Then the department is at fault for not giving them tasers and training them on it.
I've had a little time this evening to read up on the use of tasers in NYC.
As you are well aware, many liberal citizens groups are opposed to use of force under any circumstance. New York City is full of these liberal citizens that cry and weep and scream of police brutality no matter what level of force is used.
If you look at the reference link on tasers in my prior post, you will see the story is actually about the death of one of the mentally unbalanced characters that are so common in NYC.
As it happens, Iman Morales, 35, was naked and waving a fluorescent light bulb at officers as he stood on a ledge. After a half-hour standoff with the police a Lt. Michael Pigott ordered Officer Nicholas Marchesona to fire his taser. Naked and crazy Mr. Morales fell off head first and died.
Death by taser, right?
Combine a few more such instances and a few incidents where individual officers misused their issued tasers and all of a sudden the good citizens of NYC are up in arms demanding that these less than lethal force devices be held back from the patrol force. In effect, reducing the options that the cops have to: a can of pepper spray, maybe a baton and a hand gun.
Pepper spray don't work all that well on crazy people, drugged up or not. Like the perp in this instance they just take it in stride and keep on coming.
Batons against a raging, knife wielding crazy is not a fair match up. A knife will win almost every time. A knife will win against a gun in close quarters most of the time as well. I bet you didn't know that.
Which leaves us with the weapon of last resort, the handgun. Unless you hit a crazy in the brain stem or only a few other critical locations, the crazy can and often will keep coming at you. A crazy with a blade does need to be put down definitively and if a handgun is the only recourse you do need to take the shot and very likely should consider emptying your weapon into said crazy.
12 shots were taken. Maybe six would have done the trick. The shooting took all of about a second and a half. In a second and a half, a crazy can cover 20+ feet. He went down and never made it far enough to stick his IKEA 11" blade into one of the cops, so the only thing we know for sure is that 12 shots were enough.
The good liberal citizens of New York were disturbed by the twitching of tasered crazy perps so they demanded that access to this non-lethal force option be highly restricted. In effect, they made the choice of how the PD would respond and they chose lethal force over non-lethal options.
As has been stated in other posts above, tasering doesn't always work. Heavy clothing, a body pumped up on meth or PCP or bath salts, even a mechanical malfunction in the taser device will reduce effectiveness. There is no sure thing in this world, so even if every cop there had tasers, my hope is that at least one of them would have had his service weapon drawn and ready for use.
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