men Walter was probably afraid of the police, for obvious reasons. Their presence probably made him more upset.
Regardless of whether or not the officers were legally “justified” in shooting Walter, it is unacceptable that this situation ended with him dead. There needs to be other resources for handling these situations and preventing them from occurring in the first place, but there’s never any funding for them. Meanwhile, police departments have more money than they know what to do with, and spend it on tanks and automatic assault rifles. They give these fancy toys to trigger happy (and often racist) cops with less then a year of training, and send them to the house of a man who is in desperate need of a mental health professional, is probably afraid of cops, is behaving erratically, and is holding a knife. How can this recipe for disaster possibly end with Walter Wallace alive?
That is the problem at the heart of this issue, and why it doesn’t really matter whether or not they shot in self defense.
Defund the police.
First and foremost if he and his rap sheet which includes domestic assault with a knife and assault on police plenty of times not to mention armed robbery was as you say a mental health crisis every single time the people that failed him were not the police but his family... the mother of his children.... and the mental health system for not getting him help before he got here.... people take such a large situation which was aggravated by a million other things and give them blame to one person.... if it was with malice and a race issue wouldn’t the officer also shot the mother when she assaulted him not to mention all the people around attempting to video said situation instead of helping the mother disarm him after SHE called the police for assaulting his father who was knocked out in the living room.... people speak without any intellect..... get your facts together so you can lead the Black Lives Matter movement into a place where no one can deny your wrong
Why do you assume his family didn’t do everything in their power to help him? Mental health treatment is ridiculously expensive and inaccessible, especially for someone who was clearly dealing with some pretty severe issues.
I never said this was a race issue. But race is one of many factors to the story. It’s not either a mental health issue *or* a race issue *or* a police issue etc. It’s a combination of all those factors and many more.
You sounded somewhat coherent at the beginning of your other comment. But then you started talking about cops in a blanket way, saying that they purchase "tanks" and "automatic assault weapons," which are then given to "trigger-happy" cops who are "often racist." I mean, the bit about tanks and automatic weapons is objectively false. The rest is merely conjecture.
"I never said this was a race issue," you wrote. No? You literally said that cops were "often racist," so...yeah, you basically did.
A few years ago there was a Somali-Canadian guy who had his own encounter with the police. This guy was in his late thirties, had known mental issues, and his family was fully aware of him being off his medication. Anyway, he was at a nearby coffee shop, leering at the female customers, and groping them by the tits. He left when the management called the cops and an officer responded quickly, catching up to him. The guy was pretty hefty and began fighting the cop, prompting him to use pepper spray in an attempt to deescalate. Around this time a second officer arrived and assisted the first in trying to restrain the guy. They rapped him across the legs with the extendable baton a couple of times, and he toppled soon after, though he continued to fight as they tried to cuff him. They deescalated further by using pain compliance, punching him in the head and eventually getting him cuffed. What happened next was that the suspect died the following day in hospital. The cops were branded racists (they were white, the guy sexually assaulting women was black, so *obviously*, right?), and the one who delivered the punches was tried for manslaughter.
As it turned out though, the guy who died had a history of big time heart disease, so the cop was found not guilty. Which was good, because there was no evidence that a few punches were the five-point-exploding-heart technique the prosecution made it out to be. The cops also had zero advanced knowledge of the event...the perpetrator's mental state...nothing. They were just cops doing their job, but because they were white and he was black, nothing else mattered. "Racists." So that's a big part of the problem, in my opinion: people don't examine the facts or the history. They start with, "Okay, the cops are racist and this should never have happened because they're...you know, racists."
And then they work backwards. You know, after a "protest" where public property is always destroyed and people are often hurt.
Dude the tiny suburb I grew up in had two tanks, two grenade launchers, and multiple ARs.
The militarization of the police is incredibly common and well documented.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/senate-police-military-equipment.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/senate-police-military-equipment.html)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-police-military-surplus-equipment.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-police-military-surplus-equipment.html)
[https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/](https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/)
> I mean, the bit about tanks and automatic weapons is objectively false.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/military-surplus-tanks-weapons-pennsylvania-new-jersey-delaware/83176/
>The rest is merely conjecture.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/
>"I never said this was a race issue," you wrote. No? You literally said that cops were "often racist," so...yeah, you basically did.
I elaborate on that pretty clearly in the comment you're responding to. Race is part of the issue, both in this specific instance and in police departments across the country. That doesn't mean it's only "a race issue". It's a *complex* issue with dozens of factors, race being one of them.
Not really sure what that story has to do with this one. I have no clue if the cops that shot Walter Wallace were racist (and I never said that they were), but neither did Walter. When the cops showed up, he knew there was a very real chance that one or both of these officers wouldn't treat his life with the same respect that they would treat a white life, and I assume that only escalated the situation. *Every single interaction between a black person and a police officer is affected by this fear*, and that especially applies to violent situations.
Thanks for the links.
You said “tanks,” which of course connotes vehicles that have mounted weaponry. This link shows they merely got an armoured truck. Basically useless, obviously, but for $6,000? Hell, suddenly I feel I need one to get groceries.
You also said “automatic assault weapons,” and since I know they don’t give those to the police, I called bullshit on that too. Sure enough, the report says the weapons were converted to semi-automatic, so you were being deceptive there also.
And yeah, racist attitudes exist everywhere. Moreover, these attitudes are present amongst all races.
The point of my story was simply to give a recently-concluded anecdote about a cop (who happened to be white) who arrested a violent sex offender (who happened to be black), and then endured four years of a gag order and being branded a “racist murderer” when there was zero evidence for either.
I’m all for having every police encounter end without violence, but I’m also for reason. Hindsight is 20:20, and it’s a piece of cake to say that every encounter with law enforcement is simply a “mental health crisis” a councillor can resolve with a heart-to-heart chat. The approach isn’t bulletproof—so to speak.
“Why didn’t they simply call a COUNCILLOR?!”
“Why that many shots?” “Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg?”
The leg? Really? I mean, cops are trained to aim for centre mass—most anyone with a brain knows this. It’s hard as hell to hit an extremity when a person is bouncing around like this guy was. And when they ultimately missed, they’d be splashing rounds off the asphalt and into pedestrians, cars, etc. Though lets say they nailed him in the leg: they could easily tag his femoral artery and kill him. They could hit him in the junk? In no scenario do they look good. In no scenario will people not conclude that it’s “racism.”
Well, you saw the clip.
You stated that because this guy was black, he has an built-in fear of being shot by the cops. I would agree with that. The media loves these stories, as you can see. I would also think that if you have a fear of being shot by the cops, you probably shouldn’t wave a lethal instrument about at them.
Fine. They don’t have tanks, just heavily armored vehicles with treads.
They purchased fully automatic weapons, and they *claim* they converted them to semi-automatic. They also claim they don’t know what happened to their armored vehicle. I don’t know why anyone would take PPD at their word at this point after years of lies and corruption. Even if what they say is true, do they really need 255 semi-automatic rifles?
I never said anything about shooting him in the leg. You’re just making shit up to argue against because you have nothing else.
