Perhaps I haven’t read closely enough, but it seems to me that the vast majority of people posting in this thread have no beef with the police shooting the suspect, so I’m not sure why you have to trot out that white flag nonsense.
Those that do have a problem have stated more that it’s the amount of bullets fired and, as a result, the collateral damage caused that is the real problem. Allessan, for example, has suggested several times that perhaps the cops should have fired off a quick burst of two or three shots, then re-assessed before firing again.
Certainly I think the police, when confronting a murder suspect who pulls a gun, should probably shoot him, but situational details play a factor. In this case, we’re talking about a location with lots of innocent bystanders. In my mind, this would be a case where some extra care in shooting should be expected. The result of many bystanders injured is a good reason why. I would amend your statement above about their job to be: “Their job was to make sure he didn’t shoot anyone else, while causing minimum harm to bystanders.”
They did a great job on the first part (and I commend them for running into a very dangerous situation and getting that done), but a not so great job on the second part.
You haven’t established how many injured bystanders you would expect to get in a situation where a murderer with unknown mental state pulls a gun on police in Manhattan. This may be the minimum number of bystanders hurt to be expected given the scenario.
If you shoot 2 or 3 rounds, and the suspect hasn’t gone down and starts firing at people you have made the situation much worse. LEOs are instructed to fire until the threat is gone for good reason. You really can’t judge in a split second whether someone has been hit enough during a pause in the firing; you make sure.
I’m asking how else they were supposed to have responded. I didn’t see objections to the shooting of Johnson, but I saw complaints about the number of shots they fired and their accuracy. Given that the guy actually was dangerous and going for a gun, I’m not sure how much more you can expect from the cops in a couple of seconds. They didn’t have the opportunity to grab him or to get him away from the other pedestrians. If they waited, they and/or other people would have been shot. “Guys, be better shots!” is not much of a grounds for criticism in this instance.
I’m no cop, but I don’t think this is how this kind of thing works. In the moment, you don’t have time to agree how many times you’re going to shoot an armed suspect. And if you stop shooting and wait and it turns out he’s not disarmed, he has an opportunity to start shooting at you or other people. The point of shooting him is to stop him from killing anyone else. Yes, harm to other people has to be kept to a minimum, but there’s not much point in shooting him and waiting to see what happens.
I’m not sure how much more care you can reasonably expect when a murderer tries to pull a gun on a crowded avenue. Considering how quickly all of this happened and where it happened, I’m not sure how much better it could have gone. It sucks that people were injured, but if the cops fired 16 shots in 8 seconds with no advance warning and hit the guy about half the time, that really does not sound too awful. At least this time they shot a guy who actually had a gun and actually murdered someone.
A bit of tangent here, but **Cheesesteak’s **post reminded me of a video I saw recently of a NY police officer shooting a dog that approached him in a threatening manner while they were attempting to help the dog’s unconscious owner. Article and video here.
While there are clear differences between the two situations, the dog was smaller, moving faster, and much closer than the ESB shooter. Yet the police officer placed a perfect shot in the dog’s head. (She survived, happily)
I haven’t seen many videos of police shootings, but I was amazed at the accuracy and attributed it to good training. Contrast that with the ESB shooting, and I feel a bit confused. Were the situations vastly different, or was it a matter of better training on the cop’s part, or something else entirely?
Once you start pulling the trigger you don’t stop until you perceive that the threat had ended. What you absolutely do not do is fire two or three and then stop to re-assess the situation. That is a clear problem with “double-tap” training. While you are assessing the bad guy can be shooting. With a little training its easy to get off three shots a second. So, within four seconds each officer could fire twelve rounds. It also takes time for the officer to perceive the threat has stopped and then stop pulling the trigger. Maybe another second? Three more rounds?
When I see/hear these “too many shots” arguments I always like to ask, “Someone who is believed to have just shot a child is now pointing gun at your child. Bearing in mind that, if what I do next fails to stop this person, your child will die. What should I do?”
And what difference does it make that at a different time of the day it could have been more crowded or there were less people there than usual? None whatsoever, of course.
If you’d care to educate yourself on the reality of police use-of-force visit http://forcescience.org Its a wealth of information.
How many of those are accidents, though? And how many more are wild shots from untrained people? It might be more interesting and relevant to know how many people survive shots to the chest - where the police presumably aim.
I am the first to admit that I have no police training, gun training, etc. I am approaching this purely from an “ordinary joe” standpoint, as have some others in this thread. To me, the number of bullets fired seems excessive. Does it really take 10 hits to kill or disable a suspect? PCP freaks aside, I suspect most ordinary humans will be dropped quite easily by 2-3 bullets in the ol’ body.
