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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

So, for the example you provide the only contradictory claims come from accounts that have very few followers. The few posts saying "she was throwing things" have fewer than 10 followers.

But, also, rubber bullets are less lethal, not non lethal, and so they should be reserved for situations where life is at risk. If she wasn't throwing molotov cocktails or bricks they shouldn't have used rubber bullets on her.

The other claim is that she was pregnant and thus shouldn't have gone. This is incoherent: we want protests to be non-violent, so we want pregnant women and children to be able to attend.

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As a rule of thumb, coming from my dad who served in the German federal police and was sent to every single castor transport (nuclear waste to be stored in Germany, quite a controversial topic) up to 2007/8, countless fottball games and G8/20, NATO conferences, demonstrtions decrease in violence with increasing numbers of children, women and older people. Applies to both sides, except for the children of course.

The worst thing they ever used, as far as I remember, was water cannons and riot shields.

German police is trained to deescalate if possible and for riot or protest control, use of lethal weaponry is rarely authorized if riot control is necessary at all. Water cannons can still hurt people but they're massively less lethal than any type of bean bag rounds or rubber bullets.

Notably, the German police is also trained for much longer, three to four years at minimum. They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) and to only use guns as the very last resort of stopping someone. Every bullet a german police officer fires in the line of duty is accounted for (54 in 2018) and every person killed is investigated by police officers from a different precinct (11 killed in 2018). From what I've experienced and seen, guns seem to be treated as the first weapon of choice for the police officer in the US, which is the wrong mentality.

" They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) "

This is the third time I've read this in the comments but I can't seem to find any info on "shoot to incapacitate" online. I'm not doubting it, I'm just looking to collect information regarding the topic to share with others. Do you have anything to corroborate this training method?

From top of my head, what I was told from officers (my dad and others), police isn't conditioned to ai I'm for the center of mass. They rather aim for the legs and such. SWAT being an exception, of course, depending on circumstances.

It is still shooting at people, so potentially deadly. But less so than putting 6 bullets into someone's chest.

<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_... This page is a good intro if you use Google Translate. The main keyword is "Final and Fatal Shot" (Finaler Rettungsschuss) which is what the police is trained for to only use as a last resort and gets schooled on when it's legally acceptable.

<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finaler_Rettungsschuss> Details this a bit better; most shots fired by the german police aim to incapacitate an opponent or are fired in a perceived or real emergency situation, the prevention of crimes and prevention of getaway.

The difference between the mentioned cases and the "final and fatal shot" is that the later is used by the police officer with the express and only intent to kill. There are various requirements, mainly that it must be the only viable way to prevent lethal or extensive harm to others.

Please note that the english pages are not as extensive or talk about the US situation so they're less useful.

Thak you! That was the one I had in mind!

>The few posts saying "she was throwing things" have fewer than 10 followers.

What does the number of followers have to with whether a statement is true or not? That's absurd. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have tens of millions of followers on Twitter; I have very few. Does that make me a liar?

A large number of new accounts with few followers all posting the same thing points to disinformation.

But let's assume it's true: unless she was throwing bricks or petrol-bombs police should have used some other method to stop her.

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