Martial arts offer a lot of benefits, mental, health, self-defense, etc.  If everyone in society studied martial arts seriously society overall would probably be in a better condition.  In some societies, martial arts is part of the regular school curriculum.  But, incidents like this one, where a young man armed with a knife and surrounded by an entire crowd of police officers, is shot nine times and then tasered, indicate that for police officers, rigorous martial arts training should be part and parcel of their training.  It only makes sense – they are supposed to uphold the law, and sometime they need to use force to do that – therefore they need to be trained in martial arts.  Not only would an officer in this type of situation know how to disarm the boy without serious harm to either of them, but he wouldn’t be scared out of his mind.  That’s right – after watching the video of the shooting, it seems to me that the officer who shot the boy was scared witless.  Why else would he fire on the kid from a distance, repeatedly?  If he did need to shoot (and he didn’t), a single shot should have been enough to disable the boy.  But really? Count the number of police officers in the video.  There are at least fifteen, maybe more.  Even if they took him on with nothing but their hands they should have been able to subdue him.  But, they are armed with more than just firearms – they have batons, which have a lot longer reach than a knife, and apparently, they had tasers as well, since they tased him as he lay in a pool of his own blood.  This cop was scared.  Scared in a way that doesn’t even make sense – kind of like certain people who when they see a spider, or a snake, freak out and start screaming uncontrollably.

Martial arts training might have given him a better sense of confidence, a sense of calm in dealing with the situation rather than freaking out an unloading his clip into a kid holding a knife thirty yards away.

In contrast check out this video, where an officer disarms a much more violent knife attacker without shooting the assailant.