Reason looks at alternatives to deadly police force:
The man in the Camden, New Jersey, police video is practically begging to be shot. After using a knife to menace a cashier and a customer in a fast-food restaurant, he strides down a street slashing at the air as police repeatedly order him to drop his weapon. The man keeps walking, defiantly waving the knife.
Several cops form a ring around him and move along at a safe distance, block after block. This goes on for several tense minutes, as the viewer waits for shots to ring out. But they never do. Eventually, the man drops the knife and is collared.
It’s a reasonably happy outcome. Had the 2015 incident occurred a year earlier, before the department adopted new tactics, “we would more than likely have deployed deadly force and moved on,” Chief J. Scott Thomson told The New York Times. Instead, the offender survived, and no cop had to deal with the trauma of killing him.
If you can deploy multiple cops, and no one is in immediate danger, I suppose that works out — but I do have to wonder if someone who menaces random folks with a knife is going to “get better” with a little time away.
Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring takes the expected point of view in his book When Police Kill:
Police in America face a far higher risk of being killed on duty than police in Europe — because criminals here are far likelier to have guns. That difference accounts for the far higher rate of fatal shootings of police and by police in this country.
The risk an officer faces of being killed with a knife, by contrast, is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. In a typical year, the number of cops killed with knives in the United States matches the number killed in England and Wales: zero. Criminals kill more police with their hands and feet than with knives.
But people armed with nothing but knives get killed by cops all the time in the United States—as many as 165 times per year, or more than three per week. In England and Wales—where cutting instruments are no less available to criminals than they are here—there were only three fatal shootings of any kind by police from 2011 to 2015.
So, people armed with “nothing but knives” get killed by cops all the time in the United States, and the number of cops killed with knives in the United States is zero. Hmm…
“I do have to wonder if someone who menaces random folks with a knife is going to “get better” with a little time away.”
Yes, the pre-2015 tactics are better: a form of capital punishment/eugenics without the horrendous cost of trials and years on death row. And skipping the trial is perfectly legitimate if it’s self defense.
The Huffington Post in 2016 noted that “The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial.”
They draw entirely the wrong conclusion. Moldbug saw it better: “the libertarian artillery officer faces a serious moral dilemma. Does artillery violate the natural rights of the target? I would say: the entire purpose of artillery is to violate the natural rights of the target. Clearly, if you could get your hands on the people your artillery is pointed at, and subject them to a full and fair judicial trial for whatever their offenses may be, you would have no need at all for artillery.”
“But people armed with nothing but knives get killed by cops all the time in the United States—as many as 165 times per year, or more than three per week. In England and Wales—where cutting instruments are no less available to criminals than they are here—there were only three fatal shootings of any kind by police from 2011 to 2015.”
Maybe the police have it right and the police in England have it wrong?
Anyone who compares English and American murder rates is using completely different methodologies and statistic types.
They don’t count them, clear them, or compile them in the same ways.
I read that garbage men were more likely to get killed in the US than cops. I can’t remember where I got the statistic, so take it with a grain of salt.
I think cops are way too likely to shoot people.
My belief is that affirmative action has greatly declined the quality of the police force and allowed many more thuggish types to be police.
Pizza-delivery men even more so than garbage men. Such a dangerous job as delivering a pizza. Who would have ever thought it.