Police getting tougher, more agressive? II

I posted on this topic last week after a report on new police training techniques that aired on KSTP. Today on the Star Tribune's blog site, buzz.mn there is a post from a community blogger about police treating some innocent people agressively, similar to the wrong subject takedown, I linked to in last week's post. The post in interesting not only because of the story but also because of the comment thread and differing reactions to story. While there is the predictable outraged response, a bunch of people have stopped just short of defending the cops while pointing out the myriad of things that the subjects did that may have worsened their situation with the cops.

In St. Paul, a few years ago, a carjacking victim was shot to death because cops arriving on the scene thought he was the carjacker. I don't remember exactly what happened but the cops didn't know who was who and I am pretty sure that there was a weapon involved.

It isn't hard to see that, likewise, in this situation the cops couldn't figure out who the bad guys were and treated everybody like they were guilty. What's the alternative? Treating everyone like they are innocent? Given the context, that doesn't seem like an option. Another interesting thing is that this scenario only talks about 2 cops, basically a squad showing up. 2 cops are outnumbered by the three innocents and the 2 drug dealer-troublemakers. It isn't hard to see this as an intense situation for the cops. Why did they not call for backup? Hopefully there were squads available. If they weren't, we are back to the staffing problem currently plaguing the MPD.

One thing that I've noticed with the current regime at the MPD is the detailing of specialist branches to the appropriate force situations. The violent criminal apprehension team serves hostile warrants and seems to get the job done most of the time in a relatively quick and professional fashion. The Community Response Team arrests lots of hookers, johns and drug dealers every week without serious incident. Your basic responding squad has one or two cops who have only basic information about a call and have to make a series of judgements about what to do, if and how much force to use. Lots can go wrong although it usually doesn't. They could judge a situation incorrectly and take inappropriate actions. They don't want to make mistakes--any time, any one of them can be a career ender or cost them their lives.