I've had a few interactions with United States police and compared to their Canadian and European counterparts they always struck me as exuding bravado to cover up for basic insecurity or downright fear (with a few exceptions, but not many).

In situations where they know their counterparty is armed an overly aggressive response with a military vehicle and a summary execution of the suspect makes sense when you look at it from the perspective of scared people.

It's the same thing that drives 'force protection' when dealing with the citizens of some occupied country.

A police department that puts the safety of it's officers first has a rational incentive to bring overwhelming force to bear on every situation every time.

The doctrine of "safety first" needs to change. It needs to apply to the community MORE than the officers charged with protecting it. Clearly, the doctrine of overwhelming force puts the interests of the police ahead of the community they serve, which is plainly evil, even ignoring the potential for abuse in a full-blown tyranny.

1) I spend a lot of time listening to emergency band scanners. Considering the low violent crime rate in Sunnyvale, I'm pretty shocked how often the Santa Clara Sherrifs Dept are called to stand-offs and hostage-type situations. If it is resolved without fatalities, perhaps it doesn't make it into violent crime statistics, but I'm not that appalled that Sunnyvale PD feels the need to own one.

2) KTVU reports that he he came out with a firearm and ran towards them.

3) KTVU reports that they responded with a couple of squad cars, but the man disregarded orders to come out with his hands up. As a murder had been reported, calling SWAT is reasonable, IMO.

Again, I agree that police forces in general are over-militarized, but we need to represent the facts accurately.

edit: Why the down-votes? He has an alternate explanation that I've acknowledged, and that he didn't provide initially.

  > Again, I agree that police forces in general
  > are over-militarized, but we need to represent
  > the facts accurately.

Some additional back story.

1) The event was witnessed in its entirety by friends of ours who live there. They describe the sequence differently than the official sequence of events.

2) A previous officer involved shooting, on my street, was also reported as a 'charged with weapon, officer defended themselves and shot the suspect.' which was also reported very differently by the people who were standing on the curb behind the guy that got shot (and nearly caught in the cross fire). This guy had a knife and was 15 yards away from the officer when they were killed.

The similarity between both events is that there had been a 911 call, and police responded 'ready to fight.'

I've got a number of concerns with respect to the training and rules of engagement our public safety officers are operating under. I'm a big fan of the classic 'old west' rule that first shot is offense, second shot is defense. Meaning that if you fire first you are the guy doing the shooting, if the person fires back at you they are defending.

Clearly I get to follow this one, its in my 'backyard' to use the vernacular. It is certainly going to be a hot topic of discussion at the BBQ we host for the folks running for City Council. (strangely the police report through the city manager which is another topic of discussion for the BBQ)

Then you need to explain how up front. right now I'm no wiser and your position is basically 'trust me, other evidence is wrong.' I agree with you about the more general point of police militarization being bad, but to do something about that you're also going to have to stand up for limitation on the 2nd amendment.

I have no opinion on whether or not the shooting was justified.

No doubt these folks will be part of the DA's process for investigating all officer involved shootings. And theirs and any other testimony will end up in the official record.

The shooting itself, the video of the shooting, and the reporting of the shooting left me with questions and concerns.

Those concerns are around how we're training our officers and what instructions we are giving them with regard to the use of deadly force.

I'm also concerned about their equipment. You dress people up and equip them like soldiers and they start thinking like soldiers. That is, in my opinion, a bad mindset for a Peace Officer.

I'm also interested in what process my city government has in place to make sure that if we do have a problem it will be addressed. And insuring that process is working.

I'm questioning your challenge of the available facts in this specific case, based on other information that you have chosen not to reveal.

When you write "this specific case" you are talking about a guy that got shot by the police.

And when I write "this specific case" I'm talking about how the Sunnyvale Police respond to a 911 calls about some guy who claims to have killed someone in his house.

Because we're talking about different things, the responses don't make any sense to the other person in the conversation.

I most certainly am talking about how the police responded, and saying that it makes rather more sense when you include the full context of the call.

