De-escalation. Not so simple.

There’s a current trend in policing where those who direct officer training and officer accountability, many who’d never, or no longer, pound a beat themselves, seemed to have settled on an unsettling notion. If any situation devolves to where an officer has to use force against a subject, it’s the officer’s fault. The contention is that the officer failed to use sufficient “de-escalation” techniques. De-escalation seems to be the new catch phrase these days among the, I-know-better-than-cops-how-to-do-police-work, elites.

Cops know better than most that you just can’t deal with some folks for myriad reasons. You can’t reason with the unreasonable. You’d think city governments, such as Seattle, would have learned this lesson quite literally as they tried to reason with the Department of Justice.