Warning it's graphical, naturally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tpAZObNZfI

To summarize, indeed he says 'Im not a murderer' while picking up his bag, just standing around. They fire the grenade, tell him to get down blabla. He never steps forward in any way, charges them or attacks, while the officers close in and put a dog on him. Seconds later he turns away and gets shot multiple times.

From this point on he's not moving at all and just laying there. They shoot him a couple times with bean bags and put the dog on him again.

I don't hear him saying he's unable to move. It just looks like he's unconscious or dead at that point. He's just laying there still while they're deliberating whether to put the dog on him (and do).

Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.

To put this in context, over the four years from 2008-2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire on 18 separate occasions, killing nine people.

In a country of 55 million people, that's about 5 shooting incidents, and 2 people killed each year.

http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-h...

Ultimately, I don't believe the problem lies with the firearms but with the culture. As an Australian visiting or moving to the US, you will inevitably be reminded that if a US police officer pulls you over you should not get out of your car. I've had people tell me that if you do get out of the car, the officer will draw their weapon and take aim. Perhaps that is exaggerated, but to me that is an absolutely ludicrous reaction. It paints a picture of US police as having an extremely paranoid, "us vs. them" mindset. What I read in the news and have witnessed since I moved here seems to confirm that.

If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.

> If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.

There are, though.

A couple of articles on the subject:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-p...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...

But if we use the FBI's number of ~400/year[0]it's still ridiculous. In the two decades between 1989-90 and 2010-11, Australian police fatally shot a total of 105 people.[1]

Looking at those figures, Australia has ~0.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. The US has ~1.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. Five times more. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't believe that's solely due to gun control policy in the two countries.

[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c...

[1] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rip/21-4...

If you stay in the car you have a much easier time dealing with a person who can't easily get into your personal space and limiting the options you have to protect your self.

> As far as getting out of the vehicle most police don't like surprises so if things go step by step according to the person with the gun things go much better.

In Australia I can get out of the car and go talk to the officer and everything's fine.

In the US I can't - I accept that reality.

Both officers are carrying guns, though.

And if he does? Your argument has excluded half of the (rather important) outcomes.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m...

> Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo.

> “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his weapon. It was his job, it was his duty,” said Rocco Contento, a colleague who was a union representative at the central police station for Paris’s 11th arrondissement.

> Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he “never had time” to pull his weapon.

See also the NYPD cops killed recently - definitely armed - who were shot regardless.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-m...

"the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher."

This is also the same "source" which claimed that both suspects had been captured and a third killed according to "US intelligence sources" (still unnamed). Turned out that that wasn't true at that point in time or since then.

They're like the Daily Mail of the US, just peddle utter shit all of the time...

This tells me nothing. Are the facts presented by parent's post false or not?

In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.

tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.

Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.

The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.

Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.

If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.

That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.

A large contributing factor is the military industrial complex spewing out death tech at an absurd rate, and with nobody to blow up with it all it just goes to police forces at auction. So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.

Sometimes not even sold, but given. There are government programs where police departments can ask for used military gear and get it at no cost (i.e. no impact to their budget). This makes the departments especially eager to acquire as much "death tech" as they can.

> So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.

This makes me very sad. I was born in the 70s so I grew up during the coldest part of the cold war. We were taught in school that (sorry to Godwin) Nazi Germany was pure evil, Stalinist Russia was pure evil, Italy under Mussolini was pure evil, China under Mao was pure evil, and so on. Yet here we are becoming just as militarized on a local level as those regimes, giving our police forces nearly carte blanche to oppress the citizens at will. It's disgusting and disturbing, and I say that as a former law enforcement employee of 14 years.

That scares the shit out of me, and I don't even live in the US. Maybe your government is nowhere near Mao or Stalin, but all the required pieces of oppression are being rapidly put into place, so be very hopeful that two elections and a terror attack from now someone won't decide to actually use those tools.

This was the point I was trying to make. No, we aren't there yet, but we're on the slope and it's getting more slippery every day.

The DDR aka East Germany ended in the 90s, and the Franco regime in Spain ended 1975 with Francos death.

It is debatable if one should also count the Yugoslavian/Serbian government which existed until the mid-90s as oppressive - I certainly do, Miloševic rot in pieces.

Oh, I almost forgot the rest of the Soviet block... so you basically have oppressive regimes as low as 20-30 years ago, leaving a LOT of people with first hand experience.

But typically, the sort of people who blithely compare the US to a police state do so by invoking the Nazis. I wasn't going to credit such arguments with that much subtlety or self-awareness, since they seem to come from a sense of prejudice and knowledge of pop culture rather than history. Although you're right - there are a number of recent police states and dictatorships which the US does not resemble.

Personal attacks are not ok on Hacker News. Please follow the site guidelines.

Maybe the difference was never as black and white as it seemed to me at the time, but I still believe we have been drifting away from the protection of basic rights I was once taught were so important to who we are as a people.

However when most people complain about military gear finding its way to police I have to laugh a little bit. When automatic grenade launchers and .50 cal machine guns start appearing then there are problems(too late at that point I guess).

MWRAPS and armored personnel carriers, those are okay. Dressing in all black(A horrible tactical color BTW) or camo now your just doing that to look upsetting.

The armored tanks are not so bad as it provides something that police can feel safer and less threaten in so escalation doesn't need to happen so fast.

If you turn up in an armoured tank, you have just escalated the situation.

If your dealing with against a threat with a firearm I'm going to assume there are going to be more cops with guns in the majority of the situations. Those are the folks you don't want to set off!

So if you can feel a little bit safer in a little ole MRAP you might not be inclined to start a shooting gallery as quickly.

