Here’s an excellent article on the plight of the unarmed perpetrator, by John Hinderaker. Here’s an excerpt:
This is the point I really want to make: the constant emphasis on police shootings of *unarmed* men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy. If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not. Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not. If you attack him, what do you expect him to do? Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match? He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Attacking a police officer rarely ends well. Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop.If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices. Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group–6% of the population, according to the Post–impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop. If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.
This makes the point that should be obvious to all but has somehow gotten obscured by all the post-Brown propagandist verbiage, which is that a police officer can’t tell whether a belligerent aggressive suspect is armed or not unless he/she is brandishing the weapon in full sight.
If you begin to attack a police officer, that officer can’t ascertain what hidden weapons you might have, but must defend him/herself and do it quickly and effectively. Officers are not required to be martyrs, although the left would like to pretend they should be.
Just one quibble with Hinderaker: the press is not crazy when it writes these preposterous things. It is purposeful. The press wants to guide you in a certain direction and believes that you don’t have the brains to see the fallacy of its argument, and in a large number of cases the press is correct about this.
I would also like to add something. Hinderaker writes that “If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot” should be a message taught to all those who would otherwise defy the police and try to attack them. I believe that most people already have heard it, and perhaps were taught it by their parents. However, some choose to defy that advice for a number of possible reasons: bravado, knowledge of guilt of crime and fear of apprehension, and/or being high on drugs and/or alcohol.
What’s more, the “hands up, don’t shoot” crowd has perpetrated a related lie about Michael Brown, who never said or did any such thing.
For some, their motivation is to get the opposite message across than the one that Hinderaker suggests should be spread around.
One effect of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie is to tell would-be perpetrators that they’re better off defying a cop than surrendering, because it won’t help them to put their hands up since the cop will shoot them anyway. So the covert message is that they may as well try to attack the police officer (or run), who would just as soon shoot them as not no matter what they do.
In addition, if unfortunately the person happens to be shot or even killed by a police officer as a result, it wouldn’t be so bad for the movement because it would garner more publicity and become another cause célèbre and grist for the publicity mill.
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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