I started thinking about training issues when that dash-cam video became public a few months ago where the guy gets shot in the gas station for a seatbelt infraction, but he turns quickly into the car to get his wallet and the cop shoots him thinking he might be coming out with a gun. I thought about whether the cop should have positioned himself in a less vulnerable way so that he could observe what the guy was coming out of the vehicle with before opening fire (and obviously that cop needed more firearms training cuz he fired 4 times from 10-15 feet and only hit the guy once, and he fully recovered from the wound--think about the bystanders who could have been killed by those stray bullets not to mention if the driver actually was a threat which required deadly force and he only got winged).
When I saw the recent South Carolina video (which didn`t capture the initialization of the event), I wondered what was going through the mind of the cop when he shot the guy. I`m sympathetic to the police in these situations because of the "fight or flight" adrenal response, which I think leads to a lot of the, shall we say, rough handling of suspects at the end of a chase. However, in this case (again, we didn`t see the earlier part of the altercation), it would seem that the officer`s response was a little, er, asymmetric.
This got me thinking about Accumulator talking about adrenal response conditioning in the past, as in this thread: http://www.autopia.org/forums/car-dr...nal#post947936 where he said:
So this has me wondering whether police officers are given enough training/screening for this. In the old days you couldn`t be a cop if you were a woman, if you were too short, too fat, etc., perhaps today you shouldn`t be a cop if you can`t control your stress response? Or is this situation such a small percentage of cases that this type of training/screening is overkill?
It could be that this cop was just a bad guy--he certainly was (apparently) very quick to back up his story, he was very cool, etc., and unlikely you are going to train/screen out bad guys (except when they get caught on video). So I guess the point is a body cam might deter a bad cop, but it`s not going to effect a cop who can`t control his adrenal response. So do we need better police training/screening or is this simply a human nature issue that we can`t control?
Let`s try and keep this civil or it`s going to be closed pretty quick.
Bookmarks