Let’s list all items that do not look like a gun during a police encounter. I’ll start:
Small puppy Couch Basketball Bucket full of fruit Ice
I can’t think of anymore at the moment. There’s bound to be one or two other items.
No one has claimed it looked like a gun. He was running towards the police with a gardening hoe with a clear intention to hit him. There’s video of it in this thread. This is not an example of a police shooting an innocent person. They shot someone that was attacking them with a lethal weapon.
Billy club, taser, or just a good old Sparta kick to the chest. If lethal force is your first instinct when a child comes at you with a stick, you should in no way be allowed to carry a weapon.
Now lets put you there under an attack and give you 4 seconds to decide what to do. I wanna see that Sparta kick.
4 seconds to decide what to do.
Isn’t that what training is for? To train the brain to react appropriately? Why do hair dressers require more training than cops?
The point is that it’s quite easy here to observe the video comfortably from your couch at home and with the power of hindsight ponder what they should’ve done instead. The officer being attacked here had no such luxury. This is in no way me saying that there’s zero issues on how policing is done in the US. There’s nuance to these things.
You sure this was what set him off? You sure he didn’t hear an acorn drop?
Either one can apparently trigger police officer Psycho Mode.
Another child murdered.
I will not shed a single tear for when cops get shot and killed.
I hope you have a gun or know how to fight.
Otherwise you need cops to defend you.
US cops really have stored up an incredible amount of badwill, haven’t they? Now, I can’t help but see Nolan’s Batman film (whichever the one is with cops in tunnels), Brooklyn 99 and others as straight up copaganda. Just zero sympathy. The balance will shift at some point, it has to.
Not really. It’s just on these forums.
As soon as you go out into the real world, you’ll see cops are people too and have about the same amount of respect as everyone else.
First you need to go out into the real world, though.
Kid ran towards the officer with an axe, don’t run towards someone with an axe if they have a gun.
Whatever happened to tasers? I guess it’s not that convenient for the police to have someone capable of suing back, makes one wonder how many cases aren’t able to get the attention this kid is.
Tasers are also quite risky.
What they should have is some proper martial arts training so they can deal with most problems in closer encounters. Fucking shit, they have better equipment and bigger numbers. There should be zero reason to pull a gun unless the other party also has one.
Then maybe escalate to tasers if the other party has a knife and seems to actually starting to attack. If they are just standing there (in a defensive stance or whatever), they should still not be tasered.
Any decent martial arts instructor will tell you that if someone has a weapon, your best bet is to run. You can be a master of any art; if your opponent has a knife, you will get cut, or stabbed. It’s almost impossible to disarm an aggressive attacker who has a knife without getting cut; unless you get lucky, it usually becomes a struggle to control the knife, and the person holding the handle gets cut up far less. Your martial arts training may allow you to eventually dominate the situation, disarm your attacker, and defeat your opponent – but you’re still going to get cut up in the process. If they have a gun, then all your training for is give you a slight chance of not getting shot, maybe, if everything goes perfectly. The only time things go like in the movies is in the movies. And cops aren’t going to be martial arts masters; the best we could hope for for most of them is some basic submission technique, like the shit that murdered George Floyd.
Yes: cops should be getting focused time in de-escalation, but expecting cops to grapple with people, when they have no idea what weapons the person may have concealed in their bodies, or to expect them to perform some Steven Segal weapon disarming is unrealistic.
I agree with you, though; guns are not the answer, and I’m not sure I believe cops should even be armed - although, this is there US, and about 2% of the population goes around daily armed.
The kid had a stick, for Pete’s sake
So for context my local PD dealt with a fine gentleman who attacked a security guard in his car dual wielding a hatchet and metal pipe. They spent several hours trying to talk him down before charging him with a shield and arresting him without much further ado. If you guessed he was white you guessed correctly.
complimenting your PD for disarming the situation peacefullycalling your PD racist for not shooting a white Person
Were you asleep for the last decade? We’ve seen over and over how people of color get treated by cops.
I didn’t even have to open the article to see the boy’s skin color. And I’m not remotely shocked.
Officer was backing away from the kid, and turned to run away from him. The officer was actively retreating from the attack at the time the shots were fired.
Two officers were present. It is not clear from the video who fired the shots. It is very clear, however, that the kid was actively attacking the officer.
