
Policeman fired for not killing a suicidal man - SherlockeHolmes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/12/west-virginia-cop-fired-for-not-killing-a-man-with-an-unloaded-gun/?utm_term=.a52e08452f02#comments
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projectileboy
Can we make any comparisons with how police in other countries typically deal
with these situations? I'd like to know if this is a hard problem for all
police everywhere, with similar outcomes, or if this is a problem unique to
U.S. police, based on how they're trained.

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Sharlin
Well, either this sort of a hard problem happens much more frequently in the
US, or the police in other countries are much less trigger-happy and better at
de-escalation, negotiation and other soft tactics.

The list of lists of killings by police officers in different countries is
pretty eye-opening [1]. In many European countries police killing someone is
always news and happens at most a few times per year, even in countries
comparable in size to the US.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers)

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oxguy3
Could a moderator please remove the "#comments" bit from the end of the URL of
this article? :)

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Imagenuity
You can remove everything after the ? as is the case with most URLs.

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kencausey
This is total extrapolation but I wonder if one or both of the other two
officers who arrived later aren't somehow more 'connected' to someone at the
police department or in local government. Perhaps there was even a "it's him
or me" type ultimatum.

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stillsut
I'd equate this to breaking quarantine in a medical situation. Sure, to the
doctor's trained eye, the little child did not seem infected and could be
welcomed in. This of course is a noble act for that doctor alone (putting
himself at risk to save the child), but it is reckless in that it puts _the
rest of the medical team_ at risk without their consent and in violation of
protocol.

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tempodox
We still shoot first and ask questions later. Anything else is Un-American.

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bobosha
The headline sounds like an onion article

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simbalion
this is proof that police officers in 2016 are meant to be nothing more than
executioners. This is exactly what the current government wants America to be.

The insanity in our government and police departments is completely out of
control. If they can't behave the way the people of the country want them to,
then we have to get rid of them.

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sp527
Suicidal man had a gun. Nothing to see here.

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pdabbadabba
This _might_ be a decent justification if he had shot the man. (Which, sadly,
other officers arriving on the scene did.) But firing an officer for _not_
killing him? That seems nuts. Can it really be police policy that an officer
_must_ kill any armed suspect that he or she encounters? I'm not sure I'd want
to live in a place where that was the rule.

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sp527
I would have thought this was obvious but the down votes suggest otherwise.
Yes: hesitation to act once you see a gun in the hands of someone who presents
him/herself as unstable places your life and (perhaps more relevant to this
situation) the lives of your fellow officers in jeopardy. The chief made the
tough but ultimately correct call in this case. Once an officer has proven
himself incapable of acting with deadly force in a threatening situation, you
don't keep him around to endanger the lives of the officers he works with.
Civilians can't empathize with the context, but what the officer did, in
failing to act, is tantamount to a cardinal sin in police work.

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imagist
> Yes: hesitation to act once you see a gun in the hands of someone who
> presents him/herself as unstable is a credible threat that places your life
> and (perhaps more relevant to this situation) the lives of your fellow
> officers in jeopardy.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. If shooting someone is the only
solution you have to a dangerous situation, then you have the emotional
maturity of a neanderthal and _you are the unstable person with a gun_.

> Civilians can't empathize with this context but what the officer did, in
> failing to act, is tantamount to a cardinal sin in police work.

Like hell civilians can't empathize. Cops don't have the monopoly on dangerous
situations.

If this is a cardinal sin in police work, then police work is fundamentally
broken.

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sp527
You sound like the perfect candidate for police work since you clearly place a
low value on your own life. Asking people to endanger themselves on the off
chance a person with a gun isn't going to shoot is nothing short of insane.

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mildbow
Well, if cops want to be lauded as heroes, maybe they need to act like it?

I respect EMTs. I respect firefighters. Interactions with any of them has been
a _warm_ and _human_ one. They truly are heroes. They save lives with little
regard for personal sacrifice.

Interactions with cops? Dehumanizing: a glaring symptom of the imbalance of
power.

We have forgotten, to our own peril, an old adage: Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes.

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sp527
I think resorting to our own anecdata coupled with what the media presents us
is a tempting fallacy. It's likely that most cops are good people trying to do
the right thing. You might be hard-pressed to find even staunch BLM supporters
who would disagree with that assertion. Where I think policing could stand to
be improved is in the realm of situations involving obviously non-threatening
individuals (particularly unarmed Black males). In general, our focus should
be drawn to cases at the margin and not those in which decisionmaking is
straightforward (e.g. armed and unstable people).

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mildbow
The perception of threat by a random police officer _shouldn 't_ equate to
judge+jury+executioner.

However, due to the lack of consistent repercussions, it's much better for a
cop to shoot first and ask questions later.

Ergo, if you _aren 't_ a cop and support this situation, maybe you need to
think again.

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DanBC
Indeed, an officer who manages to subdue a suspect without shooting them faces
repercussions.

Police officer sacked for not shooting black man holding an unloaded gun:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/police-officer-sacked-
not-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/police-officer-sacked-not-shooting-
black-man-virginia-stephen-mader-ronald-williams-a7245681.html)

> “I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told
> him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist
> to get me to react to it,” he said.

> “I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and de-escalate it. I knew
> it was a 'suicide-by-cop' situation.”

I'd be interested to know if that's common, or if it's a one off.

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Digit-Al
I don't have the source to hand, but I seem to recall reading that it is
becoming more and more common. People who are suicidal know that all they have
to do is wave a weapon (even an unloaded one) in the vicinity of a cop and
they'll be shot dead. Here's a Wikipedia article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_cop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_cop)

