I suppose I've never thought about a lifeguard intentionally drowning a panicking swimmer (or preemptively drowning someone who appeared not to be abiding pool rules) because they wanted to ensure their own or other's safety.
Likewise, firefighters are tooled for survival in the environments they're expecting to work. Police share more of their tooling in common with robbers and kidnappers than with lifeguards or firefighters, who we don't regularly see them killing others.
If we made regular police white glove, non-lethal social servants and only minimally armed them (or not at all), would this decrease violent escalation? We'd need to treat mental health crises as medical situations and have an armed response division trained in deescalation, but I think the current belief in us vs them and commonplace sanctioning of deadly force are wounds on our society that need to be healed.
Agreed. This is not comparable to the Uvalde situation. In Uvalde, the cops were specifically trained for that situation and apparently refused to act. That's a deplorable dereliction of duty.
The Arizona drowning was different. AFAIK cops are not typically required to be able to swim nor are they trained to be lifeguards, especially in places where no swimming is allowed (which this was). Even if one of the cops did know how to swim and happened to be trained in water rescue, he/she would have needed to take the time to doff all their gear before going into the water or they would have sunk like a rock. And in that case, who guards their gear? Their partner obviously, but now they've left their partner alone with a potentially hostile crowd while the partner is also guarding their weapons and trying to make sure the officer who entered the water is not drowning. And what if the swimming officer starts to have difficulty? Who rescues them?
If I were the supervisor of these officers and one entered the water alone while leaving his/her partner alone, I would probably fire them for making a dangerous situation worse (if they lived).
The only proper procedure here is to radio for additional resources, which they did. (Whether they did so immediately or dragged their feet is another question.)
EDIT: Looks like 3 officers were involved. This lessens the danger on shore but the danger to a lone swimming officer still applies.
Which is why I think I might be on board with this. The “police are professionals trained to keep their cool
even in life threatening situations” boat sailed ages ago. So making it so police aren’t in the life threatening situation at all might be a win.
If the problem isn't that someone is employing existential violence, the response shouldn't be to send a bunch of people with guns. Often the police are called on to harass people who are on the fringes of society, such as the mentally ill or the homeless, and the best case scenario is these people are arbitrarily harassed, but they often end up imprisoned or dead. If someone is having a crisis, there should be a resource society provides you to help protect yourself and them; the police are not that resource.
If we're going to have a bunch of people with guns, we can't tell them that they're warriors, the last line of defense, the thin blue line, et cetera. It greenlights abuse by creating a culture where the rules are viewed as impediments which can be discarded as long as you get away with it, justified as "doing what is necessary," a sort of Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer theory of policing. This creates a culture that imposes it's desires on society rather than one that protects, serves, and defends society.
Sorry, I should do a better job at explaining why I said what I said. I'll try to do better at that next time. What I meant to imply is that non-violent forces like the social worker or the man defending his business (using pleading and non-violent force) can very easily be met with violent force. Whereas sometimes even the fear of violence is enough to stop the escalation of force. I honestly don't even know if that black man that defended his business lived. I can agree with you police need to be better at de-escalating they and their departments should be striving for that. Maybe training could help? Also at the same time I feel, and I'm not saying this is something that always happens but it's a thing that always happens under the given circumstances, when something isn't de-escalated without force (such as a failed de-escalation by a social worker or non-violent de-escalation by police) it by nature will escalate, so to prevent loss of life sometimes force can be necessary (such as what the police can do). So, leaving the police completely out of it in the first place could be dangerous to the social worker and other parties involved.
About half the people killed by US police have a mental illness. Police do need to be careful but shooting people is probably not the right thing to do in most of those cases.
Better training in de-escalation and rapid tranquilisation and psychiatric nurse accompaniment would be better.
In practice, very few police interactions require a firearm, so why have that as the default? If a police officer is working in a dangerous neighborhood, then they can exercise their right to carry a personal firearm at their own expense. However, any decision to use the gun would be 100% the individual’s risk as they won’t be able to hide behind their departments policies and procedures as an excuse to shoot people. So a police officer deciding to shoot someone is no different from your neighbor deciding to shoot someone. It might also incentivize individuals to seek out real firearms training on their own.
EMS people might be trained in mental health, but police officers are better prepared to deal with aggressive people, defend themselves (with batons, pepper spray, tasers, etc), and make arrests.
For dangerous situations that require firearms, you can call in a completely separate organization dedicated to that, like SWAT or whatever.
This is one of the most important points to me, and I rarely see it discussed. Defenders of killings by police usually point to the officer's feelings of safety and right to defend themselves using what seem to be the same standards as any average civilian. If you gave me a gun and put me in a dangerous situation I might pull the trigger when I didn't absolutely need to out of fear, and it might be totally reasonable for me to do that. That's why I'm not a police officer. We have a profession where part of the job description involves the possibility of shooting civilians to death, and we are somehow unable or unwilling to get tough and establish a bar of professionalism commensurate with such an extraordinary job description.
There’s a difference between telling people to not put themselves in risky situations thst will just lead to adding a casualty (firefighter running into a collapsing building) and shooting people to “be on the safe side.” The equivalent for a cop would be to wait for backup, not murdering someone else because they’re scared.
I sure hope the mechanism for last resort cases isn't men and women in uniform with guns, because then social workers will be very unwilling to approach any potentially violent situation without the not-police-uniform-gun-men there.
Sorry to be cynical, just the experience of a police officer in a place where social services are funded far, far better than the US - police don't want to deal with mental health all the time, but being the agency of last resort makes it very easy to abdicate responsibility to.
