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Powergamz1 -> RE: Suicide by cop or manslaughter? (8/1/2013 8:34:15 AM)
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It isn't a matter of 'liking'. After asking if there were a more humane way to deal with such situations (and being given honest answers), the rest of your armchair quarterbacking is purely unworkable fantasy.
More than one person has pointed this out to you, and patiently explained the facts and logic involved.
There is no defensiveness in saying that the laws of physics and reality don't allow for your suggestions to be mandated in the real world.
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ORIGINAL: vincentML
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You're not questioning. You're ranting.
Your perception due to your defensiveness on this issue and because you don't like the questions I raise.
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In your COPS-inspired fantasy, would they drive the car right up to the door and park it perpendicularly just so the dashboard camera would face the door?
Oh hell YES. One o'clock in the morning. The more light on the scene the better!!!
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See, now you're just being ridiculous and providing free entertainment. Are you seriously suggesting that when cops get a call about a dangerous man with a knife (whom they hadn't known was the caller) that they walk around with cellphones snapping pictures?
As you will see below it is counterproductive for all four offficers to be shooting. Would have been no problem to have one filming the scene. Should be doing it for their own good.
An ex-cop with 23 years' training experience, Aveni now heads the Police Policy Studies Council, a research, training and consulting corporation based in Spofford, NH, and is a member of FSRC's National Advisory Board, as well as a busy expert witness in police litigation. Like other trainers, he says, he "made a lot of assumptions that are not true" until his research provided "an epiphany for me" about some of the nuances of police shootings.
[SNIP]
A multiple-officer shooting, in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement, has an even greater influence on hit probability, Aveni discovered.
According to the LAC data, when only one officer fired during an encounter, the average hit ratio was 51 percent. When an additional officer got involved in shooting, hits dropped dramatically, to 23 percent. With more than 2 officers shooting, the average hit ratio was only 9 percent - "a whopping 82 percent declination," Aveni points out.
[SNIP]
"Good risk management would suggest that resources should be allocated to problems that are seen frequently and to infrequent problems that are very severe when they do arise. We don't allocate resources that way in firearms training. In fact, training by and large has been part of the problem, not part of the solution."
Use of deadly force is infrequent in the full sphere of police performance, yet its consequences in terms of life and lawsuits are severe. Within the realm of police shootings, Aveni's findings identify commonalities that do arise frequently, such as confrontations in low-light settings, mistakes of fact and judgment and the phenomenon of multiple officers shooting. Yet for the most part "we have neglected these issues or have only paid lip service to them in training," he charges.
"We are forced to try to accomplish too much in too little training time. Because of limited range time, firearms instructors are forced to heavily emphasize a lot of shooting in order to build that important proficiency. This results in a disproportionate amount of time spent with scenarios in which officers need to pull the trigger. This, in turn, creates an emphasis on a 'muzzle-heavy' approach and the over-emphasis on the handgun as a problem-solving tool.
"On the street, this contributes to the problem of officers putting themselves in untenable situations tactically and then feeling compelled in often unclear circumstances to shoot." He cites a case from the Midwest in which an officer pursuing a suspect with minor outstanding warrants followed him into a dark alley. The officer did not wait for backup and did not make use of his flashlight. As he doggedly ran after the suspect, the pursued man suddenly turned toward him. The officer shot and killed him. The suspect was unarmed.
"This is the kind of behavior we see in a lot of shootings," Aveni says. "An officer is so focused on apprehension that he runs into a tactically untenable situation, oblivious to the risk or subconsciously willing to subjugate his personal safety to the goal of apprehension." He likens this to the "prey drive" sometimes seen in dogs, where the master throws a stick into the middle of a busy highway and the tunnel-visioned dog chases it, unconcerned about the dangers involved.
Aveni draws another dog analogy - "fear biting" - which he feels results from the heavy use of fear as a motivational tool in training cops. "On the street, officers often exhibit 'fear biting' after drawing their handguns and then engaging in inherently unsafe firearms handling, like putting their finger on the trigger for emotional comfort. I think this is a downside of using disproportionate lethal force scenarios in training."
Another example of fear interfering with good tactics and promoting questionable shootings is the prevalent reluctance to use a flashlight in dim light environments. "If we now have confirmed that as many as 18 to 33 percent of police shootings are in the mistake-of-fact genre and that as many as 75 percent of those occur in low light, we should be conditioning officers to deploy their flashlights when walking into potentially threatening situations where they can't clearly see what's unfolding.
"There's concern about a flashlight becoming a 'bullet magnet' - and it might, if used improperly. But in all my years of research I have never been able to document a single case of an officer being shot because he was using his flashlight. I've found no statistical evidence whatever of this much-feared consequence ever happening."
Houston, we've got a problem. [:-]
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