View from the cop: Crime & punishment
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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2007 > October > 19
Friday, October 19, 2007
Cops as targets
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sometimes I get on the soapbox. This is one of those times, so up front, know this is my personal opinion and doesn’t represent anyone other than myself and perhaps my Rottweiler, Roxy, born of Satan, who stalks innocent victims for my barbaric rituals, now held on Tuesday nights since Monday Night Football started back.
There has been a lot of attention given to a number of police-related shootings in DeKalb County over the past year or two. The new DeKalb Police Chief, Terrell Bolton, has increased in-service training from 20 hours to 30 hours per year. “We are putting officers through live-fire situations that are forcing them to re-holster, that are forcing them to constantly re-evaluate situations to see if de-escalation is appropriate,” DeKalb’s Jim Helms said.
That response is what people want to hear because we don’t want to be known as gun-happy police. It’s an appropriate statement as well because police officers already train in those situations. Shoot-Don’t Shoot scenarios have been used in training for years. F.A.T.S. training, using video simulators with lasers to track shooting trajectory, have been in use for many years. Part of the scenario involves no-shoot situations. On the firing range there are situations where you must decide if or not to shoot.
Look at this trend. Last month, three police officers of the Odessa, Texas, Police Department were killed during a domestic-violence call. The man who shot the officers was said to have done it in a matter-of-fact manner. In an article in the Oct. 15th USA Today, as of a week ago, 60 police officers have been fatally shot this year. This is a 54% rise from the same period last year.
Already this year there have been more fatal shootings of police officers than in all of 2006. Almost a third of those killed were shot in the head, neck, or shoulder region suggesting that the shooters took into account the officers were or most likely were wearing body armor, suggesting among other things, that criminals are more violent and aggressive than ever before. Several weeks ago, a sweep by the Atlanta Police yielded a number of machine guns.
Machine guns!
We live in a country that at times seems consumed in violence. Take the number of police-related shootings, not just fatalities but shootings, and multiply it by 50, and you’ll get a good number of close calls that could have resulted in a fatal shooting if not for the officer’s discretion based on training and experience. Those near misses don’t make the news.
I hear more and more about of taking more power from the street officers by way of placing an even longer checklist, as to when they can and cannot pull their weapon. It all makes sense in theory but at a certain point when the officer is more afraid of the consequences of defending his or someone else’s life than the actual deadly threat, he or she has put themselves into a deadly risk situation, even greater than it is now.
What I don’t like is listening to the wave of sentiment, from the proverbial activist, whose answer is more restrictions, more taking away the discretion, from the officer as to when he or she can use the weapon to defend his or her life.
These shooting incident examinations will show that deadly-force situations present themselves at a moment’s notice. It’s quick and it’s never like you see on the tube. It happens so fast. By the way, don’t confuse activist with expert. Some are pitifully uninformed.
Every shooting situation should be examined to see why it happened and what could have been done differently. What does prove successful is training, training, and more training. Regardless of how well versed an officer becomes in deescalating a situation, chances are good that he or she, at some point in their career, will come across someone who, fueled by drugs or booze, or just snaps, comes out with a weapon and intends to use it. I don’t want that officer to lose the edge in a deadly-force situation, because they’re worried about the repercussions. Taking away more and more discretion from police officers is not the answer to deadly-force shootings involving police.
We made this culture and we are products of it. That includes the violence we see every single day. That violence targets police officers too. Those statistics suggest that they’re targeted more than ever before. You cannot solve this problem by taking more and more away from the police officer on the street. It won’t work.
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