At Fault Lines, Greg Prickett offered the cop perspective on the unfortunate phenomenon of suicide by cop.
Rule number one of a gunfight—bring a gun. Corollary—don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Axiom—if you want the police to kill you, bring a knife and charge at the officer.
The problem is that when someone wants to commit suicide, but doesn’t have the cajones to do it themselves, they oft-times look for someone to do it for them. You know, a suicide by cop.
He’s not being flip about it. Killing someone is never a thing to be flip about. But when the issue is life and death, being practical matters, and Greg is nothing if not a very practical guy. And he backs up his position with three examples, all demonstrated by video, to make his point: Don’t blame cops for shooting someone bent on being shot.
There have been three very clear examples of this within the past week, in Carmarillo, California by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office; in Indianapolis, Indiana, by the Indianapolis Police Department; and in Denton, Texas, by the University of North Texas (UNT) Police Department.
All of these appear to be justified shootings.
In all of them, an upset male subject came after police with a knife or another edged weapon, like a hatchet.
And in all of them, you have people commenting on media sites critical of the police.
Fair enough, as far as it goes. But since we know that there is such a thing as suicide by cop, a person deliberately posing a threat of death or serious bodily injury to a police officer using a weapon that any moderately rational person would realize is going to lose in a fight, it raises two questions.
First, how to distinguish suicide by cop in reality from suicide by cop as rationalization. Absent video, the murder of Laquan McDonald would have fallen into the suicide by cop hole. Disturbed kid with knife, cop with gun, boom. The suicide by cop excuse doesn’t apply, but only if there is evidence to disprove the claim, which was backed up by a cadre of lying cops.
Second, individuals who are, or at least appear to be, legitimately attempting suicide by cop, aren’t killed out of malice, but apparent necessity. As Greg’s video evidence shows, the police officer in Camarillo, California, tried to run backwards to distance himself from the knife attacker to avoid having to shoot. He did everything he could, under the circumstances, to not kill. What more could he have done?
There tends to be a flurry of impractical reactions to such shootings. Get a negotiator to talk the suicidal person off the ledge, except there is no opportunity. As Greg explains, it’s not like the cop can call a “time out” until backup arrives.
Then there’s the “movie” solution, where the cop is expected to wing the guy with a shot to a limb, so as to disable him without killing him. This works on TV, perhaps, but not on the street. Further, even if it was doable, it provides no assurance that it will take out the attacker before he shoves the knife into the cop’s gut. Even winged attackers might still keep coming.
There are bean bag rounds, Tasers, the not-always-entirely-lethal options that are often used inappropriately, and then not used when they’re needed. The problem is that cops don’t necessarily have an alternative on their belt at the moment, and even so, they don’t necessarily work, particularly when someone is dedicated to kill or be killed.
So what choice do cops have but to kill?
Well, that’s the question raised by the spectrum of force available to police when faced with someone whose crime is wanting a police officer to kill them. The fact that these are not evil criminals, acting malevolently toward others, but suicidal individuals, is what changes the equation when it comes to the acceptability of dying at the end of a cop’s gun.
We, as a society, do not want people to die because they are in psychological distress. When its root cause is mental illness of some sort, the better solution would seem to be to help them rather than kill them. But then, the practical problem is that help isn’t available, and no cop should die because we don’t want the mentally ill to suffer either. As Greg notes, cops aren’t social workers or therapists, even though so many of us wish some were just a bit more empathetic than angry bullies with guns.
So is Greg right? Well, yes and no. Under the current regime, there is little choice for the cop facing the individual bent on suicide by cop. But the binary option presented, kill or be killed, should not be the end of the discussion, which it is at this point. Law enforcement can be remarkably imaginative when it wants to be, from such things as Sting Ray devices to building penetrating radar, planting GPS devices in everything possible to license plate readers.
What gets little air time are weapons developed to subdue people without killing them. If we can take down an elephant without killing it, we can take down a suicidal attacker as well. Law enforcement has dedicated substantial resources to means of killing people and protecting police from harm. There has been no shortage of putative experts coming up with techniques to handle situations for the safety of cops, and rationalizing why cops had no option but to kill. Yet, there is a dearth of effort or concern with coming up with ways to prevent harm to everyone. No doubt there are suicidal people in Scotland, and yet unarmed cops survive.
