Speaking of “real life encounters”. . . your training scenarios, as illuminating as they may be, are simply not verified in real life. There are literally scores of cases where if the officer had taken the “second or less” to verify, an unarmed civilian would be alive today. And try as I might, I have been unable to find one verified case of an officer being killed due to the “reactionary gap.”
At some point we have to give up the idea of what “could possibly happen” for the real world data of what actually is happening. Alot of people hypothesize that raising the level of proof needed to justify lethal force will result in more dead cops. I ask what proof do you have, beside your gut feeling?
And yes, I agree, trying to educate some on these boards will drive you nuts, but it’s not who you think it is.
Actually they are. Does every single real life situation work the way it does in training? No, of course not.
You don’t really think they just make up this stuff up and do no study into real world situations, do you?
And if you are so passionate about this, why aren’t you in front of your local police and fire commission or state law enforcement standards board explaining to them how you know better and lay out what training they should actually be doing? Those hearings are public, go for it. Instead of having a bunch of lawyers in the state capitol who know nothing about the subject and are only interested in votes pass a law that will have negative consequences and not eliminate the imaginary problem you think exists.
It’s funny that the cops were able to draw and get off the first shot when it’s a kid on a picnic table. But not once in your training scenario? Something doesn’t add up.
In the training scenario, the suspect has already decided whether or not they’re going to shoot the cop. They already know exactly how, where, and when the scenario is going to play out. So when the cops appear and say “show your hands”, the suspects simply do what they’ve mentally prepared to do; no reactionary gap. The cops still suffer from the reactionary gap, because presumably some training suspects will comply with the orders and the cops will be marked down for shooting without cause.
However, in real life, most suspects have not made a decision about how they will react to an armed adversary. They don’t know how, where, or when events will unfold. So when the cops appear and say “show your hands”, the suspect suffers from the reactionary gap. The reactionary gap affects everyone involved in real life.
Maybe you explained this poorly, but if the cops get shot 80% of the time even when they are allowed to shoot first and the suspect’s weapon is not drawn, that seems like an even better argument against allowing them to shoot first. Apparently the shoot first policy doesn’t make them more likely to survive if it is a gun, and it clearly makes it less likely for the suspect to survive if it turns out to be a phone.
You’ve claimed that in this exercise “the shoot first policy doesn’t make them more likely to survive if it is a gun.” You can’t possibly make this claim unless you have information about the results of the exercise with a no shooting first policy. Source for your information?
In other words, if the result of the no shooting first policy is that the cops get shot 100% of the time, for example, then your claim that shooting first doesn’t make police more likely to survive is obviously false. At that point we still have to decide if the benefits of letting the police shoot first are worth the drawbacks. But your casual insinuation that there are no benefits at all requires actual evidentiary support, and you haven’t bothered to supply it.
I wouldn’t want you to be a cop if you intend on using unnecessary force.
The language says force must be “necessary.” In my mind, this means the officer had no other option but to use force. I don’t see why that is an unreasonable expectation. If the use of force cannot meet the threshold of ‘necessary’ then it is by definition ‘unnecessary.’
I can’t comprehend what moral system would allow an officer to use force if that force was not absolutely required.
And if the use of force was indeed just, an officer should have no problem explaining why it was necessary.
They don’t have a problem now. But it seems like with this new law, they won’t be able to simply say “I was afraid” and get away with shooting unarmed people.
Did I say that shooting anyone with their hands in their pockets was the solution? You seem to have missed my point, entirely. Let me be clearer. Some people confuse the reality of potentially violent encounters with what they already believe based on T.V., movies and god knows what else. Kobal2’s post is a perfect example.
The point of the exercise I was talking about was to get cops to think more tactically and minimize their exposure to danger. Some cops also believe that a suspect can’t beat them to the shot if they have them at gunpoint and then expose themselves un-necessarily to danger. My job is to get them to learn that lesson in training, not on the street where the stakes are a bit higher.
I think you made some good points here, but I also think you undercut yourself when you wrote this to Uzi earlier:
Your post seems unnecessarily snarky and adopted an adversarial stance and tone, when in fact, your goal and Uzi’s are at least nearly the same: to get the cops to do their jobs without putting anyone in danger unnecessarily.
Or is it just the cops you care about not being exposed unnecessarily to danger? Because the way you wrote your posts, it doesn’t come across clearly.
Not trying to snark but using examples that are inaccurate or incomplete to support one’s position doesn’t further the conversation in any meaningful way.
“necessary” can only be accurately assessed by thorough consideration of all relevant information (including information not known at the time) and often not even then.
I’ll use an example of something trivial, something that’s very far from a matter of life and death, so that I can make a point regarding the distinction between “necessary” and “reasonable” in isolation.
I put some shelves on a wall. After considering the length of the shelves and the weight of the stuff I intended to put on them, I decided to add extra support under the shelves rather than just a supporting bracket at each end.
Was that necessary? Even afterwards, I can’t prove that it was. Detailed analysis of the wall, the shelves and the weight might be able to prove it one way or the other.
Was that reasonable? I think so.
There’s always scope for consideration of what exactly is meant by “reasonable” and it should be closely scrutinised in matters of life and death, but changing “reasonable” to “necessary” is a radical change in meaning that would completely change policing and make it prudent for nobody to be a police officer.