I'm not sure what kind of training European police officers have, but I find it hard to believe there was another option in this case. Brown was pummeling Wilson and was reaching for his gun. I'd suspect the European officer would be dead right now if he wasn't armed.
Sure that would stop them from looting today, but they still have to live with those people afterwards. I think it's best to let the animals run wild and use the insurance to find somewhere better to live.
I haven't been following the details of this case, so maybe this has been answered. Why are there no cameras on the police cars? Seems like it would prevent alot of this deliberation.
It was a small town cop, not every police department spends money to have cameras. That said, even if there was film of the incident, those who want to believe that Brown was mistreated would still believe that, they aren't exactly the most rational people. There has already been ample evidence that the cop was actually the victim in all of this and it hasn't helped anything.
I disagree. Most people are very rational and a video of the incident would likely put the entire thing to rest.
It is unfair to compare American assailants to Europeans. Most Europeans are a bunch of pansies and therefore it is unnecessary to pull a gun on them.Most can be subdued by slapping them vigorously. Hence the use of a baton is deemed as excessive by Europeans.
This is what happens when you give police military type outfitting... We have now encouraged our public officers to search and destroy rather than protect and serve. Psychologically the bigger arms have emboldened officers resulting in lives lost that are not necessary and in the bigger picture are not creating more peace. More and more we see often petty crimes (or not even crimes) being escalated, by both parties, to death...this is entirely because of the push to further arm. Officers are now soldiers and the enemy is the citizen.
Don't f-ck with the Russians or East Germans or Pikeys or the Basque or the Corsicans or the Neapolitans or the Sicilians or all those scandinavian viking strongest man dudes.
http://prospect.org/article/expert-us-police-training-use-deadly-force-woefully-inadequate Expert: U.S. Police Training in Use of Deadly Force Woefully Inadequate In U.S. police department budgets, most funding goes to salaries and equipment, and virtually nothing to training. It's a deadly formula, says Maria Haberfeld of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Paul Waldman: Did you think what the officers did [in Powell's shooting] was appropriate? It seems pretty clear that that's standard operating procedure. Maria Haberfeld: Yes it is, absolutely. PW: Are those procedures adequate to deal with those kinds of situations? MH: The procedures are adequate; what's not adequate is the way police officers are trained. That's the problem, and this is something I've been talking about for decades. The majority of police officers are overwhelmingly trained with a focus on the technical part of use of force, and are not trained enough in the emotional, psychological, physiological aspects of use of force. And of course, the social aspects of use of force: how this all plays later on within the community, how it impacts police-community relations. So the use of force is not something that should stand alone. Unfortunately, in most of the training academies, it does stand alone, even if there is some rhetoric about, "Oh yes, we integrate [it] into other modules.'' The reality is—and I look at police training all the time, in various jurisdictions around the country and around the world—that's not the case, unfortunately. PW: So, is most of [that training] focused on "Here's how to protect ourselves"? It seems that's the message when you hear police representatives talk about this. Their focus is, obviously, that police work is very dangerous, and if there's any kind of a threat at all, we're going to neutralize it. MH: Yes, but how you perceive the threat is a subjective thing, and how you go about neutralizing the threat is also a subjective thing, even though they're trained around this continuum of force that allows them to go from one step to another, or skip a number of stages based on their assessment of the situation. Their assessment of the situation sometimes can be exaggerated based on their previous experience, based on what's going on in any given moment, based on the bystanders' reactions. So it's a very complicated and complex issue that cannot be just explained by: "We have the right, we are authorized, and it's our discretion." There are a host of variables that go into things. And those variables, at least in my mind, should be constantly addressed, and not end with the police officer graduating from police academy, and then the only thing they have to do is to qualify twice a year whether or not they can still carry a weapon. But this qualifying twice a year is focused completely on the technical aspect of use of deadly force. PW: One thing I've seen in the discussions about this is, for instance, that the police in England and Wales fire their guns only a few times in a year. MH: Because they're not armed. PW: So that raises a couple of questions. If most of them are not armed, what do those police do if they don't have guns, and they're confronted with a suspect who, say, has a knife? MH: First of all, there are a few countries where police forces are not armed—Ireland would be the other one. The British police have units that are armed, and if there is a situation that would require