In addition, what little I do know about guns is that the more shots you fire quickly, the less accurate the shots. So whipping off 8-10 shots in a couple seconds increases your odds of missing. It’s not clear to me that the “keep shooting as much as you can until the suspect drops” strategy is always the best one.
I could be totally wrong. It’s possible if they fired less shots, the suspect could have pulled that gun and killed more people. There’s no way to know for sure and I’m not condemning them for their split-second decision, nor do I think they were reckless. Just seems like a lot of shots to me, is all.
It’s interesting that Johnson was shot five times in the head. I wonder if that means one cop put those five in his head and the other put five in his body. I thought cops were trained to shoot for center mass as head shots are too difficult. It might not have even been deliberate, though.
FTR, this is curiousity, not criticism. All things considered, the outcome could have been much worse.
I thought I was going crazy, but Googling returned multiple news stories stating Johnson was shot five times in the head by police. This one has a story that contradicts the headline:
If anyone here has ever been within ten feet of a murderer as he raised his gun to fire upon you, I would be really interested in hearing your opinion about the competence of the police officers in question. Do we have other incidents to compare this with? Specifically, shootouts in Manhattan at close range? I ask because I used to work in Manhattan and I don’t think you could even punch someone in New York without it immediately affecting 10 other people. There are more people in Manhattan than there is air to breathe. Who can determine whether it was appropriate without gauging it with other, similar situations? One’s ability to stand in his backyard and shoot with 80% accuracy at a Styrofoam deer means jack shit in this context. It sounds like some of you were expecting the police officers to make rational, informed decisions in seconds in the midst of pure chaos. When you are that filled with adrenaline, you don’t think. Your body just does whatever it’s been conditioned to do.
That has to depend on where they’re hit. In any case it’s not like you have time to stop and count how many times you’ve hit the guy while all this is going on. You stop shooting when he falls over or drops his weapon. All of this happened in a few seconds.
It’s not clear to me that that’s the strategy, although that might be how it tends to work out.
The story is the same one that I saw on CNN. I don’t know how they came up with that headline. The credible sources I have seen state the victim was shot in the head. The suspect was shot in the chest.
OK, with this we have achieved the level of overt stupidity. We were talking about a response with the weapons at hand. But NOOKS!!!111!! Such a response is always and forever ridiculous, and I will treat them as such from this point forward.
I think adrenaline does play a role in how many shots are fired, especially if they fired that quickly. For what it’s worth, I was trained to fire three-round bursts (two to the chest, one to the head), but I was also trained to take cover afterwards if it was available. Imagine a very violent two-player version of a jack-in-the-box.
A handgun is hardly ideal for sustained fire in the best circumstances, especially if you are out in the open and lack the opportunity to use cover or concealment, or to use something as a brace to steady your firing (the cops crouching behind their cars in action movies probably get a lot more benefit from resting their hands on the hood of the car than they do from any protection fiberglass and aluminum might provide from bullets, your aim is steadier if you don’t have to hold the gun up all by yourself)
That said, I’m not clear on how many of the wounded bystanders were actually behind the target. As has been mentioned, many were wounded by ricochets. It’s entirely possible that some of them could have been nowhere near the line of fire until an unfortunate bank shot caught them.
As far as protecting the cop vs taking time to assess before engaging, body armor does exist that is effective against handguns (and even smaller rifle rounds), but that shit is heavy and uncomfortable, especially on a hot day. And I say that with my experience only being with kevlar armor. I’ve never had the pleasure of wearing the armor plates that actually make kevlar vests bulletproof.
Here is an eyewitness account. Construction worker Brian Dillon witnessed Johnson shoot the victim in the head. Dillon followed Johnson until he spotted a police car and then told them he witnessed a murder and pointed to where the suspect went.
Reading several accounts this is how it seemed to go down.
[ul]
[li]Johnson walks up to the victim without saying a word and shoots him in the head.[/li][li]Johnson shoots into the victim 4 more times while on the ground.[/li][li]Johnson walks off quickly and goes around the corner.[/li][li]Construction worker follows him. [/li][li]Construction worker flags down two cops in a car and tells them to go after the murderer in the grey suit.[/li][li]So far it seems the cops have no confirmation about the murder but head to confront the suspect before he escapes.[/li][li]Cops notice suspect and see gun when suspect was less than 10 feet from the cops.[/li][li]Suspect shot.[/li]
[/ul]
So it seems that there was probably less than a minute from the time the cops were told about the shooting and when they saw the suspect. And about 3 seconds between seeing the gun and the suspect going down. And at the time they first heard about it they did not know if the witness was correct and if there was a shooting at all.
I wasn’t disageeing with you, just pointing out that several news outlets got the story wrong. It would have been pretty strange if Johnson had been hit five times in the head in those circumstances. The link I posted has been changed without correction.