And police could have resolved this peacefully but chose to escalate the situation with someone who was terrified of them because they were incapable of understanding why she would be scared of them, and in doing so creates more fear when people see how police may treat them.
UK police are generally quite good at de-escalating situations they understand. I've praised them for that many times. E.g. they will go into situations with completely irate people without weapons, and rely on deescalation to bring it under control.
What was it about this situation that prevented this officer from doing that? I've seen first hand that UK police are fully capable of being far more patient in far more serious situations. What was the urgency here?
The police officer chose to escalate in a situation where the suspect was calm until he acted, and where his basis for wanting to search her vehicle in the first place was her fear reaction.
Police need to be able to handle people with mental health issues, so whether or not you think her fear was justified, their way of handling it demonstrated a total failure of compassion in a situation where they had no basis for knowing why she was expressing fear.
The issue remains all too often entirely blind to this kind of fear because they don't believe it is real and fail to understand it, and reacts by making all kinds of flawed conclusions, like in this case where the footage shows signal after signal that her fear of him is genuine, and his response is to assume the only explanation is that she is hiding something.
As we know in retrospect, he demonstrated that he can not be relied on to make that kind of judgement.
UK police are great health councillors. When it comes to crime, they are toothless. They deliberately ignored massive sex crimes and sex trafficking due to fear of being accused as racist. When your life is in danger from criminals, don't trust the UK police - they will probably shake their hands.
UK police are generally quite good at de-escalating situations they understand. I've praised them for that many times. E.g. they will go into situations with completely irate people without weapons, and rely on deescalation to bring it under control.
What was it about this situation that prevented this officer from doing that? I've seen first hand that UK police are fully capable of being far more patient in far more serious situations. What was the urgency here?
The police officer chose to escalate in a situation where the suspect was calm until he acted, and where his basis for wanting to search her vehicle in the first place was her fear reaction.
Police need to be able to handle people with mental health issues, so whether or not you think her fear was justified, their way of handling it demonstrated a total failure of compassion in a situation where they had no basis for knowing why she was expressing fear.
The issue remains all too often entirely blind to this kind of fear because they don't believe it is real and fail to understand it, and reacts by making all kinds of flawed conclusions, like in this case where the footage shows signal after signal that her fear of him is genuine, and his response is to assume the only explanation is that she is hiding something.
As we know in retrospect, he demonstrated that he can not be relied on to make that kind of judgement.