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[Bumber]

If a person produces a weapon, you retreat to a safe distance, establish a perimeter and call in co-ordinated support to contain them and bring them in.

What is a safe distance, and how long does it take all the officers to retreat to it relative to the time it takes to fire the weapon?

Edit: Unless you meant specifically in cases where they speed off, but that doesn't help in the case where they want to shoot you (without warning,) then leave.

A cop was executed in New Mexico by a man who seemed to be cooperating. You could say that the cop should have just let him go, but you don't know what other harm may be done by delaying.

Yeah, I'm not buying that tasing was the intent, anyway.

Given the George Floyd trial going on not too far away, and the obvious outcome of another black person killed for the city and for her personally?

[MorleyDev]

If the person is determined to kill the police officer, they will probably kill them. But that is a rare scenario, and the overwhelming majority of the time the officer isn't dealing with that, but they are taught to treat every scenario like the person they are interacting with wants them dead. There aren't established levels of escalation and they don't try to de-escalate. A person seemingly co-operating and waiting for the chance to strike will always be able to strike first, that's the whole point of an ambush tactic.

Run the plates, if the person you're stopping has a registered firearm then you can justify more caution until they are away from any source of danger, sure. But here the motion was to draw a weapon and fire at the first sign of non-compliance. Taser or Pistol, it doesn't actually matter: That shouldn't be the first go-to action. Either of those should only be fired when there is a confirmed threat to life. Suspicion of threat alone is not enough to justify potentially lethal force, and even a Taser should be treated as potentially lethal force.

To be frank, and I say this as a relative of both police officers and military: I'm of the opinion that the sacrifice of a person becoming a police officer or military personnel is that they are volunteering their life to be worth less than a civilians in the arithmetic. Police officers are at risk so normal people aren't. When innocent people who shouldn't die are regularly dying because of perceived risk to the life of police officers, that balance is fundamentally broken and the very existence of the police force is no longer serving it's purpose.

[Cthulhu]

I know what harm is done by walking in and starting a direct confrontation.  Somebody gets fucking shot.  Over and over cops deliberately initiate these fraught encounters, then say they got scared and had to shoot the guy.

As for the George Floyd trial, I've seen at least two cop shootings aside from Daunte Wright.  It doesn't seem like that's factoring into their flowchart at all, probably because 90% of that flowchart ends in shoot the guy.

Either way all of these justifications for what they did are based on the premise that what the police do is necessary and good for society, and I don't buy that.  I don't care what justifications they have for their actions after pulling him over because the entire encounter was unjust.  It shouldn't have happened in the first place.  He was pulled over for obscuring his windshield with an air freshener, which goes back to the old cycle:

• bloated police budgets eat up funds for every other sector
• cities use police to supplement the budget with fines, the laws designed so people can be grabbed and fined pretty much at will. this is mostly done in black communities
• police budget gets even bigger to support this role
• GOTO 10

So ultimately I don't buy any of these use-of-force justifications.  None of this is right, none of this is good for society, and none of it should've happened in the first place.

[Bumber]

There aren't established levels of escalation and they don't try to de-escalate.

There are. It starts with asking for compliance, then usually goes to trying to physically restrain. If they can't restrain the suspect (reasons include fleeing and refusing to exit a vehicle,) then it goes to less lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets.) Firearms are for when somebody's life is at risk. Escalation can happen very quickly, however.

The officer shouted repeatedly to Daunte that he would be tased, which was an attempt to de-escalate back to compliance or restraint.

[Doomblade187]

There aren't established levels of escalation and they don't try to de-escalate.

There are. It starts with asking for compliance, then usually goes to trying to physically restrain. If they can't restrain the suspect (reasons include fleeing and refusing to exit a vehicle,) then it goes to less lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets.) Firearms are for when somebody's life is at risk. Escalation can happen very quickly, however.

The officer shouted repeatedly to Daunte that he would be tased, which was an attempt to de-escalate back to compliance or restraint.

Pray tell me why exactly we have to restrain fleeing suspects? And why exactly would a 26 year veteran draw a gun when the taser is on the other hip?

[MorleyDev]

Terrifying and startling people whilst pointing a gun at them and demanding immediate compliance under threat of execution is not starting off at a healthy level of escalation! It puts people straight into the depths of their fight or flight response, and then police act surprised at them when they do one of those things?

The way humans work means that a lot of the time the honest answer for "Why did you run?" is "Because you were chasing me!".