Yea sadly the kid was an aggressor here
But the cops should be using tazers or something non-lethal to deal with this kinda altercation
To safely employ a tazer in this situation, the cop would have needed body armor completely covering his head, neck, torso, arms, groin, and legs. Wearing anything less than full riot gear, that attack posed an imminent threat of death or grievous bodily harm. Striking the officer’s head or neck with a bladed weapon could destroy an eye, sever the carotid artery, or cause a wide variety of maiming or permanently disfiguring injuries.
Employment of a pain compliance method is only feasible once that threat has been stopped, delayed, or mitigated.
Neither of the officers present appeared to have had any opportunity to use a tazer or less-lethal device to stop the attack.
You sound like all the cowardly cops. If you can’t handle a non lethal situation like this with your tazer: find another job.
I see. And what training, instruction, or other expertise do you have to support your assertion that this was a “non lethal situation”?
I believe that I could cause a permanently disfiguring, debilitating, or lethal injury with any of the long-handled tools in my shed. I believe if a racist teenager swung one of these tools at a black man, you, too, would consider it to have been a use of lethal force.
I think a reasonable person facing a 15-year-old attempting to strike them with any of my gardening equipment would reasonably fear a threat of death or grievous bodily harm.
I reject your characterization of this as a “non lethal situation”.
I don’t know about him but I was an Infantryman who invaded Iraq. And no. You’re wrong. You don’t just shoot kids clearly having a mental health episode. Especially with multiple cops present. You only need one designated shooter while everyone else works the problem.
Also, pain compliance is to neutralize threats. If there is no threat then you’re just torturing them. Where I’m from that’s called a war crime.
Surely we’re holding our police to a higher standard than a 19 year old scared shitless in a warzone? Right?
So if a cop, afflicted with PTSD from shooting teenagers, points a gun at me and I kill him in self-defense… Do you think the criminal justice system will hand-wave it away as easily as this?
So if a cop, afflicted with PTSD from shooting teenagers, points a gun at me and I kill him in self-defense…
The thing is, liberals want to see this as some kind of exercise in fairness. “Oh if can shoot me then I can shoot them!”
No. This is a gang-violence thing. The MS-13 gang member can shoot you because he’s got a gun and years of psychological scarring and a willingness to kill to survive. You can’t shoot the gang member, because all his buddies will show up at your house, hold you down and skin your dog alive while you’re forced to watch, then bust out all your teeth and hang you out to dry as an example.
Cops work the same way.
I saw the body cam, that kid was charging at the cop, he wasn’t just sitting in his front lawn taking care of some flowers. The only real question I have is what was that cop doing there in the first place?
Also, why charge a cop with a weapon, though? Teenager at least had the agency to not rush a cop.
Why there? Googled it, this is from a different article:
"The officer-involved shooting was reported before 5 p.m. Saturday, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department received a 911 call about a domestic disturbance in Apple Valley, authorities said.
The caller reported that 15-year-old Ryan Gainer was attacking his sister and smashing up glass and doors at the family home."
He was having a mental health crisis. But instead of being helped, he was executed by a full grown man afraid of a boy with a stick
A stick with a heavy pointy piece of metal attached to it. Anything can be a weapon and some are more effective than others.
Anything can be a weapon
Well, that explains the trend of cops shooting people with random objects in their hands. And acorns.
TLDR: What is the “5 foot garden tool”? That’s all I want to know!
So many details and blame thrown about, but suddenly vague on “gardening tool?” It was 5 feet of something. A rake? A scythe? A stick?
It sort of matters what is in your hands when you approach police; not that that’s ever a good idea. Even with a disability, he could be dangerous.
I’m astounded by The Guardian. How does an article explain is such detail the events of an altercation and aftermath yet space so terribly on such basic information?
Aren’t police carrying non-lethal stuff like tasers and trained in deescalation techniques that could be used to subdue someone without shooting them?
Edit: not ‘desecration’, although maybe they are
Some do carry batons, pepper spray, or tasers. All carry guns.
Some might be trained in deescalation. Some might be trained in “killology”: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html
Too bad he wasn’t a big white man with a knife! Then the cops would have tried to talk him down!
Lacy said the family also reported that after the shooting, the family was forced out of the home while officers “rummaged through their house looking for any justification for shooting and killing Ryan”.
Not a good look.