You originally wrote Sunnyvale police drove their tank over to a house where someone had called in reporting a murder, they asked the person to come out and then immediately shot him dead. You left out the fact that the caller identified himself as the person who had committed the murder, and you've been trying to change the subject ever since.

I have no problem with the police driving an armored vehicle* to an address where the caller has identified himself as a murderer. In a situation like that there's a high probability of getting shot at and I don't expect the police to go in defenseless. This is totally different from an innocent third party calling in to report the discovery of a murder.

* This is a Sunnyvale PD armored personnel carrier: http://media.nbcbayarea.com/images/654*488/swat.raid.2.jpg This is a tank: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/M1_... They are nothing alike.

Google "Tueller drill." You'll be surprised by what you find. Now, 45' is a bit further than that 21' that is usually cited as the "this guy can run and stab you before you can stop him" distance, but I can see why a situation very similar to what you describe was assessed as a good shoot.

(Test it yourself and see. You'll be surprised.)

It certainly doesn't mean that you should shoot the guy right away or anything, but someone with a knife being shot from 20-30 feet away is not necessarily a bad shoot.

A knife is a deadly weapon. I think that's downplayed quite a bit when everyone is worried about guns. 15 yards may be a bit a a distance to start shooting, but there's a lot of information left out that to assume is negligible would be a mistake. For example:

Did the suspect advance from behind cover or were they in plain view for a period before advancing?

How far was the suspect from other bystanders? Were others in possible danger?

In this case, what does "charged" mean? Running full-tilt, or advancing at a quick pace?

Were the bystanders looking at the situation from the beginning, or talking among themselves until someone noted something was happening and they all redirected their attention?

These are all just some of the details that may or may not be noticed by individual bystanders, and may or may not have affected their view of the situation. Eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable for other reasons as well (discussion can make people believe they saw things they didn't).

That's not to say the police accounting is infallible, just to suggest that all testimony needs to be examined closely.

If I thought it was a simple problem I'd have a simple answer (that would be wrong [1]) I'm more interested in fixing the process, understanding what in the officer's training lead him to shoot at that moment in time, what other options were considered, and what changes should we put in place to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

[1] "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken

Why is that strange? In California, in the usual case (i.e., not in charter cities with a different arrangement), the city manager is the appointed operational head of the city of government, and the city council (including the Mayor, who is effectively just the presiding officer of the council) is a (part-time) legislative body.

Good grief Chuck, how many ways are you going to mischaracterize what happened in one sentence? The guy called the police saying that he had committed a murder, and indeed police found the body of a woman in the house. Per a neighbor's testimony, the police turned up with sirens wailing, and about an hour later later shots were heard (of them killing the guy).

According to the police (whose account of events is open to question) the guy refused to come out at first and then charged them.

Now, I am not excusing the fact that they shot him, and I am not willing to take their account of things at face value absent evidence. But leaving out the facts that the guy reported himself to be a murderer, and that this report seems to have been true, and that there was a considerable interval between the arrival of the police and the shooting of the suspect, is spectacularly misleading.

I realize this might be the result of error rather than intention, but you should apologize to people for having only provided them with half the facts.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/08/08/sunnyvale-stando...

[...] What sounded like gunfire had been heard earlier at the home, and a person called police around 8 a.m. and said he had killed someone inside his home in the 600 block of San Pedro Ave., Capt. Dave Pitts said.

At 8:53 a.m., a SWAT vehicle was driven onto the front yard of the home. Roughly 10 SWAT officers wearing bulletproof vests then approached the front of the home. A few moments later, a voice could be heard on a loudspeaker saying “Come out with your hands up.”

A team of about six SWAT officers entered the home about 10 a.m. and within seconds, several loud gunshots were heard. [...]

As with most things, what is reported, what people saw, what people thought they saw, and what actually happened can often be disjoint. I'm interested in the DA's report (although those take a loooooong time to come out)

I have fundamental questions though about the rules that our public safety department is operating under. And I will get those answered.

