Thursday, August 01, 2013

Compare and contrast

The contrast could not be greater.
Montreal police spend a full day dealing with a demonstrably-violent mentally ill man who shot at them from a house with 180 guns; they finally subdue him with rubber bullets.
A Toronto police officer spends less than five minutes yelling at a potentially-violent mentally disturbed teenager armed with a paring knife; then shoots him nine times. While the other officers at the scene nonchalantly stroll past the bus door.



CBC has an article posted about police use-of-force training -- likely foreshadowing what will be the police defense:
"We teach what courts have said, when it's appropriate to use force," said Fawcett. "The courts have laid down pretty reasonable rules when it comes to the use of deadly force."
"When it comes to making a decision about the reasonableness of use of force, essentially what the courts have said is you have to be a doppelganger or a ghost in the shoes of the officer and see what they saw, not what the video camera showed, not what another witness saw.
"What was the perception of the officer and was that perception reasonable? And of course what the courts have also said [is that] you can't expect cool reflection in the face of an uplifted knife."
It sounds like the George Zimmerman defense all over again -- that the mere perception of danger, rather than the reality, is sufficient to justify a lethal response.

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