It does in fact matter. If using that as a statistic then on its face, it's accurate. Cops did in fact kill over a thousand people. But, when you break it down to people who were killed because of their actions, the stats begin to shift. It’s like saying that 50k people died in automobile accidents last year and because of that cars need to be have more safety features. Okay, on the face, that’s correct. But when you find out that 25k of them died from an accident they caused because they were driving drunk, 10k were caused by people drag racing and another 5k died from injuries sustained that would have been survivable if they had been wearing seatbelts and the other people killed were because of the street racers and drunks, all of a sudden the fact is that cars don’t need to be safer, people need to be safer.
You say the standard objective is to use only the necessary force to take a suspect into custody alive? When does that use of force escalate? There are at a minimum two people that have different objectives. The cop’s objective is to take a suspect into custody and the suspects objective is to not be taken into custody. How that whole evolution takes place is based solely on the suspects actions. Where the differences lie is that the cop has standards he is supposed to meet in taking that suspect into custody. That person not wanting to get taken into custody has no standards to worry about, no one is going to review his actions and possibly cost him his job.
When someone pulls a weapon on a policeman, they have to figure that the possibility exists they will be killed, they make that decision. When you are going against someone coming at you with a knife, machete or a gun, your goal is no longer to take that person into custody, it's to stop the threat they chose to pose to you and others.
You say in the past one or two peace officers would have been sent to the apartment. There were three patrol officers sent, hardly a "raid team". I would venture a guess they did knock on the door and I would also venture a guess that the author of this article was too drunk to hear it. Then again, maybe they didn't knock on the door? Since a call was reported of a person in an unlocked, model apartment, one that normally doesn't have a tenant in it, they already knew something wasn't normal so why would they announce their entry to someone? There was a time when most cops could handle a situation with a nightstick or a sap, those times are long gone. In my opinion, criminals have become more violent, they have less respect for the law and even less respect for human life. On a traffic stop, a cop would normally not have any reason to believe they are dealing with someone ready to act violently unless they observe something at the beginning of the stop. Going into an apartment that you know is occupied by someone, given your information, not supposed to be there, changes the scenario drastically and I think given the scenario, the cops acted appropriately.
The opinion of the actions in this story as acceptable to me come from my experiences while in the service when I searched buildings, dealt with drunks, received calls from dispatch with partial and usually incorrect information and having to draw my weapon on several people because the normal compliance measures of OC spray and Monandock PR-24 strikes were not enough to subdue the individual. If not for timely backup consisting of some rather large individuals, I may have had to shoot at least one person. If I was able to deliver head strikes with the PR-24 I may have been able to subdue him but it was against regulations so I did not. There are those pesky standards again.
I’m all up for a civil debate and will freely admit there are cops out there that should not wear the badge. But, there are others here that you cannot debate with because no matter what happens, the cop is always wrong. Those are the Monday morning cop haters I speak of. Those who never had 250lbs of pissed off human coming at you who laughed off everything you threw at them and not knowing what is more scary, knowing you may die or that you may have to kill someone.