The most common times are when there is a size or numbers disadvantage, but all it takes is a reasonable fear of imminent grave bodily harm or death. Those are the rules for private citizens (the details vary from state to state).
Official security probably has more latitude to take action because they are responsible for the safety of everyone in the area.
> Official security probably has more latitude to take action because they are responsible for the safety of everyone in the area.
probably, but they should have less latitude because of their training in other, non-violent methods to remove the threat. negotiation can help defuse most situations better than a taser or gunshot would.
When your officers carry guns, there's an implicit duty to never lose control of that weapon in a situation, and that necessitates a certain distance, often "enforced" with a gun.
You don't want to end up grappling with someone who might actually be much better at it.
Just hopeful, I'm afraid. It's easy to assume from the distance of many miles and a computer screen that every single situation can be addressed safely and easily by a soft word or three.
Abstractly, that may be true, if you free yourself of certain constraints imposed by reality. For one, you have to assume that every single person in every single situation is open to negotiation. Second, you have to assume that nuanced and complex communication of the sort that enables negotiation is readily possible. Third, you have to assume that entering into negotiation will remove any threat the subject may pose to other people nearby. Fourth, you have to assume that trained negotiators arrive sufficiently fast for their magic stop-all-threats-to-everyone powers to engage in time.
In reality, some or all of these can fail. I read about an incident in my city in the past few months where a mentally ill man was reported to police as wandering the streets, carrying a chain. The police arrived. An officer approached the man, attempting to speak with him. She wanted to find out if anything was wrong and see if there was a problem that needed addressing. He proceeded to beat her with the aforementioned chain. If memory serves, the situation was resolved when the armed, actively violent, mentally ill man was shot dead.
And this is a scenario where presumably everyone speaks English! Where in there was she supposed to negotiate with him to solve all the problems at hand? What non-violent methods do you expect to bring a rapid halt to someone actively beating a police officer with a weapon that will be remotely as fast as lethal force? What happens if you have no shared languages, someone deep in the grips of hallucinations, and actively shooting people nearby? Do you expect negotiating police to defuse that problem by negotiating with someone incapable of recognizing them as people who want to negotiate?
> It's easy to assume from the distance of many miles and a computer screen that every single situation can be addressed safely and easily by a soft word or three.
It's easy to assume for me because I've seen the vast amounts of work currently happening around "behaviour seen as challenging" in people with mental illness or learning disability[1] or brain injury.
Here shooting people is absolutely not possible in the vast majority of cases of behaviour seen as challenging. Tasering people is also absolutely not acceptable.
Rapid tranquillisation is common, but not acceptable because of the amount of restraint needed immediately prior to the injection.
Various methods of restraint are common, but are not acceptable because of the risk of injury or death.
A lot of money is being spent on better training on de-escalation, diversion, prevention, etc.
It's fucking baffling to me that people think it's okay to kill someone in distress just because the people doing the shooting are so lacking in skills that they have no other option. To me it's clearly a failure of everyone involved (and the departments they work for).
In your example with the chain: you seem to think this is a situation where a violent response is undeniably the right thing. I see that and I think how fucking clueless the woman was, and how fucking clueless the people who shot the man were. There are plenty of Youtube videos comparing UK and US police responses to these situations.
In the scenario I described, what do you think that the right non-violent solution was? I should also add that the PD had no way to know ahead of time that they were responding to a situation with a victim of mental illness in a time of distress who would exhibit behavior seen as challenging.
Incidentally, this was not a situation where there were a half-dozen officers on hand to swarm the guy. Should officers always move in groups of six or more, so that any sudden violence can be handled with grappling? Seems expensive, at the very least. How do you propose that a single officer being actively beaten about the head with a chain de-escalate the situation? I'm deeply curious how you think that could be reasonably accomplished. Maybe saying please?
What would an officer in the UK do in the situation I described when being actively beat about the head with a chain? How would it be totally different and reliably yield an ideal outcome?
Another detail of relevance: the incident did not provide the officer with an opportunity to speak to the victim of mental illness in a time of distress. The victim attacked immediately upon the officer exiting her vehicle. If any and all forms of violence are ruled out, with de-escalation and negotiation being the order of the day, how should this officer have reacted to being beaten with a chain? What peaceful, non-violent, resolution skills are available to someone subject to such immediate violence?
