Police shoot knife wielding wheelchaired man 9 times

Overkill lol

But wheelchair user or not, if you pull a knife on an officer after shoplifting I don't have any sympathy for you .

Give the officer a warning and a two week paid suspension.

Seems like they could have at least tried to disarm the guy. Not like in his condition he is capable of going on a mass stabbing spree.

Of course, I'm not a trained police officer, so I'm not going to have a full understanding of how officers are trained to assess the risks and what alternative options he had available for how he could have responded. That's why ultimately, these situations need to be investigated by those with the proper expertise to judge whether the officer's actions were reasonable or not, and whether it warrants being fired or going through a full criminal trial etc.


In any case though, the death of a man wielding a knife, threatening to use it on others and disobeying police orders to drop it is no real loss to society. The best place for him is behind bars or locked away in a mental institution - however failing that, it's better that he's dead than allowed to "walk" free, in my opinion.

Seems like they could have at least tried to disarm the guy. Not like in his condition he is capable of going on a mass stabbing spree.

Could have been worse, he could have been black and there would be businesses burning everywhere. Hopefully the cop will do time.
That gap between bullet 8 and 9 got me. It was like he got to 8, stopped, then thought "and one more for good luck" or "meh, may well as empty the clip."

Their death may not be much of a loss to society, but I don't think the police should be allowed to kill people who do not pose or have not been a significant danger to others.

I agree with you - I’m not saying police officers should be allowed to kill any criminal whenever they feel like it.

My main point is that when police officers are having to make split-second decisions on whether someone is posing a danger to others or not, with innocent people’s lives and safety (including their own) potentially resting on those decisions, I think it is justified for them to err heavily on the side of judging that the person probably is a danger.

It’s extremely difficult to make the correct decision 100% of the time, so I’d prefer any incorrect decisions to be overly cautious than overly lax. If someone has to lose their life over it, better it’s the criminal with the knife and disobeying clear instructions to drop it, rather than a police officer or an innocent bystander.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that the man was not posing a danger to others. But I don’t think it would have been wise to assume this in the moment, just because he happened to be riding a mobility scooter. He could still be faking his disability, he could still throw the knife etc.

The police officers had no split-decisions to make in this case. They had ample opportunity to assess the situation and try alternative means of restraint, but they didn't. The officer's first action was to literally just shoot the guy to death.

I don't think the idea that they might not have needed a wheelchair and might have thrown a knife at someone are a good enough justificaitons for shooting someone. Their only crime thus far had been to steal a toolbox from Walmart. As far as I can tell, their only display of violence was to simply show the police officer a knife they were carrying. Hardly cause for applying a death sentence, certainly if they did not even try anything else.

Do you think the officer should have been fired from their job?

I don’t think it is necessary to wait for the person to actually be violent before deeming them to be a danger to others. In my opinion, the police officer needs to act before the the knife wielder injures or kills someone, not wait for them to do it first and then act afterwards. It’s an issue of prevention, not punishment - so I wouldn’t call it “applying a death sentence”.

That means they need to assess whether there is a material risk of them hurting others and to try and predict what could/would happen if they didn’t shoot. That’s why it’s difficult to make the right decision every time. But if someone has a knife in their hands, are refusing to drop it and are making a pretty clear threat of violence, in my view that is sufficient to infer that there is an elevated risk of them using it on someone.

Some people seem to be assuming that “he was on a mobility scooter so he clearly couldn’t have done anything to anyone”. I don’t agree with such an assumption.



I think they should be suspended from their job pending an investigation by the relevant authorities. They can then decide, based on their expertise, whether the officer’s actions were reasonable or not (or indeed worthy of criminal prosecution or not).

But if you’re asking me to decide, I would say that firing 9 shots was excessive force. Ideally he would use a taser, but if that wasn’t possible then one or two shots aimed at the limbs would have been reasonable.

His decision feels to me like it was based on fear/inexperience rather than malice, but that still means he’s not suitable to be doing this job. So I would opt to have him fired (or retrained at the very least), but I would not consider him guilty of murder.

There is no way for us to know whether he would have actually attacked anyone, all that happened till that point is that they stole something from a shop and had a knife on them. If we were talking about someone who has been assaulting people already (or at least trying to) then I could perhaps see your point, but this didn't happen.

As far as I can tell there was no indication that they would actually be violent to anyone, so it seems like your argument is just based on the idea that they could have become violent...? That's not a good excuse for what is essentially murdering someone. I don't think the police should be excused from murder on the basis that the person they killed might have become violent.

It was applying the death sentence because the guy died.

Of course there's no way to prove that he would have attacked anyone - nobody can predict the future with perfect accuracy. It's a case of assessing the level of risk. And in my opinion, the risk in this situation was higher than merely "he might become violent" (which theoretically could be said about anybody). The fact that he was carrying a knife, refusing to drop it despite several commands to do so, and making verbal threats with it to me indicates that he was probably intending to use it if he felt the need to - i.e. there was a materially elevated risk of him doing so, relative to that of a normal person.

If police always waited for people carrying potentially deadly weapons to attack first, we would have a lot more innocent deaths and injuries. The belief that there is a significantly higher-than-usual likelihood of them attacking should suffice.

It is not a "death sentence" just because a person died. He was not killed as a punishment for something he did. He was shot in order to prevent the possibility of hurting others. Of these two, only the former is called a "death sentence".

No police officer should be cleared from murder purely on the basis that their suspect might have attacked someone, even if there were a higher-than-usual likelihood of it happening (which in this case I doubt anyway, given both the suspect's mobility, the weapon they held and their previous actions).

Higher-than-usual likelihood of them attacking would justify the police acting and restraining the person involved, not straight up killing them. That's an excessive use of force which in this case was the first thing the police attempted.