One, what is the justification for driving around in an armoured vehicle? There is so much information on how what you do "just before" a situation can totally change the way you react in a situation, it seems unreasonable to roll into a situation like a squad of marines rolling on to the beach head.

Second, what is the standard used for engaging deadly force? How is that established, trained, and on what basis was it arrived at?

Third, what is the process for evaluating the training effectiveness and its implementation in our police force? What does it tell us about this event?

Fourth, in our policy what precedence to we place on safety, is it citizens first or officers first?

As I mention elsewhere, it was the combination of events that got me asking these questions, not just this one. So it goes from "hmm, that was a sad story" to "hmm, is there a problem here that needs to be fixed?"

I know how to fix problems, step one is verify that it is one. That is where I am now.

This bit annoys me though:

  > I realize this might be the result of error
  > rather than intention, but you should 
  > apologize to people for having only 
  > provided them with half the facts.

As I wrote, (and was misread), the thing that bothered me wasn't the shooting. I recognize that there is no way at this stage for me to have any sort of informed opinion about the justifiabilty of that shooting. What bothers me is how the police responded. And to a lesser extent the equipment they brought with them.

Since nobody disavowed this as some rogue event, I must conclude that they responded as they were trained to do. And it is that which has me bothered. Trying to understand how we are training our cops to respond, and what is the motivation for training them in that way.

Sorry you missed all that.

EDIT: formatting

I do complete share your concerns about police militarization and police brutality. I've actually seen it much, much closer up than vast majority of people here, and not in the capacity I refer to above; it's not pretty, yet it's very routine for most LE.

This bit annoys me though:

Well, too bad! You don't say what facts you have from your neighbors, and you haven't contradicted the claim that the guy called police to report himself as having killed someone and that the body of a woman was found in his house. Now those are salient facts and you know it; you should not have omitted them from your original description of the situation.

What bothers me is how the police responded.

If anyone calls up the police saying that they've killed a person the police are setting out with a possibility that they're going to be encountering an armed and dangerous individual. There's a huge difference between 'I'm calling to report a murder' and 'I'm calling to tell you I just killed someone.' You originally reported this as an example of the first situation, which is clearly not the case.

I didn't miss anything here. Now if your neighbors' report of the facts is substantively different, then by all means share their version, but since the 9-11 calls is a matter of public record and can easily be obtained by the media I'm going to take the claim that the dead guy called in saying he'd killed someone at face value. How you can omit that from your summary is just beyond me.

Sorry to interrupt with a slightly different issue, but anybody can call the police, tell them some story, and cause SWAT to show up at your location. SWAT-ing is a thing. It happens. So is SWAT teams mistakenly showing up at the wrong address, and all sorts of other human errors. It happened to Brian Krebs recently, and it can happen to anyone.

So, without regard to whether there is an actual heinous criminal pedophile terror suspect holed-up in his house, or whatever else is going on; we do want SWAT teams to err on the side of professionalism and restraint, not on the side of driving armored vehicles into peoples' houses, killing their pets and generally terrorizing their victims.

You won't have to look long to find plenty of examples of police acting with complete disregard for the safety of suspects, suspects' property.

Again - why? Why is the police becoming para-military? Do they fear another major protest and want to respond in force? What's the motivation behind all this.

Nobody gives the police this money. The police take the money from people they arrest. It is called asset forfeiture, it is legal, and it is widely used by police departments to pay for all that expensive military equipment they use.

"Why is the police becoming para-military?"

To gain more power over the population, to arrest more people, and to funnel more money to the well-connected corporations that benefit from this sort of tyranny.

Becoming? In the 1990s, when I was in college, state and local police recruitment information overtly described the organizations as paramilitary. Armed police forces are inherently paramilitary organizations, and always have been.

They're getting another influx of military equipment and personnel with combat experience (and expectations shaped by that experience) because the US military is gearing down after a over decade of greater-than-usual war.