Calling it an armored tank is exaggerating. It's basically a mobile barrier that can carry a bunch of officers. There's all kinds of nice stuff you can do with them, and frankly I think it would be kind of embarassing for a town if they couldn't get a robust all terrain vehicle to some location within a reasonable timeframe.

Why?

We don't have shootouts with drug lords going on. My city has suffered exactly 3 officer deaths on duty in the last 25 years and only one of those was by gunfire (15 years ago). I utterly reject the reasoning that my city's officers need to be made to feel safe by the acquisition of ex-military hardware.

Let me be as clear as i can, that vehicle does not make me, the citizen, feel safe. I've seen them deploy that vehicle for something as common has a home robbery. This is not Afghanistan, criminals are not enemy combatants. When you have that kind of hardware sitting around, you will find a use for it.

I don't know what kinds of 'nice things' you are referring to, i'd love to hear examples. Lastly i reject that euphemistic description of that troop carrier as a 'robust all terrain vehicle'. This is a well paved, suburban, low violence city; not Kabul.

In most situations a rifle is going to be able to penetrate through almost every part of a police/civilian vehicle. If someone is shooting at you the only proactive thing you can do to keep your self safe is to return fire to either take the enemy out of the fight or suppress them.

If you have a vehicle that can stop small arms fire the immediate need to start shooting back is slowed down to a degree.

They also make nice rolling barriers in case you need to move to someone that is injured with out the need for suppressing fire.

Also psychologically it slows people down due to the fact that they will have less of a chance to be able to harm/pose a threat to police.

On the other hand if they start using turret mounted automatic weapons such a MK19 then that's going to be a problem.

When folks throw around escalation when bringing in an armored vehicle I in my mind I'm thinking the bad guy is going to get MAD due to having a harder time killing a police officer.

I guess we can all take a vote with the knowledge that police get killed in the line of duty. Let's pretend we are all police here. Who want's to be the last cop killed before we achieve societal and world peace?

What cops really need is better and more substantive training, not equipment to hide behind.

I'm not saying that you should give them armoured troop carriers though. You want them to feel safe, not invincible.

If we're worried about officers prematurely killing people how does giving them military-style tools make that any better? If they were going to prematurely kill people before, they're still going to do it. The definition of 'safe' simply moves to a new place. If the OP demonstrates anything, it's that if you give law enforcement these kinds of 'toys' they will find any and every excuse to use them (all under the fake banner of 'officer safety').

Edit: Taking some words from your comment, I guess what I'm arguing is that law enforcement is already pretty invincible.

Fair enough. What I'm arguing is just that LE officers are humans too and they both need and deserve to feel safe in their job, which involves risking their own lives for the safety of the public. But I definitely don't think that they need to go full-military for that. They indeed are pretty safe already.

If all that can happen is the armor getting dented up your not going to feel compelled to shot back so quickly. You will have much more flexibility in responding too. Your initiative is going to get taken away if you don't need to immediately react to a threat.

I do however thing that the carriers should get painted blue or white that someone resemble police colors. The all black and super tactical looking equipment is even too much for me as former military.

When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.

Several years back, near where I lived in NJ, there was a police officer killed on duty. He was reacting to a complaint about drag racing - while he was driving an SUV. He attempted to pursue one of the drag racers, and rolled over his vehicle. Trying to chase a drag racer while you're in an SUV is stupid.

Police should value their own lives higher than that of people behaving aggressively towards them, but that's speaking in a degree. And they shouldn't behave like dangerous paranoics (because of lack of training, or because they are dangerous paranoics).

I´m not sure I articulated that all that clearly, sorry...

An uparmored Humvee, on the other hand, is problematic.

Simultaneously, the terms of the sale dictate that they must use those military items within a year of purchase, or they have to return the items.

This is why the police are increasingly using military gear in situations for which they are not warranted.

I don't like this source, per se, but I've seen it posted elsewhere, and this is the handiest one right now, so here it is.

http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/tanks-on-the-streets-...

If there were plenty, why are the bad cops never arrested?

To be sure, the media crows about this as the problem. But I think that's more a sign of a dysfunctional media than a real insight.

[1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

Also to be intellectually honest in the subject, one can't use media coverage as a proxy for actual data. Lots of anecdotes doesn't necessarily provide evidence. There are thousands of arrests daily. I haven't seen thousands of news stories -- generally only when there was an angle that would elicit ratings. A white man getting shot by the cops doesn't generally make national headlines just like the over 2000 shootings of (mostly) black victims in Chicago barely warrants mention.

My point isn't to argue if cops are racist. My point is that knee-jerk claims of racism ought to be quantifiable.

Of course, 100% innocent until proven guilty; I'm not saying we should convict/target people without merit based purely off of race/age/obesity/hair color.

EDIT: Like any mutual fund manager will tell you, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." Police policy is barking up the wrong tree if they think that blackness/race are the variables to watch, much like anyone would be amiss if they solely looked at TTM rate of return for an investment option, and that is to say nothing of the positive feedback loop that racial profiling creates. Poverty, education levels, and the availability of social mobility are the variables that should be watched to create sane public policy in the USA.

Of course, the entire discussion we're having is invalid if we work with the premise that more policing = more convictions, by virtue of the crime being everywhere (across boundaries in whatever criteria you wish, e.g. race) regardless, and convictions being a simple byproduct of policing and not of said underlying factor like race, obesity, education, socioeconomic status, or hair-color.

No-one doubts that police officers have a tough job. But that truth doesn't give the police the right to execute people, bomb houses and act as judge, jury and executioner. That scenario just makes the police the biggest, best funded gangs on the street.

"If she hadn’t been selling illegal items out of the home, no warrant would have been served," he said. "What you call extreme, we call safe."

She sold some beer and food illegally. The police through a bomb into her house. Real safe.