Seems to be missing the fact that if you are unable to handle stressful situations you have no business being a police officer in the first place.
Becoming a police officer is akin to stating: "I will approach confrontations level-headed and try to deescalate" and I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well.
Nobody is prepared to handle life-or-death stressful situations. Training at least makes those experiences less terrible, but the only life-or-death stress response you have born in you is your fight-or-flight meant to ward off primarily large predators.
I don't know about that, while there might be some kinds of life-or-death situations that nobody can handle, there seems to be plenty of people that is as capable of handling some life-or-death situations better than I handle grocery shopping.
> when a suspect has a knife but is otherwise nonthreatening
A knife is a deadly weapon. Even a non-deadly strike from a knife means a loss of organs (lung puncture, liver intrusion), limbs, facial tissue, eyes, etc. If someone is threatening with a knife (attacking cop cars, etc), especially if they are not acting entirely sanely, they are an active life-or-death threat and yes, you might absolutely be walking into the moments before your death.
Even if you have a gun, you have at best a few heartbeats to make a judgement call if they decide to lunge for you. Especially if your firearm is in it's holster, in the time it takes for an attacker to lunge at you, you need to:
1. Establish a positive grip on the firearm
2. Defeat any safety measures on the holster (snaps, buttons, interlocks)
3. Clear the holster with a duty sized firearm
4. Draw firearm to combat position
5. Secure off hand grip to firearm
6. Obtain sight picture
7. Check target and backstop
8. Squeeze trigger
The person who intends to kill you meanwhile needs to do the following:
1. Lunge forward with knife angled outwards
If it's available in your area, I recommend taking a use-of-force seminar and seeing how well you do with the above kind of scenario.
If someone threatens your life with a deadly weapon, the fact that they've turned their back for a moment and headed towards other people (innocent people, your comrades, etc) doesn't make them not a threat anymore. As a police officer, you have an obligation to keep the public safe, and that includes from knife wielding nutcases.
Yes, it'd be great if cops could bear hug everyone into submission, but that's not the reality of the situation.
For example there are medical tests for pilots and other professions where the lives depend on sound mental and physical health of the operator. The same should be for police - can't handle the stress, got overflooded with stress hormones so that mental function drops below threshold - you dont get the right to kill.
Carrying the gun knowing that stress severe impairs your perception and executive function means negligently putting public in danger akin to drunk driving.
My similar thought... isn't this an argument to disarm police officers? If their brains turn them into killers, take away the tool they use to commit the killing. Police isn't even one of the top-10 most dangerous jobs - they're beaten out by auto service supervisors (not even the guy with the wrench!) and airline pilots.
Being a supervisor where work involving heavy equipment is happening is can be more dangerous because you're not as familiar with all the heavy equipment around you and depending on how much of an ass you are or aren't your team might not be comfortable speaking up when you do dumb things. It definitely depends on the supervisor though.
That said, the numbers don't lie. Policing is not nearly as dangerous as it is made out to be.
I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well
You would be mistaken in that assumption. Police in the US receive a fraction of the training provided to their counterparts in Germany and the UK. This is across the board, all types of training. They receive even less deescalation training, and in fact sometimes receive the exact opposite (training akin to "police as warrior").
Given the replication crisis, is psychology ready for much of anything?
Yes, I admit that this is snarky, but it is also uncomfortably true. There is good evidence that things said by psychology that also fit common sense are probably true. However things said by psychology research studies have a good chance of being false. And things concluded by individual psychologists upon a chain of research based on those studies should be viewed with significant skepticism.
This will change when psychology can get from their current 50% replication rate (on a good day) to having a significant body of established research that we have good reason to believe is about 90% likely to be replicable. Until then I'd advise against placing too much trust in anything that it says which you can't find independent reason to believe.
Yes, I have hope that psychology is trying to replicate what they thought were established results. After a few rounds of that we'll have a limited body of knowledge that has been successfully replicated enough that, despite the overall replication rate, we can trust those results.
Once that body of reasonably certain psychological observations is established and starts growing, it will be possible to make some statements about psychology with a high degree of confidence. But whether that coalesces into a paradigm about how to understand people that turns it into a recognizable science is another story.
Seems difficult to imagine such positivity with replication considering how much psychological science depends on subjective information from subjects using "evaluation tools".
Who knows what it means when I answer the question "How depressed am I" with 5?
And after all these years since his interview, we are still waiting. This is one of the reasons why some have placed their hopes on neuroscience being the science of the brain and mind.
