Do not confuse being incredibly, unreasonably lucky with making a GOOD choice. Making the RIGHT choice.
Your interpretation depends on the belief that most people, given opportunity, prefer to kill one another.
Not necessarily. Beating a cop in the head with his own gun is an unacceptable act, not far enough removed from killing him outright to make much difference.
Further, you are disregarding a critical factor: In most interactions, the initiator of conflict will be the escalator. This is because aggressive people are more likely to initiate contact.
In general life, the bad actor usually initiates contact. In other words, the mugger, carjacker, etc. If you are the victim in such an interaction, escalation is a real and dangerous likelihood.
In law enforcement, interactions are usually initiated by police. Therefore, there is no bias towards aggression on the part of the non-law-enforcement parties. This lowers the risk the officer faced. He wasn't confronting a person who had attacked and was primed to escalate.
This is dancing on much too fine a pinhead to be of interest or value. The police officer had the DUTY to initiate the interaction, and by society's laws, was entirely in the right to do so. Any violent reply by the contact-ee is felonious and utterly deserving of not only corrective force, but a level of force necessary to stop the attack. The officer failed to apply such force, and came too close to dying because of his mistake.
Posted by Ed Ames:We know for a fact that the officer is reported to have said that.
If we are to disregard information because of the source, why not disregard that there was an incident at all?
This is a silly argument. The point being made is that this is a statement that could be taken at face value, but -- like many other statements we hear each day -- a second, less gullible, interpretation seems to be at least as likely to apply. In the end, it doesn't matter what the cop said. He did the wrong thing, justify it however he might.
Everyone lived, the perp is in jail. Everything else is just armchair quarterbacking. You weren't there and you don't have the details he used to make his decision.
But like many other very important discussions we have here in THR, "armchair quarterbacking" is the wrong way to look at it.
Our opinion doesn't matter to the people involved, to the triers of fact, or two the true timeline of events that happened. Our purpose here is not to cheer the good guys and boo the bad guys -- this isn't like spectating pro sports. Our purpose is to take the information we are provided and create lessons and deepen our understanding of how we might best act in certain similar circumstances.
To claim "everyone lived so it went right" is to call our ST&T forum's
raison d'etre utterly valueless.
And, of course, had the officer used deadly force, the attacker may well have lived.
Unlikely.
Hardly. 80% of folks shot survive, including a lot of folks shot by officers. The officer should have used force adequate to stop the attack. He would have been entirely justified in using (potentially) lethal force under those conditions. Waiting around, lying unconscious on the ground, to see if the attacker will decide he doesn't want you to die today is a wholly unacceptable alternative.
Sorry, you are confusing courtroom standards designed to second guess "might have been" scenarios after the fact, with standards where empirical evidence exists. In other words, a court must decide what is reasonable after the perp is dead and nobody will ever know how things would have turned out without the use of deadly force. In this case, however, we know exactly how it turned out. We have hard facts, not reasonable opinions. When you have hard facts you use them.
But you're taking a bare, blinkered view of a few facts (no one died, perp ended up in jail) and saying everything that happened was the right thing, and what should have happened. That is not the case, and is an unsupportable assertion. Acceptable outcomes do not justify bad actions. And a cop beaten bloody and unconscious is NOT AN ACCEPTABLE OUTCOME, whether the perp lived or died.
It boggles the mind that you would claim that it is.
The FBI's training position, which they share with state and local law enforcement, is that to "deprive an assailant of the ability to carry on [life threatening] actions requires neutralization of the central nervous system, either directly by injury to the brain or upper spinal column, or indirectly by depriving the brain of oxygen through massive blood loss." (Deadly Force: Constitutional Standards, Federal Policy Guidelines, and ...By John Michael Callahan)
And that may cause death. Or may not. These are common themes every one of us is familiar with, here. The use of deadly force was justified. Either outcome was acceptable at that point, so long as the attack on the officer was stopped.
These are not novel, new concepts.
In contrast, non-le civilians are trained to immediately seek and/or render medical assistance.
Trained? By whom? I am not trained to render medical assistance to someone who just attacked me, and I don't know any non-le civilians who have been so trained.
Nor do I know of any situations where an average citizen has been prosecuted or successfully sued because they didn't render aid to someone whom they'd just justifiably shot. If that has ever happened, it must be quite rare, indeed.
