Derec
Contributor
While police to take on "some risks" as a matter of their jobs, I think "hero" is somebody who goes over and beyond their duty. As such, we should not expect everybody in a particular profession to be a hero.Where you draw the line at what "excessive" means is different from where someone we would call a hero would draw the line. A hero is a person who takes some risks, makes some personal sacrifices, shows courage in the face of that risk because of the value they place on something, such as for example, the lives of others.
Also, there is a big difference between incurring additional risk to save say a hostage or another innocent civilian and incurring additional risk to not have to shoot a perp trying to kill you.
Sure. A life guard has a greater expectation to incur some risk than a bystander to save a drowning swimmer, but even for a professional lifeguard there comes a point where risk is too great to be expected for him to incur it. At that point any additional risk is optional and that's where you get heroics - in optional risk.One example of a hero would be a person who saves another person from drowning while putting themselves at least some risk of drowning from the same environmental conditions.
While Chauvin did wrong, his conviction and sentence were excessive and politically based. Compare that to 5x shorter sentence given to a black Muslim officer who shot and murdered an innocent white woman. Why is Chauvin public enemy number one while Mohammed Noor is largely forgotten? Because of disgusting racial politics, that's why!But time and time again, what we observe from you is the protection of cowardly behavior and even murder as in the case of Derek Chauvin.
That should not include letting yourself be stabbed or shot just because somebody might be having a mental health episode.From my perspective, the duty of police officers is to protect and serve the public and part of that job includes the mental and physical capacity to help mentally ill people, even when those people are making terrible decisions that comes with the territory.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. If mentally ill are being a danger to others, including police officers, they need to be treated as such.It is certainly the job of police to try to rise above treating mentally ill civilians as dangerous criminals and thereby systemically as second-class citizens.