[44 AMP]

Real gun, or not, legally a gun or not, that only comes into play after the fact.

As I have said before, perception is important, and creates its own reality. Recent cases where police have "mistakenly" shot people are creating an impression, and that is, that the response of officers to their perception of a weapon is "DROPIT!DROPIT!BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG" in the amount of time it takes you to read this, and less time than it took me to type it.

ANY weapon.

It seems that the police are shooting, before commands can be understood, let alone complied with. In this most recent shooting, I believe the age of the child did play a part. 13year olds are not noted for being the most diligent about safe gun handling. And, on top of that, the boy knew he wasn't holding a real gun. The officers, of course, did not.

The report said his back was to the police. Kid hears a shout behind him, maybe he hears the blip of the siren, maybe he sees the reflection of the lights, he turns, and the rifle looking "toy" or "pellet gun" (immaterial which, at this point, it looks like a gun), turns with him. Police see someone turning to them with a gun, likely perceiving it as being pointed at them, and fire.

In another case, fairly recent, a officer sees a man on the street with a knife. He approaches the man, from behind, shouts for him to drop the knife, and as the man turns, shoots, and kills him. Only two rounds, that time, one in the back and one in the side (so later reports said). The guy was known to the locals, a middle aged street person who made and sold woodcarvings, who was also partially deaf. The officer, apparently knew none of these things.

There are others, and we can analyze them at length for their faults, but one thing seems to have become a familiar common element, and that is the officers involved are shooting without being actually threatened.

The say they were threatened (and who wouldn't?), I'm sure they believed they were threatened at the time. I'm not faulting anyone for shooting when they believe their life is in danger. What scares me is the level of training, experience, confidence, street savy, or whatever combination of things it is that allows an officer to correctly assess a situation in the brief time they have seems to be lacking all too often.

For a drastic comparison, back in the early 1970s (and I am going entirely from personal memory here, so if I make small errors, please bear with me), in northern NY a killer murdered three teenage campers. Tied two of them to a tree and stabbed them repeateded (57 times for the boy, as I recall) third body found a couple weeks later down an old mine shaft.

The cops, and a lot of the rest of us went after the guy. The manhunt went on for weeks during that summer in the Adirondacks. He was armed, with a .30-30 and a shotgun. He was seen by the police several (3 at least) times. The police could not catch him in the woods. And they could not shoot him.

Because, at the time the police were forbidden to shoot, unless shot at. And each time they spotted the guy (and he spotted them too) he never shot at, or even pointed his gun at the police, and managed to escape on foot.

He was eventually spotted and taken down by a CO (Conservation Officer aka Game Warden) who hit him with some of several shots of buckshot. CO's at the time were NOT under any departmental restriction about having to be shot at before shooting. The killer survived, and went through his trial in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. He wound up being sent to a min security place, downstate.

I bring this up to illustrate the huge difference in SOP between then and now. I am currently of the opinion that the best SOP for the police should be somewhere between these two extremes.

Oh, and the killer? seems he wasn't as paralyzed as he made out. One night he went over the wall. He was found a few days later, in a patch of woods. According to what we heard at the time (don't know the real truth), the autopsy said he had been shot. 37 times. With at least 5 different calibers. No officers were involved, and as far as I know, no one was ever arrested for killing the killer.

back on point,
I don't know if a different kind of training would help, no one, wants to put our officers at extra risk, and even having a detailed set of rules of engagement might mean risk from indecision and hesitation on the part of an officer in a dangerous situation.

These incidents of officers making bad snap judgments seem to be happening more often. Maybe its the Internet effect, I don't know. What I do know is it makes the cops look bad, and that only makes their jobs more difficult and dangerous.