From what I can understand, that’s simply not a realistic expectation of how firearms are used in real life situations. You perceive threat, then start unloading your weapon in the perceived direction of the threat, and don’t stop until after it looks like the threat is dissipated.
If the police are trained to spray and pray, then we shouldn’t allow them to carry semi-automatic pistols and make them use revolvers instead.
Had these officers taken cover (as suggested up-thread) and someone else been shot by the killer, you know what the same whiners would be saying. No? I’ll help you. “What cowards! We pay them to protect us and what do they do? Hide!” The U.S. Supreme Court says, and rightly so, that officers’ actions are to be judged based on what they reasonably believed to be the circumstances at the time. This is a bit paraphrased but that’s basically it. No benefit of hindsight, no slow motion video. No coulda, shoulda, woulda. Its easy to say now that he was probably wasn’t going to shoot anybody else and wasn’t a terrorist/mass killer. Not so easy then.
Officers have to take into account their surroundings before firing their weapons. That doesn’t mean that they can’t fire if there are people around. What are the risks vs. benefits? These officers had seconds to make a decision that they will live with for their rest of the lives. (The key word being “live”) About the same amount of time as it takes to read this sentence. No amount of training can truly prepare you for that moment. When was the last time you were in a “kill or be killed” situation? Too many people think that TV equals reality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Few things frost me more than ignorant people second guessing what cops do in life-or-death situations. Statements such as those suggesting that officers wait until the killer uses up his remaining ammo and then shoot him in the head are so absurd they hardly warrant a reply. But then I think, “This guy could be sitting on a jury someday.” Scary, indeed. These officers did an outstanding job under difficult circumstances.
And yes, I’m a retired LEO. Narcotics, violent crimes, homicide (including police shootings) and SWAT. Currently a training officer at a police academy.
Shooting nine bystanders is not an “outstanding job,” and if you think it is, I weep for the future when your trainees hit the streets. I’ll buy that it was, perhaps, the best they could have done under the circumstances. But outstanding?! No.
Yeah, I have to second this. ‘Outstanding’ indicates that their performance was better than would be expected given the circumstances.
I think it’s a questions that’s been asked upthread already, but if this was outstanding, what are some examples of just an average response? What could have occurred where the outcome would have been less than optimal?
As a New Yorker, I disagree. Given that it was reasonable to fire weapons because a suspect who had committed murder pulled a weapon on them, on that corner, it’s beyond mere good luck only nine people were injured. That corner is wall to wall people.
They didn’t shoot nine bystanders. Nine bystanders were injured. Specifically, six bystanders were injured by ricocheting flack and three bystanders were shot. If you think you can fire bullets without them pinging off of buildings and objects and sending damaging shards of said buildings and objects and broken-up bullet into the air, I am curious where you learned physics. And if you think you can take down a gunman on 34th street and ONLY hit three people, I also wish you very good luck with your superpowers.
I think, in this case, you judge the quality of their decision making, not the quality of the outcome. Given the need to make an instant decision, did they make the right one?
If your criticism is that they should have shot straighter, or that they should not have allowed their bullets to ricochet and hit people, I think you’re asking too much. There is only so much you can train for, there is no training that actually mimics a cold blooded murderer pointing a gun at you on a busy street. As I understand it, the overwhelming majority of officers never need to discharge their weapon, so extensive training is counter productive. You need your officers on the street, not at the firing range for hours and hours training for an event that will likely never happen.
You are arguing about definitions.
They injured nine people.
And in any event, they have to requialify on their weapon twice a year. It’s not like they get a 2 hour class in academy and that’s it.
Saying the right action would have resulted in zero injuries is patently absurd. Absolutely anything out of the ordinary is going to cause injuries in front of the Empire State Building, merely because it is crowded and nothing is stupider than a scared crowd. The police did a damn good job at impromtu crowd control if there were zero trampling injuries from panicked pedestrians.
