New Orleans Police Problem and the Martial Arts, Part Two

Dave Rishar said:
I do understand the point that you're trying to make here, but we must understand that for the officers in question, you can't just cross the street or pretend it's not there. They were forced to confront the man - that's what they're paid to do.
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I have watched NYC's finest disarm crazy's with weapons (so large a percent of whom are Vietnam vets who have been trained but are now homeless, living in bus stations, streets and subways.) Plain clothes and uniforms work together to disarm people in NYC. People who are also carrying a suitcase in their other hand. And we know how it is with suitcases in big city's now.
Anyway it's like watching a ballet. They work in densely populated areas and can't blaze away with bullets. I also remember street fights where an unarmed opponent (not a cop) would wait for his opening and severly damage the knife holding hand with a 2x4 a friend had tossed him.

I could be wrong. I have been before
 
About all I wish is that some cop had been armed with a 12ga with beanbags,that MIGHT have helped..maybe
 
I'm quite frankly having a difficult time in seeing the "problem" in this given case. Here in a forum dedicated to sharp things, I think it's safe to assume that MOST (not all) of us are quite aware of how dangerous even the "average joe" can be with a three inch blade. No need to rehash the old stats about disarming, 21 foot knife attacks, etc.

It sounds to me like the officers did what they felt they had to do in order to ensure there going home after shift that night. Granted, it would have been a much happier ending if they had effectively used pepper spray against the perp, tasered him, used a tranquilizer gun, or whatever. But...in accordance with my own beliefs....when someone threatens MY life, I'm going to neutralize that threat in the safest and best way possible for ME. If I can safely disarm, talk down, use less than lethal force or get away from that threat, I most certainly will, if not...then I am prepared to use lethal force. It would seem rather hypocritical to hold such a standard for ourselves, but hold another individual to a higher standard, especially when running from the threat is not a realistic option. Hmmm....how odd....I'm sensing shades of objectivism coming out of myself here.....Perhaps not as much odd, as it is disconcerting...:eek:
 
it's one thing to have a threat from someone you arrested and he's on the lawn, quite another when some local looney is waving a broken steak knife from the trash and you somehow just can't seem to take command of the situation. The solution so many times now is that the looneys arent really human. They're not us. They want to live like this, homeless, sick, broken, so f**k them.

We had a Korean vet who showed up in town once a year. Everyone knew him as "Chicago" and the kids were scared of him. Especially the routine he'd recite about making marines out of all of us. "I'll stick a thompson submachine gun up all yer asses and make marines out of you". it was one of the few things he spoke of, but he spoke with command. It wasn't till i got a lot older that I found out that the parents of kids who didn't come back from Korea let "Chicago" eat and sleep with them till the itch to travel came back and he'd disappar. Head injury? Probably.,Untreated and undiagnosed, sure. Plus they called it shell shock back then but it was the same as the kids now are experiencing when they turn around to see their buddy from back home in pieces all over the road. Now it's called PTSD. I'm babbling here. I'm suffering from DOTD shock. sorry one and all.
 
Let me change the question at hand, so to speak. (ITs my thread, I can drift it)

Let's say your teenage son has gotten just too wildly angry at you and he's stomping around the house with a knife in his hands.

Do you call the police?
Do you go get your gun?

Whatever happened to baseball bats ?

I am not anti-police. I am just hoping for a wider range of options in police response to perceived threats.

About 5 years ago there was a 14 year old boy who was shot to death in his own front yard. He had a kitchen knife and the police that came just didnt know what else to do. I try to imagine myself as a cop in that situation, and I just cant shoot.
 
I have seen this video, and the cops were justified in responding with lethal force.

Now, non-lethal weapons, tazers could have been effective. I have been tazzed by Louisiana cops before (training experience, plus I got it on video) so I know they have them, and I know the efects of it. In most instances, it will knock the person to the ground for the duration of the chock, which is usually 5 seconds. As soon as the tazer stops sending the voltage, you are pretty much good to go, can get right up with only very limited dazed feeling. It is an almost instant recovery.

But if you don't have the non-lethal weapons with you, which was probably the case, then it really isn't an option anymore. Now with the guns. The police has guns, the suspect has a knife. The gun is more effective up till a certain point. It has greater range, but up close, the knife can actually be more dangerous. Until he puts the knife down, it IS a lethal weapon that he is threatening the cops with. A gun is pretty effective as a deterrent. But if the deterrent effect does not work, then it it has to use its lethal force for it to be any more effective than a paper weight. Once the man made an attempt to use the knife on anyone (much less an officer) the duty of each police officer is to protect themselves, their fellow officers, and other citizens form the threat. Each officer with a clear shot had the right to fire as soon as that happened. Unfortunately for the victim (disregarding my own feelings) he left the officers little choice then to end his life.
 
DannyinJapan said:
Let me change the question at hand, so to speak. (ITs my thread, I can drift it)

Let's say your teenage son has gotten just too wildly angry at you and he's stomping around the house with a knife in his hands.

