The fact that cops are trained is precisely why they shoot people who try and charge them or others with knives. The correct first-line strategy for dealing with a knife attack is not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife, because once they do, regardless of how well trained you are how untrained they are there's still a high chance you'll end up seriously injured or dead. It's that imminent danger that justifies the use of deadly force. As I understand it, every self defence course worth its salt teaches this - even the ones focused on bare-handed fighting. Any tactics for dealing with attackers who do close that gap are just a high-risk last resort for situations where that fails.
Humans are entitled to use deadly force in response to credible threats to life. Someone waving a knife around, or even running while waving a knife around, is not that. The fact that knives exist is the reason that police carry billy clubs. A normal who citizen shot and killed someone of his own race because they were waving around a knife, would be charged with murder. Police officers should be better trained and better able to deal with knives than the average person. Those few departments who have mandated effective training have seen significant results from that training. [0] Well-trained ninjas with swords are actually quite rare in the modern policing environment.
This is missing the forest for the trees so badly it hurts.
Why do you think I said I'd be forced to shoot? Because even without training common sense tells you "not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife" is a pretty good course of action
By your logic the moment a person calls 911, the people who are supposed to help, the person has been sentenced to death. Think about that for a second.
1. The cops will arrive
2. "avoid knife getting close to me"
3. Less than lethal is not reliable, hell even lethal force isn't instant, I feared for my life, they're shot very dead.
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It's not an easy problem, but how is that ok? There's not many ways to fix it other than trying something other than lethal force.
Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could. It requires cops being able to put the most efficient response for self-preservation behind trying to save someone, which again, I'm not saying we require of anyone...
But let's call a spade a spade at that point. That's not the concept of policing I see paraded. That's not the "thin blue line", it sounds more like a cell of civilians that are deployed to bad situations where they then "apply self-defense"...
Thanks for making my point that the standard for officers is now people who are too scared to put the public before themselves... which is pretty much all of us. The opposite of a thin blue line.
> Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could.
I'm not a police officer because I'm not brave enough. I'd fear for my life, and I shoot. So instead of putting myself in a profession that should ideally require more of me, I don't.
If everyone felt that way, and did it your way, the only ones left would betge criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence. Without those who are willing to counter that wanton tendency to violence with a principled, controlled application of protocol driven escalation of force, civilization devolves even further into barbarism and might makes right than the arguable state in which it is already in.
If the people who were police were better able to keep cool instead of jumping to shoot people in the face in fear... all that would be left would be the criminally insane?
And somehow we'd have less controlled application of protocol?
There really would be a line that separates them from the "rest of us", and anti-police sentiment would be a hell of a lot weaker. I mean, how often do we have national anti-firefighter sentiment? Maybe when police use them to mow down humans?
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If being a police officer is just about carrying a gun and looking out for number one, all we're looking for is people who don't hesitate to pull a trigger.
Just realize, lowering the bar to "willing to shoot to protect self the moment anything threatens me" is a hell of a lot lower than "willing to put other's lives at similar value to mine, even if it risks my own".
Ironically the lower bar sounds like how attract to the "criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence"... to become police.
