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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
As an active duty member of the US Navy and specifically the submarine forces, people like you make me less and less hesitant to set condition 1SQ for nuclear launch when the time comes.
If you can't handle a teenager with a gardening tool what the fuck can you handle?
Keep in mind: these are supposed to be trained professionals with convenient access to lethal weapons and yet every. god. damn. fucking. time their response is to escalate to the point of killing.
Cops can go fuck themselves. As a profession they've proven themselves as capable as a toddler and as dumb, angry, and confused as... I don't know. I didn't even think it was possible to be as dumb, angry, and confused as they are.
I'll do you one better, I've been attacked with actual weapons dozens of times and harmed someone beyond scraped knees and elbows defusing that situation zero times. I work in mental health, we're not allowed to hurt the people that need our help. Workers that do face legal action and internal investigation immediately, and every one of those actions stays on your record for years.
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.
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?
"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?"
The Sierre Leonean method(Dismembering tykes alive with machetes)is far more sophisticated than our approach here in The States
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.
We're lightyears behind ISIS... Our firebombing of civilians almost always occurrs on an ad hoc basis, ala. The Branch Davidian Compound at Waco. By contrast, ISIS mandates the regular use of such tactics as part of their organizational mission. Their dedication far exceeds that of any police department here in The US
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah they should totally be capable of disarming a 15 year old. They should be trained in proper force escalation and use of non-lethal force. My point was just that a hoe or an adze is most definitely a lethal weapon. Even just the handle is lethal enough. Nevermind adding on 2-3lbs of steel on the end.
Like, we can talk about the cop making a bad decision while also not minimising the fact that there was a perceived threat to life. Shit, people get murdered by hockey sticks and that's just like.. fiber glass.
There's no nuance to shooting a 15 year old. Nor is there nuance to some dude charging you with a weapon. Cops should be trained better. He had less than lethal methods to work with.
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.
An adze (/ædz/) or adz is an ancient and versatile cutting tool similar to an axe but with the cutting edge perpendicular to the handle rather than parallel. Adzes have been used since the Stone Age. They are used for smoothing or carving wood in hand woodworking, and as a hoe for agriculture and horticulture. Two basic forms of an adze are the hand adze (short hoe)—a short-handled tool swung with one hand—and the foot adze (hoe)—a long-handled tool capable of powerful swings using both hands, the cutting edge usually striking at foot or shin level. A similar tool is called a mattock, which differs by having two blades, one perpendicular to the handle and one parallel.