Why don't they shoot him in the leg, or shoot him once? I mean, why a hail of gunfire? They keep shooting and shooting, the guy's on the floor, surely you try and help him survive once the threat is dealt with? Cuffing a man who has 12 gunshot wounds? What the fuck!? Society doesn't need or want this kind of "protection".. Civilised humans do not deal with our problems with mindless violence like this..

From my understanding, law enforcement officials are trained to aim for the chest and to 'stop the threat.'

I can't see in the video if he had a knife. I heard the police yell to drop the knife. Either way, this guy was looking for this. He started aggressively moving towards the police. I don't find fault in them shooting him.

Really, so whenever someone tries to commit 'suicide by cop', they should oblige and just kill them? They should never try to de-escalate the issue, only use the maximum force possible at any opportunity?
I find total fault in them shooting him, they had many other non-lethal options but chose the most deadly response possible to a minimal, avoidable threat.
The officers had every opportunity to retreat safely, had time to pull out a tazer or pepper spray, and were in no danger. Teaching them to shoot to kill anyone 'threatening' is insane and should lead to more cops being shot in self defense. If they're going to kill any 'threat' and I think they might think I'm a 'threat', it's self defense to kill them first, right? Obviously.

I'm sure the right wing would be perfectly ok with "urban thugs" standing their ground against a tyrannical police force.

All the guy did was make two cops' day by getting to kill another person. Fucking sucks.

Very provocative controversial video worthy of a *discussion (so I won't discard), but it is definitely snuff, so I'm redacting the video.

I didn't realize he was holding a knife, but it does seem he was. Not only did the officer(s) yell at him to drop the knife, but the guy with the red-and-white-striped shirt yelled at him "Come on, drop it, bro!" (at 1:38) immediately before the officers started firing.

Seems obvious it's suicide by cop. The officers should not have used a TASER if he was holding a knife and approaching them. Deadly force is definitely necessary in that case. In fact, I think the officer on the left may have even let him get too close as it is. If the guy did want to attack them and wasn't just looking to die, he could have thrust forward and stabbed the officer while he was getting shot.

This video is being sent to Sift Talk for discussion - discuss requested by lucky760.

@dannym3141 a gun is simply the wrong tool. Hollywood has taught us that police are all expert pistol shots who can target a body part with ease. From what I've read and from talking to a cop friend of mine, the reality is that you don't shoot what you don't intend to kill.

A taser would have been more appropriate here.

@artician, I think that's incredibly unfair. I'm not saying what the cops did was right, but I highly doubt they were thinking "fuck yeah, got to kill me a dude today".

@ChaosEngine I understand wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt. It does sound unfair, but my outlook is colored by the multiple police officers I know personally who think, talk and act that way.
It's disgusting, but time and again I've seen exactly how the institution works inside, and I know too many guys who became cops because they "get to beat the shit out of people".
The people I'm speaking of are truly sociopathic masochists and assholes. It has always been primarily in urban areas (Sacramento, Oakland, LA), and the problem runs straight through the institution end-to-end.
I have police in my family, some of them are good people. I know that a lot of police are good people, so I'm sorry for being so bluntly blinded by my personal experience-turned-anger. When things like this happen so frequently, it really gets my ire up.

Ultimately you're right, a taser would have been slightly more appropriate. Talking would have gone a lot further in the realm of humanity though.

A tazer may have been a option here if they have it handy. These officers had just rolled up. They were a distance away and just initiated the interaction. The man immediately starts coming at them and is brandishing a weapon. This guy called out the cops and had a plan. The cops do not deserve to get knifed here.

Why? If he had a knife then he wasn't presenting a threat to anyone except himself and anyone in his immediate reach. A taser would have dropped him (note I'm talking about the kind that shoots wires, not the close up version).

Hell, they could have at least tried the taser. Hell as @artician said, they could have tried de-escalating the situation by talking. If all that failed they could still have shot him. Yeah, it's a stressful potentially life-threatening situation, but that's what cops are trained for and paid to deal with,

If someone is presenting a direct and immediate potential threat to your being, you cannot take any half-measures and hope you're able to save your own life and that non-lethal force will suffice.

In a situation where someone has a deadly weapon and is approaching you and they could potentially kill you, there are no do-overs; you only get one chance to survive and to do something to try stopping them is to allow the possibility that your attempt will fail.

That's why you cannot just try to stymie such a threat, and you must do whatever you can to definitely stop it.

The entire purpose of a police force is to put themselves in harms way to protect the public.

If he had a gun, I would completely agree with you. Hell, if he was rushing at them with the knife brandished, I would completely agree with you. Are you seriously claiming that between two cops one couldn't have tasered him with the other ready to shoot if it didn't work?

This was a clearly mentally disturbed individual and all the cops here did was make the situation worse with by immediately escalating things.

By the way, I think you're wrong about saying he wasn't presenting a threat. He was absolutely presenting a threat to the officer and was definitely close enough to assault him with the knife; it only takes a split second to cover a lot of ground and kill someone with a knife.

As soon as the cops exited their vehicle he was standing there with a hand in his pocket. At that point they had to have guns drawn in case he was holding a gun in there.

Then when he revealed that it was a knife, were the officers supposed to have a discussion about which one of them should put their gun away and exchange it for a TASER?

It's also not a guarantee that a TASER will drop someone. I've seen people totally unaffected by a TASER, typically when they're on some heavy duty drugs like PCP.

See my comment above.

At first the guy looked like he could be holding a gun, so they had their guns drawn.

When in those few seconds after he revealed he was only holding a knife could they have coordinated that master plan you described? That's wishful thinking and totally unrealistic.

