I don’t mean to pile, but I guess I am. I notice a ‘trend’ in these police shootings that a common police statement is “he went for my gun” so I had to shoot him.
You may recall a few weeks ago someone was killed by an officer in Madison WI.
Several months before that an unarmed (white) guy was killed with the police officer stating the same reason.
Is there any evidence that this is an ‘unwritten’ rule or unofficial suggestion to police officers that they can use "he grabbed my gun’ to explain their justified or unjustified shooting.
I don’t have any evidence, but this response seems so common and almost verbatim from case to case, that it is unofficially suggested for an officer to claim
Cops know that “he grabbed my gun” are magic get-out-of-trouble-free words, whether or not they’re true.
Criminals really do frequently go for officers’ guns.
Street fights are confusing, and an officer really has no way of knowing if a suspect is going for the gun or just moving in for a bear hug/belt grab/kidney punch/defensive move.
In that last case, I cite the Michael Brown shooting, in which Darren Wilson argued that Brown was trying to take his gun away, but it was probably more a matter of Brown trying to block the gun from being pointed at him. On the one hand, touching a gun is touching a gun, and I wouldn’t expect an officer to figure out the difference between a defensive and an offensive move in the heat of the moment. On the other hand, cops are therefore in a peculiar situation of heightening the danger every encounter by frequently bringing a gun within close distance of people they’re already worried about hurting them. It’s awfully convenient that they themselves introduce a dangerous device into situations and then are able to claim to be afraid of said device.
I doubt there’s anything unwritten about it… grabbing for the gun is assault, and if the attacker is successful, he’ll be armed (and probably still all assaulty) and the police officer won’t be. Cops are allowed to defend themselves, just like any other armed member of our society.
I have never heard it formally or informally. In any of the police shootings I have been personally acquainted with it never came up. I have only heard it in isolated cases. And I have been involved in incidents where someone tried to grab my gun but it was resolved without gunfire. I know a certain crowd that is on the board will never believe that people attempt to take weapons away from officers despite the fact that is does happen. Newer weapons retention holsters make it less likely that someone will be successful at taking their gun than in the past but as this Johns Hopkins article states about 10% of officers killed are shot by their own gun. Other cites from earlier say it was over 20% before newer holster were common.
This. They really do go after the officer’s weapon. I teach Defensive Tactics for Law Enforcement and a goodly part of the course is teaching the officers how to prevent someone from getting the firearm away from them.
See #2. If the bad guy is closing with the officer, 99 times out of 100, it’s because they’re going for the firearm.
I don’t really understand the amount of people in the US killed by police in the US. A recent report says more civilians were killed in the US by the police in America in March than by the police in the UK in a century.
More than twice as much, in March in the US, than between 1900 and 2000 in the UK.
I appreciate and support the work our police do, on both sides of the pond, and a lot more people have access to guns in the US than the UK. I just can’t understand a police officer shooting an unarmed guy in the back eight times. There was the South American man on the London subway being shot in the face seven times, which wasn’t normal or acceptable. That was a very unusual event, but if the figures I quoted above are true then the average doesn’t make sense, even with the differences in population. If you visit London you’ll hear hundreds of different languages, it’s a very multicultural city like New York. Outside of the capital there is rarely gang violence and murder, although other crimes do happen too much. Violent crime is relatively rare outside of the capital of the UK, compared to US cities - why?
I suspect once body cams become the norm (rather, as to the police, head cams v. attached to a part of the body that can, would (and sometimes should) in terms of proper stance be pointed in another direction and not pick up the action), we’ll find that “(s)he went for my gun” becomes far more rare.
It is completely untrue that “he tried to grab my gun” is a standard police response. The standard police response is actually “he reached for his waistband”.
I suppose waistband reaching is only good as a standard response if one ultimately identifies that a weapon is in the waistband (in the old days, a cop might feel it necessary to have a throw-down to get away with the shooting of an unarmed person; as things evolved, it seems they don’t even feel the need to worry about that … just “he was [fill in the blank]…” Whether actually or supposedly appearing to reach for something will help the police officer should depend on other facts about the situation, but …
How many police in the UK were killed on duty last year? In the US, 126 LEOs were killed in 2014. This isn’t to excuse the clearly overboard and nearly certainly racially motivated actions by some police, but the US is a different environment than the UK and a straight up comparison isn’t IMO meaningful.
There are serious problems with how the police operate in the US, but to fix the problem we’ll need to address some societal issues.
Many years ago when I was working as manager of a convenience store we were “taught” that if we were accused of, or otherwise caught for selling underage cigarettes an acceptable defense was “I actively evaluated the age and decided they were legally allowed to buy”*
I wouldn’t be surprised if any “standard response” took the format of
“These are the acceptable defences for an officer shooting while effecting an arrest”
It wouldn’t need to be an explicit “Your default response is X if accused of shooting”
At the time the legal age was 16, and to be genuinely mistaken, (fooled) was a defense to the charge. The requirement was to give active consideration (if you like articuable suspicion type standard) to the buyers age
These are good reasons to protest against the Powers That Be, but generational poverty - two or three generations who’ve never worked living in the same house are a small percentage of UK households too. They prefer petty crime; stealing from their neighbours, drugs, alcoholism (endemic), theft, shoplifting, more drug abuse etc.
Probably none. As a police officer in the UK you’re more likely to be verbally abused, spat on, physically abused, but not shot. The lifetime of a cop in the UK is probably longer than in the US, with the result there are likely more cop widows in the US. Any killing in the act of law enforcement isn’t a pretty sight, that’s a given. I’m more looking at the racial figures - are you more likely to be arrested or killed if you’re black? Does the figure go up in the southern states? From an outsider’s point of view those numbers have some correlation.
