Was the roommate chained to the tree?
A few years ago on the outskirts of Minneapolis there was a car chase. Couple of people in the car. They had an accident and left the scene.
It was 10 below zero.
The cops had disabled the car and it was stuck in the ditch.
Four cops from different branches surround the car.
The driver came out with a knife and would not drop it.
All four cops blasted him.
The woman picks up the knife, same thing. All four blasted her.
Of course they were cleared because they were scared.
It was 10 below zero, daylight, in the country, they had nowhere to go. Cops could have sat in their locked cruisers with the heat on and these two would have eventually surrendered or froze to death.
Instead, they were scared so they executed them.
There is a time for lethal force.
There is a time when you can just sit back and relax while you come up with a better solution.
The crazed woman might easily have stabbed her if she tried to go anywhere. In my view, when police are in such situations, they’re trying to interpret them very quickly, to boil all that’s complex down to the simple essentials of what matters most in mere seconds. Trying to interpret what’s going on and what matters and weigh it all so quickly can be extremely difficult and can’t involve that much thinking because there’s no time for much deliberation. They’re reacting according to their responsibilities and training and their experiences and common sense in what’s often a fog of war type of situation.
At this point, since there’s so much contention over the police, it might really be good as a society to look more closely at all they do and what it involves. For instance, it’s been proven that eyewitness testimony to an event like a crime is both good in some ways and faulty in others. Well, police are using those same faculties as witnesses do but they’re having to act. Our perceptions in challenging circumstances like that are both sharpened and more prone to error.
In this case, then, I would say from what I’ve heard so far about the case that it’s reasonable to conclude that the officer used reasonable force because his first duty was to protect the woman close to the crazed woman. He was operating on the fact of how the crazed woman acted and the danger to the other woman.