YES!!! A thousand times YES, they absolutely should have. These aren't two random idiots with guns, they're supposed to be trained to deal with this kinda thing! It shouldn't even be a discussion, it should be an automatic response.

And again, if it didn't work, the other one could still have shot him.

That's the problem with an armed police force. When your first tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

I think it's utterly ridiculous to think standard operating procedure should be:

"Whoever is closer to the perp should pull out a gun and the other should put his gun away and pull out a TASER even though the perp may attack while he's making that exchange. And then! That officer should fire the TASER at the perp and hope that it stops him and he doesn't attack the other officer, but if he does attack the other officer that officer should start shooting and hope that he doesn't himself die, meanwhile the TASER-holding officer should exchange the TASER back for his gun and then start shooting hoping that the attacked officer has survived up to this point. And if that doesn't work, the cops should start running away with their arms flailing because it would be awful for them to protect themselves from someone who apparently wants to kill them."

Sorry, but that's absurd and a thousand times absurd.

First of all that's no less complex than anyone of hundreds of scenarios the police deal with every day. Secondly you're deliberately making it more complicated than it needs to be.

How about they start without guns drawn and talk to the guy?

How about: the guy had a weapon in his pocket? You cannot approach a guy with a weapon and try to talk to him, especially when he's yelling at you to kill him.

Again, what you're proposing is just not at all based in reality. Regardless of complexity, your scenario is one where you believe officers should be trained to potentially get themselves killed, and I vehemently disagree they should ever have to do that.

It's absolutely based in reality. I can say that with 100% certainty, because that's how the NZ police do it every day. They don't even carry guns*.

I know all of this, because a friend of mine recently became a cop and he's had to deal with situations like this.

The US is blinded by their obsession with guns. They're useful tools but they should be the last resort.

And while I don't believe that officers should be trained to get themselves killed, there is a level of risk that is inherent to the role of policing and they must be prepared to accept that.

I am not one of the rabid anti-police libertarians on the sift. If you look at my comment history you'll see that I support police more often than not. They have an incredibly hard job, but it should be a hard job. When you give some one the states monopoly on force, I expect them to be held to a high standard. In a civilised nation, "shoot first" is not an acceptable policing practice.


*they have guns available in the car and there is a special Armed Offenders Squad, but front-line uniformed police don't as a rule carry side-arms.

The BBC News Magazine had an article on this exact subject, and pointed out that:

When it comes to US police officers firing their weapons, the rules - on paper - are very clear.

"Ultimately you come to your firearm as a last resort," says Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

"You would only use that weapon in a situation where you felt your life or the lives of civilians in the area were in danger."

[...]

While there is no national standard, the state rules and regulations regarding officers' use of deadly force is mostly consistent throughout the country.

lucky760's reasoning is sound.

Anyone that has researched and/or trained on weapon on weapon defense, in this case knife vs. firearm knows the Tueller's Drill. It has been a standard for over thirty years. Basically,

The Tueller Drill is a self-defense training exercise to prepare against a short-range knife attack when armed only with a holstered handgun.
Sergeant Dennis Tueller, of the Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department wondered how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover 21 feet (6.4 m), so he timed volunteers as they raced to stab the target. He determined that it could be done in 1.5 seconds. These results were first published as an article in SWAT magazine in 1983 and in a police training video by the same title, "How Close is Too Close?"[1]
A defender with a gun has a dilemma. If he shoots too early, he risks being charged with murder. If he waits until the attacker is definitely within striking range so there is no question about motives, he risks injury and even death. The Tueller experiments quantified a "danger zone" where an attacker presented a clear threat.[2]
The Tueller Drill combines both parts of the original time trials by Tueller. There are several ways it can be conducted:[3]
The "attacker and shooter are positioned back-to-back. At the signal, the attacker sprints away from the shooter, and the shooter unholsters his gun and shoots at the target 21 feet (6.4 m) in front of him. The attacker stops as soon as the shot is fired. The shooter is successful only if his shot is good and if the runner did not cover 21 feet (6.4 m).
A more stressful arrangement is to have the attacker begin 21 feet (6.4 m) behind the shooter and run towards the shooter. The shooter is successful only if he was able take a good shot before he is tapped on the back by the attacker.
If the shooter is armed with only a training replica gun, a full-contact drill may be done with the attacker running towards the shooter. In this variation, the shooter should practice side-stepping the attacker while he is drawing the gun.
Mythbusters covered the drill in the 2012 episode "Duel Dilemmas". At 20 feet the gun wielder was able to shoot the charging knife attacker just as he reached the shooter. At shorter distances the knife wielder was always able to stab prior to being shot. (Wikipedia)

That a firearm, particularly a handgun, will instantly incapacitate an individual is not a working concept and is fallacious. Variables such as adrenaline and drugs are attributable. Shot placement is trumps. Anything but a CNS. central nervous system, shot is not efficacious in safely stopping the threat. Not an easy or sure target sans movement, stress, etc.

Law enforcement put their lives and safety in harm's way every day. They are not there to die needlessly. An individual with suicide by cop or a LEO's death in mind is a serious threat to be dealt with with prejudice.

By the way, research knife wounds vs. handgun wounds. There is much data, ER, medical examiner, law enforcement. The deadly seriousness of knife wounds are well documented.

Tasers...I would not want to risk my life behind one or anyone about whom I care.

err ... ahem! *cough* so, whassup with this video?

...'snuff said....

*return

Returning this video from Sift Talk - return requested by kulpims.

Moving this video to MrFisk's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.