The key question is: is the "stress" argument ever going to be successfully deployed to exculpate someone who, in a stressful situation with a weapon, shoots a police officer?
No, of course not. The American use of deadly force by police is far in excess of other first-world countries, and it has become a deadly part of the culture war. Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.
> Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.
That's a generalization. Certain areas of operation had different rules of engagement, which also changed over time. As a base though, if you could prove hostile intent, you were cleared for the use of deadly force.
Exactly. We've seen countless examples of "I thought he had a gun" and "I feared for my life" from cops. Can I shoot someone if I think they have a gun but, oops, it turns out I was wrong? I'd be fine, right? I'm sure I wouldn't face any serious consequences.
And therein lies the problem. There's a separate set of (lower) standards applied to the very people who are trained for this sort of thing and who are allegedly held to a higher standard.
>Can I shoot someone if I think they have a gun but, oops, it turns out I was wrong? I'd be fine, right? I'm sure I wouldn't face any serious consequences.
If the totality of the circumstances show that a reasonable person would believe that they had a gun and there was a threat to your life, then I would expect you not to have serious consequences in the form of criminal penalties.
> If the totality of the circumstances show that a reasonable person would believe that they had a gun and there was a threat to your life, then I would expect you not to have serious consequences in the form of criminal penalties.
Police officers have guns, and I suspect some minorities might reasonably fear for their lives when confronted by the police... I'm sure the bar for 'reasonable' fear is much higher for civilians.
Yes, this is precisely the point I'm trying to make. The standards that are applied are not equal, yet police officers are not only allegedly held to a higher standard, but they are also bound to follow all the existing laws because they are citizens themselves. There isn't an exemption made that allows them to violate the law or have a different set of criteria apply to them when determining if a crime has been committed. The only exception to that rule I am aware of is in cases of undercover operations - officers are able to obtain permission in advance from their handlers for certain crimes they expect to be required to commit (i.e. bribing someone or buying drugs). Outside of that, no exceptions exist that I know of.
That's possible, yes. If someone was acting completely, absolutely bonkers then I think there's a decent chance...maybe...if there were witnesses. Anything other than that, I'm pretty confident the DA will "let the court figure it out" and charge me regardless because a case could be made. And that's really the brass tacks of it. That's their job - make a case for criminality. If a reasonable case can be made and they think they can win, they'll pretty much make the case every time. It's what they get paid to do. No extra inconvenience for them. It's the person being charged who has their life totally interrupted and thrown into a tornado. Many times justifiably. But not always.
> That's their job - make a case for criminality. If a reasonable case can be made and they think they can win, they'll pretty much make the case every time.
A DA can also make cases against police, it's just that they don't think a reasonable case can be made and that they could win. Just as you said. Do you think DAs bring every self-defense case to court?
Must be awful to be an American cop... the gun, the body armour, the training, the radio to call for a SWAT team or an actual tank... and a woman in pyjamas terrifies you so much you have to shoot her https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
Interesting article. I wonder if there's evidence that the mindset of a police officer reflects the general public.
Sorry to have to generalize here but I've had a lot of exposure to police over my life as a volunteer EMT and an ex wife who's department was part of a police department. I have a lot of friends who are police officers.
They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.
Of course I have no idea if that's a selected behavior or something they learn during their time as police officers. I can certainly see how it's a beneficial behavior from a stress standpoint but we can see how it turns out with respect to these deadly force encounters.
I have a lot of respect for law enforcement but also personal knowledge enough that their decision making strategies are not like mine.
Well, if you had a gun and permission to shoot people for being "uncooperative" or "resisting" or "refusing to obey orders", you'd be right all the time too.
There's a cognitive bias where bad things stick out more than good things, which is helpful from a problem-solving perspective by helping you focus on problems that need to be solved, but it has a side effect where any job that involves dealing with the public leaves you increasingly convinced that the world is filled with people who are just plain awful at least in some respect. Of course, the world is filled with these people, but not to the proportion it seems. You just remember the bad a lot more easily than the good. Also, police officers tend to disproportionately deal with awful people anyway.
In my youthful interactions with police, the sense I got was they were sure the knew the _law_ correctly. They didn't think they were always right outside of that, but they thought they were always right about the law and the events that unfolded (they might have been giving events their own interpretation to which they assigned certainty).
Now, of course, this is typically the meat of the matter when interacting with police, but I'm pointing out that outside of this space, in my experience, they did not presume more knowledge than your average person.
> They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.