It's not about whether the other guy is armed or not. While I can't speak for other jurisdictions, in the UK it's about what's reasonable in the circumstances (with allowance made for the fact that someone in that situation does not have the time to make a full objective assessment of the situation). Sure, if the person attacking me is unarmed and I'm bigger, stronger, wearing armour and carrying a baton, shooting them might be considered unreasonable (but might be considered reasonable). If I'm in fear of my life and all I have is a handgun, shooting them is very reasonable.
Of course, in the UK, the next question from the police would be "What's with the handgun?" :)
All that said, in the case of Alan Pean in the article, I could well believe that the two off-duty police officers moonlighting as security guards were basically incompetent amateurs with weaponry, believing their own hype.
Imagine you are in a small hospital room and unable to get out. A 300 pound 6'2 dude is yelling that he's going to kill you. His brain is so scrambled that the tazor did nothing. You are backed into a corner and he's walking toward you.
In an age where such places have surveillance video you would think we don't need hypothetical scenarios. We'd have video of someone taking a solid hit from a Tazer and continuing an attack. But let's try this hypothetical: Imagine you are in a country without armed private security and only a subset of police are armed. Where are all the people who've been killed by 300 lbs crazed people?
European nations will likely have fewer such problems than we do - our population is much more violent. As Scott Alexander once quipped, "Who'd have thought populating half a country with the descendants of a group of people called "Border Reavers" would cause so much trouble?"
I'm not trying to say that the police were justified in this incident - note that I'm a huge critic of American policing. I'm merely pointing out that the threat is quite real.
That's not what I was asking. I was asking: Does armed security, or, for that matter, armed police make for fewer such cases.
There are places where security guards and police do without guns in normal duties. Perhaps it's, at least in part, because policing and security sets the tone, that they have to do more deescalation before drawing a gun, that they have less violence.
[EDIT:] Has anyplace ever become more safe by putting more guns in the hands of armed security and police?
Presumably the incident where the crazed lady stabbed the (unarmed) security guards could have been prevented by tazering her. Having practiced (simulated) knife combat, I'd certainly consider a long range weapon to be more effective than grappling.
If you are charged with protecting people from a crazy lady with a knife, would you turn down the tazer or gun? (If you believe it doesn't improve your odds of survival, you of course would.)
Given that many of these crazy people incidents happen away from security guards, it's hardly clear that "policing and security sets the tone". The US is just a highly violent place.
Mental illness is not a predictor of violent behaviour. You're falling for (probably) conjunction fallacy and confirmation bias. You find newspaper reports because those incidents are rare compared to all other murder; you use those newspaper reports (of rare events) to say "look how common it is".
(The SOMD link isn't loading for me) Note that all but one of your links involve drug abuse. Here the violence isn't due to mental illness, but to drug abuse. Drug & Alcohol addiction is a predictor of violent behaviour. (Much stronger than mental illness.)
This is a thread about mental illness, and you are using slurs associated with mental illness ("crazed"). If you're not talking about mental illness you probably need to be more careful with your lazy use of stigmatising language.
When many people keep misunderstanding what you say perhaps the problem is with your poor communication style, not their comprehension.
A quick google search suggests various mental illnesses (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and the catch-all "serious mental illness" category) are strongly linked with violence.
The latter article also describes a study suggesting "matched controls" (read: siblings of mentally ill people) are also disproportionately violent which is interesting.
Many citations are provided therein. I didn't provide it because it's completely tangential to the main point, namely that there exist crazed and violent people who should be tazed and tied up. I'll note you didn't provide a citation either.
You risk assess the situation before you go in the room. You make sure every room has panic alarms, or that individuals have panic alarms. You make sure that the patient is never between you and the door. (All of this is standard practice).
You have two (or more) members of staff dealing with that person.
You de-escalate at every opportunity.
You have stuff like rapid tranquilisation and restraint available (although these are methods of last resort).
I am also 5'3. I don't carry a gun, so I never 'have to' shoot anyone.
The article described a situation in which two people with police training used a taser and a gun to restrain a naked man. It was two against one. Did they really need the taser? Even if they did, did they really need to shoot him with a gun, too?
If you're a hospital worker, then you deal with the individual in the story exactly as the other hospital workers did before the police arrived, as they always do, and nobody gets killed.
If you give people guns, empower them to use them, and protect them from the legal ramifications, then stories like this are the obvious outcome.
