Quote:
Originally Posted by Bent Wookie
Two points:
That's the problem. You pull up stats that police aren't killed by knives and then use that as your rationale for the fact that it's not a lethal force encounter for a cop. That's a real jump in logic. Could there be another explanation as to why this isn't as common beyond just offender behavior? Could it be maybe police actually do diffuse the majority of situations involving a knife? But some just aren't solvable in such a method.
Police aren't just randomly allowed to shoot someone with a knife. No one is saying that. Every situation is different. If someone has a knife and can't physically get to a cop holding a gun, it's not lethal force - other forms of control, deescalation, non-lethal are looked at. Why? because cops have time and space at that point. Now if that knife wielding person is with a certain distance and clearly making a motion to proceed towards the cop, maybe raising his arm with the knife and jabbing it like a sword, you're going to likely get shot.
It's simply not as simplistic as you are making it out to be.
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Cops aren't killed by knives here or the UK to any great degree, it is incredibly rare in both jurisdictions and yet the police in the UK respond wholly differently to these situations, truth is we just assume the police are at risk when the statistics say they aren't, and then use this instinctive response to justify a massive amount of police shootings each year that I suspect are mostly (not all clearly) but mostly unneccersary.
If the police in the UK were dying in their droves, or even being mortally wounded here 2 or 3 times a year then the way the police currently respond would be fair enough, I'm not arguing police should be asked to die, its just in truth we are asking the public to die in high numbers for no justifiable reason.
Massively more policemen are killed in car accidents, not even on purpose, just plain accidents, than are killed by knives and yet we still ask policemen to chase people at high speed, we don't say 'well he might be killed so we'd better not let the police use cars', I am just asking why we accept the police killing 15 or 20 Canadians a year where we know, by looking at international statistics, most are avoidable because at best 1 policemen is killed a decade which is also the amount that are killed in non armed forces.
Its just bloody pointless