Police Start to Reconsider Longstanding Rules on Using Force | Hacker News Reader

Police Start to Reconsider Longstanding Rules on Using Force

nytimes.com

79 pointsjoshrotenberg83 comments

One of the problems with US police in general seems to be that levels and quality of training vary so wildly. You have some "world class" police training programs, while others seem to be almost akin to slapping a badge and a gun on the first person who walks in the door.

I have no idea if what I am about to suggest is even legal, but I'd like to see congress pass a reform bill which contains:

- A minimum level of training and minimum continuing education requirement for all levels of police (state, county, federal, etc). Similar to No Child Left Behind (but for cops).

- Civilian oversight of police complaints (akin to what other countries have). Or failing that federal oversight.

- Federal funding to develop better officer education programs (with goals including officer safety, de-escalation, alternatives to use of force, and ethics).

- Reform asset forfeiture. All funds now also have to go to local education, homeless shelters, or similar. Nothing officer benefiting can be funded. Also someone has to have actually committed and been prosecuted for a crime(!).

I think the main problem with your suggestion is that different jurisdictions have different police needs. Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

Which of the above suggestions wouldn't apply to both?

I understand what you're saying in general, but there are a lot of universals that would apply across all kinds of jurisdictions.

I think mainly the training regimen could vary wildly based on local needs.

I imagine someone in a tiny town in Alaska would need more training on dealing with wildlife than somebody in NYC would. Their training on handling humans should be pretty much the same.

With the exception that rural people probably have more and bigger guns than NYC people.

> Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

That single officer should receive the same level of training or better. I don't see lack of backup being a good argument for those officers receiving LESS training, which is your implication.

Now if you give them MORE training, then I'm all for it. I just said a minimum level of training and continued education.

You can counteract that somewhat by delegating rural policing to a larger force, so that the overhead of some programs are shared.

Maybe it wouldn't be too popular in the States, where everyone from the Mayor down to the city hall janitor (and including the sheriff) is elected. But it seems to work fairly well in Canada. Jurisdictions too small to warrant their own regional force contract the RCMP or provincial force (e.g. OPP) to serve as the regional force.

The flip side is that it can lead to a certain detachment (no pun intended) from the community because the officers consider it a "tour of duty" to serve at a tiny outpost before graduating to a "real" position.

That already happens to some degree, but the point of aggregation is from local police to county sheriff and is primarily driven by economic concerns.

In my area towns with less than 10k residents have been outsourcing policing to the county sheriff instead of continuing to staff their 1-2 officer police departments.

And how does that play considering study after study and program after program showing that a successful approach in fostering harmonious police-citizen relations and reducing crime is to have the cops "walking the beat" and becoming known and recognized in the areas they're policing?

I don't think you have to delegate to a larger police force, I think those small town's should be able to/have to send their officers the state police academy (or something similar) to ensure proper training, recurring education, standards etc.

> Should a single officer department in a rural county enact the same programs that NYC has?

A very small department probably needs higher minimum standards, but there's also a minimum viable size, greater than 1, for a separate department.

Who's getting the "world-class" training? The NYPD?

Regarding your second bullet point, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement now investigates Miami-Dade County police shooting, instead of the agency investigating itself.[0] There's a step in the right direction.

[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...

This is well known amongst law enforcement officers.

I have two brothers in the California Highway Patrol, including one that's an instructor at the academy.

CHP officers go through a rigorous 1 to 2 year application process that includes background checks and psych evaluations. After they are accepted, they live on premises at the academy for 7 months where they are instructed in the law (academically) as well as high speed driving, weapon handling, how to properly make a traffic stop (like coming up on the passenger side, not the driver side), how to investigate a crime, etc.

My brother that's an instructor says that CHP officers are well aware that sheriff deputies and city police officers do not have a rigorous selection process and only receive 1-2 months training and that their interactions with them make that difference in training obvious.

It's too bad there isn't a standard certification process to become a police officer like there is for many professions. Your manicurist likely had more training a tougher certification process than some police officers.

I'm a resident of southern California, and I have realized that the CHP is a better group to encounter than the local police or sheriff.

In my encounters they've always been right, always been fair, and have never escalated a situation. They're genuine professionals.

