What if he comes at your with a sarissa?
I didn’t read the whole link, but I didn’t see anything at all to back up your claim. Just the opposite, in fact -
I really doubt that a cite showing that nearly half had already harmed or tried to harm someone else does much to demonstrate that if they were allowed to get close they wouldn’t really hurt the cops.
As I said, this is GQ. I doubt your claim because you have no evidence (AFAICT) to back it up, and because your own cite contradicts it to some extent.
Regards,
Shodan
Based on your post, I don’t think you understood my claim. Fortunately, the people in charge of police training do.
I understood your claim perfectly. You said
Do you have any evidence that it is true?
The bar is even higher now than it was when you first made the claim - your cite shows that almost half the time, the people in question have already harmed or tried to harm non-police personnel.
Regards,
Shodan
We were talking about knife-wielding incidents, hence “wave the knife around.”
Nor is my claim contradicted in the least by anything in the study, despite your attempted characterization.
It appears that the Tueller Drill/21 foot rule has been incorporated into police training, but has it been incorporated in to any state or federal law? Being in a legally-defendable position of imminent danger is sufficient reason to resort to lethal force. AFAIK, simply claiming that someone was closer than 21 feet is not a reason to use lethal force. Another act or threat must be present.
That’s easy, you keep firing until the threat is no longer a threat. That might take one bullet, it might take the whole magazine. And I wasn’t using a justification, I was stating fact. Handguns are not instant stoppers. If you have a threat wanting to harm you, you shoot until that threat is no longer. On the other side of the coin, you do not pull the trigger once the threat had been dealt with. You never shoot to kill, you shoot to stop the threat. If the threat dies, well that’s his problem, he shouldn’t have been wanting to do you harm.
Pointed stick? Oh, oh, oh. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you eh? Well I’ll tell you something my lad. When you’re walking home tonight and some homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me!
Loganberries? Would that qualify as a drive-by fruiting?
Are police issued with tape measures to determine the distance?
No…
As it was explained to me, the “rule” derives from a series of tests conducted by an instructor at the LAPD Police Academy.
He would have an officer draw his weapon and aim at a target. He would have another office stand in the first officer’s field of view. The first officer was to fire as soon as he saw the second officer start running.
His conclusion was that a man armed with a knife can cover more than 20 feet and inflict a fatal wound in less time than it takes to notice he’s moving and pull the trigger.
The original test did not assume the gun was holstered, it assumed it was drawn and pointing at the subject.
I once a police officer sharing a story of something that had happened to him decades ago. He was off-duty, working security so he was in uniform, and he’d been chosen for the doughnut run, so he was standing at the sales counter of a doughnut shop when a guy runs through the front door and yells, “Somebody help, he’s trying to kill me.”
Hot on his heels came a big burly dude with a machete, who sees a uniformed cop pointing a gun at him and … clearly this was not what he was expecting to see. So much so that his brain can’t figure out what it is actually seeing, and needed to reboot: he just stood there, completely unresponsive for what seemed like an eternity. He did not react to calls to drop his weapon, or to anything else.
Until he finally did.
The officer had noted that this outcome was lucky for him, and at the moment the man came through the door he said, “If I’d known then what I know now, I would have shot him immediately.”
It was in response to questions about what he’d meant by that that I first learned of the “rule” about shooting somebody if they have a weapon in hand and get too close. The second the guy got in the door, he was too close.
Unless the original tests were conducted by some other guy named Tueller,
and
CMC fnord!
I assume many/most police academy and officer training departments offer some type of armed assailant training, including the LAPD Police Academy. Each police trainer, or the departments training procedures, may adopt/modify the original ideas as described in SWAT magazine, by Dennis Tueller in 1983. An officer should be aware of their surroundings, the officer should seek cover if possible, and they should be aware that an assailant armed with a club or knife can cover 21 feet in the time it takes an officer to draw and fire their weapon.
*This timeless classic, credited with first establishing the importance of maintaining a “reactionary gap,” appeared in the March 1983 issue of SWAT magazine.
How CLOSE is TOO CLOSE?
by Dennis Tueller
…So, what is the answer - just how close is too close?
