Falling Back, 5. Unnecessary Violence.

Last night, a group of young people were drinking in town, glasses and bottles spread out around them. The police, who were doing a check to make sure bars and cafés were closing at one in the morning, noticed them.

The two patrolmen went up to the young people and, after ordering them to stop drinking and go home, started asking for identification. One of them got all hussy, argued with the police, refused to do what they asked, smashed a glass on the ground, and set off. When the officers finally caught up to him, he wouldn't calm down, but tried to hit them. That was when twenty-five of the guy's friends showed up to help him. 

The officers called for backup, but they were forced to use their batons and pepper sprays to defend themselves. The guy who originally stood up to them was cuffed and sent to the local jail cell, while two others were charged with offences under the Law of Citizen Protection. The others are being identified in other ways, but they'll be found. 

One of the officers had to go to the local clinic, but he's fine. The guy who started it all was also fine, cooling his head and banishing the alcohol fumes in jail, waiting to be brought before a judge today. The end result is that no one was injured in any life-threatening way.

Local police officers here do carry guns, but rarely use them. The only time we have heard of an officer shooting his gun is during a very dangerous crime, such as a bank robbery that comes to mind some years ago in Vigo, where the robbers were cornered and shot at the police. Police here are trained to use other means to subdue a suspect.

So, if what happened last night had happened in a U.S. city, the probabilities are that one of the officers would have fired his gun and shot at least one of the suspects, even though the suspects weren't armed. Yet, don't police academies in the United States teach the prospective police officers different ways of subduing a suspect without a gun? If academies in Europe teach that, and subsequently European cities see less gun violence, one would assume such an approach works.

Defund the police doesn't mean get rid of police departments. It means, when a social worker can defuse a certain situation without recurring to violence or threats of imprisonment, why not send a social worker? Police are there to keep the peace. If the peace is not being broken, or the problem is, at root, a mental problem or some other, non-threatening problem, the police have no need to be called. And when they do respond to situations in which they are the best at solving a situation, most of the time they don't even need to remember they have guns. Too many people have been shot in U.S. cities merely on the mistaken assumption that they had a gun. Until a gun appears in a suspect's hand, why should a police officer draw his own gun? 

Every time there's a police shooting in the United States, in which an unarmed person is shot and killed, Europeans shake their heads. That is one of the reasons the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a section on their web page warning Spaniards to be careful in large American cities. And small American towns. And American rural areas. And areas with lots of people. And areas with few people. Oh, we have our own problems, some of them violent, but not to the extent that they seem to proliferate in the United States, especially with a leadership that extolls that violence and even encourages it. When the travel restrictions are lifted, I doubt many tourists will choose to travel there until things change. 

Life continues.