If You Are Mentally Ill, American Police Will Kill You

[Kamakazie Sith]

My point here is that a struggle over a firearms is no joke. If you're disarmed then you then you could be completely at that persons mercy. In the academy we were told that in all instances where police were disarmed they were murdered with their own weapon 80% of the time. Feel free to disregard this statement as I am unable to find a source.

Don't shift the goalposts...

You wanted proof that in other 1st world countries, people try to get the cop firearms (and maybe, not sure - that they don't get shot for it)

No, I was looking for examples where those situations were resolved in an acceptable manner. I thought this would be obvious but it is not an acceptable story to have someone disarm a police officer and fire at them to then escape and be caught later. That's a fail and the reason should be obvious.

The articles you posted help show why disarming a police officer should be treated as a deadly force incident.

In the whole german speaking area (~100million people) we had 3 such occurrences, and only one got shot for it, after hurting officers. Others didn't even get shot after starting to shoot. Surprisingly, of these officers, none got "murdered by their own weapon". and only two out of five got injured. So much for 80%...

You realize that just because the subject is not successful in murdering or injuring the officer doesn't mean you get to disregard it, right?

Every year in that same area, we have lots of armed assault on officers with axes, knives, and whatnot - situations where US police would routinely use firearms and shoot to kill - and still, our police only kills single-digit numbers of these attackers per year, and only fires usually less than a hundred, and rarely more than 300 bullets per year. And is having less cops killed while doing so.

You also have more cops assaulted and nearly as many injured per year as the United States despite having fewer people and fewer cops, though I believe you have a higher rate of cops per 100,000 people than the US. This isn't acceptable in my opinion because your country is demonstratively not as dangerous as the United States, your police are suppose to have superior training, and you have far superior social services.

VIOLENT CRIME RATE
Homicide Rate;
Germany .8
US 4.7

Robbery;
Germany 65.2
US 146.4

Rape;
Germany 9.4
US 27.3

Aggravated Assault;
Germany 88
US 241

Is any of this a surprise given your superior social system? I find it odd that some of you think it would be the same.

Frankly, what they told you at your academy is the same bullshit as the "I feared for my life" excuse used by cops. In every other 1st world country, cops are held to higher standards in regard to firearm use.

It's not bullshit. It's statistical fact, just because it isn't fact in your country doesn't mean it isn't somewhere else. Furthermore, under US law attempting to disarm a police officer is considered deadly force.

By the way, I grow tired of the phrase "fear for your life". From day one in the academy we were taught that those vague descriptors alone are not acceptable articulation. If you say you "fear for your life" you better be able to articulate an action by the subject that would make a reasonable person feel that way.

My point? Press releases and news articles that do not contain the actual police report should be considered incomplete. If any officer just uses the phrase "I feared for my life" and nothing else to justify anything then they're wrong and their use of force should be found unjustified...at least that's what I was taught.

I know, you are an US cop, and you don't like that fact that the rest of the world views it that way. I can sympathize with you. But it stays a fact, no matter how often you try to claim that in the opinion of the US police forces, they are doing it right while the rest of the world is doing it wrong, even though they are obviously not having any of those troubles you insist they should be having.

I never said we were doing it right. US cops have a lot that we can learn from European counterparts. I have a great deal of respect for German cops and the European criminal justice system in general. However, your system isn't perfect and one of those imperfections, in my opinion, is the fact that you have more cops assaulted than the US does on a yearly basis.

You should be proud of the number of instances your police have had to use deadly force. Again, you should also be proud of your 662 intentional homicides that you had in 2014. It is damn good compared to the 14,827 that the United States had in 2014. Again, see the violent crime rate I posted above. You have a lot to be proud of and I would argue that our criminal justice system plays a role in how violent our criminals can be because the US prison system is a terrifying place.

So, again I don't think we do everything right. I think we do a lot of it wrong and the violence that plagues parts of our country is due to our own policy decisions. However, I do think we have it right when it comes to deadly force when the weapon is a firearm.

[Terralthra]

I'm inclined to be more ambivalent about this particular case because this is a confluence of many horrible social situations in the US. The way that people with mental illness and homeless people - groups with a lot of overlap, as if it needed to be said - are treated is simply abysmal, and that treatment neither starts nor ends with the police force. In this way, it is in many cases unlike racial prejudice where the police (wittingly or not) are the front line of oppression.

Two homeless people with mental illness got into an altercation. Someone called the police. I probably would've, too. Assuming that the police reports are accurate (and so far they match up with both bystander and body camera footage), what followed after that is tragic, but not indicative of terrible wrongdoing on officers' parts. What should they have done?

If we want situations like this to stop happening or end differently, we need to fix the way we treat homelessness and mental illness in this country, and the police are not the right tool for that job, or the place to start fixing.