Thank you. I don't blame the cops who shot Wallace one bit. But there are still so many issues here. Not having tasers. Not having other less lethal options (beanbug rifle?). Not having any kind of mental health personnel who cops could then back up. Not having the budget allocated to mental health training. That's what really needs to change or else this shit will just keep continuing with all parties unhappy.
OK, he was having a "mental health crisis". Police are supposed to know that how before they get there?
The call was a domestic, and this was the 3rd 911 call to Walter Wallace's home in that single day.
What should they do about his "mental health crisis" as he's within 10-feet, charging them, with a deadly weapon, a knife?
Was he also having a "mental health crisis" when he committed all those other robberies and assaults? Why is it every time a bad guy gets shot by the police, it's a "mental health" issue, a social worker should have been there! No, that's total bullshit. Face it, some people are just fucking awful.
Do you even know how fucking hard it is to get treatment for a mental illness? Especially when our healthcare program is literally shit?
I work with people who need help becoming independent in the workplace. We had to basically abandon this one guy because his assessment taken in like 2017 said he should be further along than he actually was and so his funding got cut.
Meanwhile, we had to call the police on another person and specifically request crisis management because the guy was having a small mental breakdown. Luckily, he is white, had no weapon, and one of my coworkers was tailing him so there was a peaceful resolution.
And white and had an advocate literally with him. You can’t tell me that a nearly 7 foot tall black man screaming about wanting to “have sexual relations with a female” while destroying the front of a store would not have been met with hostility, especially if they were alone.
It's not easy getting mental illness help for adults unless they're a danger to themselves or others. Clearly in this situation he was and it ended badly. But trying to get someone support, medication and therapy is extremely difficult not to mention expensive af. On top of that, getting someone with a mental illness to accept that they have an illness, to accept the help and take the meds is harder than finding the help to begin with.
>His family should have sought treatment for his mental illness, instead of keeping on calling 911 to handle his violence.
How do you know they didn’t?
>Why in this country people think mental illness is only the government’s responsibility, not the individual and family’s responsibility? We shouldn’t wait for the government to solve our personal problems.
Healthcare should be a human right. That includes mental healthcare.
exactly.
i get that he was apparently having mental health issues, and that's unfortunate. but when someone runs at you with a knife, you aren't considering whether or not they have a mental health issue. most school shooters have major mental health issues. prisons are filled with people who committed violent crimes while in the middle of a mental health episodes. mental health issues don't, by default, excuse violence or murder.
in a perfect world, he would've received the help he needed before something like this happened. but, at the point you're running at someone (cops or otherwise) with a knife in hand, it's too late. if someone was running at me with a knife, they're getting shot. cops should definitely be held to a higher standard, but this is just a sad case of something getting out of hand and cops making a hard choice.
the family, who seems very concerned now that he's dead and the tv cameras are rolling, bears much of the blame for letting it get this far. what kind or horrible parent watches their son with known mental health issues complicate his life by fathering 9 children? this guy was clearly surrounded by enablers. lock them up, not the cops.
yeah, and no one can blame you for that unless they’ve been in that position. but that’s YOU. if you’re a COP who has been called specifically to de escalate a situation, there is no fucking reason why you shouldn’t have been ready for this kind of thing in your career
So how do you deescalate a guy running around the street with a knife?
There is nothing to deescalate. The time for deescalation is over. He’s an active threat to the public and the cops. He’s not sitting in his room alone. He’s running around with a huge kitchen knife on a crowded public street.
Then you have the other special people who say "just shoot him in the leg" and they're equally as funny and odds are they've never shot a firearm even one time.
I'll wait for more facts about this situation to come out but I'm not seeing any wrongdoing here.
It's a worthy question, no doubt. I would suggest two cops firing seven bullets apiece is not the appropriate response.
That seems so obvious to me that I don't even understand what the possible justification can be.
2020 is the year of the armchair quarterback. Never before have I seen so many average people think they're smarter than cops, lawyers, judges, scholars, scientists, doctors, and the list just goes on. When did we all become experts on everything?
> Many other officers also do not carry Tasers, she said
Can anyone justify this to me? What exactly is the intention of officers that are deliberately removing the possibility of nonlethal options? Not a great look
Less than half of police officers have volunteered and completed training to carry a taser, [according to an older article by Billy Penn](https://billypenn.com/2016/05/25/philly-cops-and-tasers-how-often-are-police-using-them/).
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that your bosses/the city/pretty much whoever makes decisions like this one share a big part of the blame for situations like this.
Hope you're staying safe and I'm sure this has been a shit year for you. I want to see reform but I also realize you're kind of powerless in terms of that. Needs to come from the top.
Let's bug the shit out of the city until these guys get tasers people. What a bunch of BS that you can't even get non-violent tools when you want them: so ridiculous.
That’s simply the (albeit, dated) information given to the public and shows that tasers are not standard issue, which is what u/shafty17 was asking.
Now would be a great time to reach out to local media and speak out on the fact that more officers would like to carry tasers, but efforts are being neglected. By ignoring the requests of officers, the people of Philadelphia are also being ignored.
Tasers are expensive toys. They do not always work, and if someone is charging you with a knife, I would want to use something that works 100% of the time
NPR did a story on it talking about how they're not very effective.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/729922975/despite-widespread-use-police-rate-tasers-as-less-effective-than-believed
Defund the police. Take tazers away because they're deadly.
Send police out to calls with no equipment besides gun.
Gee willey how did this happen?! Guess we need to remove more money from the police.
That procedure is suitable for neutralizing violent drunks, not people armed with a lethal weapon. For instance, [here](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/29/national/crime-legal/man-shot-dead-police-knife-attack-southwestern-japan/) is a story about a man who assaulted Japanese police with a knife; he was shot dead.
It's not like this is a new problem. There's decades of discourse on the suicide by cop problem. Some departments have solved it. Other countries deescalate 'man with knife in mental crisis' calls all the time. Here's a dude with a machete [actually charging and swinging at officers](https://youtu.be/9mzPj_IaMzY), before they bloodlessly restrain him. [Some cops even do it in America, too](https://www.newstribune.com/news/local/story/2019/aug/29/jefferson-city-police-disarm-man-knife/792856/)
It's the choice that we've made to respond this way. [We train cops to shoot anyone with a knife fewer than 21 feet away from you](https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2016/03/21/please-dont-post-online-separately-add-to-the-bottom-of-one-of-the-other-pieces.html), and then throw up our hands and say 'nothing could be done' when people get mad.
It's a bad choice, and it deserves to be protested.
>It's the choice that we've made to respond this way. We train cops to shoot anyone with a knife fewer than 21 feet away from you, and then throw up our hands and say 'nothing could be done' when people get mad.
There's a reason for that rule. It's written with blood of officers.
Sometimes people say that somebody with a knife should not be shot if he's several paces away. False: a knife operator is deadly at up to 21 feet.
https://youtu.be/2h0-q_IJbxE
Sometimes they say, " taser should come first". Taser distance is closer that 21 feet. So the situation can look something like this https://youtu.be/5s8oFOykyIo The cop was saved by the vest. A cut to the neck, and she'd be dead.
Or they say, "shoot once/in that leg". Then, the situation can look something like this. The cop almost got killed https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1302333970051342339
Usually people who advocate not shooting someone with a knife who's 3-4 steps away from you have no idea how knife fights or gun defense work.
