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.
I have been assaulted in a very similar fashion, shovel, around same age, and I was also a teenager. I did not need or want a gun to diffuse the situation. And this officer had grown man strength.
I agree. Using a firearm obviously was not the optimal solution here but not totally unjustified either.
I’m sure had he been unarmed he likely would have dealt with it by other means aswell. One of the big drawbacks of carrying a firearm is the ease of hasty and irreversible decisions.
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people who run at you
One sec, analyzing.
Only if they’re carrying a skateboard.
Yea, he could have reached for anything other than the gun tho.
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.
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.
No, tasers and clubs are used when someone is of no threat whatsoever to you (ego disincluded). Guns are for everything else. But also sometimes just for everything /s
Now lets put you there under an attack and give you 4 seconds to decide what to do. I wanna see that Sparta kick.
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The “child” in question is a 15 year old adult sized man.
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He’s a cop he doesn’t need the films.
No mother fucker. No. This was not a man. This WAS a child. Fuck off with your quotation marks.
“I swear your honor, this was no child…that 15 year old girl was stacked like a woman”
I was willing to give your argument consideration until this braindead-ass comment. You can fuck right off now. Goddamn boot lickers.
Describing a teenage boy as a child is just pushing a narrative to minimize the potential threath by him. Look at the pictures in the article. If someone his age and size charges at you while wielding a weapon then you should be scared for your life. That is not to say shooting is the optimal solution but you better do something and quick.
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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.
The British have figured this out, why can’t Americans:
London Bridge attack: Darryn Frost on using a narwhal tusk to stop knifeman
I think that was the one where the Millwall fan was throwing furniture at the attackers. Fuckin legend.
Well talk about nuance! you think pulling out a gun and putting some lead into a 15 yr old with a spade was the only option!
I do not hold that belief
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The training, what little there is, is the problem in this case unfortunately. All the killology and us vs them horseshit they tell cops leads to precisely this type of situation. Proper training means that is indeed more than enough time to check down an ROE before using lethal force, but when you have a hammer and no one punishes you for hitting the wrong nail…every kid looks like a nail if they’re they wrong socioeconomic type or color and you’re constantly in “fear for your life.”
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Maybe that’s why they give all that cop training for? You speak as if cops are cornered deer.
I’m not speaking of police in general. I’m speaking of this specific event.
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Why are you attacking me instead of what I’m saying?
Because as a cop you dehumanize yourself and other people, therefore are undeserving of humanity. Ya’ll have been killing black kids long before that time ya’ll dropped C4 explosives on their homes in 1985. Cops are irredeemable fascist pigs, gun-wielding arms of the state, whom the 2nd ammendment was written to permit shooting.
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Billy club, taser, or just a good old Sparta kick to the chest.
Wouldn’t a gardening hoe have range/length/blockage on those other weapons, making them ineffective for defense?
Club yeah, taser should be able to reach out and touch him, pepper spray, or just run back and try to talk the kid down since you’re the grown adult, fuckin something from these shitbirds who get a tax break on an MRAP and then cosplay as soldiers with none of the rules. Lethal force should be the last resort, not a reflexive first move. Bad training that is essentially just thin blue line propaganda.
Club yeah, taser should be able to reach out and touch him, pepper spray, or just run back and try to talk the kid down since you’re the grown adult,
I was thinking the taser wires could get caught up in the hoe forks, as they would be in front of the person.
Pepper spray may work, though I’ve always read that there’s some people who get used to it, so it doesn’t stop them from doing their violence.
I’m thinking at the point where someone is running at you (per the OP picture) with a deadly instrument it’s probably too late to talk them down.
Lethal force should be the last resort, not a reflexive first move. Bad training that is essentially just thin blue line propaganda.
Can definitely agree on this one. Considering we keep seeing this crap over and over again, I got to wonder what kind of training the police departments are giving their people, that this keeps coming up.
Not discarding proper training, but what we really need is something that only exists in fiction, Star Trek phasers, set on stun.
