An example I tend to give is the case a while back where someone was wielding an axe. Two police officers went after him, and the axe-wielding man was shot and killed because he went for one of them.
Success, surely? He protected his partner, who might have been harmed.
The way something like this would likely have gone down somewhere like the UK would be that the first responders would have called for reinforcement, and then kept their distance and waited. You don't engage someone armed unless there is immediate danger to others. She should never have been close enough to be in danger.
In the UK they may or may not call in a firearms team in such a case, but if they did, they'd be brought in as a precaution. More likely they'd close down the area around him and wait, and wear the guy down, and then see if they could get him to drop the weapon peacefully.
For comparison there was a case of a man robbing a house near me a while back unarmed, and the police brought in 20 officers, chased him until he climbed onto a roof. Then they simply waited for 4-5 hours until he accepted he had no way out.
So many of the cases I hear about from the US is down to impatience and seemingly some kind of belief that they need to stop things as quickly as possible rather than trying to stop things with as little conflict as possible.
I don't think it's necessarily so much punishment as fear that if they don't do something, things will escalate. But most of the time if you contain a threat and wait, the level of conflict will de-escalate. So much violence boils down to fear that the other side will be willing to use more violence. And that fear is pervasive through some groups of people. E.g. we see that in the insistence of keeping or carrying weapons.
The United States has areas of significantly bad crime. 4 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world (measured by murders per capita) are in the U.S. These cities have murder rates from 44 to 60 per 100,000 people.[0] For reference the United States as a whole has a murder rate of 4.88, and United Kingdom has a rate of 0.92.[1] Making matters worse the violence isn't distributed evenly in those cities, it's often concentrated in a few "bad parts."
There are neighborhoods in the U.S. where your chance of being the victim of a violent crime in given year is 1 in 7.[2] That's for civilians. When we send police in to try and protect those victims it's hard to send them unarmed.
Note that while I think there's a severe issue with US gun culture, most of what I wrote applies irrespective of whether or not police go in armed. That is not the point.
The point is whether or not you 1) go in without backup, 2) seek to de-escalate rather than escalate with armed threats from the outset.
If you're likely to meet armed resistance, then the UK strategy of getting civilians away, contain while waiting for backup and then seek to wait out and de-escalate is even more applicable exactly because the risks are higher, and indeed UK police tends to stick to that even more firmly when they come across armed resistance, while the US approach seems to be the opposite of going in more aggressively when they see a weapon.
Perhaps the reason we have such violent cities has something to do with our gun culture. It could be the ease in which we get firearms. It could be skewed due to mass shootings. It would definitely be an interesting point to look into but just saying that we have more violent cities doesn't mean our police should necessarily have a higher rate of officer involved shootings, just a higher overall number.
I wonder if some of the preference for violence in the American policing tradition goes back to Western films - where outlaws are wanted dead or alive, a quick draw is the main thing a lawman needs, and the climax of the film is the lawman meeting the bad man in the street, drawing first and shooting him dead.
I think it's more likely that U.S. police are, on the whole, poorly trained for these kinds of situations. I don't have any hard evidence to support this but have heard interviews with people who study the problem of police violence say that improper training (or more likely zero training) contributes mightily to the problem.
American police officers training depends on the state. It's generally a months long process and quite rigorous physically and mentally. I have a friend who literally just went through this and I can say he definitely had a lot of training. At the end of the day what they are trained to do is come home at the end of the night. Keeping themselves safe is top priority in a job that can put them in a lot of dangerous situations. We've had many discussions about this line between police officer shootings and justification.
You see that also in American action movies where the "good" guy often with joy kills the "bad" guy. You don't see that that much in European movies where a killing situation is often portrayed with more internal conflict.
You can also see quite violent Hong Kong movies with police officers shooting fleeing criminals in crowded public places, but as far as I am aware they don't have the same issues.
One could also easily point to the much higher probability that a criminal has a gun in the United States, although I do not think that that alone is sufficient.
There are so many comments worth responding to in this thread, but this one in particular raises my ire. Are you really trying to reduce policing tradition in America to western films? How about the real west, where self defense was a way of life. I don't want to be too combative but I seriously don't understand peoples inability to understand the principles of self defense as a natural human right, and yes that includes killing when applicable. It just reeks of a naive liberal mindset when people try to say you shouldn't shoot someone who breaks into your house in the middle of the night. Police don't have a duty to protect you, and very often will not protect you, and most of the time will just draw chalk lines around the bodies.
Its your own responsibility to protect yourself and your loved ones or other people who can't protect themselves, that's a fact, and it's high time the anti-gun crowd pulled their heads out of their ass, because a gun equalizes an otherwise unequal situation.
God made humans, Sam colt made them equal. I'm an atheist but the principle still stand. This goes for one of the most vulnerable classes of humans as well, women.
As a combat vet I have some major issues with the militarization of police, and their poor training/methods, so I got a bit ot. If we were to have a real conversation, I think we would be better served to talk of the pinkertonian origins of policing, or the CIA/FBI influence on it (eg. OccupyWall Street snipers), and the general lack of punishment of oath breakers, or the thin blue line.
Instead far too many use it to pivot to a session of anti-gun circlejerking.
western films? How about the real west,
where self defense was a way of life.
I restricted my comment to western films as I can talk about them truthfully, having seen several. I can't comment on the real west truthfully as I wasn't there and neither have I engaged in the serious scholarly study that would let me tell reality from legend.
I'm not sure how the rest of your comment relates to my comment.
As a trained member of the military I would sincerely hope that you realize there's a huge continuum in self defense that doesn't automatically begin any response to a perceived or real threat by shooting at someone.
Success, surely? He protected his partner, who might have been harmed.
The way something like this would likely have gone down somewhere like the UK would be that the first responders would have called for reinforcement, and then kept their distance and waited. You don't engage someone armed unless there is immediate danger to others. She should never have been close enough to be in danger.
In the UK they may or may not call in a firearms team in such a case, but if they did, they'd be brought in as a precaution. More likely they'd close down the area around him and wait, and wear the guy down, and then see if they could get him to drop the weapon peacefully.
For comparison there was a case of a man robbing a house near me a while back unarmed, and the police brought in 20 officers, chased him until he climbed onto a roof. Then they simply waited for 4-5 hours until he accepted he had no way out.
So many of the cases I hear about from the US is down to impatience and seemingly some kind of belief that they need to stop things as quickly as possible rather than trying to stop things with as little conflict as possible.
I don't think it's necessarily so much punishment as fear that if they don't do something, things will escalate. But most of the time if you contain a threat and wait, the level of conflict will de-escalate. So much violence boils down to fear that the other side will be willing to use more violence. And that fear is pervasive through some groups of people. E.g. we see that in the insistence of keeping or carrying weapons.