I’ve witnessed a similar phenomenon on HN, where we have no shortage of computer programmers who believe they have solutions for every problem in economics, medicine, politics, and so on. So it must be some sort of generalizable phenomenon.
This looks like nothing so much as the old determinist's "how can you be morally culpable when the outcome was predetermined by natural laws?" dusted off and dressed up with some psychology jargon.
I think the jury would have a better time first understanding predetermination & determinism, than the psychological jargon as you put it. Maybe psychologists have found a stigma against determinism by the free will thinkers and so they find the need to dress it up as something else.
It feels to me like the question of how humans react to life-threatening situations is less relevant here than the question of how humans judge what _is_ a life threatening situation. Are you in imminent danger of death if you encounter a teenager walking away from you in the middle of the street at night? I think most people would judge that situation to be non-life-threatening and I guess the jury in the referenced case agreed.
The real issue here is whether or not this same logic will apply to the average citizen. And we know it won't. Nor should it. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our actions with only very, very few exceptions that are already laid out in the law (i.e. temporary insanity, severe mental illness, etc.). It sounds like what is being argued for my Miller is that we expand the exception list in a big way. One that society likely will find unacceptable. Also, I'd be really curious to see if Miller wants to apply this same standard to everyone across the board. Because right now, if I shoot someone - even if in self defense - there's a good chance that I will be charged and have to defend myself in court to prove it was in self defense and a lawful act because the bar for me being apply to apply deadly force is very high.
The rules are already very different for cops in the current state of affairs. They already have every advantage and already face extremely low odds of being charged. As the article mentions, only 96 officers have been charged since 2005, which is ridiculous. We've seen a lot of absurd cases that were major news where officers weren't even charged. Sure, I would bet that the overwhelming majority are totally legitimate. But I also think there are way too many that go un-charged.
And I'd bet my life (no pun intended) that this same logic will definitely not apply to the average citizen if they shoot another citizen. And I'd bet my child's life that this logic would never, ever, ever be used in defense of a citizen if they had the gall to shoot (gasp) a police officer.
We the people bear some responsibility for this situation of officer shootings. Juries routinely either fail to indict in the grand jury or acquit if it actually goes to trial far too often. And these jurors themselves do not apply the same standards that would apply to the rest of us.
Accounting for population difference, on a per capita basis US police officers shoot citizens at a rate 37 times more frequently than the UK. Now, you can either choose to believe that the US has 37 times more serious violent crime that would justify that level of violence by cops. Or you can choose to believe there is a problem with US the way US police go about their business.
Note: That's presumably "shots fired at persons", not "shots fired" overall. And even for that subset, different sources have different numbers, but they all fall in that rough area.
I get your point, but I have to disagree. The fact that the UK can have its officers not carry by default and armed officers only show up for the most extreme situations is a testament to how they are conducting their operations. They had only five deaths in 2017 due to officer shootings. Four of those were terrorist attacks. So their response time is good enough to stop terrorists with lethal force while also not resulting in extra civilian deaths and still keep their beat cops gun-free.
You can't extrapolate that model to the USA, where there are more firearms than citizens [1].
This means that the average risk / threat an officer may encounter in otherwise routine situations are quite different than the UK, which has very strict firearms policies, since they decided to ban almost all firearms in 1988 / 1997.
And even with all those firearms available to US citizens, only about 40 police officers are shot dead every year in the US. Being in law enforcement isn't as dangerous as the police unions would like you to think.
I live in the South, and know two officers currently working on the street.
In the last five years, between the two of them: someone tried to run the officer over with a truck in a dark alley, a man pointed a shotgun at the officer's head from a few feet away (while carrying three guns and 400 rounds of ammo, and having previously fired several rounds through a house wall), a fleeing criminal pulled to the side of the road and opened fire at the officer, and while responding to an officer who had been shot in the woods, were ambushed by the suspect, who killed the officer next to him, and sent my acquaintance to the hospital for a month.
And I don't even live in a high crime area of country!
Hey, I've got anecdata, too! My previous institution is on the hook for half a million dollars after an officer-involved shooting. This was a civil settlement, without admission of liability, the usual kind. The officer was permitted to resign. He had racked up an unusual number of disciplinary issues already but was never disciplined for that incident, when he severely injured the student. The police captain was also permitted to resign, even though there were severe concerns about discipline in the force he was overseeing. There was never a criminal trial for either of the two, there rarely is, because of the unholy alliance between the district attorney and the cops. Probably both are working for other police forces nearby, they love officers with a disciplinary record, it shows a willingness to go along and bend the rules.