Our police, in my experience, are the opposite.

There's an attitude problem. I think it was best shown here: http://www.theagitator.com/2012/07/05/two-videos-two-cities-... .

No amount of training is going to overcome the recruit pool you get by advertising "want to feel like a big man? Work for us!"

Call me a cynic, but on the asset forfeiture part, how these things usually seem to go is that a few years after somebody decides that it all goes to education or something, the jurisdiction's budget going to that gets cut correspondingly and reallocated, possibly to the law enforcement department. Then when you want to reform asset forfeiture, you hear "But what about the children in the schools it's funding!".

That's why I'd rather see them just get rid of it entirely while also cutting back on the War on Drugs.

Money is fungible, so this is in fact what basic economics would predict. The root problem is that assets can be seized sans conviction.

I know this happens with most state lotteries. I can specifically confirm that the one in Florida was supposed to be for education, but like you said, the budget was cut by an equal amount a couple of years later. The sad part is the "money for education" thing was what got the public to vote to allow it.

The other unaddressed issue in this whole debate is candidate quality:

most u.s. police forces recruit from a similar pool of people as enlisted armed forces (and less selectively), they are: 1. HS/GED + potentially a couple years of college (its my understanding that most police officers don;t hold four year degrees) 2. Pass a drug test 3. Pass a criminal background check 4. Pass a rudimentary psych/aptitude test 5. Meet a minimum level of physical fitness

A friend who was a marine and did recruiting estimated that about 20% of a graduating U.S. high school class could meet those requirements - you then had to compete with other jobs and trades that were potentially more lucrative/appealing - and in the case with the marines (and i suspect it is similar with police forces) had a couple of motivations for joining (despite what they might say) 1. kill people/beat ass 2. Serve their country community 3. family tradition 4. need a job/job security 5. Challenge 6. uniform and toys

when viewed in this context one may not be too surprised at the actions of some portion of police officers

Veteran here, can confirm. Perhaps this is why I dislike cops so much, I know why they really joined.

Possibly even simpler than these recommendations is creating, publishing, and adopting nationally a National Decision Model, as was done in Britain. When publicly available and enforceable, it makes it really easy for everyone to see the standards by which police officers have to make decisions, and easier to discern good decisions from bad decisions.

I would much rather have many competing local standards than one centrally imposed standard written by lobbyists and bureaucrats.

The changes that the article talks about would take decades to push through such a system

Total separation of those who investigate complaints against the police from the police themselves, with separate organisations, recruiting, promotion and the chief of said investigations reporting directly to whoever the relevant chief of police reports to. Otherwise the incentives just lead to Internal Affairs acting as a cover up job to protect the good name of the police force in general.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/why-rules-bend.html > An obvious enabler of police corruption is the fact that internal affairs units, tasked with exposing corruption, usually report to the same police chief that would be embarrassed by such exposure, and who may also be corrupt. An obvious solution is to make internal affairs more independent, e.g., reporting directly to a city council or even a governor. In the US the FBI sometimes serves in this role, though rarely at the request of local governments, and within the FBI its internal affairs still reports to FBI’s chief. Why don’t more governments create independent agencies to investigate corruption, to assure citizens that corruption is not tolerated?

> Total separation of those who investigate complaints against the police from the police themselves, with separate organisations, recruiting, promotion and the chief of said investigations reporting directly to whoever the relevant chief of police reports to.

I'd argue that it would be even better if they reported to a separate authority in most cases (obviously, for some agencies this is impractical at some level, but I think the norm for, e.g., local agencies should be for a state oversight body to oversee police misconduct rather than a local agency parallel and subject to the same local government.)

Where this isn't practical (state and federal law enforcement agencies of general jurisdiction), a parallel and organizationally co-equal agency doing misconduct investigation makes sense.

> In the US the FBI sometimes serves in this role, though rarely at the request of local governments

The FBI doesn't actually serve this role except insofar as the primary authority for investigating most federal laws, when alleged police misconduct happens to involve violating federal laws (often, civil rights laws), the FBI ends up investigating, not as part of a "oversee the police" role, but as part of its general "enforce federal law" role.

