I can't speak for anyone else, but my problem with your post is that it seems to reveal a disturbingly casual attitude toward the life of an innocent person. It seems to imply that it would be better for you to kill an admittedly innocent person because they had something in their hand (or you thought they did) than for you to even risk determining if there was an actual threat to you. I think most of us expect that a police officer would accept a little risk before killing an innocent person. That is part of the job, and if you don't like it or can't accept it, find another line of work.
That is not to say we should expect the police to accept unreasonable risks to their safety, but to say they should accept no risk is not realistic.
Agree with your risk point completely. Supposedly, that’s a prime factor in “justifying” the scandalous pensions they’ve managed to squeeze out of the politicians.
“my problem with your post is that it seems to reveal a disturbingly casual attitude toward the life of an innocent person.”
At the time, I had no idea the man was innocent. I knew that he was wanted for questioning in a murder.
“It seems to imply that it would be better for you to kill an admittedly innocent(found out after much investigation) person because they had something in their hand (or you thought they did) than for you to even risk determining if there was an actual threat to you.”
From the, “I’d rather have dead cops than dead criminals division of FR.”
“I think most of us expect that a police officer would accept a little risk before killing an innocent person.”
Since you read my post, you know that at the time of the stop I had no reason to believe that the person was innocent.
“That is part of the job, and if you don’t like it or can’t accept it, find another line of work.”
I did.
“That is not to say we should expect the police to accept unreasonable risks to their safety”
Bullsqueeze that is exactly what you are saying. You prefer dead cops to dead criminals, just like all of the Losertarians that have chimed in on this thread.
It seems to imply that it would be better for you to kill an admittedly innocent person because they had something in their hand (or you thought they did) than for you to even risk determining if there was an actual threat to you.
You nailed it. Officer Safety Uber Alles.
Who's to say that a cop's life is more valuable than another civilian, especially when the danger to that cop is only perceived on the flimsiest of speculative evidence? Is a cop's life worth more than a small and innocent child who gets hit by a stray bullet when he goes reckless and trigger happy on a hunch of a perceived threat? I would argue that, all else being equal, it is not. And yet that sort of thing happens far too frequently to just ignore, almost always being justified in the name of "officer safety."