> And when they discharge their weapon they must shot for "centre mass" - shoot to wound is a myth.
This is true, for the US. It is also one of the symptoms of what is wrong with "enforcement" in that country.
Police officers in many other countries (such as Germany for instance) are explicitly instructed to shoot to wound if at all possible - and with good results both in terms of getting their suspects arrested but not killed, and in terms of not getting killed themselves. Indeed, this is not just the case for police worldwide, but even for the US armed forces when working under "nation building" rules of engagements rather than "total war" rules of engagements.
A shoot-to-kill doctrine is an obvious sign that rather than having an attitude of serving and protecting their community, the enforcers are serving/protecting themselves first.
Any shot may cause a fatal wound. And aiming anywhere other than the centre of mass increases the likelihood of missing. Shoot-to-kill makes sense given these facts.
I'm from the UK so I absolutely don't think the police should be armed as a matter of course, but where they are we should be honest about the task they are being asked to perform.
One problem among many is that US police are both allowed and trained to use deadly force very quickly, when under any kind of threat. German police will often (successfully!) shoot to disable, not to kill, even when confronted by someone armed with a knife.
It's a common American meme that when police fire a gun, the only rational decision is to shoot to kill, but it's just not true.
As I understand it, police are generally taught specifically to shoot center of mass because aiming there is the most effective way to reliably and quickly end the immediate physical threat. This also ends up pretty close to maximizing the killing effectiveness of shots, but is not the primary focus.
> Sure, if there is a real situation like that, the officer needs to use force. If the officer does get to shoot, say, not at point blank range, then the officer should shoot for a limb and wound enough to win the fight but not necessarily shoot to kill.
Please take a self-defense class. You should never "shoot to wound", you should shoot to stop, always at the center of mass. Shooting to wound, as at a limb, is very difficult and error-prone, and a miss can easily wound bystanders or damage property.
Shoot to wound is not an option in USA. Elsewhere it is literally trained and seen as option. And I am saying that cause I personally know non-American cop that has it as regular part of training.
There are also such options as shoot as warning, not shoot at all and generally use tactic that is less likely to create situation on which you have to shoot.
>American cops seem like they're all on a hair trigger to kill at the slightest hint of danger, rather than as a last resort when they're truly threatened.
This is generally correct. Police in the US are trained to hit "center mass" so they're less likely to miss and more likely to stop an assailant (I believe the NYPD has a 50% hit rate in a shooting, so police are already missing at least half the time). A lot of the reasoning I've heard from police is along the lines of "we don't know if he's on PCP or something and a shot to the leg won't stop him" which is an utter nonsense way to justify it.
I don't think any country has a police force with a shoot to wound policy. Your friend was extremely lucky. It's not practical to shoot to wound in most circumstances. The arms and legs move faster than a shooter can react and that's why center of mass is what is trained.
Officers are (correctly) trained that if they are in a situation which warrants them shooting, they should use all of the bullets currently loaded into their gun.
The issue is that in the US, officers seem to come to the conclusion that killing the person is warranted way too quickly.
> Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?
Because there is no place to shoot that will simply incapacitate everyone. The policy is generally shoot to stop the threat not to kill per se. There are many instances where a person will take many rounds in potentially fatal spots and continue like nothing has happened.
> In this free-for-all, the assailant had, in fact, been struck 14 times. Any one of six of these wounds – in the heart, right lung, left lung, liver, diaphragm, and right kidney – could have produced fatal consequences, “in time,” Gramins emphasizes.[1]
I am very surprised the article doesn't mention the american "shoot-to-kill" policy, despite the fact it gives the perfect example of how this policy is overkill (pun intended). If a knife-yielding attacker runs toward you, police in other countries (say western Europe) will shoot at the legs to NOT kill the attacker but sufficiently harm him so that he is not a threat anymore.
But in America the shoot-to-kill policy is so deeply ingrained in every officer's training that they only see 2 choices --when should I kill or not kill-- as depicted by that officer's simple question at the beginning of the article ("How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?").
I have done research in the past on why the shoot-to-kill policy became prevalent in the US but not in other countries, and I have never found an answer. This puzzles me more than it should.
Edit: to the replies saying "if you don't intend to kill, don't shoot", you are wrong. This is precisely why tasers and non-lethal weapons were invented: there are many situations were harming or incapacitating an assailant is needed without necessarily killing him. On this note I agree a taser would be a safer weapon than trying to cause harm with a firearm. But my general comment is meant to apply to scenarios where a police officer cannot make the choice of firing with a taser[1]: in this case shooting to harm is better than shooting to kill.