I suppose you think they should have waited until the armed gunman was not in a crowd, not moving, and not about to fire. That certainly would have been convenient, but it was not in the cards for them that day.
I’m sure they know what to do much better than I.
I object to your nit-picking, not their actions.
miss elizabeth said they shot nine bystanders, but they didn’t. I think it’s rather important, when asking whether NYPD are unusual bad shots, to be clear on where they put their bullets and where they didn’t. You can call it nitpicking, and I’m fine with that. I call it “accuracy.”
The caused nine persons to be injured by shooting at the bad guy.
Happy? 
Did the injured people twist their ankles and/or succumb to the vapors? Or were they injured by bullets?
Because if it was the bullets that got them, then I’ve got sour news for you – they were shot.
The latest I’ve found is that three people were shot and the others were hit by debris from nearby planters.
I’m a little torn on the issue - I believe that the police needed to fire when the gun was drawn on them. They didn’t know if he was going to shoot anyone else and if they’d just yelled and ducked behind the planters and he had shot into the crowd the injuries would likely have been worse (and so would the news stories, cops hide while people die)
I don’t know however that 7 and 9 shots were required. The article linked in this thread says that the NYPD policy is to shoot three times and then reassess. However I also have some sympathy for these cops who have both been on the force 15 years and have never before had the need to fire their weapon. Training is all well and good but I’m kind of glad that they don’t get constant real life experience.
AGAIN, I will buy that it may have been the best they could do, under the circumstances.
But to say injuring nine innocent bystanders is “an outstanding job” is mind boggling. If this qualifies as “outstanding” then what is average? Collapsing the building? Blowing up Times Square? What would be “tragic”? Leveling all of New York?
Words mean things, and injuring nine people is only outstanding in the sense that it is outstandingly sad. Unavoidable, maybe. For a trainer to feel that this was not just unavoidable, not just acceptable, not only “good, considering”, but outstanding is completely fucktarded.
ETA: in other words, I am judging the quality of the outcome, and I think it is right to do so.
…I live in a country where our police force is not routinely armed: and most of us, including myself, like it that way. We have relatively strong gun laws that I support.
But I can’t really fault what the police did here. Some of the suggestions here border on the ridiculous. The incident was over in about three seconds. The idea that they would be able to identify the pistol he was holding, determine it had five bullets, dive for cover behind the planters, wait for him to shoot off all five rounds then put a carefully placed bullet in his head is one of the most absurd things I have read on the internet. These guys had to make a judgement call on what to do in less than a second. Two seconds later it was all over. Diving for cover might have resulted in a bullet to the back. Waiting for the guy to use up all five of his rounds might have resulted in five more people dead, the guy successfully evading the police and given him the chance to reload. Real life is not a freaking action movie for goodness sake.
“Best”? They did the “best they could do”? They could not have done any better than injuring 9 bystanders? How about injuring no bystanders, isn’t that “best”?
I’m poking a little fun, I don’t think it’s insane to use the word outstanding to describe actions that can also be described as the “best they could do”.
Let’s say you take this video and use it as a training aid. If you’re going to criticize the officers, you need to take out your pointer, pause the video and say “this was wrong”.
There is another thread going on this topic, and one poster brought up a video where police shot a dog that was attacking. Thought it was great police work, great shot. I pause the video, take out my pointer and say “why wasn’t his pepper spray in his hand?”
I can’t do that with this video, if the officers did the best job they could under the circumstances they were faced with, they should get kudos, even if the ultimate outcome was sub optimal.
Pepper spray is often totally ineffectual in stopping dogs. They don’t react the same way as people. I sprayed an entire can of OC spray into the face of a charging pitbull. Barely slowed him down. The shotgun worked quite well.
That’s fair, I don’t know if there are reliable non-lethal anti-dog measures the officers could have taken. One would hope a “dog protecting master” situation would be solvable in a way that doesn’t require using a firearm on a crowded street. Not so much for the dog’s sake, but the people on the street. That was the type of situation where a bullet injured bystander would have me saying the police really screwed up.