Since the year 2000 here is the complete list of every single person killed by police in the UK:
Edson Da Costa Khalid Masood Yassar Yaqub Lewis Skelton Josh Pitt Dalian Atkinson William Smith James Wilson Jermaine Baker Richard Davies James Fox Dean Joseph Anthony Grainger Mark Duggan Kingsley Burrell Jimmy Mubenga Olaseni Lewis Keith Richards Ian Tomlinson Mervyn Tussler David Sycamore Andrew Hammond Sean Rigg Habib Ullah Mark Saunders Dayniel Tucker Ann Sanderson Terry Nicholas Robert Haines Steven Colwell Philip Marsden Craig King Jean Charles de Menezes John Mark Scott Azelle Rodney Simon Murden Nicholas Palmer Philip Prout Keith Larkins Derek Bennett Andrew Kernan Patrick O'Donell Kirk Davies
The UK has 20% of the USA population, yet your police kill more than 5 times this number....per year than the UK incidents over nearly two decades - so when you ask:
I don't see what the cops themselves could have done differently in any of those situations. Do you?
I have to suppose that there were plenty of things that could be done differently.
That's meaningless, Mod, without knowing the circumstances in each case. Five of the seven examples I gave were justifiable or accidental or the result of fear on the cop's part, one of the remaining two was criminal negligence, the other was outright murder. Mere numbers don't tell us much.
They show that UK cops manage to keep law and order without as many 'accidental', 'justifiable' or 'fearful' killings - by many orders of magnitude - so clearly regardless of one's lack of knowledge in how things could be handled better, there certainly seems to lots of room for improvement. That's what the 'mere' numbers tell us.
quote:Sky News cameras joined them as they went out on patrol in Glasgow, and watched as unarmed police dealt with a variety of potentially violent situations.
The four-day visit showed how Scottish police step back from confrontation, using shields and vehicles for protection.
They also saw examples of how in Scotland officers use language and negotiation in a different way to their American colleagues.
quote:Many American forces adopt what is informally known as the "21-foot rule".Some see the controversial tactic as a 'licence to kill'.
Scots firearms officers have shot civilians only twice in the last decade.
The last officer to be killed on duty through criminal violence in Scotland was in a stabbing in 1994.
It's usually not fair to compare two such entirely different social situations as the UK and the US.
The question is - what can be done to alter the social situation in the US to make it so less people die. If there was a September 11th magnitude attack every 9 years - I'm sure you'd be calling for changes to be made to protect American lives. That's how many are dying now - and evidence suggests that it isn't necessary. I'm not suggesting mere changes in police tactics will make the two countries identical in police related killings and deaths but that the present situation can be improved by changing how police approach their work.
The senior police officers in the documentary agreed with me. And indeed:
quote:In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 2015, Brown said that the decline in complaints about use of force come from more regular, realistic training, greater community outreach, and an emphasis on de-escalation, where police try to slow to slow the action down and avoid using force. Rather than running into a situation, take your time approaching a suspect, talk over a strategy with your partner. Have just one officer talk with a suspect rather than multiple people shouting try to build a rapport with with suspect. It’s not just Dallas, the Morning News reported; excessive force complaints have also fallen in Seattle, Baltimore, and New York, among other major American cities. In Seattle, the New York Times reported last year, all of the city’s officers are taught to ask open-ended questions, paraphrase what a person has just said so that he or she knows the officer is listening, and make statements that connote empathy with the person’s situation. If officers do those things, the reasoning goes, they’ll have less of a need for force. Las Vegas has also emerged as a pioneer in de-escalation, with the department making a commitment to the sanctity of life.
quote:Brown believes the Dallas training has also led to a 30 percent decline in assaults on officers this year, and a 40 percent drop in shootings by police.
quote:These shootings by and large are not the officers’ fault, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the Washington think tank pushing the new program. They’re doing what they’re trained to do. We have to change that training. We have to give them more tools to slow things down. It’s a change in culture, a different way of thinking.
And so at the largest national police event of the year, the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, in San Diego, Wexler is staging a town hall Sunday where he expects 500 big-city police chiefs to express their support for retraining officers to de-escalate and take a tactical pause when encountering subjects who do not present an immediate threat.
quote:We’ve created a culture in policing where officers believe repositioning is retreating, said Camden County, N.J., Police Chief J. Scott Thomson, PERF’s board president. And that we need to resolve situations as quickly as possible. And sometimes that may be the approach. But if we take a more deliberate approach, particularly when individuals don’t have firearms, we’re finding there are less incidents of use of deadly force.
Thomson pointed to a recent incident in Camden in which a man with a knife menaced people in a restaurant, then walked into the street and began swinging the knife at others. Officers walked alongside the man for blocks, waiting for the right moment to wrap him up and disarm him.
I can unequivocally say, Thomson said, six months before our training, we would’ve shot and killed that guy. It would have been a justifiable use of deadly force, but there was another way to handle it. Since Camden began a Guardian Culture Program in July 2015, its officers have responded to more than 2,400 calls for armed persons, made 370 arrests and had only one officer-involved shooting, which Thomson said occurred during an ambush.
quote:Between training and modified policies over the years, New York police went from shooting 994 people in 1972 to 79 people in 2014. The unit’s trainers helped PERF create its training.
It saves lives, said Chief Barry M. Barnard of Prince William County, Va., who has appointed a captain at his county’s police academy to instill the PERF 30.
For many of the controversial cases where we see video footage come out - there is the unusual habit of drawing a weapon early, and yelling. As officers say - there often times when a person is killed and it is called justifiable, but where other methods have been used and no lives are lost. The latter is clearly preferred.
So when you ask - what could the officers do differently? I think there is an answer, as do others. Evidence shows that it works. Whether it is not getting into situations where one feels compelled to use lethal force in the first place, or learning how defuse those situations as they develop before lethal force gets on the menu.
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