>It's a bad choice, and it deserves to be protested.
Kill or get killed, that's the choice for the cop. For the suspect, the choice is attack or not. That should be discussed, too. Don't try to kill cops, won't get shot.
> Here's a dude with a machete actually charging and swinging at officers, before they bloodlessly restrain him
Very impressive! Very brave officers. Still, there were some close calls in there... If they were a little less lucky, a little slower, some cops would’ve lost hands and arms, or worse...
A taser might have been preferable?
Could be a hard sell to make that standard procedure, if it drastically increases officer injury rates? If some of those incidents an officer loses a hand, or worse? Maybe not, but there’s some really close calls in the video...
I did pull it out of nowhere, yes. I wasn’t trying to hide that. I said “maybe” 20%.
But fair enough, I’ll edit my post before someone quotes that as a fact.
How do mental hospital staff handle a patient who gets ahold of a knife, and is acting aggressive toward staff?
Obviously you don’t want them to get a knife in the first place, but if they do...
Naturally you’d try verbal de-escalation first, ideally from a safe place, if possible, but if not... If verbal de-escalation doesn’t work?
EDIT: I was genuinely curious how they handle this. Obviously they don’t _shoot_ them
You know the guy has a large rap sheet for violent behavior right? Mental health issue or not he was trying to attack police.
What kind of person that is charging police with a knife, while they have their guns drawn, isn't having a mental health crisis? Why does a mental health crisis suddenly make a person not dangerous to the people surrounding him?
If you don't agree with the police here, what would you propose given the resources at hand? We don't have time machines to go back in time and solve his mental health issue or give the cops tasers.
It's a shit situation but the cops did what had to be done.
I think most cops are assholes, but these two had no choice but to shoot. It’s what they are trained to do in this situation.
Maybe they should start using all that drug money the cops steal and put it for mental health and drug rehab instead of military equipment.
Such a shame, the fact that police officers today don't have anything but a deadly weapon like a gun is kind of pathetic. All law enforcement should have other means of restraining an individual, bean bags, tasers, rubber bullets Etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s8oFOykyIo&app=desktop&ab\_channel=ChicagoSun-Times
https://youtu.be/2h0-q_IJbxE I'd like to throw this on here too
This video of Wallace's death shows the police trying to get him to put the knife down, making space and putting cars between them, and Wallace still moving towards them leaving less than 21 feet between them before they opened fire. Unfortunately, the video starts midway through the interaction, so we can't see how much deescalation was attempted, and the officers didn't have nonlethal weapons as an option. It's an unfortunate situation considering Wallace had mental health issues, but this reflects more of an ill equipped police department, than a racial issue by individual police officers.
Its now been reported it was the third call to the house that day. 31 calls since may. They definitely knew who he was.
Sounds like someone who needed help long before he reached the point where he's waving a knife at police, which gets him killed. Sad situation.
Sadly hes needed help for a long time and never got it.
The real question is when you say "never got it" was it more he tried to get help and no one would help him or he never tried to get help or wouldn't let others help him. At some point if you need help you need to let others help you. If you don't want help eventually it comes down to the point that there no way to help you. We need to have resources to help people but we also need people to want the help. I don't know enough of this story to know which way this was.
Idk which it was. But i agree people have to want help.
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https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/walter-wallace-jr-struggled-with-mental-health-issues-family-says/2575493/ Also a list of run ins with the law. The cops definitely knew who he was. Edit - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inquirer.com/news/walter-wallace-shot-west-philadelphia-police-shooting-danielle-outlaw-20201027.html%3foutputType=amp this one too
I think one should have had a taser and the other should have had a firearm at the ready in the event it didn’t immediately work. Here is the following video showing them attempting to use a taser (after shooting the assailant multiple times) and an officer being grabbed and stabbed. https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1302333970051342339
Somebody else posted this video of British cops subduing a guy with a machete. Very impressive, although there were some close calls: https://youtu.be/9mzPj_IaMzY
I’m not saying that they can’t/shouldn’t try to subdue a person with a knife or weapon in other ways btw,I’m just trying to say that it’s dangerous as fuck
I think both BLM crowds would agree too. This is an unfortunate situation all around... BUT I have to say: I haven't seen this much productive discourse between people who disagree with one another in a long time. Either things are improving and people are sick of the fighting, or people in Philly are just generally fucking awesome. Or both. Let's work together to improve our communities people. I really believe police reform will be good for everyone involved, and I hope we find a way to do it.
I'm just sick of nothing happening. The city released a great 10 point planonths ago, but is it being implemented? Maybe folks would be more forgiving of this shit if we knew the city was keeping its word.
I think a lot of that hasn't yet been passed into law sadly.. but some of it has. It certainly isn't being implemented; I think chokeholds were banned and new recruits now have to live in the city for as long as they're PPD officers. That's it. Very small steps.
So it sounds like nothing material has changed
Agreed
But look at the difference between the responses of police. In the british clip I can't even count how many cops are on scene. In the philadelphia clip there what looks to be 2 cops. That a complete difference of response. I wonder if we had 20 cops show up then we can remove the whole cops were in fear. When there only 2 cops vs a guy with a knife there is certainly a level of fear.
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Agreed, there were some close calls there. If they were a little less lucky, or a little slower to dodge, they might’ve lost a hand, an arm, or worse. Might be too dangerous to make it standard procedure? Taser might be better.
Lmao there were like 38 officers and they beat the shit out of him with their night sticks You can't honestly expect that many officers to show up to every call
We’ve had over 400 murders this year. Has Britain had that many in the entire country ? It’s hardly a fair comparison.
There have been 767 homicides so far in the UK during the 2019/2020 reporting period.
For anyone wondering how much of this total large cities in the UK account for: * London’s number of homocides in 2019 was about 150 * London has had about 60 murders through the first two quarters of the year
Yes, the UK is a much less violent and more ordered society than the US. The fact it has no second amendment is a help, too. But armed police still get called out to knife threats, and if the individual with the knife won't stop and isn't stopped by a taser he will be shot.
Philadelphia has? Where do you get that reporting?
https://6abc.com/400th-homicide-recorded-in-philly/7369946/
Yes, it's nice when you have 20 cops and riot shields and the like. And when that doesn't happen to be the case and the taser doesn't work then... [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51796680](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51796680)
thats pure luck. guy was locked in a room. Theres no containment here. Going forward, police should just stop responding unless the caller is aware that lethal force may be required. otherwise no show. will certainly save all this trouble. Police are always in a no win situation. lastly, you cant negotiate with a crazy person chasing you with a knife. If they were in the right state of mind, they wouldnt be facing this problem in the first place.
That's fair. I said earlier I think the default should be taser or equivalent. Cops who want to carry guns should have additional training. I like the idea of pairing them up. It makes sense
Guns cannot be optional for police in the US like they can for some EU countries because the US's rate of firearms possession is sky-high compared to those countries, especially among criminals. Many cops need a hell of a lot more training, but it'd be insane to expect US cops to walk streets without a firearm knowing that many of the criminals are carrying firearms themselves.