I didn't say they should be social workers, I suggested they have a degree in social work. Police encounters with those in mental distress (either temporary due to a crisis or a deeper mental illness such as schizophrenia) frequently end in tragedy. I want to believe that a police officer trained as a social worker would have a much better chance of de-escalation a personal than current police do.
The alternative is to have unarmed social workers, untrained in police work, accompany police officers to mental distress calls. This brings with it a host of other problems including, but not limited to, the possibility of the social worker being injured or killed in an altercation with an armed person in distress.
You´re conflating two concepts that are the opposite of each other. The examples you gave are about people putting _themselves_ in more danger when they have safety gear. This is analogous to cops being more likely to de-escalate situations instead of just shooting prematurely (the latter of which is much safer for the cop in general). The concept we´re discussing in this thread is making _others_ safer in the presence of a situation involving cops. The defenses in all of these alleged excessive cop violence cases has been that they were trying to protect their safety and were thus premature with firearm use (et al). The effect you´re describing in essence exactly what we want: cops will feel safer and thus be less inclined to excessive personal-safety measures that are actively dangerous to civilians (like quick trigger fingers).
I´m not sure I articulated that all that clearly, sorry...
They already have non-lethal options available if they intend to stop someone. I feel like this would increase the lethality of situations where non-lethal approaches are warranted rather than decreasing the lethality of other ones.
Firearms should not be treated as implements of lethality and nothing but that. Imagine how many police shooting cases we'd see where cop claims he was shooting to wound but 'missed'
Haven’t read full article because of paywall, but I get a gist.
A mate in a city I used to live, a mental health expert himself, mentioned that when mental health experts are first responders they have a tendency to shoot fewer people, and get shot at less often.
Recently I’ve been advocating that police attendances should also require at least one public legal expert / mental health expert to attend.
Police are trained to respond with escalating force. Fair enough, someone in society has to be delegated that responsibly. But it should be tempered by the attendance of those who are trained in public health, safety, and legal advocacy.
I'd go further, it's only reasonably to prevent grave and _imminent_ danger to others.
The situation is kind of ironic, because it was vaguely associated with the protest against how police tends to kill people because they can't be bothered to find non-lethal ways to solve problems.
I don't disagree with really much of anything you said, but my comments was in regards to the inability to perfectly take pre-existing conditions into account and still perform their job of protecting the public from violent suspects that don't respond to even the best, most perfect de-escalation techniques. A person attacking a bystander, or a cop for that matter, especially with potentially maiming or lethal force, may have to be dealt with using police force. That force, even when it's the minimum necessary to protect the public, may nonetheless trigger a pre-existing condition, and I don't think there is any realistic way of avoiding such edge cases.
Historically, providing alternative methods of de-escalating situations to law enforcement has proven effective in diminishing usage of lethal force. In the end it's speculation, and your guess or mine.
Your guess is premised on (1) the belief that police officers will act more carelessly, thinking they're in a video-game if they control remote machines. My guess is premised on (2) the belief that undue escalation of force happens when police officers feel their life is at risk, and removing this element from the situation will improve things.
(1) assumes that police officers are acting violently out of disregard for others, and (2) assumes that police officers are acting violently out of fear for themselves.
I'm a humanist and I think (2) is more likely than (1). It seems a simpler and more pragmatic assumption, to me, that police officers may act overly violently due to fear. I much prefer dealing with someone who's able to maintain a cool head, than dealing with someone who feels threatened.
While deadly police incidents seem less common in Australia, don't kid yourself that our police always get it right.
They could do with better de-escalation training to deal with situations in critical environments like crowds [1] or when dealing with mentally ill people [2].
I think anyone carry a deadly weapon, civilian or government officer should bear extra responsibility to safeguard the safety of all people around them.
With very few exceptions, anybody in a life threatening (or what they perceive to be a life threatening) situation is going to pick themselves over a person that they don't know and believe is trying to kill them. It is exceedingly hard to train this out of people and the only way to know whether or not you successfully have is to observe them in actual gunfights. I would even go as far to say that the trait is probably concerning from a psychological standpoint and the pool of people you would reliably find it in would raise some eyebrows, too.
Getting an officer's skin in the game doesn't make them think about what they're doing. It results in them deciding in 1-2 seconds that they're in a dangerous situation, and they're going home no matter what. I really don't think you understand what being in a life-or-death situation does to normal, mentally sound people. The idea that officers having time to decide whether or not lethal force is necessary is a bad thing just doesn't make sense.
It's also important to remember that police go into what they understand to be life or death situations.
When we look back on these incidents they seem horrible, but if you give someone a gun and give them a reason to believe their life is in danger you're probably going to get deadly consequences. It's obvious to us that the cops life wasn't in danger in the instances you mentioned, but people are fallible and they may have brought past trauma or prejudice to the incident. It's probably extremely rare that a cop actually wants to murder someone and is looking for the right opportunity.
That said, if cops had better non-lethal alternatives to guns, we could save lives. Something that is more effective than tasers and works immediately at a distance. The cops objective in a potentially deadly situation should be to immediately incapacitate rather than kill.
Likewise, firefighters are tooled for survival in the environments they're expecting to work. Police share more of their tooling in common with robbers and kidnappers than with lifeguards or firefighters, who we don't regularly see them killing others.
If we made regular police white glove, non-lethal social servants and only minimally armed them (or not at all), would this decrease violent escalation? We'd need to treat mental health crises as medical situations and have an armed response division trained in deescalation, but I think the current belief in us vs them and commonplace sanctioning of deadly force are wounds on our society that need to be healed.
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