Why walk up to a driver's window and start barking at him/her. Doctors practice good bedside manners, so why can't policemen use some kind of decorum? Then if the police know they have a dangerous situation, why don't they stay away from a dangerous person and wait for backup, maybe giving the irate driver time to calm down.
I'm thinking about Tamir Rice also. Why couldn't they have assessed the situation better with a 12-year-old. Perhaps the angry ones are the police? They are the ones who need to calm down?
If a Doctor didn't know if the next patient was going to punch him in the mouth, I'm pretty sure his bedside manner would suffer a more than tiny adjustment. The Police Officer, like the Soldier, never knows where the next danger is going to come from. He operates in a constant state of alert and must be able to react without hesitation. Mistakes happen. Tragic ones.
I concede that some of these people didn't need to be police officers to begin with, and that certain prejudiced practices are endemic to the force as a whole.
But I don't know if, (and I'm not in any way being confrontational) I would say that the cops just need to be nicer.
@NHP -- Doctors, especially those who work in emergency rooms or who deal with mentally disturbed patients, face the punch-in-the-mouth risk every day. The good ones, like good police officers or good soldiers, learn to differentiate between REAL signs of danger/violence and ones that are simply based upon prejudice.
When doctors over-sedate patients because of they're afraid of mouth punches, we call it medical malpractice. When soldiers machine-gun entire villages because any one of The Enemy might be armed/dangerous, we call it a war crime. When police officers abuse/kill unarmed African-Americans, far too often excuses are made based upon the officers' subjective perception of danger.
I understand.
I think it's evident that some of these officers shouldn't be in that line of work at all. Too bad we only discover it after it's too late. That isn't to say all officers are emotionally unstable, but it's obvious that some are.
Course, I tend to think that when you spend all day on the job driving around issuing citations for petty traffic violations, encountering an actual "armed and dangerous" bad guy must be kinda like hitting a small lottery.