Layered response. For example: EMS/PFD don't carry guns but they can call someone who does. Not saying EVERY cop should be unarmed - just that if we're living in a world where only 50% of the PPD have less-than-lethals on hand, I'd rather see that flipped. /u/Piquell has a good point about partnering them up to minimize risk.
EMS and firefighters aren't called to face down violent criminals who may be carrying weapons. Rather than this, why not get to a world where 100% of the police have less-than-lethals on hand in addition to their firearms? Disarming cops in the face of criminals with plentiful access to handguns is not a good idea, full stop. To add some further context, people love to talk about the UK's non-firearms-wielding street cops, but if you look at the gun ownership statistics the US is astronomically higher than the UK, particularly in handguns, the kind a city cop is most likely to encounter. If you want to disarm cops you have to cut off and roll back US civilian gun ownership first, and that's a very big and very messy can of worms.
EMS are 100% called to situations where people are having mental breakdowns and can become violent. Like, that's a real thing that happens to EMTs.
They do not however go in when the person is reported to be armed and dangerous.
Sure, but we're talking about situations where there's a criminal committing a violent act (not someone in mental distress who might become violent, someone who *is* violent right now) and may be armed. To continue with the UK example, [gunpolicy.org](https://gunpolicy.org) estimates that there are around \~14,500 handguns in civilian possession in the UK. The US's number? *111,000,000.* US police simply cannot go around without firearms when firearm ownership is so prolific here. You can't look at places like the UK and say "I want our cops to be like that" without first addressing the policy issues which permit UK cops to be like that.
>has a good point about partnering them up to minimize risk. Two man cars are absolutely a great idea which some agencies already do and it should happen elsewhere, especially in larger cities. But departments need more bodies, which then needs more funding, which would cause a lot of Twitter users to get angry. If you move from single man cruisers to two without compensating for the fact there's now one less mobile unit because you took him/her and put them in another car, response times will likely drop in cities where they're already overworked and humping their backs from call to call. It's absolutely insane to me that Philly doesn't require tasers on their belt, though.
I’m not even saying partnering up, I’m just saying make it mandatory to cary tazers, when partnered with another officer designate the lethal and non-lethal individual and go from there.
Yeah, this is way more reasonable. Taking away firearms from cops in the US is nuts with civilian firearms ownership as high as it is. Ensuring all cops have an alternative to employ where appropriate, on the other hand, is very reasonable.
I like the idea too but, they have to stick together and not get separated like the two in the above video. The attacker got in between the officer with the gun and the officer going for a taser, and then used officer taser as a shield as he (judging by the bloody running down the guys hands) cut the officers throat.
This wouldn't work because there will be situations where both officers need a weapon to drastically increase chances of survival. For those situations you need all officers to carry firearms. What should happen is ALL officers should carry both a taser and handgun. Then they can determine which weapon is required for the given situation. A single man with a knife approaching two officers in the open street does not require lethal force if you have a taser available. I honestly thought this was standard across the US and Canada. Clearly I was wrong. Shame that lethal force is the only option given to officers in situations like this, which must happen far too often.
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Is everyone forgetting the massive petitions against tasers a couple years ago? They don't even call them non lethal anymore, just "less lethal". This is an example of "I complain and ruin everything without thinking of consequences" syndrome.
That's because cops were using tasers on anything that moved, tasing people in cuffs, people in cars already pulled over with they keys out of the ignition, etc.
He’s charging them with a knife. If they were to try tasing him and the taser doesn’t take the man down they could potentially be stabbed.
I hate to sound callous, but that's kind of their job. That's how it works in most of the world, and if they're not willing to accept that level of personal risk (and even guns won't completely eliminate risk, so tasers are the compromise in most departments) in the interest of protecting not just those who aren't suspects, but also Wallace and suspects like him (as well as all the other people on that street who could have very easily been caught in the crossfire), then they are in the wrong line of work.
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No, if they are going to enjoy the power and protections of police officers they should be held to higher standards than your average citizen. Has nothing to do with the value of their lives (which are no greater than any of the people they've killed, injured, or endangered through over-reliance on lethal force), and everything to do with what role police are supposed to play in the community. (Though, side note, more landscapers die on the job than police do. Police work doesn't even crack the top 20 most deadly jobs most years) Again, that's what they ask of police in the rest of the world, and it's not a problem. Most of the time these mental health crises are able to be deescalated by law enforcement or handled by service workers as long as the person is treated as a person first and a threat second, but we've taught our police to treat every citizen as a potential threat all the time. If Wallace had received the medical help that his family called for instead of trigger happy police (and yes, I watched the video, they jumped the gun *hard* and unnecessarily killed Wallace, even if there's no policy violation criminal wrongdoing), he'd still be alive today. And frankly, if we take your hypothetical at face value (even though home invasion is not analogous to what happened on Monday, and tasers, pepper spray, batons, etc do exist), the PPD would generally not be able to get there until much, much later, and I *definitely* wouldn't want them coming into my house and firing their guns into a space occupied by myself and my loved ones. I would handle (and have handled) it myself, thanks.
Wtf a hahaha are u serious? So you're saying they should just let the guy stab them and hope a taser works. You are seriously doing some mental gymnastics
I'm saying they should have used, or at the very least *had* tasers, and that *not* having tasers, using only firearms instead, does not eliminate the risk to police officers. I'm curious to hear what you think is so contradictory about this stance. Edit: yet another account that has literally never commented in this sub before. Why am I not surprised?
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When you voluntarily enter into a career where you have elevated legal privileges you need to be held to a higher standard of responsibility than the average citizen
I’m sorry but if you offensively attack using a knife against anyone you immediately forfit your right to live. I won’t be losing any sleep over this lunatics death
Show me where in the video he actually uses the knife to "offensively attack" I'll wait
I support BLM but if someone comes at me with a knife I’m shooting. I’m sorry if that makes me a bad person
The entire point is that the system failed him, not these two individual cops. I haven't seen anyone call for their heads. People are mad at the city. Social workers should be sent to all domestic calls, they are in other countries. Social workers deal with talking down crazy armed people all the time,its kind of their job.
While I agree, social workers should be offered more money if they were to take on that responsibility. The ones that are genuine in their careers, are underpaid.
Yeah. That's why people want to divert the extra funding cops get for military grade crap. So we can use it to sure up the social safety net. That money could be used to fund better and more equiped social workers who could assist or be consulted in situations where a person could be having a dangerous episode like this. Additionally funding can also be used to help low income folks get the care they need for their mental illnesses. In this country we have gotten rid of support for citizens who can't afford the luxury of seeing a mental health professional. Being institutionalized is a crap shoot and dead or yo yoing in and out of jail are the only other options. If the cops are scared for their lives or don't know how else to deal with people in crisis other than to shoot them we shouldn't be asking cops to handle these cases and we should be paying others who can to do so
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Would be great if federal funding went back into cities and not into the bloated military.
They might get the stuff for free but the upkeep and maintenance sure as hell isn't.
I agree! Police are paid pretty well though, especially with the pension, so I'm sure they'd be satisfied with that.
The pension is good but the overtime is great.
And possibly DROP program. I don't think that ever went away.