Do you call the police?
Do you go get your gun?

Whatever happened to baseball bats ?

I am not anti-police. I am just hoping for a wider range of options in police response to perceived threats.QUOTE]


Not to be beligerent or anything...thread drift is usually a wonderful thing, but....by developing this hypothetical scenario, I feel that a debate of reason has enormous potential to become a debate of emotion, which has the frequent tendency to lose power and focus. (as well as instigate arguments, but we're all above that around here, right?:D ) We could develop hypothetical situations all day long and stack the odds towards any answer that we seek, but it doesn't change the reality of a given situation.

I'm also very, very skeptical of anything reported in the media. There's ten thousand miniscule factors in every media story that we as the readers never know about. As a consequence I try to be slow and considerate of how I assess a media story. All I can say for sure is that I hope to never have to walk a mile in any of there shoes...the cops or the perp.

Incidentally, I agree very much with the development and training of less than lethal weaponry, but on the flipside I think it would be quite tragic for an officer to be stabbed to death with a loaded gun on his hip because the latest-greatest pepperspray-taser-make 'em crap themselves and convulse space age gadget didn't work during a critical moment. Less than lethal weaponry is wonderful, but I feel an officer should ultimately have broad discretion when it comes to the implimentation of such devices.

As a general rule of thumb I believe that when lawyers or politicians create legislation regarding "use of deadly force" innocent citizens, soldiers,and police tend to be placed in much graver danger.
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Using extreme stereotypes to characterize other extreme stereotypes seems to leave the middle road, which is where most people and situations fall into, alone.

I'm sad no one could shoot the legs out from under the guy. I know all about the use of lethal force and agree the shooting was justified, even without seeing the video. We've talked about how fast a suspect can cover ground with a knife and deliver a fatal blow often enough here.

But justified is not the same thing as best outcome.

Having worked in acute Psych units, and seen criminals brought in under mental evaluation laws, and having talked to police and those associated with this branch of legal and psychiatric intervention, and having personal experience in witnessing Police intervention, and having lived very close to the bottom of the bucket in society, amidst crazies and criminals, I'd say for the most part Police are pretty good at taking into account some schizophrenic just being off his meds, or someone's teenage son high on PCP.

I've lived in some jaundiced and bitter urban centers, LA and outskirts, and the Police even there do a good job. They don't really want a justifiable homocide on their records, you know. It is a very difficult bureacratic nightmare to wade through.

Rigid rules, and the lawsuit take away a lot of discretion. We've done this. If a cop tries to knock someone on the side of the head, and misses, and the suspect manages a terrible wound to the officer or a peer or a civilian, he's in trouble. Why didn't he shoot him? If he knocks the guy out and gets sued, the system won't believe his life was in danger because he would have shot the guy first instead. Since obviously lethal force was unneccesary, why did he clobber the suspect in the head causing permenant brain damage? And so it goes, round and round.

Cops are surrounded by catch 22's. We've given them laws and rules which make it easier for them to kill rather than maim. Even with this, I think most of them give a decent shake to a mere crazy or druggie most of the time.

>>>>>>>>>

A thing:

In the years I've posted here, I remember using the F word twice. One time was when the former forumite, who'd been banned, came back under a new name and tried to defraud Uncle Bill and say the blades were crap. Eikerverang and whatever the heck his last alias was.

But anyway, it is rare in this forum to even see truncated versions of the F word, and I personally like it that way.

Throwing in epitaths all the time is a habit easily aquired but usually does not do me any credit at all- when I fall into it. And I do occasionally in the 'real' world. I usually get out of there before I've dug too many holes.

I don't think anyone here, or any argument or set of ideas, deserves the F word riding along. It makes the place look cheap. And F's little brothers, S and H, are spare or become tired real fast.

Like CB radio.

Seems to me I've used damn and Hell- recently. I'll have to watch that. Some of the most dangerous people on this forum never use profanity, anyone notice that?


munk
 
I cant figure out why I feel this way. I know I am probably perceived to be a very conservative, republican, shoot first and ask questions later- type of guy.

All of this sounds like bleeding heart liberalism, doesnt it?

I am a ninja in training, for God's sake.

And yet, and yet, the more I learn about real ninjutsu, the less inclined I am to want to use lethal force on people, even those who ostensibly want to injure or kill me.

I dont want to put police in danger, and I dont want to coddle the bad guys.
It just seems like the gun has replaced all other forms of police response. This is a bad trend. It's not a good thing, for them or us.
 
I think yer a good ole boy, DIJ....a bit strange....but a good ole boy nonetheless.:D

I always admire your level of compassion, even when I don't agree with you on a given topic.
 
I see two distinct issues here. First: was this a "good" shoot, i.e. were the officers justified in their response? To that I still say yes. But the second part is, Why did this man have to die? At what point was the decision made that cast his fate and what could have been done do change the outcome before that point was reached?

I think maybe some of us are talking past one another on these two points rather than disagreeing on either of them.






