Wayyyy earlier Lind asked why people don't comply with orders.
People were yelling at this dazed, unsuspecting man to put his hands up. And he got shot for putting his hands up, albeit quickly and after some fumbling.
Cops protect us. Their jobs are dangerous. Still, they need to be held to a higher standard than the people they protect and serve. They go into a situation:
Sober
Trained
Mentally fit, ostensibly
Physically fit
Prepared for confrontation
They are up against people who may be legally intoxicated, are entirely untrained in conflict situations, have unknown mental health status (lots of focus on race with police brutality,
People with mental illness 16 times more likely to be killed by police that's a fun read and the title is self explanatory), physically unable to comply with certain orders, and especially in the case of innocent people, completely caught off guard.
There is no reasonable way to argue that the burden of responsibility here lies on untrained civilians to react perfectly to an extremely stressful event like this. Back when I was taking medication that made me prone to seizures, the lights on police cars gave me a seizure once while an officer was questioning me. I seemed hella shady because he couldn't get a clear answer from me because I was going into a seizure. And a cop can't possibly know that. Any and all non lethal means should be used first, not second, because no one can know how capable someone is of following orders perfectly under stress.
This isn't to say cops are evil. They put their lives on the line. They just want to get home to their families. But I do too. I want my husband to come home to me if he goes to the door at night to check on something while tired and confused. I love the man, but when he is exhausted he cannot follow what is going on.
It's frustrating for many reasons, but also because there is some evidence that de escalation training greatly reduces this.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/201 ... story.htmlThere was a
story not too long ago about a cop who was disciplined for not shooting someone who was trying to suicide by cop. No one was hurt, the guy didn't pose a real threat in the first officer's opinion, but because an officer who arrived at the scene later thought he did, he shot the man and the officer originally at the scene was the one who got in trouble. That first officer was a military vet and there is a reason military vets who become cops tend not to shoot recklessly - they have extensive training in combat situations.
This lack of vital training hurts everyone. No police officer wants to go home to his wife and kids and say, "Today, I shot someone else's daddy." This is criminal and allowing it to continue is of no benefit to genuinely good men and women who put their lives on the line. And it's certainly of no benefit to little kids and widows and bereaved parents whose loved ones were slaughtered but who can get no justice because we set our standards higher for civilians than we do for the people who are supposed to protect them.
It is smart to comply and surely there are people who deliberately don't, but a lot of these people are doing their best and just cannot keep up with what is demanded of them for whatever reason.