I apologize for damning your timeline with this, but there are several points I want to make regarding this police encounter.

This video illustrates the complexity of police work, and sometimes just the sheer brutality of the things we encounter.

You are dispatched to a DV disturbance, seemingly of an unknown nature and proportion. As you arrive you encounters a bloodied and distraught woman outside the residence.

As you attempt to elicit information from the woman, a disturbance is heard in the background. Guttural, animalistic sounds emanating from the residence. This distraction causes you to miss a critical piece of information.

Unsure if there are others inside in need of help, you approach the residence. At the door you are confronted by a man engulfed in a deranged rage, demanding that you shoot him. You reach out through your radio for assistance.

You draw your taser and attempt to create some sort of dialogue, but instead you are charged by a man wielding a guitar. Presumably the same guitar the seriously injured woman stated she was struck by.

You discharge your taser, but it is ineffective. You then attempts to create some distance, and then achieve a bit of rudimentary shielding in the form of a child's trike. The man retreats back inside the house.

You follow the man to the door in an attempt to maintain visual contact with him, still hoping to achieve some level of successful dialogue and peacefully resolve this situation. Then you see him grab a knife and begin to approach.

Again, you attempt to create distance, and again plead with radio for more officers. You create some time for yourself to work with. After all, there is space between you, not to mention an entire wall. He's contained inside, at worst you will be working a barricaded subject.

Now there's a man outside, previously unencountered. He tells you there is a child inside the residence. Trapped inside with a madman armed with a knife.

The time you created is quickly evaporating, you must now weigh your options. Do you remain outside, wait for backup, and leave the child to an unknown fate? Or, do you give up the space and relinquish your shielding? There is no time left.

You make your decision, you are going inside. Once there you see him cutting himself and again attempt to create dialogue. Instead the man appears to spin further into madness. Your attempts seem fruitless.

All of this just in time for the man from outside to attempt to intervene. You must shift your attention between the two men now, one armed, the other placing himself in your line of fire and potentially making a bad situation worse.

You demand that the man leave, and in the middle of removing him yourself you hear the armed man say "I killed him." At first it doesn't register, but then he says it again, "I killed him.", and this time you hear him loud and clear.

You ask him who, & he responds by telling you that he has killed his son. At first you don't believe him, who would, or even could, do something like that. You approach further, "Oh my God", you see the motionless, bloodied & beaten little boy. What little time you had is gone.

Keeping your attention on the man who has now backed himself into a corner room, you desperately attempt gain an understanding of the child's condition. Again, you desperately reach out over radio for help. Where are they?

The man begins to cut his own wrists, he stabs himself in the side. He tells you he wants to die as he plunges the blade into his body. Finally, you see them. Backup. However, as they arrive, the man raises the guitar that he beat his child to death with & makes his way towards.

That's where we leave it. In a YouTube video that blurs out the dead body of a child who just had their skull bashed in by an electric guitar. We are left on a freeze frame of a man, murder weapon raised, just prior to the officer taking that man's life.

That's not where the officer leaves it. He didn't see a blurred box obscuring the mangled body of a 4 YO. He didn't leave it at a freeze frame right before putting bullets into the body of another human. He carries those memories, those emotions, with him the rest of his life.

This nightmarish scene occurred in a total time frame of just under 6 minutes. This is the world a police officer must function in. These are the decisions, the choices, & actions that a police officer must make, & often in situations where we don't have the necessary time.

This video was chalked full of de-escalation. To the brim. From dialogue, to the creation of time, distance, and shielding. And you know what? It didn't do shit. Now, obviously that isn't to say de-escalation is pointless. Obviously it is the 1st thing, when feasible, to do.

But that said, situations like this prove that de-escalation and de-escalation techniques aren't the end all, be all. The aren't the magical salve that the media and activists want to you to think or believe that they are. Sometimes, your best efforts just don't work.

I applaud this officer. I applaud his attempts a de-escalation, even to the bitter end. I applaud the innovation of using his surroundings, picking up a trike. And I'm gonna be praying for him.