A diabetic man became hypoglycemic and confused, he led the police on a car chase and was then manhandled by two officers after he crashed into a ditch. He would like changes in protocol and can only pussyfoot around the real issue, police brutality, because everyone agrees that he deserved a beating. Or something. As is usual, there is nothing to see here, district attorney sides with the cops.
Whatever anecdotes one has, citizens are more at risk from the police than the other way round.
I'd agree that this means firearms in the UK are much harder to come by for criminals and that this results in a higher risk to officers in the US. However, this risk also applies to all citizens (and non-citizens) in the US as well. In fact since people are far less likely to use a weapon against an officer as opposed to a non-officer, the risk of mere existence as a non-officer in the US is greater. That being said, other 1st world nations with gun-carrying police (almost all of them) have much lower rates of officers discharging their firearms.
Also, with 100+ million guns in the US, violent crime overall is down substantially over the last several decades. We're at 40 year lows in violent crime.
This includes violence against officers. More interestingly, violence of police against citizens is at 40 years highs. All while gun sales have soared over the same period.
>You can't extrapolate that model to the USA, where there are more firearms than citizens
I agree unarmed police may be a stretch, but countries like Switzerland (where every home has a gun) or Estonia (which has CCW laws similar to some US states) don't see the same level of police shootings even with armed police.
> The fact that the UK can have its officers not carry by default and armed officers only show up for the most extreme situations is a testament to how they are conducting their operations.
They also don't enforce every little law with force. They'll often just warn people to not smoke/drink in public, have people shake hands after a small bar fight with no injuries, and generally focus on restoring order rather than locking people up. If someone drives off, they run the plates or use CCTV, dashcam footage, or helicopters to track the driver rather than engage in dangerous chases.
Their entire model is "policing by consent"[1] and an American cop would eat their service revolver if they were told they had to approach a yelling homeless man and say "Hi there, is something bothering you? Can we connect you with a social worker?" rather than demand compliance then tase them.
Yeah, I should have marked my comment as a nitpick.
I suspect if you picked Germany or Australia or any of the other "normal" countries where cops do have guns, the stats would look more like the UK than the US. Partly because they too have better procedures.
The UK did, however, have a full troops-on-the-streets state of emergency in Northern Ireland for 30 years, complete with carbombings and firing on demonstrators; it would be interesting to compare the numbers for that with US policing.
(Last time I ran the numbers, 70s Belfast was overall less dangerous than 80s Detroit, but someone else can do this one)
>The real issue here is whether or not this same logic will apply to the average citizen.
The big difference is that the average citizen has the ability/expectation to flee dangerous situations. For example, if I saw a crazy guy with a knife, I call the police but otherwise make sure I stay far away. In situations where the average citizen doesn’t have that expectation (for example in their own home) US law also generally gives them the benefit of the doubt regarding deadly force against a home invader. Now as a society , if we had police who avoided dangerous situations at all cost, it would not be very helpful. We as a society need people who are willing to intervene in dangerous situations, and so as a society we have in the past given them the benefit of the doubt regarding how they deal with what they perceive as immediate dangers to their lives.
There may not be a legal duty, but there is definitely societal expectation. For example take Scot Peterson the Parkland officer who has been blasted, called a coward, and forced to retire for not confronting the Parkland shooter. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parkland-officer-scot-p...
If a police officer or department develops a reputation of running from danger, there are going to be at least societal consequences for them.
Were there any real consequences? Did someone go to jail or lose their government pension? People frowning at the police and police inaction means nothing, they just get fewer calls and less reports of crime, that improves the statistics.
The current system has two sets of rules, one for cops, one for everyone else. It's like how in medieval Europe a knight would be justified if he cut down a normal person in circumstances where a normal person could not engage in violence against another normal person. That's all fine and dandy (I'm being sarcastic when I say that) except that out current societal norms and laws prohibit double standards like that. This is just an attempt at bastardizing science and law in order to uphold the double standard when what we really need is to apply the same standard to police use of force as we do to normal people
Dr. Laurence Miller: "His fee as an expert witness in cases that require travel is $10,000 per day of testimony"
I don't know how Mr Miller gets to be an expert witness but it seems to me that Law Enforcement pays him quite well to be in the business of being a witness...
64 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 95.1 ms ] threadBecoming a police officer is akin to stating: "I will approach confrontations level-headed and try to deescalate" and I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well.
