An idea for LEOs.....

[itslucky]

What the public at large doesn't realize is that street police work is a contact sport. There will always be twenty percent or more of the general citizenry that will do ANYTHING to avoid going to jail. The use of force, although not pretty, IS legal and expected when being forced to protect yourself or another.

I understand that the unwashed masses don't get it. They haven't walked a mile in a Police officers' shoes. The people who SHOULD know better, the politicians & news reporters, are eager to enable the cries of the chronically stupid by throwing the officer under the bus. That's immoral and dangerous./B]

 

[LostintheOzone]

I have seen videos of meth-heads/crack-heads in action. Those drugs give them a super-human strength (at a very terrible physical price). One of the videos was of a guy who wasn't that big or heavy but amp'd up big-time on meth. It took four BIG LEO's to take him down and keep him down so the could hook him up. That was after they had deployed the taser and tagged him twice (he just blinked at them). The one thing that I thought of at the time was "pepper spray or a bean-bag gun would probably be useless".

I had a dog trainer use my grounds to hold classes on training dogs for a sport that resembled police dogs (I can't remember the name of the sport). I got to wear "the suit" which makes you look like the Michelin man. I then was told to act aggressively and use a bamboo slap stick (makes a crack like a whip). The dogs are taught to wait for the verbal command and when they get it they light into you. You cannot BELIEVE the feeling of those dogs when they bite into you and start yanking you around. They are fast and strong and a few of them were very strategic (would feign a bite to the leg and then grab the groin). I can see why perps are given pause when a police dog is threatened.

Oh yeah, a trained dog is going to take you down, meth or no. The more aggressive you get the more aggressive a dog gets. The great thing about a dog is their reflexes are about twice as fast as a humans and if they are trained to disable a person they can do it.

If you want an attacker subdued fast without shooting them let them deal with a dog for a few minutes.

Not every LEO can have a dog so their weapon really is their only defense.

 

[30-30remchester]

My daughter and husband are retired LEO's, I vote republican, respect my mother, help the elderly, and spent years as a volunteer firefighter. When I go to Baskin Robbins I order vanilla. You might say I am a bit conservative. However the thing that must be remembered is, the police are the enforcement arm of our judicial system not the punishment phase. Is running a shootable offense? Are you required to submit to everything a police officer requests? Did the man running hear the command to stop and why is he being asked to stop? As straight laced as I am, I still guard my liberties. You can not be stopped or questioned if you are doing something legal. I have no idea what transpired during this shooting, and am making no judgments.
And to answer the op's main question, yes there is now on the market a device that gives the LEO the option without complications. A device he wears on his belt can within 2 seconds be attached to his main handgun. When the gun is fired with regular ammo, this device absorbs the bullet and expels a large metal ball. This ball hits the bad guy with the force of a hard thrown baseball. After the shot the device is ejected from the gun and the rest of the guns magazine is ready to discharge with another pull of the trigger. This was designed to give the LEO the option of less than lethal force while still using their familiar sidearm, and transitioning from less than lethal to lethal is just a pull of the trigger.

 

[rwsmith]

More dogs......

Oh yeah, a trained dog is going to take you down, meth or no. The more aggressive you get the more aggressive a dog gets. The great thing about a dog is their reflexes are about twice as fast as a humans and if they are trained to disable a person they can do it.

If you want an attacker subdued fast without shooting them let them deal with a dog for a few minutes.

Not every LEO can have a dog so their weapon really is their only defense.

More dogs in the field??? I'd like that. Of course then the doggy has to take a perilous position. But of course if the perp shoots at the dog, they pretty much know that he has bad intentions. More body armor for dogs.

A more complicated question. How do you deal with the 12 year old kid that was playing with an air soft gun? Yes, it would have been smart for him to drop it right away or not use it without the orange barrel and maybe he wouldn't have gotten killed but did he really understand the implications of what he was doing? He SHOULD have, but I've made a case on several other threads about how stupid kids can be, even after they are told straight up what to expect. I should mention how stupid adults can be, too. My son and his friends were playing in a neighborhood park (unincorporated area) with airsoft guns that had the tell tale orange barrel. A woman came along and had a conniption fit about them having 'guns' and called the police who came and cleared up the non-problem. I appreciate that an officer NEVER knows exactly what he's getting in to when responding to a call.

 

[rwsmith]

Me neither....

O Heck, I won't even carry a gun with a manual safety for reasons of simplicity.

I have all DA semis and a DA/SA revolver.

PS I looked up rubber bullets/bean bags and found that they can be very lethal, causing life threatening internal bleeding, so it's just a dim chance that a person may be just knocked out by one. I thought that there was a reason I hadn't heard about them after the big splash they made in the 80's.