And in the USA traffic stops can start with firearms drawn! This is not a slow escalation and an aim to de-escalate. When things start with hands on firearms, it's already escalated to the extreme. Which is the problem, rather than approaching people like...people, American police are taught to approach everyone as an immediate and significant threat. But when you start treating someone as a threat, the only direction for things to go is worse.

I personally know white people in the USA who have said they wouldn't call the police if their house was burgled because they expect the police would treat them as roughly as they would treat the burglar. That's fucked up.

A simple question:
If you were found to have a small white bag of cocaine on you whilst trying to enter a club and a police officer were called over, which of the following do you think is more likely to happen in the USA:
A) You be calmly talked to by a police officer, asked for details and id which they note down and report, and they only resort to physically restraining you and conducting an immediate arrest if you became aggressive?
B) Or approached with hands on weapons or weapons drawn whilst being shouted at, restrained against a wall, forcibly searched, and then forced into a police car?

And which of them do you think is in the best interests of the police and society to do? And if you aren't white, are you more likely to receive A or B?

[nenjin]

Oh look.

A 60 year old white guy who dragged a cop with his car and then hit them with a hammer was neither tased nor shot. And this was over wearing a face mask in a store.

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1382671200867004421?s=20

Moments like this make every justification for force against black people look like exactly what it is: complete bullshit to justify racism in policing.

Amazing how much restraint police are able to show when they actually value the life of the suspect they're attempting to detain. If this guy was black they'd have shot him a dozen times and run him over for good measure.

[Vector]

The toddler did what the parent didn't want!

The parents screamed at the toddler to de-escalate! It wasn't very effective!

Toddler screams more.

The parents used ... nonlethal force? to de-escalate! It wasn't very effective!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[Bumber]

Moments like this make every justification for force against black people look like exactly what it is: complete bullshit to justify racism in policing.

It happens to white people plenty. It's just not newsworthy when it does.

I remember seeing footage of some white kid getting tased while sitting in their car some time last year. It's impossible to find now since the Daunte incident now takes up several pages of all search results involving tasers.

[Vector]

Tazed =/= shot, though, which is literally the distinction we are concerned about right now. No one is even saying "he shouldn't have been tazed" (he shouldn't have been tazed). We are saying, "why is it that this guy was killed, but they can get the likes of the Charleston church shooter into custody without finding him threatening" ?

A white dude who has literally just killed a half dozen people is not life-threatening, whereas a black dude sitting in his car is life-threatening? how does this make sense?

[martinuzz]

Probably because the Charleston shooter was apprehended by a highly trained tactical response team, and Daunte was killed by a ex-military trained to regard all opponents as a threat.

Enlisting former miitary as police officers = a bad idea.  Those people have been trained to kill on reflex (and are often mentally scarred / unstable, if they've been deployed to a warzone).

[Bumber]

It's cherry picking. More white than black people are killed by cops each year. Those numbers of white people shot have to come from somewhere. (Also, Daunte wasn't just sitting in his car. First he was outside his car, then they tried to cuff him and he got back into his car, with the officers still struggling with him.)

Also what martinuzz said.

[nenjin]

Most current and former military are better trained in the use of force than police officers, and have better protocols for the use of force. They're usually the first to pop up and say that police use of force is improper and highly arbitrary.

I'd worry more about people that have never fired a weapon or been in a real conflict than a former soldier. At least former soldiers know what the reality is like instead of the fantasy many new police officers come to the force with.

Or to quote The Departed: "Half of these guys SIGNED UP to use their sidearms."

[MorleyDev]

It's not that it doesn't happen to white people, it's that it disproportionately happens to non-whites. If a person walk into a room of 100 people, 80 white and 20 black, and shoots 20 people, and it turns out 18 of those shot are black and 2 are white....then it's probably true that there was some racism going on there in that shooting. After 100 shootings with the same ratio, then it becomes ridculous to argue racism isn't a factor.

There are two problems: A too-high portion of American police are trigger happy. A too-high portion of American police are racist. The end result is too many civilians are being executed by US police, and proportionately too many of those are non-whites for the USA African-American community to feel at all safe around the police force whose very job is supposed to be to protect them.

[scriver]

It's not that it doesn't happen to white people, it's that it disproportionately happens to non-whites. If a person walk into a room of 100 people, 80 white and 20 black, and shoots 20 people, and it turns out 18 of those shot are black and 2 are white....then it's probably true that there was some racism going on there in that shooting. After 100 shootings with the same ratio, then it becomes ridculous to argue racism isn't a factor.

Other people: This argument doesn't need a devil's advocate

Me, a contrarian: But what if it's the event organisers that are racist and have placed all the black people by the door