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I guess there's a question of reasonableness. Could you assume they have a cache of grenades in the cabinet? Are they hiding trained attack tigers in the attic?
Whole problem for me is that most of the danger was avoidable if they don't let the lady get off the couch. If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.
Once she does, maybe exit the house and see if she escalates further.
I don't buy that they feared for their safety up until a second or two before she threw that water.
Did they, though? I haven't watched the video, mostly just skimmed some of the comments here. But I could imagine them not even thinking about her possibly threatening them with a pot of water; who does that?! Instead, just give her a moment to turn the stove off, then she's not worried about it or whatever, and they can continue doing whatever they need to do. It's only after she grabs the pot and appears threatening with it that they might think, "Oh shit, that can be a weapon; what did we get ourselves into?"
What I'm really thinking is that this is something I could totally see myself doing (the not thinking about a pot of boiling water being a potential weapon bit, not various other things). I'm not sure if it would cross my mind until some sort of threatening action was taken with the pot in hand. It's too ingrained in my classification circuits as "just cooking".
Right, but its simultaneously hard to understand why their immediate response to seeing the boiling water in her hand is "I'm will shoot you in the face."
I guess I'm suggesting that their failure to control the scene was a problem. Okay, they don't see the boiling water as a danger until she's holding it. Maybe that's a training flaw in itself.
If they didn't think she was posing any danger prior to that point, I'm confused as to why that escalated to "I'm going to shoot" you nigh instantaneously. If they DID think she was a possible danger, then just keep her on the couch and shut off the stove off yourself, don't let her roam around to, e.g. grab a knife or set something on fire.
Why they made the actual choices they made, what was wrong with their training, and what they could have done better is above my pay grade. I just think that if one of the questions is why did they seem to not take a pot of water as a threat at the beginning, but did immediately after she grabbed it, a plausible answer would be that they're almost as dumb as me and just mentally binned it in a completely different bin, just thinking about turning a stove off rather than it being a possible weapon. I could also see myself being able to read someone's face/body language as they pick up a pot like that and immediately think, "Oh shit, I guess that can be a weapon, and they might be wanting to use it."
When I was younger, I worked at a daycare for a bit. I had one troubled kid kind of try to attack me with a pair of scissors. I knew that he caused a variety of problems and that one of my main long-term goals was to try to improve his behavior, since he was one of the biggest trouble spots, but I hadn't really thought that he might actually try to attack me up to that point. The attempt was kinda pathetic, really, but it was also a moment where I very suddenly went from not thinking about him having scissors, because we had scissors and the kids used them for various things, to, "Oh shit, this fucking punk might actually try to stab me with a pair of scissors!" I'm also glad that I didn't have millions of people on the internet scrutinizing my reaction; I think I did okay, but I could definitely imagine hyper-critics going overboard on silly stuff.
I have a slight sense that there's a Schrodinger's Cop problem here. People want cops to stop being overly paranoid about possible threats, especially when they're more hypothetical than real, but when a hypothetical threat becomes a real threat, they want to complain that they weren't paranoid enough about the hypothetical threat before it became a real threat.
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