stupid old man should have known better than to bring a knife to a gunfight, huh?

listen; severe mental illness can trigger some very erratic and irrational behaviour, and it's not beyond the pale for the officers to treat the situation very seriously. i want to be empathetic to the man's conditions, but not at the expense of public safety.

however, using guns to take down a crippled old man with a knife is excessive force, clearly.

a happy ending to that story would have probably ended with the man transferred to a psychiatric hospital. the presence of a negotiator aside, the police should have known to restrain themselves long enough to bring the situation to that specific endpoint. i mean, i think there's something wrong with telling me that the failure was that the police didn't wait for a negotiator; that is setting an incredibly low bar for the behaviour of the actual officers, who must surely be expected to have better judgement than this.

are they trained to behave like this? was it that specific unit brought in, that is trained to identify and eliminate threats? i can't take that as an excuse; that's a failure in training, at least for police use at the civilian level, as it did not take into account real world scenarios, such as this one. so, it goes back to the first point, actually; if you're going to tell me that the cops are just trained to react to situations and need to be directed by a negotiator, then i need to protest to the low bar set by expectations in police behaviour, which should at least include training in judgement on the use of excessive force. otherwise, these police officers should be deployed strictly for military use, and a separate force for civilians should be designed, with these concerns in mind.

so, telling me that they're doing what they're told is not an excuse, it's a description of the problem.

the thing is that this is actually the one situation where something like a civilian force is going to remain necessary to maintain. yes, he was a crippled old man with a knife, and excessive force in this situation was not necessary. but, he was also a crazy old man with a knife, that may have tried to use it. there's no social program to get rid of crazy, and we need to collectively be prepared to protect ourselves against it. so, i'm not particularly critical of the premise, and recognize that this is a situation where some kind of support personnel that could protect itself would need to be present on the ground.

the issue is the excessive use of force.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/siu-police-shooting-mississauga-1.5621243