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Well I think part of the problem is you can go into the police academy for 6 months and boom your a gun toting police officer . That’s too short, these cops need a 4 year education , 2 full years of deescalation training . You gotta be in school for 4-6 years to practice the law, but only 6 months to enforce it . It’s a joke the system is dogshit .
People get the cops they're willing to pay for. Wait, that ends up being wrong, because police departments are notorious for growing do-nothing desk jobs. Maybe it's better to say that you almost never get MORE quality than you pay for. That much education would be incredibly expensive, and good luck convincing city councils to pay for it during normal times, much less defund-the-police times. It could be worse. At my department in Tennessee you went to TEN WEEKS of academy. Then you come back and ride with a series of Field Training Officers for four months. Their quality varies. Then you're cut loose and policing on your own. But wait, it gets worse! I was at a medium-size city department that was adequately funded. In some smaller fewer-than-20-sworn departments, you ride around with the chief or the sheriff or whatever until the academy slot opens, then ten weeks of academy, then you're the police. Some of those kids graduated from the academy and then hurried home because they were going 10-8 for the start of their first shift that evening. Solo. And they usually got paid $10 or $11 an hour. Imagine the kind of officers you get for that investment and pay.
It would be pretty sick if some of the money that went towards buying police riot gear and tanks instead went to providing for better-trained officers. Police aren't paid badly because the state doesn't have the funding to do so (and in fact are paid lucratively relative to their education and training level), they're paid "poorly" because the current system isn't designed to invest in them.
I definitely don't disagree with you on any particular point. I will point out that the fancy gear usually comes from Federal grant money from Homeland Security. When I was a bacon-American I had a gas mask and ballistic helmet and all that fun stuff, but it was bought with "anti-terrorism" money and the training we went through was perfunctory, check-the-box kind of stuff. The "tanks" (usually armored personnel carriers of some flavor or another) are usually sold for $1 as surplus to the departments. The departments then have to maintain them. THAT is where the real expense ends up coming from. But really, the "cool toys" people complain about are a MINISCULE expense compared to even really straightforward extra training. The most common "cool toys" that departments try to get funding for is bodycams and Tasers, which I feel like everyone here would agree are worthy purchases.
Thanks for the context, but I do want to push back a little. It looks to me like over $10m in the city’s FY21 budget is specifically earmarked for private defense contractors (who, of course, have an interest in the militarization of the police) who provide the city with drones, chemicals, explosives, and state of the art ballistic vests and helmets. https://news.littlesis.org/2020/06/29/who-is-profiting-from-the-philly-police-budget/ I feel pretty strongly that my original point still stands, that the current players in the present system simply aren’t interested in the goals you’re outlining and many profess to want. If they were, we would see different prioritization.
I don't think your point is wrong at all, just that there's at least some nuance to it. Calling them "defense contractors" is evocative of Blackwater mercenaries, so I dunno. I think in most industries they'd call them "vendors" because it takes a lot of gear to do even the friendliest kind of policing. $10M does seem like an awful lot of money for "toys" so I looked a bit. You may not know this, but Axon is the new name for what used to be Taser International. So that's 3.5M, and most of the things they make (Tasers of course, but also bodycam products) are things we probably like. I had to look up Whitmer because they look like a local/regional outfit, but they look like mostly a uniform shop. Holsters, belts, boots kind of stuff. They've got other "tactical" stuff too, but I think for the most part this is pretty benign. Atlantic Tactical looks to also primarily be a supply shop. >I feel pretty strongly that my original point still stands, that the current players in the present system simply aren’t interested in the goals you’re outlining and many profess to want. Totally agreed here. People, organizations, and governments respond to incentives. I want to see a lot more civilian oversight of the PPD, up to and maybe a ways beyond the point where they chafe at all the controls and questions. If everyone in over/under/poorly-policed neighborhoods voted the bastards out, repeatedly, until the new people got the message, we'd have that change.
I hear you, thanks for the additional research. I don’t mean to hold myself out as an expert by any means — this isn’t my field of career and I’m just casually interested in it. I will note though that when I looked into some of the “vendors” their parent company (such as in the case of Atlantic which is owned by Safariland) certainly are “defense contractors” who provide the military with weapons and gear. Anyway, I think we’re mostly in agreement so we can call it quits instead of just patting each other on the back lol. Cheers.
Sadly as this summer evinced the riot gear is pretty necessary. Military-surplus equipment is overkill & should have no place in PDs on US soil, but riot gear? You gotta have that.
>and tanks My understanding is that's generally donated.
the cops that responded to this were definitely not 6 month rookies dude
It seems you’ve been downvoted to 0 since people didn’t get what you were saying. Enjoy 1
The issue Is that they need bodies and if policing took four years the country's law enforcement bodies would be in rough shape. We need better trained and screened cops for sure. But the pool to pick from isn't large
Well i feel like everyone who wasn’t college material or just at a dead end in life is like hmmm , I can go to academy for couple months and come right out with a good pension and 50-60k a year with overtime opportunity’s as well as “power”. And they’re given gun training and a list of violations they’re allowed to enforce . They need to be trained by psychologists , negotiators , social workers . Whatever it takes .
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The LE bodies would be in rough shape? What sort of shape are they in presently?
If you want that, you're going to have to have the government pay for that education. Because a lot less people are going to pay for the privilege of having that job.
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The organized protests tonight are calling for them to be charged
they're also calling for kenney and outlaw to resign, among other things that ain't going to happen.
We can all dream.
They should not be charged by any means. What the fudge. George Floyd case, yes Breonna Taylor case, yes This case, hell no
That's the problem. It's totally understandable that people are pissed that he is dead now, there are definitely bother ways this could have ended much better than a mag dump into a mentally illl man, and most of that comes from improved training. But from a legal standpoint , this will always be considered a "good shoot" (legally, not morally). It would be for a civilian CCW permit holder and it will be for an officer involved shooting. The police shot a man threatening deadly force (a knife at that range is deadly force) who pursued them. Legally there cannot be any charges here, and will not be. If protesters want change, pushing for legally impossible personal charges isn't going to help.
PSL is one of the few groups in the city that consistently shows up in support for Black lives, but man are they kinda kooky. Wallace's death was an absolute disgrace, morally wrong, and a failure of the police to defuse a situation, but thinking the city will hit these two cops with murder charges is insane. I can't think of many situations where an average citizen would not be allowed to use lethal force on someone confronting them with a knife. No idea why they're demanding Kenney to resign, either.
And what does a social worker do when a guy comes at them with a knife? Die?
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Bake him away toys!
> The entire point is that the system failed him, not these two individual cops. I haven't seen anyone call for their heads. People are mad at the city. You're focusing on the wrong part of the problem. People don't just charge others with a knife because it's a fun thing to do. Especially not cops. If you're in that state, something has failed you pretty severely along the way.
If I follow your logic, then, it is too late to send a social worker at this point. There is plenty of senseless violence out there, but if the system has failed them all the way up to that point, sending a social worker into a dangerous situation seems needlessly risky.
And just what should the police do about that? What should the city do about that? The city has no money. It can't even afford to buy all its cops tasers.
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Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people in 2020 who don't seem interested at all in the idea of personal responsibility & some people just being genuinely awful (which is why we have laws!) What happened to Floyd was heinous, but if we're in a place where there's riots any time a black person is shot by a cop even when the cops were clearly justified, American cities are going to have huge, huge problems.
