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Nothing is ever guaranteed, but courtesy, cooperation and compliance are key attributes to bring to any conversation with an armed police officer. Statistically, the Philando Castille incident is an outlier, and he was also reaching for "it" ("it" allegedly and most likely was his ID after he informed the officer he was in possession of a weapon, and the officer repeatedly yelled "Don't pull it out", but Mr. Castille continued to reach behind him for his ID or weapon). Sadly, Mr. Castille failed in the "compliance" category and a cop shot him unnecessarily (IMO).I mean Philando Castille did all of the above and still got shot.
I'm mostly just curious about people's belief about what cops knew, might have known, should have known, and how people who got shot behaved, didn't behave, could have behaved. It's an incredibly difficult job and errors on all sides are really costly.
Conversely, there are probably a metric shyte ton of citizen-police interactions where the citizen acted like an utter nincompoop and didn't get shot (impossible to verify as there's no statistics on "didn't shoot the asshat").
There are really only two viable alternatives:
- Improve training and aggressively remove the lower tier of LEO's who lack the needed decisioning skills to safely police their communities. In sales, if you're not burning the bottom 10% of your sale force each and every year, you're doing it wrong. Bad cops need to become ex-cops, but we still need cops (IMO). There will continue to be questionable situations where deadly force is used under this model, but we "should" be able to see statistical improvement in policing and outcomes over time. This doesn't necessarily mean much if you happen to one of the statistics in the interim.
- Truly defund or completely disarm cops. Think of the London "Bobbies" of the 60's: "Here's your night stick. Good luck against the criminals."