The problem stems from utterance of the phrase, “suicide by cop,” whereupon everyone shrugs and says, “it’s unfortunate, but it couldn’t be helped.” We haven’t tried to help. We haven’t put in the effort to find a way to prevent it from happening, whether by technology or training. We just shrug as if it’s unworthy of the effort to prevent a needless death.
It’s possible that no foolproof method exists. It’s also possible that there are methods that will allow a police officer to address suicide by cop, not to mention a potential wealth of other threats, without having to put a bullet into a human body. But that would require us to want to make the effort to try, rather than just shrug it away. Until that effort has been made in earnest, the binary option of kill or be killed is just another excuse for the First Rule of Policing. The shrug is not good enough.
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Train drivers are traumatised by the deaths of people who jump in front of their trains. Many police officers are affected by taking a life- no matter how justified. There’s an argument for the cops’ sake to better handle confrontations with mentally ill people. The Police Federations should be leading the way, for the welfare and safety of their members.
“No doubt there are suicidal people in Scotland, and yet unarmed cops survive.”
Isn’t this a result of the cops being unarmed? If cops in Scotland have no guns but every baker in the country has one, wouldn’t we be seeing the phenomenon of suicide by baker? The suicidal person seeks the gun not the badge. If the cop doesn’t have a gun then that particular method won’t be viable and they would find another way. Trying to make the Scotland connection here seems misleading. This isn’t a situation they would have to deal with at all.
Yes and no. On the one side, you’re quite right that a person seeking to commit suicide would be wasting his time with an unarmed cop. On the other side, they are nonetheless threatened with people with knives, and manage to survive despite being disarmed. The “suicide by cop” factor is about the need to shoot to end the threat, regardless of the motive of the attacker.
That cops survive in Scotland demonstrates that they can survive here as well, whether attacked by a guy with a knife bent on suicide or just a guy with a knife. Ultimately, it’s about safely surviving an attack without killing the attacker, whatever his motives. That’s why the Scotland experience is worth remembering.
I’m not buying the redefinition of “suicide by cop”, here. The motive of the attacker is pivotal in the result of the confrontation. If a person approaches an officer with the specific intent of being shot, that’s wholly different than a thief being caught in the act. Officers in Scotland do not have to deal with former. I would agree officers in Scotland are probably better trained to deal with the emotional and delicate situation of a suicidal individual, but I doubt they are trained in how to respond to themselves being the means of that person’s suicide. It fundamentally changes the nature of the confrontation.
You’ve misunderstood. The point is someone determined to attack a cop with a knife. Whether the motivation is suicide or otherwise doesn’t change the fact of a person attacking. It is “wholly different than a thief being caught in the act,” unless that thief is also bent on attacking a cop with a knife, because we’re not talking about a generic thief caught in the act otherwise.
So where does the whole “suicide by cop” part come in? It’s that cops feel little regret about a righteous shoot on a mutt, but they don’t feel the same sort of compulsion to kill a suicide by cop attacker, except to protect themselves. Figure out a way to end the need to kill the suicide knife attacker and, as it happens, you also prevent the needless killing of others as well.
And whether “you’re buying” really isn’t relevant.
Is the officer who feels regret over a suicide the same who would callously “shoot a mutt”? It appears you are arguing the application of some as yet unknown catchall training. We would be better served by just removing the mutt shooters. New training won’t make them care more.
” And whether ‘you’re buying it’ really isn’t relevant. ”
Too true. Sometimes my ego gets the better of me.
Removing the “mutt* shooters” would be a great idea as well, but then, we never seem to figure out who the mutt shooters are until after they’ve shot the mutt (if then, but that’s a separate issue). That hasn’t proven to be a particularly good way to deal with problem cops. This isn’t about making them care more, but about putting a different tool in their hand in lieu of a weapon. And even if it doesn’t work out well for everyone, at least it will save some lives. That’s a good reason to address the problem.
