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Notes -
I've seen a decent amount of bad cop interactions (as in, the interaction went bad). It often times is,
Cops have different information than suspect, making the cop think the suspect is dangerous
Suspect doesn't know what to do.
Cop interprets innocent thing as bad thing, shoots.
What I think is most practical is a playbook for cops that assumes civilians will sometimes do irrational things but aren't necessarily dangerous. I keep thinking back to Philando Castile. A cop is informed of a situation involving a black guy with a white shirt (in other words, a very broad description). He stops a black man with a white shirt. The man informs him he has a gun and the cop tells him not to reach for it. The problem being that his gun is on his right hip, and his ID is in his right pocket. So how do we prevent this?
Let's say the cop stops Castile, and is informed of the gun. He is told to step out of the car slowly and put his hands on the hood of the car. The cop takes the gun and explains he will return it at the end of the stop if there are no issues. Proceed from there.
At the end of each bad interaction, do a root cause analysis if there is a reasonable way to prevent the issue from happening again. Have a database where districts can compare policies.
I want to target "suspect doesn't know what to do" specifically here: my goal is for the default behavior when interacting with cops to be things that don't worry said cops.
It seems like asking about weapons first before asking them to do anything else makes a lot of sense: Castile can respond before having to get anything, the cop now knows he's got a weapon to worry about but Castile's hands are still clearly visible, and the officer can temporarily disarm him as you mention. But maybe we should have it on the citizen side (or both): if you as a citizen are asked to do something that puts your hand near your own weapon, maybe there should be a standard of not doing that and explaining the problem. That could be an issue right now because from the cop's side you're not complying, but if we make that the norm it'll be less of an issue.
I do wonder if this starts cutting into rights though: obviously from the police side they'd rather you just incriminate yourself of whatever they might get you for, and it's possible the eventual script gets a little too "volunteer information that the police don't necessarily have rights to, or you're considered a threat". But I'd at least like it to be something we're working on, and it seems far more realistic than "defund the police" or "just shoot the gun out of his hands".
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