P.S. You're a good man, Danny.
 
We can get into a lot of what-if's here, but what we have to work with is what happened.

Litigation and such aside, there are some very real reasons why shooting for center of mass is taught to most (if not all) law enforcement and military agencies. Granted, we've all seen videos of police snipers shooting guns out of hands, but we haven't all seen the videos where they missed and people died because of it. (It happens. Not frequently, but it happens.) Precision shooting under stress is highly difficult for very experienced shooters. It's nearly impossible for anyone else...

...and that's not even the half of it. I don't mean to pick on you Munk, but this topic is one that I used to deal with a lot.

Now that my life has taken a turn, I think that part of my problem with it is a problem with me: that I have an embedded need to believe in the system that I used to preach. That might be part of it, but the logic makes sense to me as well. My beliefs stand, but I'm more open minded these days.
 
I think we can all name alternate, less-than-lethal systems for controlling violent people. Nets! Riot batons! Tazers! Bear spray!

Why doesn't every cop on the beat carry all that gear?

Handguns are the most reliable last-resort weapon we can give them that are compact enough to carry regularly.

Then we threaten the police themselves with investigations or even criminal charges if they use them, in that tense situation, in a way a judge and jury can mull over a year later for months at a time, and decide they should have used a butterfly net instead.

Sheep, wolves, and dogs. Stop blaming the sheep for being tasty and don't blame the dogs for protecting them. If the wolves would go back to eating grass, we wouldn't have these problems.

Personally ... I do feel a lot more could be done with a coordinated police action with batons, before firearms were employed. But I haven't seen what happened in this incident, and second-guessing the man on the spot, with HIS life on the line, is counterproductive.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
I think we can all name alternate, less-than-lethal systems for controlling violent people. Nets! Riot batons! Tazers! Bear spray!

Why doesn't every cop on the beat carry all that gear?
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Well, here in Louisville they have pepper spray and Taser guns.

But I would no more say police shouldn't be armed than I would say that Citizens shouldn't be armed.

I just found out that in Kentucky it is an aggravating add on if someone you kill is a public official. Sounds like animal farm to me.

Now the thread swerve is completely off the road.

I give you DIJ.


(Love you man).
 
DIJ, I never thought of you as conservative or liberal, but I do think of you as randomly weird. I also like you a great deal.

Say again; there is a difference between a legal, even justifiable outcome, and BEST outcome.

Satori, you want to talk center of mass, that's fine. I'm with you. It was still not the best outcome for the situation in this thread. And out of the huge variety of situations Cops must handle, I don't want to live in the world where some kid doing drugs and not complying with Police is shot to death every time.


munk
 
you won't be seeing the F bomb here anymore from me munk

I realize now and probably should have a long time ago that one of the moderators is a lady.

sorry. I've been in trouble before for this exact same thing with best friends in their homes and have always been ashamed afterwards.

I offer my apology as I've always done in these cases. and will keep the expletives out of the conversation
 
munk said:
Satori, you want to talk center of mass, that's fine. I'm with you. It was still not the best outcome for the situation in this thread. And out of the huge variety of situations Cops must handle, I don't want to live in the world where some kid doing drugs and not complying with Police is shot to death every time.

munk
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I saw the video on CBC and although I have never seen a person shot in real life, I can't believe that if someone shoots you in the hand or arm, you can still hold a knife and that if someone shoots you in both legs you can still walk. I also can't believe that New Orleans finest aren't good enough marksmen to hit what they aim at at 40 feet. I also can't believe that 9 officers with pepper spray and batons could not encircle and subdue one man with a tiny knife. No-one has mentioned he was black. He was one man with a knife, not two armed gangs spraying bullets with wild abandon as we had in Toronto the other day. Those perps got away leaving a teenage girl bystander dead.
 
we no longer discriminate against bulk users of ammo in this country.

The NRA has made us all aware of how great gun ownership is and that's a good thing. Now the gun makers are indemnified this year by congress, and for the life of me I'll never understand why it took congress to pass a law assuring gun makers could churn em out 24/7/365.

I don't want to see ammo makers have to make huge contributions to politicians, driving ammo prices through the roof because some folk just can't stand the indiscriminate use of ammo.
 
fredricktoo, this is a serious subject. No one is belittling the problem. You don't have to mock the establishment to establish your own credentials ... as what, I'm not sure.

The Political Arena is a better venue for sneers and slurs, and Whine & Cheese is better yet.
 
"Esav Benyamin fredricktoo, this is a serious subject. No one is belittling the problem. You don't have to mock the establishment to establish your own credentials ... as what, I'm not sure.
The Political Arena is a better venue for sneers and slurs, and Whine & Cheese is better yet."

such a serious subject that you're gonna make it personal it seems. Not only personal, you're gonna tell me where to get off. I absolutely don't think I'm going to take your advice or you seriously.

But I shall take a few weeks off here, cool off and consider whether I should just read the Cantina and not participate, or participate weighing in only on less explosive subjects.
 
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