Rising Concerns over Police Use of Deadly Force

Police officers are trained to protect us, and themselves through their intensive training. They are also trained to know when they should be permitted to use deadly force, or when the time is not appropriate to use such force. But, police today seem to be using more deadly force than they did 10 years ago, which makes it seem as if police are only trained to use deadly force. Police already have a tough enough job as it is. Making a decision in a split second could result in a life or death decision depending on the situation and an officer needs to be able to adapt quickly. But deadly force such as shooting to kill has become more common than before. Take for instance five years ago, a man who was unarmed and thirty five years old, was shot by a police officer who mistakenly took his garden hose as a gun. Deadly force was the wrong decision in this case. However the officer was adapting to his situation and acted quickly to a false alarm. Every year, death tolls by American police officers shooting to kill civilians has reached up to one thousand people. Police claim that seventy percent of these shootings are justified killings, and had proper meaning in defense. In 2015, only 956 people were fatally shot by police officers. In 2016 already, the numbers of civilians and criminals shot by police is already up in the thousands. These

Well, if police did not have the option to ever use deadly force to defend themselves then criminals would have a high advantage over them because they know the officer is not allowed to act in deadly force. This would potentially lead to a mass crime wave due to officers not having the ability of threatening, and deadly force to maintain order. If there was a shooting to occur and they were being fired upon, you wouldn’t expect the officers to just not be able to defend themselves. Therefore in this matter, the defense cannot be stripped from