Regardless of the Reddit anti- American police circle jerk, this is not good police work and should not be protocol. The officers are both very lucky not to be harmed or killed. Squaring off with someone who has a knife is life threatening regardless of whether or not you are trained or have a gun. Just because the officers got lucky and were able to knock the knife away, does not mean it is the safest way to deal with this sort of situation.

The fact that so many comments here are pointing to the fact that the UK police handled it "the right way" and American police would be wrong because they would automatically shoot someone just goes to show how little this site, on average, knows about in person confrontations or police work. Further, while these cops are likely well trained, the fact that so many Redditors are implying that the % chance that the guys arm was broken and he dropped the knife is due to some elite training and not sheer chance, shows that most of you have never had any actual self defense training.

One of the first thing's you learn (beyond run if you can which obviously cops can't do) is that you can hit someone a 100 times and have 100 different outcomes. Bones breaking, cuts, bruises, etc can all drastically change in severity based on what the other person does and even slight changes in direction or force of a strike. If you are relying on this to stop an armed assailant, I've got some bad news for you. When you swing a batton at someone, you are hoping for the best possible outcome, but again no amount of training can tell you how someone will react. I've been told by multiple martial artists that if they were approached by an attacker with a gun the ideal outcome would be 1. Run away 2. If you can't run shoot the person so you don't risk fatal injury 3. The worst possible thing is to try and go one on one either with fists or another melee weapon.

I am not saying shooting him right away is the correct way either. I just wish more of you would acknowledge you no absolutely nothing about this sort of situations and all of your information is based on short snippets of videos and mainstream media.