Pussification of America is all I see now a days."She was an old lady" .People love being armchair quarterbacks like you know something.She had a knife plain and simple.She was told to drop the knife.She didn't so she was put to the ground.I see nothing wrong with what the cop did.I pretty much dislike cops,but she had to neutralize the situation.So a poor old woman smacked her head.Tuff ****.Don't carry a knife near a cop like an ignorant bitch next time.If this woman is out of her mind then she should be put into a mental home and locked up.I don't care how old you are.Any person with a knife can hurt anyone.Of course wannabe heroes could stop anything from happening and never get hurt.Maybe we need wannabe heroes as cops then.

 

That was handled pretty poorly. Female cop...go figure.

 

GOD thats so messed up!!
power trippin cops! think they can jus do what they want. i cant stand most law enforcement, someone should slam her dumbass on the pavement.

 

I don't give a damn. This is the reason people act like idiots so much now and days. Because they feel they are exempt from the law. I don't care if your 100 years old, when a LEO tells you something you do it. Plain and simple. You start clouding the issue with other things like oh you could have handle it another way; b.s. how about not walking around in public with a knife in your hand.

 

I know you are trained to use a disarming technique that is fast and powerful in order to leave no chance that you won't get the "perp" under control, but aren't there exceptions for the teetering and brittle elderly or the toddling child? Doesn't the technique need to address the level of threat? Try a little charm? A little psychology?

If the Packers can stand up Adrian Peterson and take the ball from some of the strongest hands in football without slamming his head into the ground, why couldn't these two cops do that to granny? Just asking for a little creativity and proportion here.

Bias note: She reminded my of my 89 year old mother, a little before her death.

 

To be completely honest, it appeared to me that the hag was on psychoactive drugs! Her dumb old self was strong enough to have a death grip on that knife, who knows what else she could do?!
Maybe she will learn she must listen to a L.E.O. now.

 

Actually to my knowledge, most local law enforcement are not trained to disarm.

Disarming someone means putting yourself into harms way. And the chance that if you get disabled while doing so, that the armed person can go to harm others. I'm seriously betting the officer violated policy when she did the takedown. She would have been completely justified to shoot the lady.
.

 

At the risk of pissing everyone off on both sides of the issue:

So cops are "victims" of their training? Limited by policy and/or instructions. No room for judgment. No finesse. "I was just following orders." That isn't the way it works. Not since Nuremberg. (Is that inflammatory enough for you?)

Every person in this country has a duty not to create an unreasonable risk of harm to others. The old woman owed the cop. The cop owed the old woman. A jury will decide whether ordinary prudence was exercised by both parties and will apportion the responsibility as they see fit.

There is no answer in advance. It's the jury's call. The rest of us are just guessing until the fat lady sings.

 

No, the cop isn't a victim of her training. If my bet is correct, she went against her training when going for the takedown. The leo is actually getting bagged on here for not doing what she was trained to do: shoot an armed person who does not relinquish their weapon within a certain radius.

Age, perceived frailty and gender are all asides when the person has a weapon. A weapon enables the person carrying it to do something most unarmed people cannot: kill quickly without warning.

I'm no fan of the police, having been held for 3 days on suspected dwi when the breathalyzer declared my BAC was .01 (I was conveniently lost in the system after having bail posted within the hour of arrest). And having been stopped more times than I can count for DWB (Driving While Black) in a Jaguar at 24. Despite that, I still call them as I see them: the officer would have been completely justified to put 2 in the center mass and took a big risk going for the disarm.

The video shows most people on here would have severely underestimated that 'frail' lil old lady's strength.

 

I guess the point I didn't make was that there isn't a chart somewhere that says "person with weapon entitles police to do X". We can have our opinions based our our own previous experiences, prejudices and the information we have available, but the question of who did the right or wrong thing gets made a very different way. We can say "she's right" or "she's wrong" but we don't have either the factual basis to make that claim nor do we typically apply the proper rule. We make up our own rules, as illustrated in many posts above. There are some very broad principles which legally apply "A person must exercise ordinary prudence to prevent creating an unreasonable risk of harm to another person" but there is no matrix connecting particular facts to particular outcomes. We don't know either person's motive, background, emotional state, experience etc. And we don't know what happened before this or what was being said. That's why juries make the call after hearing it all, rather than just having some guy look at a chart and determine the outcome. OK, I'm done.