You'd think the solution to "scared" and well armed officers wouldn't be more weapons.
Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
I'm not from US and I've never been there, but I think the problem is not only about police abuse. When you're in a country where almost anyone can have a weapon (and kind of the military range), the police also is having more risk than in any other country...
I used to think that too, but the problem with gun ownership in the US tends to be more about gun culture than ownership. Other countries with high gun ownership rates don't have nearly the same problems, especially when it comes to accidental shootings.
The problem of law enforcement killing people also has little to do with gun ownership. The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives". This can only either be explained with terrible training or plain old racism (i.e. black men seem more threatening by default to the extent that an unarmed black man is considered more threatening than an armed white man), or most likely a mixture of both.
There's a lot wrong with how police in the US is trained and held accountable. Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem.
>The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives."
Police officers only ever say that to lay the groundwork for a legal self-defense argument.
>Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem
On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
> Police officers only ever say that to lay the groundwork for a legal self-defense argument.
Or on the other hand, being afraid for your life is one of the motivators for resorting to deadly force.
> On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
It's a good thing that human beings are not equipped with appendages on their lower body that enable locomotion.
>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting
Tasers are routinely used to attempt to deescalate situations.
The problem is though they just aren't terrible effective and often fail. Simply wearing thick clothing can't prevent penetration, distance and wind can prevent them from even making contact, batteries age, etc. An enraged suspect, such as one on drugs or drunk, can also rip them out of their skin or outright not be deterred.
Here's one study that backs up what I've said above
> A total of 2,395 use-of-force reports indicated conflict ended at the first “iteration” (the officers’ first application of force). In the first iteration, TASER’s were deployed 2,113 times. Out of these deployments, 1,459 ended the conflict at the first TASER application (69-percent success rate); chemical agents had a 65-percent success rate; impact weapons had a 45-percent success rate at the first iteration; takedown had a 42-percent success rate; and compliance holds had a 16-percent success rate.
If you think using a taser is a way to "deescalate situations", you have a very different interpretation of what a "deescalation strategy" is meant to accomplish than most.
TBH the problem seems to be that US police is often trained to "deescalate situations" by shutting them down quickly and forcefully rather than actually deescalating, i.e. carefully defusing the situation.
Tasers are violent, less-than-lethal (i.e. potentially fatal) weapons. If they're ineffective at reducing casualties and decreasing the overall use of violent force, they need to be removed.
When you're confronted by someone larger than you, more muscular than you, that's enranged at their partner/coworker/family member and have been violent already and want to make you their next target, let me know how well trying to talk them down works 99 times out of 100.
Less than lethal options exist because in some scenarios the fact of the matter is you have to deploy a less than lethal option, shoot them or get hurt/dead.
While you might be able to talk your best friend down when he's mad that they put lettuce on his sandwich, that doesn't work when you're talking to someone that doesn't have respect for authority and is drunk/high/mad/mentally unwell and wants their way.
- Pepper spray/mace, despite spraying in a stream, are NOT targeted devices. They will immediately spread to the surrounding the environment and while the intended target may take the brunt of it, everyone in the immediate area will feel it to some degree
- Less than lethal rounds, like a rubber bullet, can be considerably more lethal than a taser
- Tasers can miss, fail to seat, and yes can cause death in some circumstances
- Bullets, at best, are going to cause permanent damage and at worst are instantly fatal.
I urge you to see if your local law enforcement has a community outreach program and if they do to actually attempt to talk to some officers about the sort of things they deal with daily and how they personally feel about their various offensive tools.
I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles. The extreme majority of law enforcement officers hope they NEVER have to draw their firearm or even need to deploy a taser or spray someone but the fact of the matter is when police are called to deal with someone that is being disruptive, or actively attempting to harm others, they've already thrown reason out the window and there is a realistic chance they're going to attempt to harm the officer(s).
A taser is a deescalation tool. Simply drawing it can be enough to back some people down although as the study I linked shows You've got roughly a 1 in 3 chance that even sending electricity into someone isn't enough to get them to comply after the first round. That alone should tell you something "shocking 1 out of 3 people causes them to continue to resist" is exactly why law enforcement carry firearms (again, that they hope they never have to draw and certainly never use).