an armed backup, then the backup is called for. But a situation like this, where they have somebody with a knife, it's a simple explanation. It goes back to training. Police forces in U.K., in Ireland, in other countries where police forces are not armed, they have a much more extensive, in-depth training than we have. An average training in the United States is fifteen weeks. Fifteen weeks is nothing. Police forces in other countries have twice, three times as long training as we have here. It's all about how police officers are prepared to deal with people who pose threats to them or to others. This is not something that we should save money on, but to me, that's exactly what we're doing. We are saving money on police training, saying that it's very expensive to have longer training. And I think it's irresponsible in a democratic society to say that a profession that has the authority to use deadly force, we just should shorten the training because a longer training is too expensive. Basically, what we're doing is putting a dollar sign on people's lives, both police officers and members of the public. PW: So that means that if you're a policeman someplace else—England, France, Germany—you're going to be trained so that you're better capable of talking that person down and getting them to put down their knife or their pipe or whatever it is that they have? MH: No doubt in my mind, based on what I am seeing in police training in other countries, that police officers are better prepared to deal with the public over there than the ones we have here. No doubt in my mind, based on the research that I have done over the years. PW: Do you think that a controversy like this one will make police forces around the country more likely to reexamine how they do their training? MH: No. PW: It won't make any difference at all? MH: No, and I'll tell you why. Ninety percent of the police budget goes to salaries in any department. So, whatever is left is allocated to equipment and some other stuff, and nothing is left for training. The majority of police departments around the country don't have in-service training. So if you don't have the money, you're not going to re-examine. PW: Well that's a little depressing. MH: It is depressing. I've been writing about this for twenty years, it's very depressing to me. [Most] police departments in the United States are not NYPD or LAPD. Police departments in the United States are exactly what we're seeing—the Ferguson police department, fifty cops. This is the average size of a police department in the United States. So you can understand that a department of that size is not going to get any resources. This is very sad, and this is why I've been talking about the need to centralize law enforcement in the United States, to professionalize their response to the public, not just about use of force, but about everything. An average police department, all they care about is whether you have a GED, and you didn't use drugs in the last three years. Because policing is not just about the high-profile incidents, it's also about how they perform on a daily basis vis-à-vis the public. But this requires skills, this requires education, this requires training. An average police department, all they care about is whether you have a GED, and you didn't use drugs in the last three years. I mean, it's ridiculous. If somebody looks at this a little bit closer, then it's really scary. PW: Is the training and the resulting way the cops deal with the public—not just about the use of force but about everything—do you think that is superior in other Western countries, too? MH: Absolutely. I don't think, I know, because I do research with police departments in other countries, I see their training, I visit the departments, their police academies. That's what I've been doing for almost twenty years, so I know exactly that it's superior over there—not in each and every country, but the majority of police forces in democratic countries today —yes, absolutely. --------------------------- Now, to be fair, the criminals have a lot more guns in the USA, so it would make sense that the police need to use guns a lot more as well. Here is one more article, comparing it to Germany: ----------------------------- Why German police officers rarely reach for their guns German police officers rarely reach for their guns - for good reason. But when deadly shootings do occur, the victims are often part of an especially vulnerable group in society. Police officers are armed and under pressure. They are called to situations they can't assess and "in that kind of a situation, people have tunnel vision, that is, limited perception," says Gerd Enkling, chief police coach in the southern state of Bavaria. Myriad factors influence the course of events: whether passers-by are in the area, the weather, whether the officers are being yelled at, whether they were forced to run to the site and whether they can keep a distance. "These situations are extremely complex," Enkling explains. In the US, such situations often have a deadly ending. In early August, a white police officer shot black teenager Michael Brown. Several hundred people, not all of them armed – and this is only an estimate, there are no reliable figures – are killed by police officers in the US every year. Unlike Germany, where police rarely use their guns: there were eight fatalities in the past two years and 109 deaths by service weapons in Germany since 1998. Unlike the US, where almost as many weapons are in circulation as the country has