by Dish Staff
This video of police shooting and killing Kajieme Powell has been making the rounds. Conor Friedersdorf can’t help but wonder whether deadly force was necessary:
A police officer might retort that law enforcement shouldn’t be obligated to take on any extra risk to their own lives in a dangerous situation wholly and needlessly created by a person menacing them. A citizen deliberately baiting police with a deadly weapon cannot expect restraint. Even a small knife can be deadly.
In the abstract, I can’t disagree with those principles—and if questionable police killings were confined to such circumstances, there’d be less cause than now to complain about overzealous law enforcement. Yet watching this video, it seems certain in hindsight that the threat could’ve been stopped with force short of at least nine and as many as 12 gunshots; and again, if they’d kept more initial distance between themselves and a man they knew to have a knife before they even arrived, perhaps no deadly threat would’ve materialized. If they’d stood well back and engaged, perhaps Powell would’ve kept coming with a knife until stopped.
But Beutler expects that you “won’t find many police who’ll say that what the police did to Kajieme Powell is a great or unjustifiable departure” from normal police protocol:
And if that’s a shock to you, then you’re a newcomer to a very basic argument: That if this is proper protocol, then the protocol is bad.
Powell had a knife — Police Chief Sam Dotson described it as a steak knife. But he was not wielding it in the way officers claimed (or in the way it may have felt to them in the moment). He was not two or three feet away, but perhaps eight or nine. He wasn’t charging hard or issuing threats. To the contrary, he was demanding to be shot.
But that doesn’t mean the police needed to oblige him. It’s hard to watch the video and not conclude that there should’ve been some safe way to preserve his life.
A reader agrees that there was another option:
With the growing examination of how the St. Louis police behaved in shooting Powell after he was wielding a knife, I thought that this video from a 2011 incident in London involving a man trying to attack the police with a machete could illuminate how this situation could have been handled differently.
Instead of calling in armed police and opening fire on a troubled man, the Metropolitan Police consistently retreated – or approached him from behind a wheelie bin – before eventually seizing their chance and disarming and arresting the man.
Along the same lines, Ambinder wants to train officers “to account for differences in the type of threat posed, and even differences in the aim points”:
Not a liberal complaint here: Cities themselves are asking the Justice Department to review use of force training. The shoot-to-kill and shoot-when-threatened-at-all training has resulted in a number of innocent people’s being killed. Mentally ill people have it worse.
There are ways to resolve violent conflicts without killing people. Figuring out how to more rapidly defuse dangerous scenarios and training officers to distinguish between scenarios are not easy, but they seem worth trying, no?
Dreher is conflicted:
[L]ooking at it cold, it’s clear that the cops badly overreacted. But trying to think through it dispassionately, it’s a lot murkier than it seems. Is it really fair to expect cops to do a mental health exam of a man with a knife stalking around the street with people all around him, acting bizarrely, and refusing orders to drop the knife? I don’t know. If the cops had a taser, would they have had time to deliberate and get it out to use it, given how close the man was, and how irrationally he was behaving? I don’t know that either.
Allahpundit is sympathetic to the cops’ predicament:
The objections to what the cops did have less to do with legal culpability than with ways they might have avoided killing Powell. What about a taser? The problem there, said the police chief, is that Powell was wearing a sweatshirt. True, it was open at the chest, but that’s a small target to aim at. If they had hit him with the stun gun while he was advancing and the probes ended up embedded in his clothes rather than his skin, he might have kept coming with no time for the cop with the taser to reach for his gun. Okay, but there were two cops there; if the taser didn’t drop him instantly, the other officer had his gun already trained on Powell and could have taken him down. (If neither cop had a taser handy, why didn’t he?) …
My weak, easy hope when faced with a moral quandary like this is that technology will help solve it. Tasers will be refined, they’ll become cheaper and more reliable, and more cops will have them as a means to stop a violent perp without killing him. Of course, that’ll end up posing a different problem, as some irresponsible cops end up overusing the new technology. Better that than overusing a gun, though.
The Dish 