raydude wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:48 am
Training, training, training. They need more training in how to shoot, how to be calm under stress, and training so they can be confident and competent in alternative techniques for subduing a suspect.
If officers are using deadly force, they're usually trained to not pause their fire and to shoot in quick succession -- taking a break to assess the suspect they're shooting at could give that suspect time to harm them or others, he said.
The whole issue of number of shots brought up in the article is a dead end IMO. If they make the decision to use deady force to stop what they perceive as a threat, they use deady force. That's either the right call or is isn't, number of shots don't matter. There isn't a degree of deadly force, it's binary.
If every person killed by cops was double-tapped with surgical precision, would everything be OK?
There are plenty of other issues training issues that are more viable and should be tackled first. Particularly stopping it from getting to a deadly force situation in the first place. And possibly reducing the scope of authorized deadly force.
raydude wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 9:48 am
If the default reaction to stress and a tense unknown situation where everyone may be armed is to pull out a weapon and shoot then we would be seeing many more civilian casualties from our infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq. As it stands they receive lots and lots of training to be able to stay calm and NOT shoot as their first impulse.
We need to train the police as intensively and as long as our military in armed and unarmed combat so that they don't get so tense that a gun becomes their go-to stress relief.
Police and military training
should be completely different. We do not want to train our police like the military.
For several reasons but most of all because they have very different jobs. Soldiers are rarely sent in to domestic situations and when they are, they are their most dangerous jobs. Clearing houses is always cited as one of the most stressful and dangerous jobs a soldier has. These are things cops are asked to do on a daily basis. If we trained cops to clear houses like soldiers, we'd see more militarised cops, not less.
Soldiers have clear cut ROE. They are told when and who they can shoot and when and who they cannot. Cops have to rely on their own judgement. Soldiers use ball ammo designed to punch through barriers and penetrate multiple contacts. Police use hollow point ammo designed to limit penetration and reduce ricochet. Soldiers use offensive weaponry designed to be effective at long ranges. Police (generally) use sidearms designed for defensive use.
And honestly I think you may have a rosy view of the number of civilian casualties and soldier closure under fire. Directly attributed to US/coalition forces, numbers were in the thousands annually at the height of Afghanistan and in the mid-hundreds later in the conflict. That's just Afghanistan.
Finally, IMO, some of the worse offenders in police forces are former military. I know from personal experience that while they may be the best shots or calmest under fire they are also the first to resort to force, quickest to go to the gun, and talk the most shit about beating up/shooting "perps." There are plenty of ex-military who make great cops but some of the worst are also ex-military.
I'm not alone, apparently.
Dallas Police Department officers with military experience were significantly more likely to have discharged their firearm while on duty than cops with no military service, a study reported this month.Researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas examined the U.S. Armed Forces records of officers in the local police department and published their report in the Journal of Public Health on Oct. 3.
They billed the study as the first of its kind and found that regardless of their deployment history, cops who were military veterans were more prone to shooting incidents.
