[vorpalhex]

Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders? And if a bystander is harmed while you are attempting to de-escalate, doesn't that make the officer negligent?

Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes.

De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.

[freeflight]

> Can you de-escalate when there are innocent bystanders?

Sure you can, it's what the vast majority of police forces in developed countries are doing all the time [0].

That way they also don't end up shooting innocent bystanders, which is apparently quite a common thing in the US [1] [2]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ge...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in...

[ardy42]

> Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes.

No, it's not that simple. Police escalation itself can put innocent people in harms way. The police can shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders. Escalation can provoke a criminal to start shooting and kill innocent bystanders or police. That's not to mention the now better-documented situations where the police escalate against someone who's not a threat and murder them in the process.

[vorpalhex]

Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed.

You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.

[ardy42]

> Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed.

> You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.

There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unsourced) statistics. If you want to reason from statistics, they have to be measuring comparable situations, which yours are not. Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].

Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply. For instance, Philando Castile was armed, but clearly should not have been shot by police.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[vorpalhex]

Sorry for the lack of citation, my stats come from the Washington Post Police Shootings Database [^2]. As far as I know, it's the most comprehensive one currently, though unfortunately it has a paywall.

> Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].

The question at play as I understood it is whether, being in a dangerous situation as a bystander, you should call the police knowing that they may respond with lethal force. If someone, even someone you know, is posing a threat to you, then the police pose much less of a threat by several orders of magnitude. Yes, police are imperfect and occasionally kill bystanders, but they kill less bystanders by far than people killed through criminal acts.

This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.

Which brings us to the Philando Castile case, in which he was not threatening anyone. He was stopped for a traffic incident.. not waving a firearm around, not because someone was panicking. The police officer who shot him was wrong, and that's why he was charged and faced trial.

> Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply

It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person. If we are interested in those cases where the police acted wrongfully instead of just those cases in which they acted at all, then that number is important. Yes, there are cases where someone armed is unjustly shot, those cases are obviously more rare.

[^2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

[ardy42]

> This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.

Look, obviously there are some rare situations where de-escalation is not possible, like the North Hollywood Shootout, but it sounds like you're saying that the police should come in guns blazing whenever they think a suspect is threatening lethal force. That's obviously wrong. Police should try, to the greatest extent possible, to avoid shooting anyone. Whenever possible, they should de-escalate the situation, which refers to stuff like this:

> De-escalation more broadly refers to the strategic slowing down of an incident in a manner that allows officers more time, distance, space and tactical flexibility during dynamic situations on the street. Applying these specific skills increases the potential for resolving the situation with minimized force or no force at all, which reduces the likelihood of injury to the public, increases officer safety and mitigates the immediacy of potential or ongoing threats. A reduction in use of force incidents also reduces community complaints, promotes the perception of procedural justice and, most importantly, promotes resolution of events with the public’s compliance. [1]

Here's one case of what not de-escalating looks like, and the kinds of police attitude problems that are at play here:

> “Last week, there was a guy in a car who wouldn’t show me his hands,” the officer said. “I pulled my gun out and stuck it right in his nose, and I go, ‘Show me your hands now!’ That’s de-escalation.” [2]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-applauds-a...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/long-taught-to-use-for...