We recently had a case in Victoria of a fifeteen year old boy being shot to death by police. The boy was carrying knives.

I don't understand how three armed police officers couldn't dis-arm the kid, or shoot him in the leg. Why did they have to kill him?

It appears that police training is grossly inadequate to deal with such situations. At the police firing-range officers are trained to shoot targets showing the upper body. It doesn't seem to occur to them to be trained to shoot suspects in the arms or the legs.

Does the police force attract the right-sort of people for the job?

Or is it that people who think on their feet, especially in difficult circumstances are not acceptable to the current system?

Often in these type of shootings where a civilian is killed the entire blame is placed on the victim, and not on the perpetrators doing the killing.

The excuse always appears to be - that their life was at risk, and they had no other choice, like running from the attacker, shooting him in the leg, or disarming him by using other means at hand,
to subdue the victim.

It is time that police training was reviewed by a higher authority.

Any comments?

I think it is premiture to comment on this issue, at least until a post motum has been conducted. The boy may have been drugged off his face.

The biggest problem we face is that the courts fail to apply adiquate punishments for juvenile crimes and kids litteraly get away with murder.

I also understand that he was dowsed with capsicum spray which apparently had little or no effect.

I place the blame...100% ON THOSE POLICE who refused to accept tazers as a control option.......

Had these police been equipped with them.... this boy would have been alive today.

Apparently 3 police officers shot 10 bullets into him. Apparently the kid was waving a couple of kinives around aggressively and one of the cops was cornered. Capsicum spray apparently didn't subdue the offender.

Sounds to me like suicide by cop, by a mentally disturbed adolescent.

I'm thinking that this may well have been a case where Tasers might have been useful. However, given the record of Victoria's police, I'm not at all confident that Tasers wouldn't be used by them as recklessly as firearms apparently still are.

The 10 bullets into the body is telling me that the cops have a pack mentality.

Surely if a bullet was necessary, one into the leg would have been enough.

A good point about cops thinking for themselves, Foxy. However, quite often the system seems to want to have cops on board who don't think but blindly follow the prescribed standard operating procedeures. Sometimes this is a good thing (if dealing with hardened crims) and sometimes bad.

But anyone waving a weapon in a threatening manner towards police is taking a dangerous step.

>>or shoot him in the leg. Why did they have to kill him?<<

I've thought the same thing many times over the years. The Victorian police have a deservedly nasty reputation when it comes to killing people, but they're not the only ones.

The stories are always the same. Police were called to the scene of whatever where someone was doing something wrong, they call for the person to drop their weapons then shoot them. Have they not understood by now to aim for the lower legs? Drug crazed or not, a single bullet would stop them. Let alone 10, which is probably enough to mince someone below the knees.

The 10 shots bit it news to me, but the kid's being portrayed as a white supremacist, as if that somehow justifies killing someone. If the thing hadn't lost all proportion before, it has now.

Tasers are not the answer. Trigger happy police will use them on the slightest pretext, and they can kill. You can't tell the state of someone's heart from their appearance alone.

If they had enough time to capsicum spray the kid 3 times, they had enough time to aim for the lower legs.

I understand that police will occasionally be forced to choose between their own lives and that of a criminal, but this appears to be one case where they had time to think about it and avoid killing someone, but chose not to.