[1] For whatever reason: he has no taser, or a firearm is the weapon he has in his hands during the split second where he has to decide to shoot, etc.
German police will often (successfully!) shoot to disable, not to kill, even when confronted by someone armed with a knife.
From what I've read very few police officers have the time to selectively shoot someone. If deadly force is called for, you aim for the center of the person.
Also, shooting to injure rather than kill is not exactly easy. If you take a bullet in a major artery in a leg or an arm, you can bleed out just as quickly as a bullet to the chest.
Agreed. Been shooting in the military since 2006, and I just left the active duty Army after 5+ years. Was an Infantry Platoon leader...been to a bunch of shooting courses...This idea that you can "shoot to wound" is just not based in reality. Like, at all.
Shoot someone in the leg, huh. Better not hit that femoral! They'll bleed out in ~2, maybe 3 minutes, depending. Better practice your tourniquet. Watch your background, too, because if you miss that leg/arm you don't wanna hit anything else that bleeds.
One thing I've noticed in watching videos of police recently is that they seem really quick to draw their weapons on a target.
Perhaps that's where we should start, with this assumption that citizens are constant, dynamic threats and that cops, when out on patrol, only exist in a constant high-threat environment. Idk. I'm not a cop, but this place has to be safer than Afghanistan.
(Un?)fortunately it usually is the only option from the point of view of the American judicial system. I work with police officers on a fairly regular basis in a professional context, although I am not employed by any government or police/security force. It’s a fairly common though among laymen that shooting to wound is almost always preferable to shooting to kill. Legally, it almost never is.
The way it was explained to me when I asked the very same question (I don’t necessarily agree, just offering this officer’s viewpoint): discharging a firearm is a deadly act, which always carries with it potentially deadly consequences. It should only be done to save a life, whether yours or someone else’s. The problem is that if you shoot without the intent to kill, you’re saying that you weren’t really in fear for your life, you were just stopping a lesser threat.
"...but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work."
I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?
You ask of evidence in a thread about a man being killed by police emptying multiple magazines into and the area around him. That doesn't even sound like shoot-to-kill that sounds like they were afraid to death.
There's plenty of more stories of where that one came from. Were you unaware of that?
It ultimately comes down to the relationship that you want the populace to have with their police force. A policy of shoot-to-kill tells the populace, that ultimately the lives of police are more valuable than that of any other citizen, and you better be terrified to be caught in any situation with the police where stress-levels are elevated.
A policy of shoot-to-disable, where killing an offender is a possibility, but it's a policy of using this lethal force as as a last resort, sends a message that the police actually care about the people they are trying to protect.
I'm not protesting police using guns, clearly there are situations where it's necessary to match and up the force of a threat. And clearly there are situations where police are justified in killing a human being.
I take issue to the police being justified in using lethal force as a first resort.
Surely we can train them better than "just try to hit the general area of where the suspect is, it's fine if you hit them in the head".
This source [1] [2], a police detective with 26 years of experience, contradicts it directly:
"Officers are told to shoot until the threat is neutralized, down, and no longer a threat to themselves or the public. They are not trained to empty the magazine into a target."
>There is no training for “shoot to injure” ... the logic being that if you are injured, you can reach into your clothes and pull out a gun, potentially killing the officer who shot you.
I'd have thought the logic is, "If you want to injure, use a baton. Guns are tools for killing."
Teaching "shoot to injure" would be reckless considering the chances a "wounding" shot ends up killing somebody.
> Obviously nobody expects the police not to shoot back when fired upon.
They do it in other countries though. Equipped with vests, helmets and shields police forces have much more protection against gunshots compared to the shooter. Even if they're shot at, they have still multiple options to resolve the threat without killing the shooter. But that needs extensive training.
This is true, for the US. It is also one of the symptoms of what is wrong with "enforcement" in that country.
Police officers in many other countries (such as Germany for instance) are explicitly instructed to shoot to wound if at all possible - and with good results both in terms of getting their suspects arrested but not killed, and in terms of not getting killed themselves. Indeed, this is not just the case for police worldwide, but even for the US armed forces when working under "nation building" rules of engagements rather than "total war" rules of engagements.
A shoot-to-kill doctrine is an obvious sign that rather than having an attitude of serving and protecting their community, the enforcers are serving/protecting themselves first.
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