“Shoot to kill” vs. shoot to stop threat

[Leonhard]

This is kinda raw to me --- SOMEWHERE on Tweb, I recounted the incident were a friend of mine was in an officer-involved shooting of a young black kid in a dark ally - had NO WAY of knowing it was a kid, and he fired, seeing the "man" turn toward him after multiple warnings to stop. Something in the "man's" hand reflected the light of the security light, and it LOOKED to my friend like a muzzle flash, and he immediately returned fire.

John (don't remember if that's the name I used before) then had to sit through all kinds of analysis, including an official "shooting board", an Internal Affairs investigation -- he was grilled over and over and over. It ended up being ruled a "righteous shooting", but only after taking a heavy toll on John.

Subsequently, he was on a call (and I rolled in as backup) where he had stopped another kid in a traffic stop, and the kid didn't have his license with him, but lived only a couple hundred feet down the road. Inexplicably, John allowed the kid to get back in his car and drive home to get his license.

The kid ran into the house, and as I'm driving up to the scene (I was just getting there) I see the kid come running out the front door of the house with a deer rifle, John was just getting out of his unit -- he sees the kid with the rifle, his gun hand reaches for his gun, pulls it about halfway out of the holster, then just stands there, frozen, while the kid put a round through his chest. A 30.06 at that close range doesn't care much about body armor, especially back in those days. John was dead.

He hesitated, and got killed, no doubt in my mind because he thought about all that crap he went through the last time he "shot a kid".

Definitely a hard case.

[Leonhard]

Are these from TV shows, or actual video of actual events?

It's actually been from all the high profile unjust shootings we've seen here on tweb. And each time I noticed that the person shot was still alive for several minutes, but the officer in question was doing nothing at all to help them. Phillip Castillo, the officer shot a man point-blank who had tried to cooperate but had mistakingly reached for his glove compartment in a moment of confusion. Even after being shot, you can hear Castillo croaking out some words, trying to explain something to the officer. Mostly the officer just stands there for minutes shouting what I only remember as 'cop talk' into his radio.

Then there was the case of the guy who had tried to run away from a cop, the one I keep mentioning where the police report of what happened wildly diverged from what actually took place. He got shot in the back, and then... the guy just wanders around, talking into his radio, you can see the guy shot moving around on the ground for minutes. Eventually one of them (there was more than one) walks over "checks on him" and walks away again.

Then there was the case of the guy who got shot in his own apartment, and the officer who shot him just kept talking into her radio. In the call she made, which has been made public, you can hear him in the background. No one is instructing her to stop the bleeding, or anything like that.

And in each of those situations, I just couldn't understand that if the officer shoots someone. Like Castille, like the guy in his apartment... why don't they help?

Maybe you're right, maybe they're so pumped up on adrenaline that there's just nothing coherent they can do afterward. Or Mountain Man is right that there's selection bias, in that if they had done the life-saving measures, these cases wouldn't have become what they had.

Thank you for explaining it Cow Poke, because, to me, it just seems so weird.

[Cow Poke]

It's actually been from all the high profile unjust shootings we've seen here on tweb. And each time I noticed that the person shot was still alive for several minutes, but the officer in question was doing nothing at all to help them. Phillip Castillo, the officer shot a man point-blank who had tried to cooperate but had mistakingly reached for his glove compartment in a moment of confusion. Even after being shot, you can hear Castillo croaking out some words, trying to explain something to the officer. Mostly the officer just stands there for minutes shouting what I only remember as 'cop talk' into his radio.

Then there was the case of the guy who had tried to run away from a cop, the one I keep mentioning where the police report of what happened wildly diverged from what actually took place. He got shot in the back, and then... the guy just wanders around, talking into his radio, you can see the guy shot moving around on the ground for minutes. Eventually one of them (there was more than one) walks over "checks on him" and walks away again.

Then there was the case of the guy who got shot in his own apartment, and the officer who shot him just kept talking into her radio. In the call she made, which has been made public, you can hear him in the background. No one is instructing her to stop the bleeding, or anything like that.

And in each of those situations, I just couldn't understand that if the officer shoots someone. Like Castille, like the guy in his apartment... why don't they help?

Maybe you're right, maybe they're so pumped up on adrenaline that there's just nothing coherent they can do afterward. Or Mountain Man is right that there's selection bias, in that if they had done the life-saving measures, these cases wouldn't have become what they had.

Thank you for explaining it Cow Poke, because, to me, it just seems so weird.

There are ALWAYS exceptions to "how it's supposed to go". And I'm rather infamous, when talking to cops, for stating the fact that you can always say "if X ever happens, I'll do Y", very confidently, but when X actually DOES happen, you don't necessarily do what you were trained, or what you SAID you would do.

A lot happens - you've just taken a human life (or that appears to be the obvious outcome) and you're going to get flooded with questions - did he have a gun, was there another option, what was his mental state.... etc, etc, etc.... your mind goes crazy with the "what ifs", especially if this is your first Officer Involved Shooting.


Are you aware that the vast majority of cops never fire their weapon in the line of duty?

In fact, only about a quarter (27%) of all officers say they have ever fired their service weapon while on the job, according to a separate Pew Research Center survey conducted by the National Police Research Platform. The survey was conducted May 19-Aug. 14, 2016, among a nationally representative sample of 7,917 sworn officers working in 54 police and sheriff’s departments with 100 or more officers.

So, you're trying to flush the adrenaline, calm down, figure out how to report this to headquarters, because EVERYTHING you say will be on 911 tapes and your body cam.....