Training should equip officers for the not-uncommon case when a suspect has a knife but is otherwise nonthreatening.
A knife is a deadly weapon. Even a non-deadly strike from a knife means a loss of organs (lung puncture, liver intrusion), limbs, facial tissue, eyes, etc. If someone is threatening with a knife (attacking cop cars, etc), especially if they are not acting entirely sanely, they are an active life-or-death threat and yes, you might absolutely be walking into the moments before your death.
Even if you have a gun, you have at best a few heartbeats to make a judgement call if they decide to lunge for you. Especially if your firearm is in it's holster, in the time it takes for an attacker to lunge at you, you need to:
1. Establish a positive grip on the firearm
2. Defeat any safety measures on the holster (snaps, buttons, interlocks)
3. Clear the holster with a duty sized firearm
4. Draw firearm to combat position
5. Secure off hand grip to firearm
6. Obtain sight picture
7. Check target and backstop
8. Squeeze trigger
The person who intends to kill you meanwhile needs to do the following:
1. Lunge forward with knife angled outwards
If it's available in your area, I recommend taking a use-of-force seminar and seeing how well you do with the above kind of scenario.
Yes, it'd be great if cops could bear hug everyone into submission, but that's not the reality of the situation.
Carrying the gun knowing that stress severe impairs your perception and executive function means negligently putting public in danger akin to drunk driving.
Being a supervisor where work involving heavy equipment is happening is can be more dangerous because you're not as familiar with all the heavy equipment around you and depending on how much of an ass you are or aren't your team might not be comfortable speaking up when you do dumb things. It definitely depends on the supervisor though.
That said, the numbers don't lie. Policing is not nearly as dangerous as it is made out to be.
You would be mistaken in that assumption. Police in the US receive a fraction of the training provided to their counterparts in Germany and the UK. This is across the board, all types of training. They receive even less deescalation training, and in fact sometimes receive the exact opposite (training akin to "police as warrior").
Yes, I admit that this is snarky, but it is also uncomfortably true. There is good evidence that things said by psychology that also fit common sense are probably true. However things said by psychology research studies have a good chance of being false. And things concluded by individual psychologists upon a chain of research based on those studies should be viewed with significant skepticism.
This will change when psychology can get from their current 50% replication rate (on a good day) to having a significant body of established research that we have good reason to believe is about 90% likely to be replicable. Until then I'd advise against placing too much trust in anything that it says which you can't find independent reason to believe.
Once that body of reasonably certain psychological observations is established and starts growing, it will be possible to make some statements about psychology with a high degree of confidence. But whether that coalesces into a paradigm about how to understand people that turns it into a recognizable science is another story.
Who knows what it means when I answer the question "How depressed am I" with 5?
Paraphrasing Richard Feymann, he called social science a pseudoscience until proven otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
And after all these years since his interview, we are still waiting. This is one of the reasons why some have placed their hopes on neuroscience being the science of the brain and mind.
No, of course not. The American use of deadly force by police is far in excess of other first-world countries, and it has become a deadly part of the culture war. Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.
That's a generalization. Certain areas of operation had different rules of engagement, which also changed over time. As a base though, if you could prove hostile intent, you were cleared for the use of deadly force.
And therein lies the problem. There's a separate set of (lower) standards applied to the very people who are trained for this sort of thing and who are allegedly held to a higher standard.
If the totality of the circumstances show that a reasonable person would believe that they had a gun and there was a threat to your life, then I would expect you not to have serious consequences in the form of criminal penalties.
Police officers have guns, and I suspect some minorities might reasonably fear for their lives when confronted by the police... I'm sure the bar for 'reasonable' fear is much higher for civilians.
A DA can also make cases against police, it's just that they don't think a reasonable case can be made and that they could win. Just as you said. Do you think DAs bring every self-defense case to court?
Sorry to have to generalize here but I've had a lot of exposure to police over my life as a volunteer EMT and an ex wife who's department was part of a police department. I have a lot of friends who are police officers.
They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.
Of course I have no idea if that's a selected behavior or something they learn during their time as police officers. I can certainly see how it's a beneficial behavior from a stress standpoint but we can see how it turns out with respect to these deadly force encounters.
I have a lot of respect for law enforcement but also personal knowledge enough that their decision making strategies are not like mine.
Now, of course, this is typically the meat of the matter when interacting with police, but I'm pointing out that outside of this space, in my experience, they did not presume more knowledge than your average person.
