US police thread

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Associate
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Oh dear, not the first time I've seen that either. Really bad timing as well.

It still does reiterate the point though, that even when the police are in the wrong as in this case, it's usually started by the suspecting resisting in some manner. The suspects know what they are doing, they a rolling the dice and sometimes it doesn't go their way.

That lady cop is completely screwed now. It was obviously not intentional but talk about the double whammy of worst time and place Minneapolis for it to happen, and to happen to a 20 year old. Barely an adult and a young father such a tragedy.
 
Soldato
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But what happens when the person with mental health issues pulls out a gun and kills them?
What will people say then?

You obviously have an officer there as well, stood back but close enough to intervene if necessary. If the mental health professional can't talk them down or it gets dangerous then the police can handle it. Its far better to try and deescalate it though, the idea is to protect life and the police aren't trained to deal with a mental health crisis.
 
Soldato
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You obviously have an officer there as well, stood back but close enough to intervene if necessary. If the mental health professional can't talk them down or it gets dangerous then the police can handle it. Its far better to try and deescalate it though, the idea is to protect life and the police aren't trained to deal with a mental health crisis.
How do you determine if someone is mentally ill? Usually 911 get a call from someone reporting a person with a knife or gun, police turn up and within minutes it's all over. There's no time to call in the social workers.
 
Soldato
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How do you determine if someone is mentally ill? Usually 911 get a call from someone reporting a person with a knife or gun, police turn up and within minutes it's all over. There's no time to call in the social workers.

Have you never seen anyone who you thought was suffering a mental health crisis or clearly isn't all there mentally, paranoid, ranting etc? We aren't talking about bank robbers who might have mental health issues here. To be honest I can't imagine any police would have issue with cases like this being taken off their hands if at all possible. It doesn't sound like you'd have any idea how to deal with a situation like this so why do you expect they would?
 
Soldato
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Have you never seen anyone who you thought was suffering a mental health crisis or clearly isn't all there mentally, paranoid, ranting etc? We aren't talking about bank robbers who might have mental health issues here. To be honest I can't imagine any police would have issue with cases like this being taken off their hands if at all possible. It doesn't sound like you'd have any idea how to deal with a situation like this so why do you expect they would?
Yes I've seen them, but who is making this determination if they are mentally ill? Is it the job of the person making the phone call, the dispatcher, the police? Someone has to make the decision for the police to stand back and send the social workers in. If it's the police, then they are already on scene, and will have to deal with the potential threat, because in the end, the person has a weapon and is a danger, mentally ill or not.

Here we go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWBfhzMEV4

At what point should the social workers be called in? 911 gets calls of a person with a knife, police turn up, police start backing up, the person with a knife continues to move towards the officer and she is shot.


Here's another classic, police officer turns up, and is stabbed 16 seconds after leaving her squad car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeYN4t1oJ2E

Who the hell wants to be a social worker turning up to that...
 
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Soldato
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Honestly i dont know what is going on in these videos, multiple shots, everyone is still alive???

Like she is shot 6 times yet a few minutes later grabbing the dog???
And yet some people will say in criticism "why do they have to fire so many bullets?" It often takes many to put someone down.

They fire about 20 at this guy, and he is still grabbing the officer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s8oFOykyIo
 
Soldato
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Contrary to what hollywood will have you believe, the only time someone is likely to drop dead from one bullet, is a headshot. Anywhere else they could still potentially fight back, even if only for a few moments.
 
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Soldato
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They're dying as you watch.

Sometimes people aren't in a state to respect the pain and damage of being shot and the police are trained for body shots which are unreliable for immediate incapacitation so in the rush to get immediate incapacitation unreliably they keep firing.

That's how you end up with someone off their face on drugs being turned into a walking sieve before the damage and blood loss causes them to collapse.
 
Man of Honour
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Not really, they didn't shoot him did they. They had their guns drawn, rightly so because they couldn't see inside the vehicle because of the tints, and he didn't pull over immediately, massive red flags.

