Police gone bad: What to do?

[JusticeZero]

The Danziger Seven are having their day in court now, and the news is flooded with damning evidence and testimony about them.

For those not in this area, the Danziger Seven is the name given to the seven police officers who were involved in an incident during Katrina on the Danziger Bridge.

According to witnesses, the police drove up to a group of people attempting to walk across the bridge to evacuate, identified themselves as police, then ambushed them with a semiautomatic rifle and a shotgun, killing one person with a shotgun wound in the back and injuring others.

The official police story is.. confused, at best, contradictory, incoherent, and has been changed several times. Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of evidence that counters the civilian report.

This is clearly a severe failure of law enforcement to be the upstanding individuals that we trust in them to be and which they generally are. However, it begs the question as to how to respond should one find themself being attacked by the police in such an absurd situation.

http://www.nola.com/crime/law_and_disorder/

[sensei8]

Police gone bad; what to do?

If at all possible....RUN and HIDE!!

An ambush is hard to concretely defend against especially when the ambushers are the police...more weapons and more tactics are going to be on the side of the police.

This is a real rough thing to answer, imho.

[Wastelander]

Police gone bad; what to do?

If at all possible....RUN and HIDE!!

An ambush is hard to concretely defend against especially when the ambushers are the police...more weapons and more tactics are going to be on the side of the police.

This is a real rough thing to answer, imho.

In general, this is the best answer possible. If society were to collapse so completely as to make you justified in fighting the police then you would still be out-manned and out-gunned unless you happen to have a large gun collection and lots of friends and you all train group combat tactics together.

[JusticeZero]

Well, it's happened before, obviously. I don't know that the goal in such a case is so much to fight the police as to get out of the situation. The situation that time was apparently, in general, that people in various law enforcement agencies apparently decided, presumably not so much as a policy matter but as an individual hiccough of some sort, to force anyone who wasn't driving a car to stay inside the city during an evacuation. Any time a disaster happens, similar strangeness has a high possibility of happening.

[bushido_man96]

This is terrible. Anytime a cop ends up using lethal force, there is alway a question as to why, and whether or not less lethal force could or should have been used.

As an officer, I make sure I keep myself in check as to what force I use, and whether I can justify its use or not. This is done through articulation, usually after the fact in a report. That's why scenario based training is so important; to recognize when to escalate force levels.

Its alway hard to Monday-morning quarterback a cop's force decisions, and I try not to do it too much. However, with that said, there should be some clear articulations out there on what caused officers to escalate their force levels, and hopefully that articulation justifies why they did so.

At any rate, it is of the utmost importance that the integrity of an officer never be jeapordized; after it is gone, we have nothing left to keep us honest. If we are not honest, how can we protect and serve?