On assaulting Nurses and Pro Football players.

[roguebanshee]

I don't understand what is hard about de-escalating hostile situations. It's got to be a dominance thing, or ego thing, or bad training. I mean, the recruiters should be able to filter police applicants. Bullies need not apply.

Not everyone is a confident talker without having the backup of force. And if you tried to filter out everyone who might react badly in a hostile situation, the police force (of any nation) would be rather miniscule. Everyone has had different experiences growing up, so the instinctive/default behaviour of people is always going to vary. Someone being told that "dem <insert racial slur> are bad criminals" throughout their youth is likely to have that as part of their intrinsic worldview.

Then there's whatever prior stress is influencing both parties in a situation, their current mood, initial reaction/prejudices to the other party, what they expect of the situation, and other such details. If one person reads the situation wrong, they're likely to react in an inapropriate manner.

As far as the nurse goes, depending on the tone of the officer and the tone of her responses, that could go a long way to (de)escalate the situation if either of them felt the other disrespected their station. Since I wasn't there and haven't seen any recordings of the action, I can't say whether either of them were (un)intentionally escalating the situation.

For the nfl player, running away from police is almost always a bad idea. If they're looking for an armed suspect even more so. He likely just wanted to get away from the shooting, but running away from the police is very likely to make them suspicious of you. The police may have (massively) overreacted, but the officers likely didn't know if he was the shooter and he was trying to get away.

I don't condone the actions, but I can see how they could turn out the way they did without any ill intent from the police officers involved.