The complaints that have filled news stories over the past lustrum or so pertain to cops using undue violence.
What you've highlighted is a scenario in which a suspect wielding a knife was proximate to someone else and the cops inaptly assessed the situation they faced. The suspect clearly to the cops had a knife and he was in the vicinity of bystanders.
Nobody takes exception with cops using deadly force
when it's warranted. Doing so and being able to tell when to do so and when not to do so is part of what cops must be capable of doing and doing well. The problem is that too few cops are adept at assessing the nature of a situation and assailant.
To be sure, it's not easy to aptly assess certain situations, yet doing so better and and with vastly greater aplomb is the expectation up to which cops must perform. That it's not easy militates for our upping the psychology training and mastery requirements as goes the theory and application to the kinds of situations and cops encounter. Yes, cops must be adept at using force, but they must be even more adept at assessing when to use it, how much to use and when not to use force.
In short,
21st century policing requires officers to have and exhibit more skills and abilities than it used to. It used to be that if a cop said events transpired "thus," that's how they happened. In these days of ubiquitous video and audio, we're observing that policing in accordance with our country's standards of jurisprudence is simply beyond the capacity of many a person with but a high school degree and training in how to use weapons and command people to do XYZ.
Exacerbating the matter is seniority and promotion model used in police forces. That model obliges the least experienced cops to face the most challenging situations. That's like tasking the fresh-out-of-med-school doctor with taking the lead in performing open heart surgery. Moreover, upon developing extensive experience in managing the most complex situations that comprise the day-to-day of policing, they are then promoted to positions wherein they either face no such scenarios, or they are "trotted out" to face predominantly exceptional situations.
Policing is like many other careers: it needs a variety of types of people:
- Officers who enjoy and want to ply their trade working a beat. These folks don't want to manage the administration of a police force; they want to police and they're good at doing so it. They read people and tense situations really well, they're good at diffusing situations, they excellent marksmen, etc. These are what some might call "high EQ" people.
- Officer who have some experience on a beat, but they really don't want to be on patrol. These are folks who are good at abstract organizational management who are only so-so on the "EQ" side of things. These are the cops who should move into police force management rather than remain in policing. The cops who transition into this aspect of policing and who don't produce demonstrable results -- operational improvements that benefit the community -- should be return to beat patrol where they're given a couple years to get up to quality of the "high EQ" guys whereafter if they don't they are let go. Alternatively, if they don't "work out" as police administrators, they can leave the police force and not return to the beat patrol.
The military has figured out that not all service members want to be or are good at combat, yet there is a need for non-combat enlisted and commissioned personnel. Why police departments haven't figured that out and overwhelmingly implemented career paths in accordance with that is anybody's guess.