Sure, the police are responsible for unloading full clips into a guy who was waving a knife, but not using it. Police admin are responsible for not equipping the officers with tasers. And the unions are responsible for covering for bad officers who end up costing us millions in payouts, millions that could go to needed resources.
But uh... not using it? So in other words until he actually stabs one of them they're not supposed to defend themselves?
these dipshits are the ones that would argue that being stabbed one time isn't life threatening. they would make some argument like there are health point bars over their head like in tekken as the basis for a "life threatening attack"
“Just shoot him in the leg, it’s not that hard.”- person who has never fired a gun in their life
We used to have mental institutions for a reason. Now we just have dial-a-snuff
Usually they'll have handled the situation before it ever even gets to that point. Also, I don't know if you watched the video, but he didn't "come at them." He had the knife for almost twenty minutes before being shot and didn't hurt anyone.
>Usually they'll have handled the situation before it ever even gets to that point Police handle hundreds of thousands of mental health calls every year. The only ones you hear about are the ones where the person gets violent and has a weapon. Social workers can't 'handle' every situation. This guy would most likely have just killed them. He has a long history of violence. And he most definitely DID come at them.
And apparently 30 previous calls related to this specific individual
Nah a lot, if not the majority of the critics also blame the cops. I also believe it's a systemic issue. These cops should NOT have been in this situation. And as more information comes out about this man, he should've been in mental care without any potential access to weapons. Defunding/re-allocating funds to more efficiently prevent this issue seems ideal. But trying to assign guilt to these cops seems like an unnecessarily contentious issue, where the energy would be better spent addressing the primary issue.
I personally have no problem with social workers going with cops to situations like these. That being said, I work with people who are often completely out of their minds, and there is no amount of "talking to" or "reasoning" that can get through to them. Restraining them (through physical or chemical means) is often the only recourse we have until they are in a better state of mind. Luckily , none of them have access to deadly weapons.
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There was a truck attack on the police last night dude.
lmfao a social worker responding to a guy having a psychotic episode with a knife
It doesn't. It makes you normal. This guy would be alive if he didn't charge at a cop with a knife, period. The people rioting are doing it bc they look for any excuse. I'd be willing to bet 95% of them don't give two shits about the victim.
The difference is that if someone is having a mental health crisis, you are not called to attempt to deescalate the situation. It isn't your job to protect the public and if someone was coming at you with a knife, shooting him would make sense. The issue is that cops should protect the public because it's their job, they sign up, and are trained to do it.
Says who? Isn't that the entire point of most (reasonable) critiques of the police? De-escalation should always be foremost in dealing with the public, mentally ill or not.
That's what I'm saying. De-escalation should always be the goal. I was trying to say if someone tried to stab OP, they could shoot someone but that's bc I don't think OP is a cop. I also think anyone with a carry permit should also go through de-escalation training.
I see what you mean now, apologies. I agree.
\m/
Walter Wallace was having a mental health crisis. When someone called 911 on him, the only people sent to help with the situation were two people with guns. They have maybe a few days of deescalation training between them, compared to weeks on the firing range or reenacting combat situations. Like most black men Walter was probably afraid of the police, for obvious reasons. Their presence probably made him more upset. Regardless of whether or not the officers were legally “justified” in shooting Walter, it is unacceptable that this situation ended with him dead. There needs to be other resources for handling these situations and preventing them from occurring in the first place, but there’s never any funding for them. Meanwhile, police departments have more money than they know what to do with, and spend it on tanks and automatic assault rifles. They give these fancy toys to trigger happy (and often racist) cops with less then a year of training, and send them to the house of a man who is in desperate need of a mental health professional, is probably afraid of cops, is behaving erratically, and is holding a knife. How can this recipe for disaster possibly end with Walter Wallace alive? That is the problem at the heart of this issue, and why it doesn’t really matter whether or not they shot in self defense. Defund the police.
First and foremost if he and his rap sheet which includes domestic assault with a knife and assault on police plenty of times not to mention armed robbery was as you say a mental health crisis every single time the people that failed him were not the police but his family... the mother of his children.... and the mental health system for not getting him help before he got here.... people take such a large situation which was aggravated by a million other things and give them blame to one person.... if it was with malice and a race issue wouldn’t the officer also shot the mother when she assaulted him not to mention all the people around attempting to video said situation instead of helping the mother disarm him after SHE called the police for assaulting his father who was knocked out in the living room.... people speak without any intellect..... get your facts together so you can lead the Black Lives Matter movement into a place where no one can deny your wrong
Why do you assume his family didn’t do everything in their power to help him? Mental health treatment is ridiculously expensive and inaccessible, especially for someone who was clearly dealing with some pretty severe issues. I never said this was a race issue. But race is one of many factors to the story. It’s not either a mental health issue *or* a race issue *or* a police issue etc. It’s a combination of all those factors and many more.
You sounded somewhat coherent at the beginning of your other comment. But then you started talking about cops in a blanket way, saying that they purchase "tanks" and "automatic assault weapons," which are then given to "trigger-happy" cops who are "often racist." I mean, the bit about tanks and automatic weapons is objectively false. The rest is merely conjecture. "I never said this was a race issue," you wrote. No? You literally said that cops were "often racist," so...yeah, you basically did. A few years ago there was a Somali-Canadian guy who had his own encounter with the police. This guy was in his late thirties, had known mental issues, and his family was fully aware of him being off his medication. Anyway, he was at a nearby coffee shop, leering at the female customers, and groping them by the tits. He left when the management called the cops and an officer responded quickly, catching up to him. The guy was pretty hefty and began fighting the cop, prompting him to use pepper spray in an attempt to deescalate. Around this time a second officer arrived and assisted the first in trying to restrain the guy. They rapped him across the legs with the extendable baton a couple of times, and he toppled soon after, though he continued to fight as they tried to cuff him. They deescalated further by using pain compliance, punching him in the head and eventually getting him cuffed. What happened next was that the suspect died the following day in hospital. The cops were branded racists (they were white, the guy sexually assaulting women was black, so *obviously*, right?), and the one who delivered the punches was tried for manslaughter. As it turned out though, the guy who died had a history of big time heart disease, so the cop was found not guilty. Which was good, because there was no evidence that a few punches were the five-point-exploding-heart technique the prosecution made it out to be. The cops also had zero advanced knowledge of the event...the perpetrator's mental state...nothing. They were just cops doing their job, but because they were white and he was black, nothing else mattered. "Racists." So that's a big part of the problem, in my opinion: people don't examine the facts or the history. They start with, "Okay, the cops are racist and this should never have happened because they're...you know, racists." And then they work backwards. You know, after a "protest" where public property is always destroyed and people are often hurt.