The Army does, and then gives it to the sheriff's department when they're done with them.

i first want to say that our 'police' are honestly the nicest and most caring of all departments i've dealt with. i've interacted w/ them a dozen or so times over the last few years. after a tragic event a year or two back, one of the officers took it upon himself to check in w/ me after a few weeks and again after a few months to see how i was doing and offer support.

additionally, sunnyvale's 'police' are actually 'public safety officers' additionally respond as trained firefighters and EMTs. they carry the gear for fire/medical in the trunk of their squad cars.

for your questions,

#1 it's a "santa clara county regional rescue vehicle".

#2 after an hour+ he came out armed. police are protecting neighboring houses in addition to themselves. i'm pretty sure the guy wanted to die.

#3 they did respond w/ just a couple of cars. they summoned SWAT after it was apparent he wasn't going to come out, and he's already admitted to killing someone in the house.

it's sad that he was killed, but he already stated he'd killed on person and he came out armed. SWAT did what they were trained to do, and neutralized a threat. 6 or 7 shots were fired from rifles of highly trained personel. in a dense residential setting, i'd much rather have SWAT pulling the trigger than by a hoard potentially nervous cops w/ less training. you often read stories that police fire 40+ rounds when someone makes a similar move.

for the record, i'm not a fan of the militarization of police in the US by large. but i just wanted to put in a word of defense for sunnyvale as they've been the most restrained and caring of all the departments i've known.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/01/local/la-me-sunnyval...

Now, if the man hadn't responded in a threatening way and had come out peacefully, then the police probably wouldn't have shot him. If they did, then this would be a bigger deal than you're making it out to be.

Taking a tank to the house was probably overkill, but I think the police are under a "use it or lose it" mentality when it comes to their toys.

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_23821648/sunnyval...

I think this was suicide by cop... And the cops that have some sort of extreme fear of the population (perhaps justified, considering how badly the US population had been treated recently?) did what the guy wished.

Although rather than being worried about our police becoming militaristic (they are pretty good, I feel), I was mostly concerned with who paid for it!

IMO, the money would have been better spent on training instead of hardware. The NYPD budgets 150 rounds a year per officer for firearms proficiency testing & training. The NYPD is also known for violating the civil rights of the people they interact with -- if only they knew more about the law...

There was a recent incident where ALL the civilian casualties were from the cops, and most specifically we believe from one who screwed up big time, the other did the right thing for himself and others, to the extent we could determine.

I suspect this had lots to do with the Fruitvale Station incident. Taser cartridges cost 30 or more times more than bullets, so the conditioning strength of taser use was a whole lot weaker than the conditioning strength of firing the pistol. I see this as a big problem.

Ah, I now remember there's a recent RAND report on how badly this is done.

But you're generally right about the required amount of training, and that explains the various Federal unit cartridge procurements that have raised so many eyebrows (mostly because people don't know they're indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity ones, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDIQ). I only looked closely at the one for the fish police as I like to call them (NOAA armed officers who police things like sea fishing, see http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ole/), it attracted attention due to a clerical error listing it under weather forecasting, and running the numbers resulting in appropriate quantities for training, obviously a lot more than the NYPD's 150/year.

They're still potentially lethal, so as a citizen without all the protections police have I might as well use the most effective means of self-defense, I'll be judged the same if an adversary dies and very likely if not. Especially since I'm not expected to intervene in situations like the police are.

On the other hand this has little to do with the Fruitvale Station incident, the error there was in drawing the wrong weapon and not recognizing that before pulling the trigger (when I looked at the officer's face his expression of horror was very clear).

It could be addressed by simply putting it in a hard or very strange place to draw from, so the muscle memory of drawing the two is sufficiently different. Even a waist cross-draw with it located on the non-dominate side of the body, since it's less lethal, and wouldn't be effective at all again body armor, weapons retention is less of an issue. That was my first thought after seeing the incident (well, there's also second guessing the decision to escalate the level of force used, but I didn't seriously consider that; again, as a civilian, all this will never come up).