Consider this. How long does it take for you to draw your handgun and place two center hits on a man-size target at seven yards? Those of us who have learned and practiced proper pistolcraft techniques would say that a time of about one and one-half seconds is acceptable for that drill.
With that in mind, let’s consider what might be called the “Danger Zone” if you are confronted by an adversary armed with an edged or blunt weapon. At what distance does this adversary enter your Danger Zone and become a lethal threat to you?
We have done some testing along those lines recently and have found that an average healthy adult male can cover the traditional seven yard distance in a time of (you guessed it) about one and one-half seconds. It would be safe to say then that an armed attacker at 21 feet is well within your Danger Zone.*
That’s got to be some serious work place satisfaction right there.
I think the point that others are trying to make is that if the guy with the knife is say… 40 feet away, the officers have a lot more decision-making time than if the guy’s inside of 21 feet.
So as a rule of thumb, an armed person who crosses inside of 21 feet is liable to be shot, as the cops’ reaction times aren’t fast enough for them to assess, make a decision and actually shoot (or not) within that distance, without putting themselves in serious danger.
That’s not to say that some nut waving a Phillips-head screwdriver around and ranting at imaginary people, who happens to step one shoe within that 21 foot radius while wandering around on his rant, should be shot. It’s rather a rule of thumb that an armed person moving intently inside that radius. or an armed person already within that radius who does something threatening, is in imminent danger of getting shot.
It’s ALSO a rule of thumb for the cops, as to when, and how far to back off, so that they aren’t in those situations if they can help it. In other words, they shouldn’t crowd up on the suspect either, and should keep a good safe distance (i.e. well outside of 21 feet). This is so that IF the suspect does charge, they have enough distance to make a good decision about how to handle it.
Consider a suspect waving a knife, who just sort of casually wanders slowly up to 15’ away from the officer. One might object “Well, at the rate he was moving, the cop would have had plenty of time to react, no need to shoot him yet”.
But now also consider another suspect waving a knife, who just sort of casually wanders up to 15’, and then suddenly lunges straight for the cop. In that case, the cop should have shot, and if he waits until 15’, he’s probably too late.
And now consider that the cop has no way of knowing which of the two any given knife-wielder is.
As for mentally ill or challenged people, it may well be true that they represent a disproportionate number of knife incidents. But that doesn’t make the police any more culpable for the use of force. Quite the contrary: A mentally ill or challenged person is less predictable, and hence even more dangerous to the officer, than a mentally-healthy person.
This has been the logic for a few decades, but it is factually wrong, legally wrong, and bad policy. It is not true that mentally disabled people are less predictable. On the contrary, officers who are properly trained to handle mental health cases are taught that “crazy guy holding knife” scenarios very frequently play out on predictable lines. It is legally wrong because it ignores the ADA. As I noted above, the Supreme Court hasn’t decided the issue, but the majority of lower courts have held that officers have an obligation to treat mentally disabled people differently. And it is bad policy because de-escalation tactics have been proven to keep both officers and suspects safer.
It is not always possible to safely use de-escalation techniques, of course. Cops get stuck in bad situations, and they may indeed have to use deadly force to protect themselves. But the typical scenario is not that a random cop suddenly finds himself within 15 ft. of a knife-wielding suspect. The typical scenario is that the cops receive a 911 call about a crazy guy with a knife–often someone already known to law enforcement. If they arrive on the scene with the intention to create a corridor around the person, have some officers with guns at safe distance providing cover, and other officers with tasers closer in, they can play for time and more often than not avoid an unnecessary killing. This is what police forces do successfully in some other countries, and increasingly what they are being trained to do in the US. There’s a great video of cops in Camden, NJ using this technique to great effect. I don’t see that it’s on YouTube yet, but I’ll post it if I can.
“Why the hell did you let him get that close to you?”
As the suspect waving the knife wanders towards the officer, the officer should be backing away. Preferably while pointing his gun at the suspect.
The tragedies that arise come from police who suddenly find themselves close to an armed person, or officers who got close to someone who suddenly produces a weapon.