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For some reason this is unpopular, but I don't think a police officer should be allowed to remove their firearm from its holster until actual assault has occurred, unless non-police citizens are in danger.
A cop merely being scared should never be a reason somebody dies.
If you can't handle the pressure, don't be a fucking cop.
… and I can’t believe I have to add this, but not obeying is almost never a valid reason to just start blasting. If no one is in danger, police have the power of radios, time, reinforcements
This is the norm in many countries. For example anytime a policeman takes out a firearm, they need to file paperwork explaining the encounter, which is suprisingly (or not) a huuge deterrent.
I’m in the US and years ago a cop had to come by to put down a rabid raccoon that was wandering around. I jokingly asked him if he’d have a bunch of paperwork later for discharging his firearm (around houses to boot).
He did not seem to care, lol. I think he just gave me a “nah” or something.
The lack of discipline in American cops is hard to understand. Why does anyone put up with this?
Yeah but then police would actually have to receive training on de-escalation. Can you imagine paying teachers more? Better to use the traveling drill instructor screaming "SHOOT OR DIE MAGGOT".
The HBO Watchmen series has this as part of its premise.
Watch a YouTube channel like Police Activity and you'll see plenty of OIS / body cam videos where if that were the rule there would be a lot of very dead cops.
And the reality we have now is a lot of dead citizens who didn't sign up to a job inherently involving danger. Is that a preferable situation?
You think there would be less dead citizens if cops waited to pull their guns until after assault? Go and watch a OIS channel like Police Activity and come back with a straight face and claim that.
I think there are plenty of other options that exist before drawing weapons. And I think the comparative successes of police in other countries justify this belief. So yes, I do strongly believe that on the whole there would be less dead total, citizen and cop combined, if police were restricted from drawing their firearm until danger has been actualized and were thus instead forced to focus time and resources on necessary de-escalation training.
I wonder how well the police killing rates correlate with civilian homicide rates. Is our police shooting problem in the US just a reflection of our angry adversarial culture?
Glancing at the stats by country on Wikipedia, no surprises. The US is better than many rough places in the world, but the rest of the developed world just humiliates us.
Police in other countries don't face an epidemic of guns, crime, homelessness, drugs and mental health issues. If the US wasn't so dysfunctional and actually attempted to tackle these issues in a holistic way then I assume the role of cops would also change. But right now it is not that way. They are trained so if someone comes at them with a knife, or draws a weapon to threaten the cop or somebody else, they WILL shoot. Watch the body cam footage on https://www.youtube.com/@PoliceActivity/videos or the state cop channel of your choice and you'll see exactly why.
And to repeat what I said somewhere else, I'm not on the cop's side, but I am on the side of full disclosure and body cam footage to show context. I support defunding the police - although, not the name which is a fantastically stupid way to describe it - but supporting mental health services, tackling drugs & recidivism and other assistance would mean less people in these confrontations.
I have been watching a ton of those channels lately. It’s interesting to see how things go down in the real world without a bunch of annoying editing and interruptions.
There are of course many cases where the cops give somebody a hundred chances to stand down or comply with orders or whatever. But there is probably also a strong bias in choosing the clips. These channels seem to heavily lean towards “criminal’s day went from bad to worse” or the opposite towards “idiot cop tries to arrest innocent person / does not know the law.”
Most major police forces in the US release footage of officer involved shootings. I think predominantly they show the police using lethal force appropriately. There are some occasions where they clearly don't, or where you wonder how it got to the situation where the cops were put in a position to have to defend themselves from somebody that the system could have helped.