Seventeen shots fired, 10 hit the gunman, three hit bystanders. So, 4 shots missed, possibly hitting things that fragmented those bullets. Probably not too bad a job given the need for an instant response.
There is no such thing as overkill. You shoot until the threat is no longer a threat. You can’t just shut it off, either. An old joke goes like this:
“Why did you shoot the man six times, sir?”
“Because I didn’t have seven bullets, your honor!”
It’s not like there’s any scientific way to determine how much force it will take, and it’s not like they can see how many hits the guy took from both officers, so you fire until the guy goes down. Ten shots can be fired very, very quickly.
This is a prime example of why police should never open fire in public unless they have no other choice, and if you are a civilian with a carry permit you never open fire in a situation where innocent people may be injured or killed, period, not even to shoot back. That’s part of the price of being able to carry a concealed weapon.
But anyway, the police were not overzealous or trigger-happy, although they may have picked a bad way to engage the guy. Endangering yourself on behalf of civilians is part of the job, and they maybe should have given the public more time to evacuate, but you know what? I wasn’t there, so it’s not for me to say. The courts will chime in, though, you can be sure of that.
That’s a really good point. Not to drag this off topic too much, but this situation kinda blows a hole in the argument that if everyone had a gun, it would prevent mass shootings. Police are trained for specific circumstances like this and as can be seen, even they aren’t immune from hitting unintended targets.
Not entirely. The natural reaction for a person under fire is to either run or get down. Once your target is cleared you’re free to take action. The key is the part about endangering innocent people, which is not a uniform situation.
Given their history with accuracy and such, I don’t think NYC cops should have guns at all. Ron White said it best:
You ever see tape of the Kehoe brothers from Ohio, those two guys that get out of that white Suburban, it’s been on COPS a few times? Those guys, folks, have a shootout with the police, at point…blank…range—nobody gets hurt. I would love to have been at that office the next day when that guy’s being interviewed by the police. “And then what happened?” “Well, at that point, I unloaded my semi-automatic 9 millimeter weapon at point blank range.” “And then what happened?” “They…left.” Nice shooting, Elmer Fudd. There was a kid in Detroit a few years ago, shot 8 bullets, hit 9 people. These cops fired 22 shots, didn’t even hit the fuckin’ Suburban!
While I really do believe that a lot of cops truly relish the idea of legitimately shooting an attacker, I don’t think there’s a significant number who wouldn’t do what they could to limit the number of victims. The accounts of the encounter and the reporting on the scene after suggest that it all happened in the blink of an eye and at close range on a very busy urban sidewalk lined with sturdy roadblock planters. Truly a no-win situation and there was bound to be metal flying everywhere.
Apparently, three bystanders were hit by ‘whole bullets’ and the remaining six were struck by fragments. Really, it is astounding more people weren’t seriously wounded.
I’m as cynical as the next guy when it comes to police scandals but this looks like a justified shooting if there ever was one. They have to fire until the guy falls down and they train for a fast volley. This was clearly the fault of Jeffery Johnson and by confronting the police with a weapon, he is the one who put those people in danger.
One of the cops involved is named Sinishtaj. I can’t stop saying it.
It’s like this - according to the training I’ve received, you have two options when you have friendlies in your line of fire:
Wait until you have a clear shot; or
Aim very, very carefully.
The cops did neither. The fact that civilians were hit proves that there were civilians in their line of fire; the fact that so many were hit proves that they weren’t aiming carefully enough. Thus, they screwed up.
Did you see any of the video? As the police approached, the gunman took his weapon out and turned to face the officers, who were less than 10 feet away with no opportunity to take cover. At that point, their only choices were shoot or don’t shoot - and they knew this man had already killed one person. No time to evacuate the people on the sidewalk, who started running as soon as they realized what was going on.Some of them may have actually run into the line of fire, and I believe that most of injured were not actually shot directly- they were hit with ricochets or in some case fragments of the concrete planters. No way the cops can predict what will happen with those.
Then they either should have not fired, or fired more carefully. Unless you’re firing from a tripod, if you shoot 10 rounds in rapid succession, only the first three or so will end up anywhere near your target - the others will *always *go wild. Newton’s Third Law of Motion demands it. The cops should have fired two or three shots, paused, assessed the situation, aimed, and fired again if necessary. That is, if they’d had any training.
Plus, since when does emptying a magazine make tactical sense? What if the guy had had an accomplice?
You don’t know anything at all about this shooting, for one. It appears almost all of the bystanders wounded were wounded because of bullets hitting large concrete planters and fragmenting, the bystanders were hit by the fragments. I’ve heard of one woman who was directly shot by a stray bullet (there may be more, but that is all I’ve heard confirmed at present.) The man they killed had just pulled a gun out and shot a man to death in the streets of New York, then when confronted with approaching police officers pulled his gun out again. He was shot and killed, by aimed fired that mostly hit and killed him and did not primarily hit anyone else.
I know that in fantasy land where you live we can have police forces populated only by super heroes wearing caps and wielding Captain America shields. Since they were genetically enhanced during secret government programs during WWII they obviously never miss. Here in the real world this is exactly what should have happened, a dangerous gunman on the streets is shot and killed by police, no innocent bystanders are killed or seriously wounded. The police did not create this situation, they responded to it.
Plus there is absolutely no way you are seriously arguing the police shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns, that’s patently ridiculous.
The problem with giving police guns is they don’t know how to operate without them. Why bother trying to defuse a situation if you can just draw your gun and threaten? Besides that, it offers an incentive to people more interested in power than helping communities to join the police force.
I’m not saying there is anything better the police could have done with the situation they were given (I don’t have enough details to pass judgement) but unfortunately it does seem to me that police can get a little over-excited and endanger the public, not just with guns but with car chases too. Too often catching (or killing) the “bad guy” is given far higher importance than protecting innocents, it seems.
Eventually enough people will realize the Wild West is dead, but I don’t see it happening any time soon. Guns are just so cool!
ETA:
Police with guns should understand the risks of this, and not shoot unless they’re going to hit their target. And not shoot at one guy sixteen times either. Ten out of sixteen is not a good result. That really sounds to me like a case of losing control, either out of fear or excitement.
But incidents like this sure don’t help the case of the pro-gun activists who claim that we would all be better off if more people carried concealed weapons during their day-to-day activities.
The police are presumably reasonably well-trained professionals, and they managed to injure 10 bystanders in one way or another due to their panicked, uncontrolled response to a single individual. I’m not saying that it is reasonable to expect them to do better, but if that’s how a “trained” police officer responds, can you imagine the chaos that would result if half the bystanders had also been carrying guns, and they all decided to play hero?
A quarter of the people on the street would be dead because they pulled out their gun and were subsequently mistaken for the original shooter, and another quarter would be dead because of stray bullets from the mass of panicked, untrained citizens trying to “defend” themselves.
No. It wasn’t “exactly what should have happened”. What should have happened is that no bystanders were wounded. Anything less then perfection deserves to be criticized.
You seem to think that criticism is the same thing as assigning blame, or worse, assigning liability. That’s utterly incorrect. Criticism is a vital part of the learning process. If you’re not willing to analyze your actions and search for mistakes - any mistakes, no matter how small - then you’ll never improve. And you have to improve, constantly.
So yes, the cops did a good job. I’d give them a B+. Now let’s see why they didn’t get an A+, so that next time maybe they will. “Eh, good enough” is not good enough.
