They also say they tried a less lethal option first. They shot him with a rubber bullet but that didn’t stop him.

Rubber bullets are frequently called non-lethal but they can be lethal in rare cases when they hit someone in the head.

okay, I've never seen this suggested anywhere so I assume there's a good reason it's not done, but here's what I think could be a real solution to the problem:

nets.

obviously this could only work for situations where the person doesn't have a gun, but they do have a large bladed weapon or something. Part of the problem is that when the assailant has a knife, it's really risky for any officers to get close to them because they can get lethally stabbed really quickly. And tasers and pepper spray aren't very reliable, and we'd like to avoid using a regular gun, right?

Here's what I'm imagining: they basically have these dense, sticky nets. As soon as they get the net on the person, it sticks to their skin, clothes, and to the net itself, and makes it so they immediately can't move that much. There would be no risk of suffocation because the net is mostly holes. It would be made of a tough enough material that it couldn't be easily cut, especially given their limited mobility.

to get the net on the person, they could have two officers hold either end of a long net and then encircle/clothesline the person from a distance. Once a single net has touched them it should be really easy to get more nets on them. You could do other things too, like maybe a t-shirt cannon that flings the net out from a distance.

so once the person is covered in a few nets, frustrated but mostly unharmed, they could walk up and take the knife away. Then they could use some safe chemical that would dissolve the net's stickiness to free the person. This is kind of like those "man catchers" they use in japan to hold someone immobile from a short distance, but those are still prob too risky and require too much skill for the average cop.

An unarmed response to mental health calls seems like a tragedy waiting to happen. A non-violent situation could easily turn the other way quickly. A Co-Response would be much safer.

I think the city has great services if one seeks them out. No one is talking about this young man’s history. Was this the first episode? Was he suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness?

Yes, I agree. Never stop improving..

But if what the police are saying is true - this may well have been the last remaining option. It would be nice if there were bodycams to get a definitive answer but that is being held up at city hall, not the police. It would be nice if there were more tools, like tasers that could’ve been deployed, but again - that’s on city hall.

The problem I have is that almost everyone is taking this tragedy as an opportunity to push their anti-police agenda. The Muslim Justice League and others are trying to make this a race issue when it’s not. Some City councilors are again using tragedy to shit on police, calling for them to disarm and disband. Councilor Zondervan actually asked why do we need armed police to respond to dangerous calls and that firefighters don’t go into burning buildings with guns. Councilor Azeem asked was it necessary to chase a man who was self harming with a knife. Either these people are out of touch with reality or they just use any tragedy to push their agenda and hope people really aren’t paying attention to the details.

I would argue that officers who truly believe in justice should be advocating internally for these techniques and approaches and asking to have those responsibilities given to those trained for it. It feels reductive and irresponsible to me that the argument could boil down to "I wish we had people to care for these folks, but since we don't I guess I have to kill them." Officers are conditioned to believe that killing one person can save others, but that system empowers them to make judgement calls about whose lives are valuable enough to save. I would like to see a shift in culture where officers stand up and say "stop putting me in positions where I have to end innocent lives" instead of being conditioned to believe they are actually doing good for society.

I also acknowledge that the level of income inequality in our country creates power dynamics in which individuals cannot always risk losing their jobs over their principles (though if they stood together they'd have a lot more power to do so). This is further evidence that we have a cultural problem around policing and that we should continue to expose how race, mental health, economics, and policing are always intersecting. Saying that someone is "astroturfing an anti-racist agenda" over any story about police brutality overlooks the reality that the history of policing is racial in nature.