Kansas Police Shot Unarmed Suicidal Teen 16 Times As Family Says They Begged Them Not To

[JJMacNab]

39. FWIW

Suicide by cop is a relatively new phenomenon. The first documented case was in the early 1980s, and the suicide guy took a bunch of people in a bank hostage and ordered the cops to executive him in a half hour or else he'd start killing. He ended up killing two or three and shooting more than a half dozen others before the cops obliged.

The idea was exceedingly rare until TV and movie writers starting dropping it into their scripts. By 1998, it accounted for 16% of all cop shootings in the country. Eleven years later, it was more than a third of the 700 police involved shootings.

Cops aren't shrinks, and they have to decide whether a person threatening suicide is serious enough to harm others (including the cops) to get his wish.

I researched this stuff for a book I was writing and found that it was such a common stereotype in cop and thriller fiction that I dumped it.