A prosecutor has declined to file criminal charges against a Missouri police officer who shot and killed a woman and her infant child last year.
Independence police officers had responded to a reported assault in November at an apartment building. They were figuring out how to arrest the woman, who was nonverbal and communicating with nods and gestures, when she abruptly grabbed a butcher knife from a bedside table and moved toward the officers while holding the child, Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson’s office said Friday.
One officer backed away, but the other was against a closet and couldn’t escape, Johnson’s office said. He fired four shots as the woman moved toward him with the knife, the office said. The shots struck and killed the woman and her child, identified by KCUR news as 34-year-old Maria Pike and her 3-month-old daughter, Destinii.
Johnson’s office said the officer’s use of deadly force “falls within the protection of the law.”
Her office also noted there wasn’t enough evidence to conclusively prove the officer intentionally shot the infant.
You signed up for a job where you have to make tough maybe life-threatening decisions. You take an oath to serve and protect. You wear a bulletproof vest that is also stab and slash-resistant. You respond to a call, the woman is mental and won’t talk and she is holding an infant. She picks up a knife and advances on you. Do you close the gap and try to disarm her knowing your core vital areas are relatively safe from the knife and she has a child in her other hand? Nope, you might get cut. So, instead, you just smoke her and the kid.
Knife threats must be terrifying. If only there was something they could deploy that didn’t murder people, like a taser or a net gun.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_gun
Pretty sure the netgun isn’t commonly on the belt next to the pepper spray and taser.
I’m guessing that police no longer carry batons or night sticks? It seems like every available option has a trigger (spray, taser, pistol) and all training goes towards how to shoot to kill rather than non-lethal CQC.
TASER seems like a much better option, or OC spray and a baton. Pistol seems like the worst option. They were pinned in a closet so I can understand the panic but damn…
They literally have bright blinding flashlights they can use to make it hard for an assailant to even fucking see them properly. They have so many options to protect themselves before resorting to a magdump.
Getting cut in the arm is still very dangerous. I mean there’s a reason people cut their wrists to commit suicide; your arm has a lot of things that a knife shouldn’t touch. There were likely better options in that situation, but this isn’t an ACAB moment; this cop likely just needed better training so they could make the split-second decision to use one of those better options.