In case this gets overloaded with outsiders looking to cause trouble I'd like to counter some of the things seen on r/news.

I work with at risk and troubled youth. This means kids dealing with trauma, who are in conflict with the law, who often have cognitive and developmental delays, mental illness or substance abuse issues. They are often the people who grow up to do heinous and unspeakable crimes. Some of them have already. They also find themselves in distress and interacting with my city's law enforcement, and depending on where it happens some neighboring jurisdictions.

I won't speak to the incident in the article, but the attitude that continues to thrive based on horrible incidents and media bias.

I also am not, nor have I ever been, a cop, nor do I wish to be one. I just frequent this sub because I enjoy the conversation. Often people are seen as cops or wannabes on here, I just want to set myself a part from that. Full disclosure, I am friends with a few police officers but have no working relationship with them.

I do however interact with cops nearly every day that I am working. I have also seen police respond to a personal situation where my brother, who suffers from post traumatic stress, was aggressive, angry and a threat to himself and others. For every incident where there is a shooting, followed by calls for reform and brutality, broad condemnation for all cops due to single incidents, there are also the 500 simultaneous calls to similar situations where things were resolved, deescalated or calmed down.

I find it mind numbing to hear people say that all cops just shoot people. That the gun is the only solution to them. That they are trained wrong. It's just wrong. If you believe that, shame on you for failing to educate yourself before condemning the people that I witness save and protect people in crisis daily.

To the cops that I see day in and day out, thank you for what you do. To the faceless cops who do it around the world, thank you for what you do. To the cop who talked down my brother from pulling the trigger, thank you for what you do.

And to quote myself from an older thread

If you speak to any cop who works in a decently sized city or municipal service, a large portion of their calls deal with mental health. And what percentage of those result in that person being arrested? Charged? Killed? You may rebut that with statistics of the mentally ill in prisons, but that isn't the police to blame but inadequate systems in place to deal with societies mentally ill. At the end of the day, the police have been on the forefront of the mental health struggle in our community for decades. It's not the police that is failing the mentally ill and the community at large, but systems that incarcerate and fail to address mental health. Can police do wrong? Yes. Can there be police officers who over step, misstep, commit crime, commit murder? Yes. Are the cops busting into random scenes, guns blazing? Please.