Originally Posted by
Buncheong
Why is it that DV calls so often result in a lethal threat to peace officers? WTH?
Because it's such a non defined situation with such a wide spectrum of variables. It's not like rolling up on a known bank robbery or going after a drug dealer where there is a reasonable assumption of violence.
Some domestics are just people "being loud" and they simply need to be separated and calmed down, others are right at the point of one person getting ready to kill another person, but at the initial contact they can both look identical but they need to be treated very differently.
This might be the most monday morning QB event in an LE experience, and when somebody gets killed everyone says "should have known better", but the reality is if you respond to every DV call and treat the initial contact like somebody who is getting ready to shoot you, you are gonna escalate half of the "nothing burgers" into an actual event and you'd never survive your probationary year because you'd have 57 formal complaints against you in the first six months.
The reality of police work is nobody is going to tell you they intend to try and kill you and the most dangerous ones hide it the best. But at the same time everyone working is limited by an escalation of force criteria that must be satisfied before they can proceed to lethal force and a lot of guys end up dead before they mentally arrive at that determination. Balance that with drawing down on some old lady that seemed loud and aggressive only to discover she's yelling because she is very hard of hearing, didn't even know it was police officers who were the strangers in her front yard and that was a cell phone in her hands, not a weapon.
Sometimes police work can be a real shit show, most of the time officers are simply surviving the odds despite the operating restrictions they must function under. Thankfully most people aren't really and truly "bad guys" because anyone competent and coherent who wishes to ambush and kill a police officer is probably going to be mostly successful. And cops who overreact sometimes shoot innocent people (or at least people doing bad stuff but not bad enough they deserve to be shot) and cops who under react end of getting killed by those who catch them off guard. There is no safe middle ground but there is a hell of a lot of room for overlap.
The most true thing I ever heard taught at a police academy is "anything you do can get you killed, and that includes doing nothing."
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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