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Notes -
Here's my issue. You have repeatedly talked about how cops who fail split second decision making shouldn't be cops. I definitely agree there, but that's such a vague statement that it needs to be defined. My position is "barring information and time to judge further, could this cop reasonably have made this call?" Given how chaotic and high stakes many of these situations are, that clears a lot of cops, and there needs to be some huge failing of in-the-moment judgment, or clear intent to be excessive or needlessly violent to make me think otherwise. The Pretti case is pretty endemic of that, where I don't think it is good or "right", but understanding the requirements of the work I'm not much more interested in going after the agents. It's too much an edge case.
My point here is that I suspect your requirement for "split-second decision making" is unreasonably high, if not impossibly so. There are many situations where people are explicitly trying to commit suicide by cop, the cop doesn't want to do it, and might even suspect a gun might be a fake, or that the person has no intent to shoot, or may not even have something that looks like a gun at all (quickdrawing a wallet or some other item in a pocket and aiming it like a gun is very common) but he shoots anyway because he can very, very reasonably assume in the time that he has that the person has the intent and capability to do lethal harm, and if he's wrong he or others could die. Many of these cases fall on the edge, where someone with slightly faster reaction speed could identify the silhouette of what the person drew, or make some very risky judgment call that "this guy doesn't really want to do it", but I find those to be wishful thinking at best.
And then you bring up Uvalde. Uvalde is the exact opposite of split second decision making. Uvalde was a whole police force (or rather, the people in charge of it - I recall that many officers wanted to go in and were held back by their own) that chose, given an agonizingly long amount of time, to do nothing. Had an officer had a 10 second freakout, or initially ran but turned back, or even the department made some bad call like assuming it was a prank or something but quickly corrected - I don't think people would be judging that very harshly. Uvalde stands out because it was such a bad choice maintained for so long. It is the absolute worst example to bring up in this debate where we're trying to determine what acceptable split second decision making is. Especially because there was no decision made at all! They did nothing!
Accuse me of tilting at windmills all you want but if I am it's because your argument is not well founded. If I'm not it's because you are indeed trying to wedge this issue behind the facade of principled outsider.
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