Did you watch the video? The cop literally was running away from the guy that was chasing after him.
The way you defend against a reach weapon is by closing in, not giving space. Unless you have murderous intent.
Unless you have murderous intent.
I think it’s safe to think that would always be the case, if someone comes at you with a weapon.
*child *farm implement
And by you I meant the cop. But I agree we can assume they’ll always have murderous intent. That’s the only thing they’re trained to do. Mental illness? Murder. Acorn fell? Murder. Child having an episode? Murder. Suspect complains they can’t breathe? Murder.
I wonder why they don’t shoot in less vital spots like legs or hands in cases like that. Distance seems to be small enough to precise shoot.
Are they undertrained or deliberately escalating?
The training deliberately is to aim for center mass, the police have made no secret to that.
The thinking is that a gunshot is always lethal force. If you want to stop the threat most effectively you aim for center mass. So in this case someone is attacking you with a weapon capable of causing death or great bodily harm and legally you can defend yourself with deadly force.
We were told when I was in junior high about 30 years ago by one of our teachers that cops weren’t allowed to attempt non-lethal shots with guns. It either had to do with being sued for intentional maiming or something, or that if a person isn’t endangering you enough that lethal force isn’t necessary, then shooting your gun at all is putting someone at risk of death when it isn’t warranted. We were also told it was better to just run away because cops weren’t allowed to shoot you in the back because you are no longer a threat.
I don’t know if any of that was true then or if it is still true now, but it makes me really sad as an adult that a teacher felt it was important to teach kids about how to not get shot by police.
shoot you in the back because you are no longer a threat.
Some wisdom doesn’t last the course of time
Legs are suuuuuper lethal. Hit the thigh, good chance of obliterating the femoral artery, gives you well less than a minute to stop the bleed before the person loses consciousness and maaaayyyybe a couple of minutes before they are unalived.
And as others have pointed out, they are massively under trained in the US, and the training they receive is basically that every person you interact with has a gun and they want to kill you, so pull your gun ASAP and make your first shot a kill.
Doesn’t a chest have more lethal zones in comparison to limbs?
I’ve wondered the same thing. That’s what police often do where I live. Here’s an example.
To my knowledge they’re not exactly instructed to do so but probably choose to do that of their own will likely because killing someone is going to fuck you up wether it was justified or not.
Are you aware there are countries all over the world where police don’t resort to shooting children when situations become tense and potentially violent?
UK manages.
Yes, I live in one of them. What does that have to do with what I said?
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Cops in America also firebombed and dropped C4 on civilians so ya’ll might actually be in competition with not just Sierre Leonean justice but like Islamic terrorists too. In fact, cops have killed more civilians than Islamic terrorists could ever hope for. Cops are the real terrorists of America.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing ya’ll bombed Philadelphia.
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Which is why cops are terrorists.
While super shitty and something a lot of people don’t know about, it also happened so long ago that when you bring it up to people they don’t really take it seriously as an example of anything and will dismiss whatever point you are trying to make. It’s a “historical event” more than it’s something people typically feel is a part of “now”. These days the police operate completely differently, as the person you’re replying to said, what we saw with MOVE was an ad-hoc action that isn’t really an example of typical police behaviors in the contemporary US. They aren’t dropping bombs from helicopters, it’s a weird dumb thing they have done but the world we live in now is roided out SWAT with military surplus and they are doing a pre-dawn raid because they love to LARP and that’s what they train for.
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Is that a garden hoe? Looks like an adze to me, which, if that’s what the kid was wielding… I could see an argument for use of force. An adze is basically a curved hoe with a bevel that can be as sharp as an axe’s, just perpendicular to the handle.
A garden hoe, which is what it looked like in the video, is a flat piece of metal on the end of a handle that would definitely hurt, but not like an adze, and likely wouldn’t be sharpened.
They used to call them shin splitters or something because carpenters back in the day would stand on top of logs and swing the adze down towards their feet to mill that face of the log flat. If you missed, well… Yeah, goodbye toes/shin/etc.
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It is to a weed.