There's definitely a legal way to do it. You just tie federal dollars that flow down to local police to requirements for police training. It's the same way federal highway dollars are tied to standards for state driver's licenses.

Of course states and cities will be free to turn down the dollars if they want, but the incentives will be strong for them to comply.

While more training is definitely necessary, it begs the question of what's being taught, because my guess is the "first rule of policing" (see link) is still a core part of the curriculum

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/06/19/the-first-rule-of-po...

"Like the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said, policing is in crisis."

Seeing cops with tanks in Ferguson, Missouri has been a wake-up call for many Americans. Fortunately many on the left and the right (http://truthinmedia.com/billionaire-koch-brothers-fund-campa...) agree that it isn't appropriate, so hopefully we will start to see some change.

The vast majority of police should not be armed. They are simply not well enough trained.

/s/police/people

If the population is armed the police should be armed. Simple as that. Good luck getting the population disarmed in less than a century, and thats if you get them to pass the constitutional amendment first.

> If the population is armed the police should be armed.

Interesting assertion. But there is no basis in fact. Legal gun owners, think of them and their choices what you will, also tend to be law-abiding.

I know they are mostly law abiding. I am one of them. My point is that you can't expect a police force to go unarmed when there is a 50/50 chance someone in each call is armed. No one would want to do that job.

> No one would want to do that job.

That's another assertion without any basis. Cop boards are full of statements like that. Exactly 0.00% of cops making such statements have quit.

Those statistics have some skew, as well. "Crime" is at a low, but it's not a crime when police steal your life savings of cash via civil asset forfeiture, nor is it a crime when they put you in a chokehold until you are dead, or burden you with unreasonable financial penalties for minor traffic infractions.

Crime as a category for the measure of citizens' happiness does not mean what it did 20 years ago. We can walk more neighborhoods at night with less fear, but we are more afraid than ever of what can be done to us in broad daylight by someone with a badge.

As far as I can tell, the rules that are on the books for handling dangerous situations is not at issue, it's the complete disregard for those and any other rules. It's the rampant abuse of power that's the real problem.

There is no longer any accountability or consequence for a police officer committing the most heinous of crimes in the United States. At worst they'll get fired, then hired back onto the force in the next town over.

Nowadays, the police looks fearsome and threatening with their high tech automatic gear and offensive stance. They are not approachable. Why does policing require these military style weapons?

I do find it hard to believe they can have access to all of that military tech and not have some incentive to use it as often as possible.

Maybe it's "toys", maybe it's "budget" (the more expensive the equipment the higher their overall budget), but whatever it is, it's costly for taxpayers and dangerous for anyone the police interact with.

What's the difference between military style weapons and police style weapons? which specific weapons do you refer to?

it's mostly down to apcs and a change in uniform, coupled with a rise in swat team usage and flashbang/fully automatic weaponry.

Flashbangs, fully automatic rifles, armored vehicles, tanks--those are some military weapons that have no place in a police force, IMO.

I think they should be more-or-less limited to a standard patrol officer's gear, plus specific proven tactical setups, for specific situations, like sniper rifles when hostages are taken.

> Flashbangs, fully automatic rifles, armored vehicles, tanks--those are some military weapons that have no place in a police force, IMO.

Not sure what the etiquette of HN in replying to deep message threads is so I'll try it here. We'll see if it sticks

As far as I understand police officers on the streets do not routinely carry flashbangs nor drive armored vehicles. They do have an AR-15 style rifles in the patrol cars, but those are not fully-automatic though they do look like military M4/M16. Flashbangs and APCs are SWAT team toys.

Serious question. We have guns in the US. Lots of them. Leaving the politics of that aside. What do you expect police to use when they need to approach a barricaded person or extract someone in the line of fire?

A Bearcat/MRAP is the perfect tool. Its big (hides officers visually), armored, and relatively cheap to buy & maintain vs outfitting patrol cars with armor. It has zero offensive capability unless you count sitting someone on top of it with a rife.

I can understand (and I agree) with not wanting them to use armored vehicles in certain situations (non-violent protests, non violent drug raids, etc) but do you really not want them to have the capability at all?

