| It's a spectrum. Some, like this 6 year old (http://theadvocate.com/news/13907799-176/few-details-emergin...) leave the officer in greater culpability than this active shootout with police (http://www.pe.com/articles/riverside-784400-officers-stop.ht...) where the driver sped away and died in a car crash against a barrier. If you scroll through and read the stories, most of them seem to be either terrible car crashes or violent criminals. Presuming that officers work 2080 hours a year and there are 765,000 with arresting power, you are 1755 times more likely to interface with a not-a-cop than a cop on the job. Therefore, you are 160 times more likely to be killed X minutes with a police officer than X minutes with some stranger. 15 seconds with 1 cop is as dangerous as 15 seconds with 160 random people. My friends in south LA from different backgrounds have a mantra to never call the cops under any condition. The idea is that however bad a situation can get, introduction of the police will incontrovertibly make it a de facto worse situation. Whether true or not, this seems to be a gut intuition to many (search google for "never call the police" to see people express this view). The crux of the question is two-fold: 1. Does bringing police into any situation generally lead to worse consequences than avoiding them? 2. If we believe that violence is always an inferior solution that lacks efficacy, then why should we invite state-sanctioned violence into our lives voluntarily? Stated another way, why is the government provided service to someone with psychological distress two people with firearms locking them in a cage? Shouldn't we provide a more appropriate government service for this? |