> I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles.
You didn't even have to say that, it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.
You can talk about "but what if a polar bear attacks you" all day but that won't ever excuse why it is literally every week that new video evidence of US police officers brutalising or murdering people comes out and barely any of the officers involved ever are seriously punished for it.
If this violence was inevitable because of the gun ownership, you would see similar events in Canada or Switzerland. If this violence was necessary to protect officers from civilians, you would see vastly more stories about injured or killed police officers in the UK.
That you think your scenario of the muscular angry brute looking for "targets" is even remotely plausible should tell you something. Suspects are suspects, perps are perps, not enemy soldiers or wild animals.
Police officers in other countries are trained to deal with these situations without shooting unarmed people. How little do you think about your friends and family that you think they're incapable of learning how to do that?
You've crossed into personal attack. That's not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.
When our backgrounds are distant from each other, we need to connect across those distances, not become aggressive. There are two options: conversation or war. Here we want conversation.
Edit: we had to ask you about this another time recently too. Would you please review the guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit? It's not always easy, but it's work everyone here needs to put in, if we are to prevent the commons from burning.
It's fine. I'm not going to engage you in an argument about whether policing tone is productive if you don't police content (or the effective politics you produce by what content you do police) but I'm mostly just annoyed that the HN blocklist extension stopped working for some reason.
HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".
I don't know what you mean by the HN blocklist extension, but it doesn't sound like a feature we have. Are you using a third-party extension?
> the effective politics you produce by what content you do police
People tend to overinterpret that. Politically, HN is pluralistic (all major positions are represented, as you'd expect in any large population sample), but it turns out that pluralism is experienced by each side as bias in favor of the other side.
This is mostly an artifact of HN being a non-siloed community site. Nearly every other place where people encounter political views on the internet has already been pre-filtered (by subreddits, follow lists, friend lists, etc.) That's what everyone's used to, so when they walk into a place that doesn't work that way, they quickly encounter a much higher frequency of opposing if not offensive viewpoints. This is painful; it feels a bit like getting smacked in the face. Because this painful experience doesn't come with any explanation, people reach for the handiest and in a way most comforting explanation—not, "oh, this is about what you'd expect from a statistical distribution", but rather "this place is a (SJW|alt-right) cesspool". Even if the distribution were more in your favor, you'd still feel this way, because we're so primed to notice the things we dislike and to weight them more strongly.
(I know you said you didn't want to engage about this, but it comes up so often that every now and then I feel like writing out my latest take on the topic.)
>it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.
992 people were shot and killed by police in 2018 [1] with 686,665 sworn officers [2] in the country. For a little comparison to killings by civilians - Chicago alone had 530 murders that year [3].
In 2018, there were an estimated 1,206,836 violent crimes [2].
106 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2018. Of these, 55 officers died as a result of felonious acts [4]
So 'the lengths I go' are simply basing my opinion in facts and not emotion.
Calling a robot dog a weapon is a stretch without more context. Why can't this be used as a communication platform to replace no-knock raids? You'd just need to equip it with a loud speaker and a short range radio for the most part.
>Why can't this be used as a communication platform to replace no-knock raids?
Because telephones and loudspeakers already exist, and law enforcement clearly doesn't want to replace no-knock raids, because they could already do so if they chose.
This is just a land-based drone, expect law enforcement to put it to the same use as military drones - surveillance and violence. Maybe bomb disposal/retrieval.
>You'd think the solution to "scared" and well armed officers wouldn't be more weapons.
>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
>US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
As much as I hate the entrenched corruption the MA state police stands for they seem to be content to waste taxpayer money on useless toys and enriching themselves (recurring falsified time-card scandal anyone?). It is thankfully very rare for them to kill people under questionable circumstances so I can't complain too much about them wasting a little more on a cool toy. This is kind of how the deal works, the state is basically buying their good behavior and letting them have toys a reasonable parent would say no to is part of that.
I generally agree with you about giving additional hardware to police not turning out well for the people being policed though.
I don’t think, that anybody uses a Taser in swatting situation. These are marketed in Germany as better replacement for tear gas instead of replacement for a gun.
Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".