It would take a sorry excuse of a person, to feel threatened by and 8 y/o, with a knife.
Picture this scenario: You are in your house minding your own business, when you hear screams from outside. You run out the front door to see your own child being attacked by a young neighbor boy wielding a stabbing implement of some sort. Your child is on the ground about to be seriously hurt or perhaps killed. The aggressor spots you and makes a taunting remark. You have seconds to react. What do you do to deescalate the situation?
Now, you don’t actually have to answer that, but my point here is that you don’t bother to ask the kid his age. You DON’T try to do anything that would make the situation more dangerous. You try to resolve the situation as effectively and quickly as possible given the means at your disposal. Now put yourself in the officers’ shoes. You’re in a similar situation, but you have a tactical belt with OC spray, possibly a taser and a firearm. Which do you employ to defuse the situation?
Sure, you could try to tackle the kid, but he’s already threatened you. What if you hurt him in the struggle? Worse, what if he manages to get one of those tools off your belt and use it against you?
You could shoot him for advancing on you with a potentially deadly weapon. Officers have done it before in similar situations, but I think we can both agree this is probably not the best choice here.
You could taser him, but we all know how much the media loves a tasering story, and there have been certain reports that that amount of electrical shock can be dangerous to younger individuals
…or you could OC spray him. His eyes will water and burn, his skin will turn red, but he’ll drop the weapon and likely not put up much more of a struggle. It takes a very determined attacker to keep up an offense after being sprayed, and as soon as he’s disarmed you can take him outside to the paramedics. He’ll be fine in an hour at most and no one got hurt.
The teacher should have been more involved with defusing the situation, rather than doing nothing and allowing it to grow totally out of control.
This wasn’t the first time the kid had done this, clearly his parents didn’t care enough to put the fear of God in him when he got home after the first two incidents. This is not the teachers fault. What could she have done differently?
And, there's what's wrong...right there.
Precisely, it’s not a teacher’s job to parent.