*By “mutt,” I refer to the cop slang.
Scott, good post, but I have two quibbles.
First, this is not a binary issue. There was a suicide by cop a couple of years ago in Denton, another UNT student. If you can, you employ other methods. In that case, the officers keyed on getting the innocent roommate out of the apartment and away from danger. They were doing so, when the student came out of the apartment and pointed a pistol at an officer. There they were trying to buy time for a negotiator to get there, but the suspect did not allow it. You have to remember that there are two sides to this, that the police do not control all of the action, but in most cases must react to the actions of the suicidal person.
I can think of at least three such calls that I went on. In all of those, we did not have to shot the person. In one, we talked the kid out of it. He had written his name and “bye mom” on a shotgun shell, but he wasn’t intent on dying I guess. But if he had come out of his room with the shotgun, yeah, he probably would have been shot. We had a negotiator called too, but the kid gave up before he could get to us to help with the kid.
Second, Scotland’s not a viable comparison. If you are suicidal, you’re not going to call unarmed police to come and shot you. They may be suicidal, but they’re smart enough to realize that they have to have a way to die if they’re going to get someone else to do it for them.
Greg, you know as well as I do that there is never a perfect solution to anything involving human beings. We just can’t manage to conduct ourselves the way theoreticians think we should. But that doesn’t mean we can’t, or shouldn’t, come up with means to eliminate, to the extent possible, the binary solution that now exists.
There has been no effort up to now to find an alternative to avoid the binary choice. There are anecdotal stories, like yours, where a cop calmed down a potential suicide, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. This is about the determined suicide, who won’t be talked off the ledge, and as of now, there is nothing but kill or be killed. Maybe there is no viable option (though I don’t believe that to be the case), but until serious effort is put into giving the cop an option when he doesn’t want to kill, there is no justification for not doing better than a shrug and a shot.
As for Scotland, I explained that here.
Sure, I agree that we should come up with other solutions, if possible. You’ll get no argument from me there.
We also need to realize that we can’t always solve these types of problems. There are times on the street where it does come down to a binary issue, an either / or choice. The non-police party is usually the one that drives that decision.
I still don’t buy the Scottish officer argument. You would have done better to use the German Polizei as an example. They are armed, but very rarely shoot at anyone, much less kill them. But they also have to deal with suicide by cop.
German, Scottish, whatevs. It’s just not that critical a point.
While I appreciate that you would prefer an alternative to the binary solution, you still take it very much in stride, as something that can’t be eliminated (so why bother trying to hard) and forced by the non-police party (it’s not the cops’ fault anyway, so it’s not a big deal).
It is a big deal when people die, and it is the cops’ fault for not putting serious effort into an alternative to killing. Sure, the suicide by cop person “drives the decision,” but you know cops know he’s coming and have chosen not to put their resources and efforts into doing anything about it. Don’t blame the crazy guy for being crazy.
As long as that’s the case, there will never be real effort put into creating alternatives. And people will die. That’s a big deal.
No, I don’t think that you understand.
I’m all for improving the way of handling these, of coming up with a way of eliminating these deaths. It is an extremely big deal, for more reasons than one.
But there will always be cases where none of that matters, where the officer will still have to shoot.
Let me compare it to something else, friendly fire in the military. It happens and it has always happened. It probably will happen again in the future. Thomas Jackson was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville. My dad was likely wounded by mortar or artillery fire from the U.S. Second Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. There were U.S. soldiers killed by A-10s in the First Gulf War.
Although it has always happened in the past and will likely happen again, the military has made tremendous efforts to avoid it. The IVIS system in military vehicles now identify friendly vehicles by GPS. IFF prevents fighter aircraft from shooting at friendly fighters. And so on. But there will probably still be friendly fire deaths.
You do everything that you can to prevent it. That doesn’t stop one from recognizing the fact that it will probably still happen to some extent.
We already agreed there was no perfect solution. The next question is whether it is a sufficiently serious problem to make it worthy of the allocation of effort and scarce resources.
That’s all that need be said. Anything more is Gertruding.