I’ve witnessed a similar phenomenon on HN, where we have no shortage of computer programmers who believe they have solutions for every problem in economics, medicine, politics, and so on. So it must be some sort of generalizable phenomenon.
The rules are already very different for cops in the current state of affairs. They already have every advantage and already face extremely low odds of being charged. As the article mentions, only 96 officers have been charged since 2005, which is ridiculous. We've seen a lot of absurd cases that were major news where officers weren't even charged. Sure, I would bet that the overwhelming majority are totally legitimate. But I also think there are way too many that go un-charged.
And I'd bet my life (no pun intended) that this same logic will definitely not apply to the average citizen if they shoot another citizen. And I'd bet my child's life that this logic would never, ever, ever be used in defense of a citizen if they had the gall to shoot (gasp) a police officer.
We the people bear some responsibility for this situation of officer shootings. Juries routinely either fail to indict in the grand jury or acquit if it actually goes to trial far too often. And these jurors themselves do not apply the same standards that would apply to the rest of us.
Accounting for population difference, on a per capita basis US police officers shoot citizens at a rate 37 times more frequently than the UK. Now, you can either choose to believe that the US has 37 times more serious violent crime that would justify that level of violence by cops. Or you can choose to believe there is a problem with US the way US police go about their business.
The UK is not a good example, since it is one of the few countries where most cops don't have guns.
This means that the average risk / threat an officer may encounter in otherwise routine situations are quite different than the UK, which has very strict firearms policies, since they decided to ban almost all firearms in 1988 / 1997.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/there...
In the last five years, between the two of them: someone tried to run the officer over with a truck in a dark alley, a man pointed a shotgun at the officer's head from a few feet away (while carrying three guns and 400 rounds of ammo, and having previously fired several rounds through a house wall), a fleeing criminal pulled to the side of the road and opened fire at the officer, and while responding to an officer who had been shot in the woods, were ambushed by the suspect, who killed the officer next to him, and sent my acquaintance to the hospital for a month.
And I don't even live in a high crime area of country!
But this is the important anecdote: https://www.wrdw.com/content/news/Diabetic-man-has-episode-t...
A diabetic man became hypoglycemic and confused, he led the police on a car chase and was then manhandled by two officers after he crashed into a ditch. He would like changes in protocol and can only pussyfoot around the real issue, police brutality, because everyone agrees that he deserved a beating. Or something. As is usual, there is nothing to see here, district attorney sides with the cops.
Whatever anecdotes one has, citizens are more at risk from the police than the other way round.
Also, with 100+ million guns in the US, violent crime overall is down substantially over the last several decades. We're at 40 year lows in violent crime. This includes violence against officers. More interestingly, violence of police against citizens is at 40 years highs. All while gun sales have soared over the same period.
I agree unarmed police may be a stretch, but countries like Switzerland (where every home has a gun) or Estonia (which has CCW laws similar to some US states) don't see the same level of police shootings even with armed police.
They also don't enforce every little law with force. They'll often just warn people to not smoke/drink in public, have people shake hands after a small bar fight with no injuries, and generally focus on restoring order rather than locking people up. If someone drives off, they run the plates or use CCTV, dashcam footage, or helicopters to track the driver rather than engage in dangerous chases.
Their entire model is "policing by consent"[1] and an American cop would eat their service revolver if they were told they had to approach a yelling homeless man and say "Hi there, is something bothering you? Can we connect you with a social worker?" rather than demand compliance then tase them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
I suspect if you picked Germany or Australia or any of the other "normal" countries where cops do have guns, the stats would look more like the UK than the US. Partly because they too have better procedures.
(Last time I ran the numbers, 70s Belfast was overall less dangerous than 80s Detroit, but someone else can do this one)
The big difference is that the average citizen has the ability/expectation to flee dangerous situations. For example, if I saw a crazy guy with a knife, I call the police but otherwise make sure I stay far away. In situations where the average citizen doesn’t have that expectation (for example in their own home) US law also generally gives them the benefit of the doubt regarding deadly force against a home invader. Now as a society , if we had police who avoided dangerous situations at all cost, it would not be very helpful. We as a society need people who are willing to intervene in dangerous situations, and so as a society we have in the past given them the benefit of the doubt regarding how they deal with what they perceive as immediate dangers to their lives.
If a police officer or department develops a reputation of running from danger, there are going to be at least societal consequences for them.
I don't know how Mr Miller gets to be an expert witness but it seems to me that Law Enforcement pays him quite well to be in the business of being a witness...