There are all kinds of extreme and extremely implausible situations which could be used to justify extreme firepower, but it is not a good idea to use a military force as a police service. Ergo, we must accept that the right call will sometimes be "back away and negotiate".

Is an active shooter a "back away and negotiate" situation? What about when rioters are throwing 5lb chunks of concrete at firefighters/police like they did in baltimore this past week?

I can't be in the minority here thinking that armored vehicles have a use case and that we should dictate those use cases by policy. Removing them all removes the ability to stop those shit hits the fan scenarios in a timely manner.

I can't possibly imagine an instance in which the police arriving in an armored vehicle would deescalate a situation, and I believe deescalation ought to be the aim of police showing up at disturbances. Especially at protests and anti-police riots, like what happened in Baltimore this past week. Rolling around with military gear is antagonistic toward the people who already believe you exist only to oppress them. Perhaps that is not the best move to make.

Military weapons are designed for maximum lethality, police weapons are designed for minimum lethality. Military weapons are about killing opponents, police weapons are about controlling citizens.

There's not much call for a soldier to be sent into battle with a taser, or for a police officer to be on duty with a SAW.

> Military weapons are designed for maximum lethality, police weapons are designed for minimum lethality.

That's actually not true in either case. Military weapons are designed (or at least, selected) for cost-effective lethality -- even the heavy-spending US weighs logistical concerns heavily.

And police weapons are, for the most part, not designed for minimal lethality (TASERs are designed intentionally as less-lethal weapons, but they aren't cops main weapons.)

cost-effective

Everything is designed for cost-effectiveness in this age of economic rationalism. Military weapons, police weapons, this keyboard I'm typing on... being cost-effective is not a hallmark of being military.

TASERS ... aren't cops main weapons

In some parts of the US. Which is the problem being discussed here: that police in the US reach first for the lethal solution. Police in the UK don't often carry firearms at all. Police here in Australia carry firearms, but they're a weapon of last resort, not their 'main weapon'.

Because the median cop is a washed up loser with an authoritarian complex pissed he can't shoot people for any reason or no reason at all?

Asking why monitoring eg Ferguson demonstrations require the same military gear as rolling through Fallujah makes you a dirty hippie, and probably a communist.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/14/ferguson-and-...

Police in the US have killed 398 so far in 2015 [1]

German Police used only 85 bullets against people in all of 2011. [2]

Germany Population: 81 million USA population: 323 million (3.99x bigger)

So, if the USA were like Germany, Police would only use 340 bullets against people PER YEAR.

Not 398 deaths in 6 months, but 340 bullets used for an entire year!

Something is very different about the way the Police in the US approach situations.

[1] http://killedbypolice.net/

[2] http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...

And police in the UK went two years without fatally shooting anyone. [1]

Something is very different about the way the Police in Germany approach situations...

You're not wrong, certainly--US police do approach things differently. Perhaps US citizens respond differently. I think there's more to think about than the very surface of the data.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/police-in-england-and-wal...

Let's include gun ownership stats in this, some state or a city maybe.

agreed - comparing the UK's relatively unarmed populace is not a good comparison.

The problem is that the U.S. is very heterogeneous when it comes to crime and gun laws: Hawaii (strict gun laws, and safe) Illinois (strict gun laws, unsafe) Vermont (loose gun laws, safe) Louisiana (loose gun laws, unsafe)

You can't just go by population. America is just a vastly more violent nation. America has a 6X higher murder rate.

America has higher handgun ownership, which is a cause of many of the police shootings.

Fine, take Switzerland, where every home pretty much has a rifle...

A government-issued rifle kept in the home, with sealed ammunition that is checked and can only be used in peacetime at a training event. A bit different from handguns that can be easily concealed while walking around the streets.

Two-thirds of the US's annual homicides (about 12k total at the moment) are committed with handguns. Homicides with longarms aren't trivial (total firearm is around three quarters, from memory), but they're a much smaller proportion than handgun murders.

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.

(I'm American)

Despite having some major complaints with police, I do not have any problem with police using deadly force against an assailant running at them with an exposed knife.

Additionally, I think aiming for the legs in that situation is largely a mistake.

Perhaps the article skipped that point because it would be lost on us, given that I think my opinion is widely-held in this country.

