Why Did You Shoot Me, Sir ???

[yesiwasacop]

53. I cant provide any answer to whether or not the frequency

has increased or we just know about more of them because of social media.

As for using some kind of sensor- I'm not confident with technology at this time to guarantee 100% that it would work. Also, what if another officer needed to use your gun? That has happened.

Part of the problem with this is the public in general feels that if the suspect is unarmed, there is no way an officer can truthfully feel threatened. Tell that to a 125 lb female officer getting beat up by a guy my size ( I weigh 200 and am not fat- I can kick some ass). I can kill someone with my hands / fist / feet easily if they are either weak or I incapacitate them somehow. Or the more li kely scenario is any officer being attacked by multiple suspects. Most people cant win fights like that. If a cop is in that situation, I would hope they would shoot the suspect if they cant fight their way out of it. Also, it is not uncommon for criminals to simulate a weapon (esp during a foot pursuit) in order to somehow get a cop to stop chasing them. This is effective on occasion. No one has done that to me from what I can recall. Also, we get suicidal subjects use fake guns and come out of their car / home and point it at the police and we know what the answer to that action is. Unarmed doesnt neccesarily mean the suspect wasnt doing something to make the officer believe he was armed.

Anyway- in regards to deciding to shoot/not shoot, I think the best training / conditioning I ever got was to be on our tactical (SWAT) team for several years. On these teams, you resopond to the crazy stuff that patrol cant handle (other than to contain it) and you get to deal with the crazy guy. Usually the level of potential force is off the charts when a tactical team has to get involved.

Just dealing with that stuff conditions you and gives you more confidence to deal with out of control people- or people threatening you. Also your skills (shooting, defensive tactics, handcuffing, ground fighting, verbal judo) get refined through lots of training and repeated practical application in the field. This maes you a better patrol officer.

Problem with this type of training and experience is you cant give it to everyone. The basic patrol officer in most agencies is adequately equipped mentally and with equipment to deal with MOST scenarios. We just cant predict exact how someone will react to everything because as we know there is a first for everything. When an officer is dealing with the unknown and they get top where they fear for their life, well anything can happen at that point. Are there some rogue cops out there? Sure, but if one doies the math on how many cops there are in the country, compares that with all the calls for service they have handled versus how many citizens have been shot by police, one will find that in relation to all the public contact out there, officer involved shootings become extremely rare.

I was a cop for 20 yrs and handled thousands of calls and hudreds of violent incidents....one shooting. Virtually all my former co-workers were/are in the same boat so the notion that cops are just executing everyone is a bunch of nonsense. Not to say there are not some pretty bad incidents out there, but the vast majority of police contacts going bad are pretty much nearly zero.

Here is a DOJ study about officer involved shootings and murders of police officers. The quote from page 6 that I included is an interesting fact. Also you will find in there the death rate of officers is declining (as of 1998). At the time of the study, the police culture towards wearing a bullet-proof vest was changing. When I was hired, there were still guys running around in patrol without them. By the time I retired, I guarantee there was no one on the street without a vest on. That being said, I think the reduced death rate is attributed to the armor and no the lack of people shooting cops. Sorry about the length of response- enjoy the read.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf

From 1980 to 1998, young black males
made up about 1% of the U.S. popula-
tion but 21% of felons who murdered a
police officer (figure 17); young white
males were 8% of the population but
20% of the murderers of law enforce-
ment officers. Young black males
murdered police officers at a rate
almost 6 times that of young white
males (5.7 versus 1 per million popula-
tion) (the figure below and figure 18).

Just extra reading if you are bored

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2012/press-release-summary-of-2012/press-release_leoka_-2012