http://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/ar...of-exmesa-police-officer-charged-with-murder_
What do you think?
Should he have been?
What do you think?
Should he have been?
Been there, didn't kill an unarmed kid.I'd like to see the naysayers put in the same situation where your death could be just a second away.
Mike
Just when I think I've heard (read or saw) the stupidest thing. I read the Huffpost.The officer who killed Hithon had legal justification. Hithon had weaponized her car. However, it is unclear whether killing Hithon was necessary or even the best way to insure public safety.
I spoke about the incident with Randy Shrewsberry, a former police officer, and currently the executive director of The Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. Shrewsberry says that “cops are trained to react on possibilities instead of on probabilities.” In the case of Hithon’s shooting, the imagination of the police officer is likely that if she drove away, she would have hit a family. In reality, the officer shot his gun in a crowded place, and killing Hithon made her lose control of her car, which could have endangered people down the street. The possibility won over the probability.
The same exact problem arises in the killing of Daniel Shaver. In his testimony, Brailsford told the jury that “if this situation happened exactly as it did that time, I would have done the same thing.” The officer added, “I believed 100 percent that he was reaching for a gun.”
Crawling on the ground, crying for his life, with multiple weapons pointed at him, the possibility that Daniel Shaver would be able to somewhat magically pull out a gun, aim, and shoot fast enough to harm the responding officers beat the probability that proved true — he didn’t have a gun.
Even if Shaver had a gun, if the police officer was pointing a taser at Shaver and discharged it at the exact moment the officer shot the gun — the moment that he allegedly thought that Shaver is reaching for his gun — the officer would have neutralized Shaver without killing him.
Had the police responding to the call been unarmed, none of the police officers would have been hurt and Daniel Shaver would still be alive.
Comparing the experience of American police to the experience of the unarmed police officers in other first-world nations is unfair some may say, since the United States is home for almost half of the civilian-owned guns in the world. But it is a common misconception that police officers frequently use their guns. While eight in 10 adults believe that a police officers fire their weapons once in their careers, it has been estimated that, in New York City for example, 95 percent of police officers never used their guns on duty. Other countries with high gun ownership rates have had success in disarming the police. Iceland, for example, had a single homicide in 2009, despite having an unarmed police force and one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world. Norway has the world’s 11th highest gun ownership rate, on par with Iraq; however, Norway’s police officers traditionally keep their weapons locked in their patrol cars. Following an increased terrorism threat in 2014, Norway decided to temporarily arm police officers. Yet, by January 2016, Norway returned to having unarmed police officers, because firearms were not needed.
It is important to think about disarming the police not as a measure that will put police in danger, but as a measure that will increase their safety. An ambush is the most frequent circumstance in which police officers are killed, but unfortunately preventing the ambush is the key to safety, not being armed. In other circumstances, such as in in Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, the police officer claimed that the the assailant reached for the officer’s gun. In other cases, like the shooting deaths of Akai Gurley in New York and Justine Damon in Minneapolis, officers claim that they discharged their weapons due to being startled. Removing the weapons from the equation would have removed that problem.
Like any policy solution, disarming the police is not a magic bullet. We need other policies to keep police officers safe, like gun control laws. It also won’t happen overnight. Some might say that having unarmed officers responding to every type of call is an attempt to force one solution for multiple varying situations. However, it is important to recognize that having armed officers respond to every call - from calls in schools to mental health crises to a disturbance in a hotel - is a lethal one-glove-fits-all policy that is costing lives.
It is time to have a serious conversation about disarming the police. As long as police in the United States have weapons by default, police officers will be America’s most lethal strangers. It is time that police carry gear that is appropriate to reacting to probabilities, not possibilities.