A clip shared recently by Look We Are Included has been stopping people mid-scroll, and it’s easy to see why. The caption is simple enough: officers show up for a routine welfare check, and within seconds someone is thrusting a knife through a partially opened door. The bodycam footage shows an officer pinning a suspect against a wall, a struggle that spills out onto the porch, and the officer eventually wrestling the person to the ground while shouting “stay down” twice before the threat is finally over.
Like a lot of bodycam footage that circulates online, this clip doesn’t come with a full case file attached — no agency name, no date, no location. That’s fairly typical for clips like this; the footage itself is the story, and it speaks for itself. What it captures is unmistakable: a video of an officer nearly getting stabbed has stopped thousands of people in their tracks and reminded them what these calls can actually look like in real time.
And it turns out this exact scenario — a “routine” check on someone’s wellbeing escalating into a near-fatal knife attack — isn’t some rare fluke. It’s a pattern, and there’s well-documented footage to prove it.
This Keeps Happening
Take what happened in Reston, Virginia, last September. A 14-year veteran officer trained in crisis intervention, Peter Liu, was sent to check on a woman whose doctor had flagged concerns about her mental state. He knocked. She opened the door, then slammed it. He waited and tried again. Two minutes later, she opened the door a second time — and immediately came at him with a knife, slashing him across the face. He retreated down a hallway, ended up backed into a dead end with nowhere left to go, and had to fire his weapon to stop the attack. Fairfax County’s police chief later put it bluntly: it could have gone much, much worse for the officer.
Or look at Houston, where an officer was stabbed in the head while trying to do exactly what departments train officers to do — talk someone down, treat them with patience, give them room. The suspect kept warning the officers not to get closer. They tried anyway, because that’s the job. He produced a knife and stabbed one of them before he was stopped.
Then there’s Hartford, Connecticut, where officers and mental health professionals went out together — the supposed “best practice” response — to check on a man in crisis. He still managed to pull a knife and lunge at an officer who’d fallen backward.
None of these are isolated incidents, and none of these officers showed up expecting violence. They showed up because someone — often a family member, a doctor, a worried neighbor — asked them to make sure another person was okay. That’s the entire job description for a welfare check: go be a help to someone who might be struggling. And over and over, that simple act of checking on a stranger turns into a fight for survival in the space of a few seconds, with zero warning.
The Part That Doesn’t Make Headlines
What strikes me watching footage like this — both the viral clip and the verified cases — is how little time officers actually have to react. We’re not talking about minutes to assess a situation and plan a response. We’re talking about a door opening and a blade appearing in the same breath. The officer in the Instagram clip didn’t have time to draw a weapon, call for backup, or do anything except physically control the threat in front of him, immediately, with his hands.
It’s easy to scroll past a clip like this, feel a jolt of adrenaline, and move on. It’s harder to sit with what it actually represents: someone walked up to a stranger’s door that day not knowing what was on the other side of it, and very nearly didn’t walk away. Whoever that officer was, wherever this happened, he’s one of a long, growing list of people who’ve had a “routine” call turn into the worst few seconds of their year — and who did their job anyway, the next day, on the next call.
That’s exactly why footage like this matters, and why pages like Look We Are Included sharing it is worth paying attention to. It’s a reminder that the people behind the badge are walking into the unknown every single shift, doing a job most of us wouldn’t sign up for twice.