Without a non-lethal option, you're stuck. There are situations which don't warrant a lethal response, or which don't absolutely require a lethal response, but where if you get close, weapon retention becomes a serious issue, turning the whole thing into a lethal force justified encounter. Which is a huge problem for police who open carry handguns; less of an issue if you CCW.

Tasers are huge, and unless openly carried or in a house, are basically the same form factor as a handgun. If I were a high-risk person (smaller, female, disabled, etc.) in a place where I couldn't or wouldn't carry a handgun, it would be an option. It might also be an option in a place where use of force but non-lethal force was likely, like a mental hospital, bar, etc. Otherwise, the optimum seems to be OC/knife/light, and then handgun.

I do not face the same quandary with a pocket knife. I always have either a Spyderco Tenacious or Persistence on me. (Depending on local laws and wardrobe requirements) Size and quality criteria are easily met with the tenacious/persistence. The kicker is they cost ~$45 so I don't have to worry about losing them and I never feel guilty abusing them if I need to scrape or pry something. The cherry on top is that I can throw a zip tie on the thumbhole and I essentially have an auto opener that is legal where actual auto-opener would not be.

I tend not to lose things when actually wearing them; it's when they go into storage that it becomes a problem, and I've solved that with labeled/inventoried plastic bins and baggies. So, I didn't really care about cost (maybe $100?). I got Fenixes when slickdeals said Amazon/etc. had them on sale (some around $10), and I got some other stuff from PXes in Iraq and Afghanistan (where it was also cheap -- like the Cold Steel SRK was $49, so I got a bunch).

(on the other; I don't have a California CCW because I don't live in San Mateo County (the only Bay Area county which is vaguely lawful in how it issues CCWs); for states where I can, Ruger LCR or G19 depending on clothing, rarely a 1911. If I move to San Mateo, probably Sig P938.)

The only lights I've been amazingly impressed by are the Surefire shotgun foreends I put on my Mossberg 590s, and the kickstarter programmable rechargeable light (hexbright).

For a knife, I most often carry a Kershaw Cryo or a Ken Onion Ripple. I have no illusion about using either for self defense.

See this page: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/knifelies.html

A lot of that applies to guns as well.

The very specific case of someone grabbing a gun is the one area where I feel comfortable using a knife in self defense. Other than that it would be my absolute last choice (unarmed, even, might be better).

I'm generally in my house, in my car, or in an office somewhere -- all fairly secure environments, where I have 10-15 seconds to draw, or possibly even grab a long arm. My goal is to have a house/office on enough land that it takes >60sec for even SWAT to get to the front door after initially being noticed (a 150mph helicopter might be difficult, though), and maybe 30+ seconds to breach it (minimum).

The C2 TASER is a flashlight.

I would not go around my house searching for the bad guys, in any case. You hole up in your safe room and dial 911 from behind cover. Massad Ayoob recommends against going on the prowl to search out the bad guys. The pros don't even do that alone without backup. He notes that it's also a good way to get yourself shot when the cops do arrive on the scene.

One needs to distinguish between "a bump in the night" that might be an intruder but probably isn't, and a known intruder. It's impractical to call the police for every instance of the former, and nowadays down right unwise unless absolutely necessary ("Don't talk to the police"). But I would of course hole up and call them if I'm sufficiently certain.

No, you should have a light attached to your handgun, or use the technique of separating centermass from your light. The point I was making is that the C2 Taser is its own weaponlight, which you indicated you didn't know.

> One needs to distinguish between "a bump in the night"...I would of course hole up and call them if I'm sufficiently certain.

Going forth in the dark of night and presenting yourself to an intruder is probably not going to be the best strategy, especially if it's an intruder. Your home safety plan should probably include procedures for identifying an intruder without putting yourself in harm's way. For myself, I can usually tell by the sound. If I can't, I'm locking the door and I have a means of blocking it as well. If they bust through, then they face the consequences.

In California, the law is that a citizen has a "duty to retreat." You can only legally use deadly force against someone if you've already tried to do so, or you think it's not an option.