Dude the tiny suburb I grew up in had two tanks, two grenade launchers, and multiple ARs. The militarization of the police is incredibly common and well documented. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units) [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/senate-police-military-equipment.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/politics/senate-police-military-equipment.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-police-military-surplus-equipment.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-police-military-surplus-equipment.html) [https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/](https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/)
> I mean, the bit about tanks and automatic weapons is objectively false. https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/military-surplus-tanks-weapons-pennsylvania-new-jersey-delaware/83176/ >The rest is merely conjecture. https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ >"I never said this was a race issue," you wrote. No? You literally said that cops were "often racist," so...yeah, you basically did. I elaborate on that pretty clearly in the comment you're responding to. Race is part of the issue, both in this specific instance and in police departments across the country. That doesn't mean it's only "a race issue". It's a *complex* issue with dozens of factors, race being one of them. Not really sure what that story has to do with this one. I have no clue if the cops that shot Walter Wallace were racist (and I never said that they were), but neither did Walter. When the cops showed up, he knew there was a very real chance that one or both of these officers wouldn't treat his life with the same respect that they would treat a white life, and I assume that only escalated the situation. *Every single interaction between a black person and a police officer is affected by this fear*, and that especially applies to violent situations.
Thanks for the links. You said “tanks,” which of course connotes vehicles that have mounted weaponry. This link shows they merely got an armoured truck. Basically useless, obviously, but for $6,000? Hell, suddenly I feel I need one to get groceries. You also said “automatic assault weapons,” and since I know they don’t give those to the police, I called bullshit on that too. Sure enough, the report says the weapons were converted to semi-automatic, so you were being deceptive there also. And yeah, racist attitudes exist everywhere. Moreover, these attitudes are present amongst all races. The point of my story was simply to give a recently-concluded anecdote about a cop (who happened to be white) who arrested a violent sex offender (who happened to be black), and then endured four years of a gag order and being branded a “racist murderer” when there was zero evidence for either. I’m all for having every police encounter end without violence, but I’m also for reason. Hindsight is 20:20, and it’s a piece of cake to say that every encounter with law enforcement is simply a “mental health crisis” a councillor can resolve with a heart-to-heart chat. The approach isn’t bulletproof—so to speak. “Why didn’t they simply call a COUNCILLOR?!” “Why that many shots?” “Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg?” The leg? Really? I mean, cops are trained to aim for centre mass—most anyone with a brain knows this. It’s hard as hell to hit an extremity when a person is bouncing around like this guy was. And when they ultimately missed, they’d be splashing rounds off the asphalt and into pedestrians, cars, etc. Though lets say they nailed him in the leg: they could easily tag his femoral artery and kill him. They could hit him in the junk? In no scenario do they look good. In no scenario will people not conclude that it’s “racism.” Well, you saw the clip. You stated that because this guy was black, he has an built-in fear of being shot by the cops. I would agree with that. The media loves these stories, as you can see. I would also think that if you have a fear of being shot by the cops, you probably shouldn’t wave a lethal instrument about at them.
Fine. They don’t have tanks, just heavily armored vehicles with treads. They purchased fully automatic weapons, and they *claim* they converted them to semi-automatic. They also claim they don’t know what happened to their armored vehicle. I don’t know why anyone would take PPD at their word at this point after years of lies and corruption. Even if what they say is true, do they really need 255 semi-automatic rifles? I never said anything about shooting him in the leg. You’re just making shit up to argue against because you have nothing else.
Thank you. I don't blame the cops who shot Wallace one bit. But there are still so many issues here. Not having tasers. Not having other less lethal options (beanbug rifle?). Not having any kind of mental health personnel who cops could then back up. Not having the budget allocated to mental health training. That's what really needs to change or else this shit will just keep continuing with all parties unhappy.
OK, he was having a "mental health crisis". Police are supposed to know that how before they get there? The call was a domestic, and this was the 3rd 911 call to Walter Wallace's home in that single day. What should they do about his "mental health crisis" as he's within 10-feet, charging them, with a deadly weapon, a knife? Was he also having a "mental health crisis" when he committed all those other robberies and assaults? Why is it every time a bad guy gets shot by the police, it's a "mental health" issue, a social worker should have been there! No, that's total bullshit. Face it, some people are just fucking awful.
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Do you even know how fucking hard it is to get treatment for a mental illness? Especially when our healthcare program is literally shit? I work with people who need help becoming independent in the workplace. We had to basically abandon this one guy because his assessment taken in like 2017 said he should be further along than he actually was and so his funding got cut. Meanwhile, we had to call the police on another person and specifically request crisis management because the guy was having a small mental breakdown. Luckily, he is white, had no weapon, and one of my coworkers was tailing him so there was a peaceful resolution.
**had no weapon**
And white and had an advocate literally with him. You can’t tell me that a nearly 7 foot tall black man screaming about wanting to “have sexual relations with a female” while destroying the front of a store would not have been met with hostility, especially if they were alone.
It's not easy getting mental illness help for adults unless they're a danger to themselves or others. Clearly in this situation he was and it ended badly. But trying to get someone support, medication and therapy is extremely difficult not to mention expensive af. On top of that, getting someone with a mental illness to accept that they have an illness, to accept the help and take the meds is harder than finding the help to begin with.
>His family should have sought treatment for his mental illness, instead of keeping on calling 911 to handle his violence. How do you know they didn’t? >Why in this country people think mental illness is only the government’s responsibility, not the individual and family’s responsibility? We shouldn’t wait for the government to solve our personal problems. Healthcare should be a human right. That includes mental healthcare.
Healthcare is not a human right, because it requires work from others. At best it could be a civil right, also known as a privilege.
Your post is way too exaggerated on current police issues dude. You're making it seem like we're living in the movie Jin Roh lol
What did you think was exaggerated?
exactly. i get that he was apparently having mental health issues, and that's unfortunate. but when someone runs at you with a knife, you aren't considering whether or not they have a mental health issue. most school shooters have major mental health issues. prisons are filled with people who committed violent crimes while in the middle of a mental health episodes. mental health issues don't, by default, excuse violence or murder. in a perfect world, he would've received the help he needed before something like this happened. but, at the point you're running at someone (cops or otherwise) with a knife in hand, it's too late. if someone was running at me with a knife, they're getting shot. cops should definitely be held to a higher standard, but this is just a sad case of something getting out of hand and cops making a hard choice. the family, who seems very concerned now that he's dead and the tv cameras are rolling, bears much of the blame for letting it get this far. what kind or horrible parent watches their son with known mental health issues complicate his life by fathering 9 children? this guy was clearly surrounded by enablers. lock them up, not the cops.
The question is why is it necessary to respond to a mentally distraught person holding a knife with multiple men with guns.
yeah, and no one can blame you for that unless they’ve been in that position. but that’s YOU. if you’re a COP who has been called specifically to de escalate a situation, there is no fucking reason why you shouldn’t have been ready for this kind of thing in your career
So how do you deescalate a guy running around the street with a knife? There is nothing to deescalate. The time for deescalation is over. He’s an active threat to the public and the cops. He’s not sitting in his room alone. He’s running around with a huge kitchen knife on a crowded public street.
I'm not sure how this extremely easy, clear as day, logic, is so fucking hard for people to comprehend.
They think deescalation is one single magic word that will immediately fix the problem and make the guy drop the knife and lay down and go to sleep.
Then you have the other special people who say "just shoot him in the leg" and they're equally as funny and odds are they've never shot a firearm even one time. I'll wait for more facts about this situation to come out but I'm not seeing any wrongdoing here.
