Extremely good points. I completely understand where you're coming from. However do you not think 10+ Grown men with bulletproof vests on who are supposed to be trained to handle these situations could take down a 18 year old scrawny kid?
If it were me on that bus, and I was resolved to causing problems - at least two of those men would have been hospitalized, likely more, and quite possibly more than one fatality.
The bus was a natural choke-point. Even if they'd come from all directions - the most I'd have to deal with at any one time is two. Ballistic vests are always a compromise between various types of protection. Kevlar weave does nothing to stop a blade that polyester clothing doesn't. Ceramic plates are where you get equal effectiveness at stopping blades and ballistics - but you start talking about 30-60lb vests at that point in time. Some of the better vests weave in metal fibers or disks behind Type II and Type IIIA plates to try and limit the effectiveness of blades while preserving protection against handguns - but your sides, underarms, and neck are still very accessible to piercing.
If I was given the order to try and take him alive - I'd choose jail time and shoot him, because it doesn't come with an unreasonably high likelihood of death or life-altering injuries.
If the police hadn't used lethal force they would have been praised as heros for handling it the way they did.
No, they wouldn't.
And you know it. There -might- have been a small little article about it in the mundane news section.
It's no different than how many times we were able to talk people down from instances where we could have shot them; or when our Embark teams could have destroyed some fool on a motorboat (and, according to the textbook, should have... but if they followed that - they would have sank a small vessel every hour, it was just a busy area).
What happens when one of our embark teams does fire on a boat that took every sequence of actions to make your anus pucker? It becomes front-page international news and the ship is not allowed back into that nation's harbors. Conspiracy theorists go wild, etc etc.
You never heard about how we were bringing -billions- of dollars of annual income to that region; how people of that nation interacted with us on a daily basis and we got along just fine or turned a potentially nasty situation around without Al Jazeera getting involved.
It's a thankless job. You never get praised for being the good guy. You never get portrayed as being the good guy. You only get attention when something happens that can be construed as controversial or used for some political or social agenda by reporters and/or politicians.
EDIT: Taser was requested,
For example ( True story ) I was at a party where some idiot called 911 and said there was someone with a knife. Cops brought a ton of guns with rubber bullets. like TONS. Toronto is the capital of Ontario with a huge population. Rubber bullets were certainly an option along with the taser.
Those aren't on-hand by responding officers. Those are special dispatch situations.
In your case, they were called to a party. The likelihood of a bunch of drunks getting rowdy is fairly high, and you can't very well gun the whole mess down.
Responding to an armed individual is going to pull officers off of the beat rather than be a cause to dispatch specialized teams.