citizens, German police officers are rarely confronted by armed people. This may be the main reason for the widely differing figures, but observers note that German police are also quite cautious where using their weapons. There has been a significant decline in the number of shots fired at people since the 1970s, says Otto Diederichsen of the Berlin-based Institute for Civil Rights and Public Safety: "In that respect, a lot has happened, and that's certainly positive." The impact of stress "Don't shoot" - that's not only the title of a police weapons training course in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, it's a main goal. First, recruits learn how to use a gun. "You have to know how to handle it - it's not a toy, it's life-threatening," says Uwe Thieme, head of the operative and hazard control section of police training in Germany's most populous state. Target practice at the range is just a beginning, he says, adding that afterwards, the recruits focus on training stressful situations. Role games make up a large part of police training, which usually takes three years, in all of Germany's 16 states. "If tunnel vision sets in when we're in a stressful situation, we resort to proven and tested tactics, everyone does that," Enkling says. If an officer has practiced again and again not to act immediately but to get a handle on the situation first, to speak calmly to a suspect - he stands a good chance to fall back on that pattern when the situation arises. Take a closer look Things go wrong all the same, and the past years' fatal shootings were by no means unavoidable. Thomas Feltes, a criminologist at the Ruhr University Bochum, points out a case that occurred in Berlin last year: a police officer fatally shot a man who stood by a fountain in front of City Hall, naked and armed with a knife. The man was schizophrenic. Berlin's RBB TV channel found out that two-thirds of the people who were killed by police gunfire over the past five years were either mentally ill or known to the police as having mental problems. "Many officers aren't aware of the fact that they're dealing with mentally ill people," Feltes says. "We need them to be trained more soundly." It's also worth considering whether German police officers shouldn't use taser guns or dragnets in certain situations - a practice that is quite common in the US. When a police officer in Germany shoots at a person, or even an object, the prosecutor's office invariably starts preliminary proceedings. Often, however, these cases are closed too quickly, like the shooting in front of Berlin's City Hall, Thomas Feltes says, adding that, where fatal gun shots are concerned, he would like the prosecution to "take a closer look." http://www.dw.de/why-german-police-officers-rarely-reach-for-their-guns/a-17884779
There are over 300 million guns in the US. A police officer cannot assume that a suspect is unarmed, especially when they've punched the officer multiple times and reached inside their shirt like Brown did. Gun ownership in Germany is nothing like the US, so cops there don't have to worry about the assailant having a firearm. So of course there will be less usage of guns. We're getting off topic a bit. The grand jury was convinced that Wilson shouldn't be indicted for what he did. I think the real story should be the media's despicable role in fanning the flames of violence -- their portrayal of Brown as an "unarmed black youth murdered by a white cop" has caused a large amount of violence and property damage. The witnesses who lied about what they saw are also to blame.
He's conflating actual problems with what happened in Furguson in an effort to make it seem like there were actual problems with the Brown shooting.
i dont think it helps comparing american police tactics and using guns against european officers. ive personally never been to europe, but what ive seen on tv they seem a lot more friendlier, polite and less hostile. when i do the guns come out over there, its usually automatic and submachine guns so they dont mess around. no disrespect to the officers in america but the really dumb and pyscho guys in my school became police and the smart ones went into IT and computers. the cops here are overworked and always on edge so maybe more training, time off, better pay is in order for the good ones.
Agreed. I am not disagreeing with the decision. Just thought I'd add a different perspective on use of deadly force overall (regardless of race of the officer or assailant).
No pity party here. I would like an open discussion on how LE protects communities rather than letting it slide every chance we have people passionate on the subject. What part of protecting or serving is receiving a radio call to find 2 black males? What if police presence was focused on preventing crime rather than enforcing punishment? Anyways, back to my point, all these weapons are just confidence boosters resulting in worse result than if they were not present. People buy guns because they are afraid, they are weak, or they are uncertain of their situation.
The mere definition of war is when someone tries to kill you because of the uniform you're wearing. No, the police are not at war with the average citizen. Hell only 4% of the population is a criminal. But it is a war on the American streets right now. 42 officers have been KILLED this year from gunfire alone. Officers and criminals are at war if you ask me. I could punch your square in the jaw and knock you out, and you'd only have a slight red mark on your face; you wouldn't resemble a bruised peach
