You shouldn’t have a gun either.
I hope you never get the chance kill a crazy person, who needs help, not a bullet.
Exactly what do you think “to protect and to server” means?
Having the justification for lethal force, does not require someone with far greater capability to use lethal force. Its a moral issue.
If a crazy person has a baseball bat they do not require killing.
Once again, I hope to hell that you are not an LEO.
Your statement assumes crazy people are also stupid and incompetent. They are neither. They are just as able and competent to use a baseball bat in lethal manner as a sane person. The only difference is their perception of necessity and motivation, i.e. they are not necessarily perceiving and responding to the same universe we are (particularly during a psychotic episode) which makes them unpredictable. The psychotic may not even be attacking you, but the demon on your shoulder that you do not see or hear. They may believe they are saving you.
But you will have no way of knowing that, will you? Assuming that you are smarter, faster and more capable may just end up with your head being a lump of mush. And assuming you can talk or reason with a psychotic is another ignorant assumption, a huge risky maybe.
The problem is not the cops, the problem is a mental health system that leaves these troubled ill people out living on their own with insufficient supervision to make sure they are taking their meds and without protection from predators.
The chronically mentally are preyed upon and suffer far more violence than they dish out but that doesn't mean we should tie the police's hands when dealing with them. We'll just end up with dead cops to go with the dead mentally ill person.
Every time a mentally ill person dies in a confrontation with the police, they get endlessly second guessed and blamed. But the blame lies with us as a society for not bothering or caring to create and fund an intelligent and comprehensive system for housing and treatment. Instead we have "community health" plans that basically sets them up to be beaten up for their disability checks and food stamps on a monthly basis.
As for what I think "protect and serve" means, it means protecting the community from the individual. Sucks, but there it is, when you present yourself as a disturbance and a threat to the community, bad things can result.
The tragedy is that we keep placing the mentally ill and the police in a conflicting and incompatible relationship and expecting it to turn out differently.