Saturday, August 23, 2014

How Police Train to Stop a Threat ... Shooting Multiple Times at a Suspect is 'not unusual'

Whether one shot is fired or 10, police training dictates that it's not the number of bullets but what it takes to stop a threat to an officer's life that matters when a confrontation suddenly spirals out of control as happened in Ferguson, Mo., according to law enforcement experts.
"If somebody's mad or somebody's trying to do something ... you don't even think about it. It just happens so fast that you just react and then you hope like hell that you did the right thing," says Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization that conducts research and training to improve policing.
It's far too early to determine whether the killing of an unarmed Michael Brown, 18, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson -- an incident that arose out of a dispute over Brown walking down the middle of the street -- was legitimate, Bueermann says.
But the fact that Brown was struck six times is not necessarily proof Wilson acted illegally, according to Bueermann and David Klinger, a former police officer who is an associate professor in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
"Officers are trained to shoot until the threat is no longer presenting a threat," says Klinger, who shot and killed a man while a police officer in Los Angeles in 1981. In conducting book research, Klinger interviewed more than 300 officers who were involved in shootings.
"It's not unusual for police officers to find themselves in a circumstance where they have to shoot multiple rounds because the suspect simply isn't stopping," Klinger says.
Klinger fired one fatal shot that killed a man who had stabbed a fellow officer with a butcher knife in 1981.
There have been starkly different accounts of what happened between Wilson and Brown that early afternoon of Aug. 9. Police have said little other than that Brown tried to grab Wilson's gun when the officer pulled his patrol car alongside and told Brown to move off the street. At least one shot was fired in the vehicle, police say.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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