Possibly, I also think young veterans that were or are fresh from tours in Afghanistan and/or Iraq are being highly targeted as the “perfect” recruits for police departments across the nation. The demand for officers is high in most areas and because of veteran’s previous weapons and combat training they are being sped through the training process and practically thrown out on patrols before the ink on their applications even dries.

These men and women for the most part are probably suffering from mild to severe forms of PTSD yet doing nothing to actually treat it. Perhaps departments are turning a blind eye because acknowledging it means fixing it and fixing it means potentially losing a huge portion of their force while also facing a drastic drop in new recruits.

This could easily explain why so many officers have been far too quick to use lethal force as they’ve had it ingrained in them to kill any threat that presents itself without any hesitation. They probably need more thorough training to deprogram this automatic response and to seek help immediately if signs of PTSD become present.

Obviously, there is grave concern for possibly having thousands of unhesitant armed officers patrolling our streets while suffering from PTSD as they can become easily irritable, become irrational in their judgement, and be “too on edge” to properly handle these situations and interactions amongst civilians.

They may not have been properly demilitarized, in the mental aspect. They’re still, possibly, approaching situations as they would in combat and that is the worst way to approach working as a Peace officer. Peace and soldier are complete contradictions yet it seems our peace officers are becoming more militarized and closer to being like soldiers everyday.

It’s insane how much more aggressive and quicker they are to escalate the use of force in recent times compared to 25 years ago or so. I was recently watching COPS and was paying attention to the officers responses when confronted with violent or aggressive behavior from episodes in the early 90's.

I could not believe the things suspects did and how not once did an officer draw his or her gun. It was basically watching boxing matches as one officer was being bit and repeatedly punched so much that his nose became one big bloody mess, yet his partner (standing right over them) calmly took out his baton and hit the suspect in the shin with enough force to get the suspect to give up and not cause any major bodily harm to him. That was it, then they arrested him and the one officer sought minor medical treatment.

That segment was followed by one which involved an incident with a woman who concealed a knife until she abruptly grabbed it from somewhere and fully lunged at the officer with it, but once again no gun was drawn as the officer engaged her head on in which he swiftly brought her down to the ground.

He escaped without a scratch on him, but the woman fell directly onto the knife which is unfortunate, but it was her choices alone that caused that. The officer didn’t make the conscious choice in whether she lived or died.

Could you imagine someone biting and punching an officer or lunging at them with a knife without excessive or lethal force being used by an officer when thinking in today’s standards? It’s so bad now, that I am actually shocked that those people weren’t shot and killed. Literally shocked. That’s horrible.