The woman, Talisa Coombs, told Delaney she’d just gotten into what she alleged was a physical altercation with her granddaughter’s mother, Maria Pike, and called 911. Independence police’s response to that 911 call ended with the shooting death of Pike, 34, and her two month old daughter, Destinii Hope — who were identified Tuesday by authorities from the Police Involved Investigative Team, or PIIT, a team of eastern Jackson County detectives called in to investigate police shootings and use-of-force incidents.
The officer who fired his weapon was “a long-tenured veteran of law enforcement,” Dustman said. That officer and another two who were at the scene are on administrative leave.
The USA never heard of tasers?
I mean you shouldn’t tase everyone but at least if you shoot someone with it at least they are taken out of the equation with a high chance of survival.
I don’t want to defend the police here. It seems like they’re more than capable of defending themselves against toddlers and innocent people sleeping in their homes.
What I will say though is on the efficiency of tasers. They’re grrrreat, if you get skin contact with both electrodes, on the first try. But both prongs must hit, pierce the clothing, and get skin contact. Reloading the taser, or switching to the side arm, can take too long. There’s a lot of myths about what will stop a taser, and I guess that some of the myths are affecting cops in their choice of force method.
But going for the gun on a disturbance call about a woman with a baby and the baby’s grandmother? And shooting the baby? What, as the baby identified as an armed and dangerous fugitive?
Not only that but you have to be a preeeety exact distance from the target, too far and you’re likely to miss a prong entirely, too close and there’s no chance you get enough prong spread for intramuscular incapacitation to take effect (think the difference between taser videos where they get the right spread and the guy locks up vs videos where they don’t and we get the “I’ll get you bitch” video lol).
(Of course as you said this situation likely called for neither. It seems to be a domestic between a 30ish/yo woman and her older MIL, unless one of them was armed this was a “hands” matter not a “weapons” matter, at worst OC spray.)
It’s only a problem if you think that you need to kill. And I mean there lots of different tasers, you just described one and then went on to say that it won’t work.
Funny you say that…the same police force almost killed some kid with tasers.
https://fox4kc.com/news/former-independence-police-officer-sentenced-to-4-years-for-tasing-arrest-that-put-teen-in-coma/
Sure the kid would have survived if he got shot instead, right?
A punch to the face can kill, but more seldom than a bullet.
For sure. I just meant a weapon in the hand of a tyrant is a weapon that will be used against its own people.
There was an alternative option out there that I haven’t seen much of - it’s an attachment on normal 9mm pistols, that dampens the first shot with a less-lethal projectile. The idea is, if someone is resisting, you can use the shot and avoid killing them. If they’re playing Superman, then you still have lethal force ready in the rest of the magazine.
Police departments haven’t favored it. I assume, because they just gosh darn love killing.
Hear me out on this: Let’s leave guns to the undeniable ‘this is for killing’ variety. We need to reduce the normalization that it’s ok to draw a gun and this would only serve to have a stronger ‘gun first policy’ to encounters. I don’t want to be in a world where I hear gunshots and have to question if it’s non-lethal or not. “It’s ok. I only heard one shot.” Is not the next step I want to see.
Absolutely agree. We already have instances of cops shooting people when they intended to taze them. With that approach it will be “I only meant to pull the trigger once” or “in the moment I didn’t remember I’d already used the first shot.”
I have to salute the out of the box thinking of the idea though.
I would assume that if the police were forced to use this they would condition themselves to double tap in every scenario to get right to the lethal rounds.
Oh, they use those when they want to torture you.