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Another Magic Bullet: The Psychology of Persuasion
Police officers live in the world of possibility, not probability. They don’t memorize the stats on the number of violent encounters between officers and the public. When conducting a traffic stop, or sent on a call from a dispatcher they are dealing with people that they don’t know. They don’t have the time to contact someone’s former scoutmaster, rabbi, priest, minister, or former sixth-grade teacher for a character reference. Calls that are dispatched concerning violent crimes in progress gives the responding officers more time to mentally prepare for a dangerous situation.
There are no magic bullets; whether it is a Taser, non-lethal impact munitions, baton, or pepper spray when confronting someone with a knife. Sometimes those options are effective, and sometimes they are not. Every potentially violent situation is different, and every violent situation has its own set of facts. In other words hypothetical second-guessing after an incident to try and come up with one standard that will solve all future encounters without lethal force is nonsensical.
All shooting incidents should be thoroughly investigated for two purposes. The first is to determine if the officer has committed a crime, or was the officer justified in using lethal force. The second is to examine the training model of the affected agency.
Burlington, Vermont Police Chief Brandon del Pozo wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times:
“We tell officers that a knife or a shard of glass is always a lethal threat and that they should aggressively meet it with a lethal threat in return,” the police chief wrote. “But doing so forecloses all of the better ways to communicate with a person in crisis. There are alternatives.”
Well, I have news for the Chief, a knife or a shard of glass is a lethal threat if it is in someone’s hand and ready to be used.
He said that one of the biggest mistakes trainers have made has been to teach law enforcement officers “to lead with the gun.”
American law enforcement leaders should instead try to mimic techniques used in countries where officers are unarmed, such as Britain or Iceland, Chief del Pozo suggested.
I don’t know how they train officers in Vermont but the comment “to lead with the gun” is so patently ridiculous that I’ll just ignore it. I don’t care what the techniques are in Iceland or Britain.
Yelling commands at a knife-wielding attacker “is unlikely to make a difference,” especially when the officer is unarmed, he said.
But unarmed officers would instinctually back away from the attacker, which could then allow for the situation to de-escalate, the chief claimed.
“Unarmed officers will cultivate an instinct to de-escalate,” Chief del Pozo declared.
“They will keep a safe distance, they will try to assess the true level of threat rather than see a weapon as a cue to rapidly escalate, and they will communicate in ways that reach people.”
There is no doubt that an unarmed officer is going to back-off. An unarmed officer will probably tell the dispatcher; “Yep, there is a guy with a knife here, he won’t calm down. We’re going to get a cup of coffee and will advise if he’s still here when we come back in half an hour.”
This is all admin cop-speak for the woke community.
Published in Policing
Wow, the Chief needs to turn in his man-card.
Yes, he’s definitely been off the street too long.
There are plenty of body cam videos where officers almost beg armed wrongdoers to drop the knife while tactically making room. They all seem to end the same way.
I have sat in a rescue truck countless times while a deputy goes in alone and defuses a potentially violent actor. I can’t overstate my respect and admiration for those men and women and the skill and courage they show in the face of threats.
Some time ago, I believe it was @dougwatt, shared a link to the blog of a serving police officer (I think it was Chicago). I followed that blog for a while and was glad for the link: Then I came to a training video on there that I watched where the officer kept yelling at the person in the pickup to drop the gun. Finally the officer was shot dead, the assailant checked to make sure he was dead and then just drove off. It was a good while before that video left me alone.
To be fair, nobody lives in a world of probability. Everybody, even the irrational, deals with uncertainty (which is always present) by acting according to expectation. For rational people (and nobody is perfectly rational) expectation is probability times cost. For most of us, it’s a mix of that calculation times our most recent experiences.
What the chief is missing is that police are called to a situation because it has escalated. Why else are people calling the cops?
I once had police called after I lost my temper and directed a bunch of insults and a few hits to trash can or metal pillar in a public place. By the time they arrived, they realized I had calmed down, told me not to do it again, and left. They did not have brandish a weapon or even raise their voices. I was not worth the paperwork. Anyone who thinks that police are leading with the gun is hanging around officers who are going to be trouble.
Wokespeak is how you get to be police chief almost everywhere. Al least it seems that way.
Instead of new forms of insulting, counter-productive PC sensitivity training for cops, maybe police departments should offer/sponsor classes for the public on how to interact with cops.
One morning I had breakfast with a bunch of older cops, most still active and some retired. I learned that chiefs do not represent the opinions of rank-and-file officers in political matters such as gun control and race relations. Presumably this also includes tactics when that touched on a politically sensitive area such as police shootings. I asked about the police unions and got essentially the same answer. In short, these guys didn’t feel their views were represented accurately by any public figures.
This is true. It’s the norm for chiefs of police, not the norm for sheriffs. Chiefs of police are hired by their respective city councils, which tend to be dominated by liberals / socialists, especially as the size of the city increases. They’re employees. Therefore they are likely hired because they reflect their city council’s political leanings, or at least know that it’s their job to reflect them – unless they want to be fired. Sheriffs, on the other hand, are elected. With significant exceptions, of course, sheriffs represent the views of the public, and their deputies, far more often than CoP’s and their officers.
If I were a Burlington, VT police officer, I would now be searching for job announcements. Of course, the officers may well have been hired because they held the same beliefs as the chief.