[floatingatoll]

The procedural vulnerability you describe stems from a philosophical dilemma around policework.

If an officer should choose between "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" and "high risk to self, low risk to civilians", which choice is appropriate?

SWATting works because American police have decided, for whatever reasons, that "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" is the appropriate path to take.

Should the police send an unarmed officer, an armed officer, or an armed SWAT team to respond to a phoned-in report of an armed hostage situation?

If they send an unarmed officer, the officer could die, but civilians won't (by the officer's hand).

If they send an armed officer, the officer could die, and civilians could too (by the officer's hand).

If they send a no-knock SWAT team, the officers won't die, but civilians probably will (by the SWAT team's hand).

And so this ties back to police militarization and a question that you will be hard-pressed to see police and police unions confronting openly: Should officers put the lives of citizens above their own lives — even if that means they occasionally die while responding to a call without a SWAT team, when it turns out to be real rather than fake?

I believe that, yes, police officers should select a "higher risk to self, lower risk to civilians" path than they do today, increasing the risk of police deaths in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths at the hands of police officers. I make this statement even though I have former police officers as family and friends, because I'm tired of American police killing more American citizens each year than terrorists do [1]. Your view may vary. Those of police certainly do.

The core issue, where officers must either accept a higher risk of death or a higher risk of killing civilians, remains unsolved — and undiscussed — in America today.

[1]

https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/mar/16/cops-kill...

https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938170/us-police-...

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...

[yellowapple]

I suspect the solution is even simpler: make the penalties for mistakenly shooting unarmed civilians significantly higher. The death of an unarmed civilian should be career-ending for the officer(s) at fault at the very least. If the penalties are higher, than that'll drive officers to prefer less-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, batons) and only use actual lethal firearms after assessing that yes, the situation warrants it.

I also say this as someone with family members who have served as law enforcement officers.

[zilian]

How do you justify that our special forces for instance in France or Europe dont kill innocents so carelessly ? And don t tell me criminals dont have guns here. Something is definitely wrong with the US police - to the point where Im worried as a tourist

[paulryanrogers]

Could it relate to the number of incidents local police encounter? I imagine special forces are called upon far less frequently and for situations less vaguely defined than police.

[floatingatoll]

Police training curriculum in the United States has been steadily leaning further towards the "less risk to officer, more risk to civilians" philosophy of policing each decade since the War on Drugs was launched ages ago.

You're wrong in one respect, though. They're not killing carelessly. They're killing intentionally, and are trained to do so when they feel it necessary. That their training seems to encourage them to feel it necessary is a side effect of our failure as a society to confront the philosophical problem.

As of 2006: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12118906/police-training-mediat...

> police academies spend about 110 hours training their recruits on firearms skills and self-defense — but just 8 hours on conflict management and mediation

So, as of 2006, they're assigned 14x as many hours of training at reflexively shooting attackers before they get shot in return as they are in determining when to risk being shot to defuse a conflict. Of course they're prone to shooting — they never learn when it's not appropriate to!

I am not a police officer. If you're a police officer and your local department has better a training ratio of violence:deescalation than the nationwide 13.75:1 ratio from 2006, hooray! But you're probably an outlier.

EDIT — Random current news example:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/willie-mccoy...

Officer finds person asleep in car with gun in lap. Officer summons more officers. They study the sleeping person and prepare their weapons, determining that the gun has either 0 or 1 bullets left. The person twitches as they wake up. All six officers fire.

The police are trained to fire when someone's muscles twitch. It's hammered into them over a hundred hours of training to kill before they are killed. They exercised their weapons training competently.

Was it appropriate for the officers to draw their weapons and take aim for kill shots?

Answers vary, because that's the same philosophical problem. Either the officers take a less violent approach that puts them more at risk of being shot and killed, or the officers take a more violent approach that puts them less at risk of being shot and killed.

(In this specific example, it's clear that the officers were behaving inappropriately for quite some time prior to the shooting; I do not attribute all of their actions to this problem, and focused on highlighting the philosophical issue rather than analyzing other factors such as racism etc.)