Public protests about white police officers that have had the misfortune to kill a subject resisting arrest have grown in recent months yet little has been said about ways to make it safer for police officers to arrest those resisting arrest with violence or the threat of violence.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/05/justice/new-york-grand-jury-chokehold/
Police officers are not all world champion wrestlers or martiall artists with the ability to effortlessly subdue a physical resistor to arrest. Police officers encounter those with an itch to kill them or those that are on hyper-activity drugs such as pcp or drunk and rowdy people. Additionally there are those plain dumb and without common sense that to commit a crime on a po,lice officer directly by resisting arrest is a very bad idea and should never be attempted unless one really needs to return to Al Qaeda, some foreign intelligence agency or a whatever such that a death sentence probably will follow if taken in to custody.
Police officers sometimes are spread kind of thin. They may be working alone in a patrol car to get twice the coverage from the same number of personnel. If they must arrest someone-even a black person, it can be dangerous. If someone resists arrest they may not be able to wait until help arrives or even be able to call for help. If it is a mano y mano conflict the police officer must win generally-and victory all the time is difficult-not even Muhammad Ali was able to accomplish that.
Unless a police officer has a guaranteed knock out punch there aren’t a lot of options to choose from without a black belt-hit em with a flashlight or nightstick maybe, and of course there is a gun. So police officers may use the choke-hold like a lot of inexperienced fighters-the body follows the head.
Can a police officer use a headlock? Sure-yet he may spend more energy in applying the headlock and controlling the suspect than the subject he is trying to arrest and when he eventually lets go the subject is ready for round two. Applying a headlock means that the police officers hands aren’t free to apply hand cuffs either-so what is he or she to do?
One imagines some sort of a derringer up the sleeve contact-taser that is voice activated so a police officer could knock out the subject with a jolt after saying the activating code-word-and maybe that would make it possible to get hand cuffs on the individual being arrested.
To avert accidental police caused fatalities of suspect resisting arrest some kind of tech solution producing a Judge Dred taser might be the remedy. The hopefully the government can go to work solving the problem of blacks shooting blacks in Chicago and other American cities. Though they aren’t police officers doing the shooting the victims still perish.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 