From an article linked below.
"I recently watched the helmet-cam video of James Boyd’s death, and I’m absolutely sickened. Boyd was a mentally-ill homeless man caught up in a confrontation with police due to his camping in the hills outside Albuquerque without a permit.
After hours of arguing, Boyd warily agreed to pick up his bags and leave. He was paranoid that the police were going to double-cross him. As he took his first step away from his primitive campsite, officers lobbed a flashbang grenade at his feet, frightening him and provoking him to reach for a pocketknife.
After escalating the situation themselves, police used Boyd’s reaction as justification to open fire.
READ MORE: Homeless man shot to death by police while “illegally camping” in the foothills
I’ve been sitting here thinking back on my LEO career and I came up with maybe a half-dozen situations where I could have used deadly force and gotten away with it.
But I didn’t do it. It wasn’t my job to GET AWAY with killing people. My job was to kill people only if it was absolutely necessary.
Our downtown area was lousy with unmedicated paranoid schizophrenics that our courts, in their wisdom, turned out of mental hospitals. Confrontations with them were frequent. Most of us were pretty good at handling them. We UNDERSTOOD that we were dealing with people whose connection with reality was tenuous. Sometimes it required force. I had to pound a guy one day who was chasing a city bus up a downtown street biting its tires because he thought he was a werewolf.
There were many times when I could have manipulated mentally challenged individuals into doing things that would have given me the justification to kill them. I didn’t do that. None of us did. Our job was to DE-ESCALATE situations like this, not provoke the people we were trying to talk down.
Why on EARTH any law enforcement professional would throw a ****ing flashbang at a known mental AFTER he had been talked down I can’t imagine. That tactic GUARANTEED a defensive response from the suspect, which ANY experienced and properly trained LEO KNOWS!!!!!
So the guy pulled a knife. OF COURSE HE PULLED A KNIFE!! That’s what paranoid schizophrenics DO!!!! The goal is to talk to them so that they DON’T do something like that, not guarantee that the poor sick bastard WILL do it!!!
So now they’ll get away with a claim of self-defense. The reality is that the poor SOB was set up murdered by a gang of damned cowardly bullies hiding behind badges. If there had been any REAL cops on the scene it would have ended very differently. This makes me SICK!!!!
People who have surrendered don’t have to be stunned to be handcuffed. And if not for one of those damned idiots throwing a flashbang he wouldn’t have been HOLDING any weapons. The man capitulated, picked up his stuff and started to walk down to meet the officers. There was NO JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER to throw that flashbang.
When you are dealing with an individual whose thought processes are already gravely impaired by chronic paranoia, INCREASING the subject’s paranoid delusions is child’s play. Just a few words, a gesture, even a look can easily provoke such an individual to launch an assault. The key to succeeding without resorting to violence lies in REDUCING the subject’s stress and level of paranoia.
When a mental isn’t actively trying to kill you, then you should talk for as long as it takes. Talk is cheap.
I had many such confrontations over the years, many of them long before the advent of the taser. I won more than I lost. I claim no special abilities in this. I merely employed patience and understanding of the problem I was dealing with.
I offer a story from my past to illustrate that having the “right” to employ force doesn’t make it a good idea to do it.
A call was received from one of our nice downtown hotels in Cincinnati. A woman was behaving erratically and the hotel had requested assistance in removing her. I arrived at the hotel room. Several officers had arrived before me and were confronting the lady in question.
It was evident that the lady was indeed suffering from significant mental problems. The officers in front of me were informing her that she would have to leave. She had dug in her heels and made it apparent that she had no intention of going anywhere. The situation was deteriorating rapidly, and was about to become physical. We had the right to use force to remove the woman, as well as to take her into custody and take her in for a mental evaluation, authorized under Ohio law.
As the lady spoke I noticed that she had an unmistakable accent from one of the Scandinavian countries. Her clothing and general appearance suggested a genteel upbringing. I decided to try something. If I failed we’d be no worse off than we were.
I shouldered my way to the front. I swept my hat off and placed it under my arm. I bowed slightly and said, “Madame, please excuse this intrusion. It seems some irregularities have developed concerning your accommodations here, and unfortunately you must vacate this room. We have arranged alternative lodgings for you. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. May I escort you to your car?”
I held out my arm and got ready to duck. The woman look at me quizzically for a moment. She visibly relaxed, smiled at me and said, “Why yes, of course you may.” She then took my arm. I turned to my brother officers and said, “Gentlemen, would you be so good as to bring the lady’s bags?”
We stepped out of the room and down the hallway toward the elevators, followed by a couple of my brother cops with her suitcases. I took her out to the street and placed her in the back of one of our cars, and she was taken to our University Hospital for evaluation.
Did the law give us the right to employ force against that lady? Yes, it did.
That doesn’t mean that we HAD to do it. Neither did the officers in Albuquerque HAVE to lob a flashbang at James Boyd.
The APD officers had no expectation that the flashbang would disorient their suspect, nor did they intend that it should. Its purpose was to destabilize the suspect and provoke him into attacking them
http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/right-way-wrong-way-mentally-ill/