I prefer not to comment on the case of the army lieutenant, but it’s worth noting for the uninitiated, the difference between being stopped by a U.S. cop car, and a U.K. cop car.
In U.K., the cops will pull alongside you, and point toward the side of the road, meaning pull over, or they’ll overtake you and display a red sign in their back window, POLICE-STOP.
In the U.S., they’ll light up the red and blue lights across the roof of their car, and close on the rear of your car, expecting you to know the score, and pull to a stop at the side of the road.
The first time that I was stopped in U.S., the cop sat on my tail, roof lights flashing, while I tried to get further and further to the right, waiting for him to go round me, so that I could stop behind him.
When the penny dropped, and I eventually stopped, to say that the cop was not best pleased would be a king sized understatement.
He walked up to my door, unsnapping his holster as he approached, but didn’t draw his weapon.
After calling me all the dumb s.o.b’s under the sun for not stopping immediately when he lit up his strobe lights, he asked for I.D.
We were on our way to the airport to return home, and were a tad late, so I’d pushed it up to 65 in a 50 mph limit, both our passports and driver licences were in my wife’s document case, on her lap.
I told the cop this, and my wife reached for the case, THEN he put his hand on the butt of his gun, and said, “Very slowly lady.”
On checking my licence, and telling me again that I was a dumb s.o.b., he said, “You’re lucky that I stopped you right here, I’m going to let you go with a warning, but if you’d been in the next county, you’d have gone straight to the county jail for doing that speed.”
The second, and only other time that I was pulled over in the U.S., I stopped as soon as the cop “lit me up”, he had me bang to rights, but for some reason decided to let me off with a caution.
 
Soldato
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Yep if he pulled over when prompted things wouldn’t have gone south the way they did. Instead he managed to get one of the officers fired…
That's very generous of you to say the event which didn't happen would have gone fine.

The officer was meant to be the professional in the situation, with a fellow officer backing him up, he sent the situation south and got himself fired.

If you can't keep it together while dealing with members of the public being unreasonable then you're a bloody useless police officer since that's your entire job.
 
Commissario
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Yes I've seen them, but who is making this determination if they are mentally ill? Is it the job of the person making the phone call, the dispatcher, the police? Someone has to make the decision for the police to stand back and send the social workers in. If it's the police, then they are already on scene, and will have to deal with the potential threat, because in the end, the person has a weapon and is a danger, mentally ill or not.

..
Often the police are called to do "Welfare checks" on people who are suspected to have self harmed or become incapacitated, they get those calls because quite often the funding from other departments has been cut to pay for the police - this is where a lot of the "defund the police" calls come from, remove the money the police have been given to deal with those calls as the primary responders and instead give some of it to the likes of properly trained people, pretty much everywhere it's been tried (in both the US and elsewhere*) it's turned out to be cheaper and more effective than tying up several fully trained police on every call when often a cheaper medically trained person would do better.

Often these do not go well when the officer who usually has next to no training in dealing with mental health issues, or general health issues (a diabetic can seem drunk for example) and thus treat the person who is little or no threat in accordance with what training they do have, which is that everyone is a threat no matter if it's a little old lady on the floor or the 300lb guy.

Two extreme examples that show exactly how badly trained and how badly it can go wrong are the Psychatrist who was dealing with an IIRC autistic guy who was having a meltdown, the police arrived and after telling the psychiatrist to get on the ground, shot him whilst IIRC he had his arms and legs out stretched and was trying to both calm his patient and explain to the police what was going on. When asked why they shot him the answer was "I don't know".

Or the one where a disabled guy accidently triggered his "assistance button" and the service that answered it and had his full records did a call to the police, before calling the police again to say it was a mistake and no need to attend after managing to contact the user.
The officers arrived and spent about 30 minutes outside the door despite being told both by the occupant and the call service it was a mistake before breaking in and killing him - they IIRC claimed initially they'd forced entry immediately upon arrival but the call logs showed otherwise.

I know some people on here will think I have a thing against the police, but the opposite it true, I admire the police when they are trained, professional, and accountable, unfortunately a lot of the time in the US that is not the case, and there is little or no oversight by outsiders (not even an independent unit like we have here), and few if any repercussions for officers who are actively criminal in behaviour. To give an idea of how bad it is, IIRC the only national numbers for people killed "in custody" in the US is done by a couple of newspapers and even the FBI refer to it as there are no official records that have to be reported up to federal level and different forces account for the deaths differently.

US policing is a mess, training levels vary massively, no standards, no national database of officers who have been fired for serious misconduct etc and a court system that tends to take the attitude that an officer can do nothing illegal in the line of duty unless they've been taught that in that specific circumstance it's wrong (unlike the UK were IIRC officers are expected to know the law and follow it, but also know the exemptions that apply to them in the line of duty and the limits of those exemptions).


*In the UK we have a number of teams where you get a single officer, a medic and a psychiatric nurse who will respond to these sort of things as that covers the ability to use force/protect the public initially, offer medical assistance, assess the medical needs etc.
 
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