The intent, as I have been explained about this policy, is to bias the officer towards the "not shooting at all" side of the equation. If I can shoot to maim when killing would be inappropriate I might shoot more often and gunshot wounds can be lethal in a surprising amount of places (shoot the leg, get the femoral artery, still get a dead guy). Ultimately it looks like this logic might have failed, but without knowing more we can't know that we don't just have a trigger happy culture and lessening the threshold for gunplay wouldn't have an even more negative effect. If someone has data beyond European stats (there seem to be too many disparities for even comparison; gun ownership, police armament, societal attitudes towards police, etc.) I'd be very interested.

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.

New Zealand is the same. Police are not routinely equipped with firearms, shootings are very rare, but they shoot for the biggest target (the body) and I'm very comfortable with the policy.

The important point is that they don't shoot at people very often. The idea that the police would e.g. shoot a running, unarmed suspect, or follow you (in a car) to your home and shoot you through the window is the stuff of a dystopian nightmare.

> 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.

That sounds more like a movie than "Western Europe." Nobody shoots at legs since it is ineffective, can end their life anyway, and can risk collateral damage (what is behind that leg? What if the bullet bounces off of the bone?). You shoot to kill, period.

Here's what the UK police do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf3RZ7gi2f0

Which is exceptional policing in my opinion. But no shooting at his leg.

PS - Not disagreeing with the argument that US police are too quick to kill people, even unarmed people. Just that shooting at people's legs is a legitimate alternative. Even when armed, other countries kill citizens much more rarely.

PPS - Another good video showing UK police's constraint, this time armed officers: https://youtu.be/nVOLH_aN-zI?t=3m35s contrast that with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwYVJ4W7DPo both incidents involve a cap gun and armed police (one in the US one in the UK).

Here in Finland armed men getting shot in the leg is not that rare of an occurrence, e.g. http://yle.fi/uutiset/prison_guard_arrested_after_shooting_a...

The question here is what did the police aim for not what did they hit.

Yea, tasers seem superior by pretty much any measure to shooting to immobilise. The only advantage I can see a gun having is range, and far outside taser range I don't think trying to shoot a leg is exactly reasonable.

They don't of course solve the problem of police using too much force for the situation - they're nasty and threatening at a peaceful protest for instance, but when the force is appropriate they seem like a no brainer.

from second youtube video suspects do not really fight back.

In that video, the man with the knife is not threatening the police or rushing them. He wasn't even reacting to the policeman walking close by. Not to say that the UK don't have a different policing style, but that video isn't an example of police behaviour when being rushed.

I saw someone asked about this (sorry, can't remember who) in an interview after one of the many recent shootings and he said that in a scenario where deadly force is not required, the gun should not be used at all.

It makes a lot of sense and I can only imagine the lawsuits and riots we'd have here if police were allowed to say "I was just trying to shoot his foot".

Police officers in the United States, as well as in Europe are trained to shoot for the center of mass when engaging an armed attacker. Do you know why? Google "Tueller Drill" for an understanding of just how dangerous someone with a knife is to an officer - at 21 feet away, that person can close the distance and kill the officer in 1.5 seconds.

Most people with knives aren't Bruce Lee.

Some evaluation of the actual danger the person poses is necessary. A man standing idly with a knife is not the same as some sort of ninja commando running towards you at full speed. From inevitably watching a bunch of videos recently of unlucky black people being shot by racist cops, the US police definitely does not seem to take the attitude of the victim into consideration when deciding to shoot - half of those guys are running away from the policeman. How fast can someone kill you with a knife if they're running away from you as fast as they can?

Actually rcurry is right. If Mythbusters is correct then the knife wielder always wins if they are within 20 feet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

rcurry is right if the knife wielder is within 20 feet AND the gun holder has their gun holstered, uncocked, with the safety still on.

Why not also do a test where the officer has to front-load the powder into their musket and put a bullet in and arm the gun? Have you seen those videos? The policemen are the ones who approach the knife wielder, not the other way around! They have the power to set the distance and to prepare themselves if they're going to close the distance! They're not hapless policemen standing idly by, suddenly assaulted by a knife wielder who surprise-jumps out of a doorway within 20 feet. That's a totally different situation.