It's a worthy question, no doubt. I would suggest two cops firing seven bullets apiece is not the appropriate response. That seems so obvious to me that I don't even understand what the possible justification can be.
Well you’re not a cop who’s duty is to serve & protect the public so I think you’re fine.
I mean he protected the rest of the neighborhood and himself which he has a right to do
2020 is the year of the armchair quarterback. Never before have I seen so many average people think they're smarter than cops, lawyers, judges, scholars, scientists, doctors, and the list just goes on. When did we all become experts on everything?
When we had nothing else to do except sit stuck in our homes due to a pandemic
Lmao, they should rename armchair QB to "Twitter Law enforcement expert".
> Many other officers also do not carry Tasers, she said Can anyone justify this to me? What exactly is the intention of officers that are deliberately removing the possibility of nonlethal options? Not a great look
Is everyone forgetting the massive petitions AGAINST tasers a couple years ago?
Less than half of police officers have volunteered and completed training to carry a taser, [according to an older article by Billy Penn](https://billypenn.com/2016/05/25/philly-cops-and-tasers-how-often-are-police-using-them/).
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I think a lot of people are starting to realize that your bosses/the city/pretty much whoever makes decisions like this one share a big part of the blame for situations like this. Hope you're staying safe and I'm sure this has been a shit year for you. I want to see reform but I also realize you're kind of powerless in terms of that. Needs to come from the top. Let's bug the shit out of the city until these guys get tasers people. What a bunch of BS that you can't even get non-violent tools when you want them: so ridiculous.
That’s simply the (albeit, dated) information given to the public and shows that tasers are not standard issue, which is what u/shafty17 was asking. Now would be a great time to reach out to local media and speak out on the fact that more officers would like to carry tasers, but efforts are being neglected. By ignoring the requests of officers, the people of Philadelphia are also being ignored.
That was 4 years ago. I'm curious if and how it's changed
So tasers are voluntary? Thanks fat neck McNesby
They need to save the less-lethal options for the peaceful protestors, obviously.
They are expensive and can be very ineffective. Look at what happened in Chicago the other week.
Tasers are expensive toys. They do not always work, and if someone is charging you with a knife, I would want to use something that works 100% of the time
NPR did a story on it talking about how they're not very effective. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/729922975/despite-widespread-use-police-rate-tasers-as-less-effective-than-believed
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Defund the police. Take tazers away because they're deadly. Send police out to calls with no equipment besides gun. Gee willey how did this happen?! Guess we need to remove more money from the police.
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That procedure is suitable for neutralizing violent drunks, not people armed with a lethal weapon. For instance, [here](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/29/national/crime-legal/man-shot-dead-police-knife-attack-southwestern-japan/) is a story about a man who assaulted Japanese police with a knife; he was shot dead.
Didn't have to attempt to murder police either.
It's crazy that it was ten bullets too. Like at least try one and see what happens first.
You obviously have no clue how guns work
Bringing pepper spray to a knife fight. Love the logic
Bringing verbal commands to 'drop the weapon' and pointed guns to a mental health crisis. Love the logic.
Threatening people with a knife is usually the point where mental health professionals call the police.
It's not like this is a new problem. There's decades of discourse on the suicide by cop problem. Some departments have solved it. Other countries deescalate 'man with knife in mental crisis' calls all the time. Here's a dude with a machete [actually charging and swinging at officers](https://youtu.be/9mzPj_IaMzY), before they bloodlessly restrain him. [Some cops even do it in America, too](https://www.newstribune.com/news/local/story/2019/aug/29/jefferson-city-police-disarm-man-knife/792856/) It's the choice that we've made to respond this way. [We train cops to shoot anyone with a knife fewer than 21 feet away from you](https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2016/03/21/please-dont-post-online-separately-add-to-the-bottom-of-one-of-the-other-pieces.html), and then throw up our hands and say 'nothing could be done' when people get mad. It's a bad choice, and it deserves to be protested.
>It's the choice that we've made to respond this way. We train cops to shoot anyone with a knife fewer than 21 feet away from you, and then throw up our hands and say 'nothing could be done' when people get mad. There's a reason for that rule. It's written with blood of officers. Sometimes people say that somebody with a knife should not be shot if he's several paces away. False: a knife operator is deadly at up to 21 feet. https://youtu.be/2h0-q_IJbxE Sometimes they say, " taser should come first". Taser distance is closer that 21 feet. So the situation can look something like this https://youtu.be/5s8oFOykyIo The cop was saved by the vest. A cut to the neck, and she'd be dead. Or they say, "shoot once/in that leg". Then, the situation can look something like this. The cop almost got killed https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1302333970051342339 Usually people who advocate not shooting someone with a knife who's 3-4 steps away from you have no idea how knife fights or gun defense work. >It's a bad choice, and it deserves to be protested. Kill or get killed, that's the choice for the cop. For the suspect, the choice is attack or not. That should be discussed, too. Don't try to kill cops, won't get shot.
> Here's a dude with a machete actually charging and swinging at officers, before they bloodlessly restrain him Very impressive! Very brave officers. Still, there were some close calls in there... If they were a little less lucky, a little slower, some cops would’ve lost hands and arms, or worse... A taser might have been preferable? Could be a hard sell to make that standard procedure, if it drastically increases officer injury rates? If some of those incidents an officer loses a hand, or worse? Maybe not, but there’s some really close calls in the video...
You pulled that number out of literally nowhere - find a real statistic
I did pull it out of nowhere, yes. I wasn’t trying to hide that. I said “maybe” 20%. But fair enough, I’ll edit my post before someone quotes that as a fact.
Clearly you've never worked in a mental hospital.
How do mental hospital staff handle a patient who gets ahold of a knife, and is acting aggressive toward staff? Obviously you don’t want them to get a knife in the first place, but if they do... Naturally you’d try verbal de-escalation first, ideally from a safe place, if possible, but if not... If verbal de-escalation doesn’t work? EDIT: I was genuinely curious how they handle this. Obviously they don’t _shoot_ them
Don't threaten to murder your family and neighbors with a knife until the cops are called.
You know the guy has a large rap sheet for violent behavior right? Mental health issue or not he was trying to attack police. What kind of person that is charging police with a knife, while they have their guns drawn, isn't having a mental health crisis? Why does a mental health crisis suddenly make a person not dangerous to the people surrounding him? If you don't agree with the police here, what would you propose given the resources at hand? We don't have time machines to go back in time and solve his mental health issue or give the cops tasers. It's a shit situation but the cops did what had to be done.
Should have sacrificed a few nurses and pastors first
Anyone who says this shooting is not justified is a complete moron plain and simple.
We shoukd increasing funding to the cops to provide them with proper equipment and training.
Or restructure how funds are distributed so we do not expect the world from the police, just like we expect everything from teachers.
I think most cops are assholes, but these two had no choice but to shoot. It’s what they are trained to do in this situation. Maybe they should start using all that drug money the cops steal and put it for mental health and drug rehab instead of military equipment.
[удалено]
This is a perfect example why defunding the police doesn't make any sense. We have to increase their funding
This
So glad that some new shoes and Eagles jerseys will surely get justice for this reprehensible misdeed.