[Medic42]

(05-28-2015 04:07 PM)TheWastelander Wrote:  

This girl made the mistake of calling a non-emergency number and mentioning he had a knife, which immediately elevates it to emergency status. She took his bottle of vodka away..so why didn't she take his knife away?

I'll say I can't comment on whether it was a clean shoot without seeing what the coroner and forensics have to say. I'm not one to jump on the "cops fucked up" band wagon until I see hard evidence of it. That said, a possible error in tactics that I see is them advancing on him without at least one tazer deployed. Officer safety is priority one, dead cops can't save anybody, but the rest of the officers can drop him with a hail of .223 fire if the tazer doesn't work as intended.

That said, who do you expect them to call? If the police department is of any size the officers receive extensive training in dealing with the mentally ill in their role. As a medic we will not even go near a call with a known weapon until the police have disarmed the patient, and secured the scene. The number one thing that we are taught to ask from the beginning of EMT school is, "is the scene safe." In our clinical training we are automatically failed if we choose to remain on scene at a situation like this. Psych hospitals do not make house calls where I come from and their rules regarding safety would be the same.

It's a shame that this guy is dead, he obviously wasn't right. It would have been much better for everyone involved if he was tazed till he shit himself and then injected with enough Versed to kill a small horse.