Fairfax Cops Had Every Right to Shoot This Guy, but They Didn't

Most of us law-and-order fans get a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach when news breaks of an officer-involved shooting. 

Here we go, we say to ourselves. All us normals are about to spend the next six months getting clobbered with obnoxious protests, our tax and spending money siphoned off to sociopathic Marxist groups, and the spectacle of an imperfect human pilloried as a racist brute for the "crime" of doing his job imperfectly.

There are promising signs lately that Americans are becoming immune to the manipulation technique of the leftist narrative drivers in which they cherry-pick an anomalous situation and pretend it's actually representative of a systemic problem. After the BLM chaos of the early '20s, there is little patience for calls to "Defund the police" or claims that all cops are racists who love to kill black people just because they're black.

In fact, the far more normal outcome, when law enforcement officers confront aberrant members of the public, is for the suspect to be taken into custody with little or no incident. This is an extraordinary fact that deserves to be celebrated regularly, given that responding to calls and making arrests are the most dangerous parts of police work.

One striking example of excellent police response and restraint occurred Monday in Fairfax County, Va. A teenager in the throes of some sort of episode took actions often associated with "suicide by cop," a situation where a suicidal person will call the police to his or her home and attack them with a weapon to provoke a fatal shooting.

In this case, the 16-year-old called 911 and "was rambling to the call taker on the phone about killing two people," related Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis at a press conference. (This claim was found to be untrue.) Two patrol cars were dispatched to the scene. When one officer got out of his car to speak with the other, the suspect appeared and ran towards the unoccupied vehicle as though to steal it. The officer ran towards him, and the teen pulled out a knife and chased him, stabbing him once in the torso and tussling with him.

At one point, the officer under attack attempted to draw his weapon. The second officer on the scene drew his weapon and aimed at the suspect but couldn't get a clear shot while the struggle was going on.

The wounded officer, who didn't even realize he had been stabbed, was able to end the scuffle by throwing the youth to the ground. And there he lay, face down and still, the fight gone out of him, as officers took him into custody. It's a pathetic sight; as Chief Davis said, "Something has gone wrong in that young man's life." This was not the suspect's first interaction with police.

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The officers had arrived on the scene of a possible double homicide with no description of a suspect or the reporting party. The attack with the knife, a deadly weapon, unfolded quickly, and one officer took a stab in the torso. By law and best practices, this is the sort of action that 100% justifies a fatal police shooting. And yet, the officers involved were given the courage and restraint to handle the situation without the use of lethal force. 

It's a miracle the wounded police officer didn't sustain a fatal injury. It's another miracle the disturbed kid who attacked him is alive and unharmed, to maybe get help and have a chance at a future someday. "When an officer, a uniformed police officer is stabbed and but for the grace of God is alive, um, I think we tend to blow by it too quickly — as a society, as a profession," remarked Chief Davis. He's right.