What's more likely to be happening in a real situation, based again on all those countless snuff films floating around the internet, is that the officers have the safety off, have their hand on the gun, or even have the gun out of the holster in their hand, long before the 20-feet distance is reached.

That reduces the dangerous distance pretty significantly I would think.

So again, my point totally stands: unless the victim (I refuse to call them an attacker when they're clearly the one who always dies in practice when these scenarios happen, especially if they're black) is actually actively moving towards the policeman, there is no reason for the policeman to shoot their gun at a victim that's standing 20 feet away. If they feel the victim is a threat, then unholster the gun, take off the safety, cock the gun, and be ready to shoot, but maintain your distance.

It totally refuse that the only reasonable course of action after you deliberately approach a knife wielder is to shoot them when you get them within your 20-foot radius. That's murder, pure and simple.

No need to google Tueller Drill; it's mentioned in the main article, with quotes from Tueller about how his drill has been overused and stretched beyond it's intent. Your comment is an example of such a stretching - the Tueller Drill is saying that a cop needs to be aware that they're in potential danger at 21 feet, not that you should shoot for the centre off mass.

Shooting for the easiest, most incapacitating target is the result of policy designed to keep your emergency workers safe. Nothing to do with the Tueller Drill - for example, if the criminal was about to shoot a cop, the target would still be the torso, regardless of whether they were within 21 feet or not.

I wasn't commenting on the article, but rather replying to another user's post - who wondered why officers don't shoot for the legs when someone with a knife runs at them.

I've always assumed this policy was in place to limit potential liability. Depts have been sued for non-lethally using deadly force. The logic goes that if a person is not dangerous enough to kill, one should not be firing a gun at them at all.

If you are firing a gun at someone, you'd better mean to kill them.

I think that in Britain, if they shoot, they kill. Guns are extremely ineffective at "set phasers to stun". Blowing someone's hip apart is quite enough to kill them.

for what it worth, when i was taking concealed handgun course, i been told never do "warning shot" in the air (can kill bystander), never try to shot legs/arm/hands/etc (you will miss, even if you will not miss, it still often fatal, and if not fatal, often not enough to stop person with blood full of adrenaline). On top of it chance of hitting someone behind leg/arm is high.

What been taught is to only use deadly force to stop imminent danger. And to stop someone means to shoot into center of the mass (so aiming at head is not advised too.)

Now, how you decide if using deadly force is necessary - is totally different area from how to properly use deadly force to stop attacker when you already decided you have to do it.

Yup. Anyone who has a decent amount of experience with guns / carries knows this. Shooting for the legs/arms is not practical and poses more danger to bystanders than it's worth.

Real life is not like the movies. People don't go down after the first shot unless you hit something critical. Shooting center mass provides the best odds for disabling that person and the best odds to hit your target.

Shooting a moving target is already hard enough, trying to shoot at the legs of a moving target is even harder.

You also have to consider than an officer is responsible for every round that leaves the barrel. If you miss, thats just one more chance for that round to hit an innocent bystander and increases the odds that that guy with the knife is going to reach you before you can take him down.

Good manners, a soft tone and respect for other people is what most police officers are sorely missing.

A hostile attitude often escalates situations which could have been completely prevented or resolved differently. Unsurprisingly, treating people with complete disrespect often elicits a fight response.

What police departments really need more than anything else are strong "don't be a dick" policies that are rigorously enforced. Along with more "how not to be a dick" training seminars. One can be firm and even shoot someone when needed all without being one. Let the dicks go be mall cops. The guys with real guns should have above average patience and compassion. We should demand this and we should be willing to pay for it.

I hope they - both the article authors and the trainers being described - know what the 21-foot rule is supposed to mean. A person with a drawn knife 21 feet from you does not mean that it's time to shoot them, even if they haven't made a move towards you. It means that the time for a healthy person to run up to you is close enough to the time to draw and fire a holstered weapon that you're at risk, so you should address either the closing distance or draw time by backing off or behind obstacles or drawing the weapon before any attack starts.

This article is missing a critical criteria: racism. It's quite obvious that police officers (worldwide, but particularly in the United States) are more likely to shoot black suspects than white ones. This is not a training problem.

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