Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later | Hacker News Reader

Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later

nytimes.com

35 pointspmiller249 comments

The first comment picked by NYT staff on that article is from a retired cop. It is very telling:

"I was a Police Officer in Phx for 30 years, and fortunately never had to shoot anyone, but was shot at four times and hit once. I was in several situations that I would have been justified in shooting! Were I an officer in todays world, (retired 20 years ago) I would probably be more likely to use deadly force in situations like I encountered. It is a much more dangerous world today and I cringe each time I see an officer making a stop. I still carry and at each stop I see being made I prepare to come to the officers aid if needed."

This retired cop has somehow reached the conclusion that it is a much more dangerous world today than it was 20 years ago, despite crime rates being at an all-time low. I'm seriously wondering where his delusion comes from, because it seems to be shared by cops all over the nation.

>This retired cop has somehow reached the conclusion that it is a much more dangerous world today than it was 20 years ago, despite crime rates being at an all-time low. I'm seriously wondering where his delusion comes from, because it seems to be shared by cops all over the nation.

My wild guess: the 24 hour news cycle.

You can't conclude he's delusional, or even wrong, from the fact that crime rates are down. What you need are stats that compare the risk to the officer now and during some time period during his career (50 to 20 years ago) in situations where use of deadly force is justified. I suspect that the necessary stats will be hard to dig up.

Is putting your hand in your pocket now a capital offence?

> The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.

Doesn't sound like there was any way for the victim to not be shot here; doing what he was told was lethal, and keeping his hand in his pocket would have gotten him shot for disobeying the police.

I would be very nervous in that situation.

Even if you tried to explain what you were doing "I don't have a gun, I'm going to remove my hand from my pocket slowly" there's every chance they'll still be shouting instructions and not hear you. If they mistake a shadow or fold in fabric to be a dark shape, you're toast.

He's justifying shooting by the speed with which an assailant can shoot, but with zero data on the accuracy of the assailant when moving that fast. I'd want to know what is the estimated time to pull and shoot a gun with at least a roughly 10% chance of the officer being hit, not to mention being killed.

So it's OK to pull a gun and shoot at a cop if you don't hit him?

Nah, someone is just playing probabilities with someone else's life. But hey, you don't have to be a cop. Better to be a webdev and hangout on Hacker News all day.

Stray bullets and accidental shots are just as lethal as aimed ones. The point is that someone pulled over at a traffic stop can keep a gun hidden and take the first shot if they want to. Each and every traffic stop is a nervous bundle of potential danger for a cop, and they aren't paid to endanger themselves. That's why we go out of our way to make cops comfortable during a traffic stop. Keep your hands where they can be seen. No sudden movements. Polite interaction.

It's not healthy to be near nervous cops.

It's unfortunate that most will discount this article prima facie given the current political and societal winds.

I'm not qualified to determine whether the guy's science is sound or not, and I damn sure don't endorse "shoot first and ask questions later." But I've been the guy with dirty boots carrying a gun and can tell you that unless you've been there, it's difficult to understand how quickly things happen and how your brain and nervous system react...far too quickly to rationally consider things like "he is shooting too fast to have a high probability of hitting me" or "statistically my job is not getting more dangerous" like so many enlightened internet commenters are proposing. Comments like that nauseating naiveté masquerading as enlightenment, not constructive solutions to police shootings.

Let me state unequivocally that one preventable death is too many, regardless of race or circumstance, and police officers who abuse their power or hide behind their badge ought to be punished more harshly given the increased responsibility they bear.

But in the same way that we ought to empathize with the victims who have gotten the short end of the stick from our justice system and society in general, maybe we ought not to be so quick to judge officers who do a dangerous and often thankless job, but one that's critical to society. Especially those who have never been in a shoot/don't shoot situation or faced the ambiguity of trying to determine in the heat of the moment whether the situation unfolding before them in real time is truly a shoot/don't shoot situation.

You have your values wrong, and this is probably due to lack of training. There are a couple ways to deescalate a situation which don't involve thinking or judging (if you've learned the criteria as a pure yes/no situation, they become a reflex). Also, police should protect the citizen more than themselves, therefore when in doubt, don't shoot and take the risk of being shot. Police will be popular when they count more deaths in their rows than arbitrary executions by police on the street. You can't take the risk of a police/population divide.

> one preventable death is too many

It's not one. See comment from slxh in next thread. I don't set foot in the US for fear of police mistakes, and last time I said that I was upvoted 9 times [1], so it seems US is already massively facing the consequences of their untrained armed force on their ground.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948835

You can't ask living, breathing humans to not defend their lives.

Yeah, ~500 people have been killed by police in America so far this year. That includes rightful and wrongful shootings. Some of them were innocent, sure, and some were in a grey area, sure, but plenty were warranted.

Contrast that with over 100 /homicides/ in New Orleans so far this year. NONE of those are warranted or just (by virtue of being homicides).

And just to do the math, there are approximately 750,000 officers with the authority to arrest in the USA (wikipedia). If each of them interacted with only one non-officer per day (rounding against the police, here), that's over 160 million police interactions so far this year, making a deadly outcome the result of only .0003% of all police interaction, and I'll bet a huge segment of those shootings are warranted.

Staying out of the USA because you're scared of cops isn't exactly a rational decision.

One quote from the article:

"People die because of this stuff,” said John Burton, a California lawyer who specializes in police misconduct cases. “When they give these cops a pass, it just ripples through the system.”

I'm curious what people think of this ... does defending the police even under pretty damning situations really equate to being responsible for future death?

Everyone deserves a defense.

...excluding the dead victim. Because, you know, he's lost his rights.

I think it depends a lot on the style of the defense and the extent to which the surrounding system pushes toward fairness.

I've lived in a number of different cities, some of them overseas, and I've seen an enormous difference in police culture. Even in the US, I've lived places where cops believe they are basically immune from criticism and some mistreat citizens as a result. One country I lived in it was just understood that you should flee the scene of an accident rather than risk cops having power over you.

Good recent US examples include the shooting of Samuel Dubose and the death of Freddie Gray. There cops clearly expected to literally get away with murder.

In some ways this shouldn't be a surprise; the whole theory of our criminal justice system is that crime is reduced if transgressors are caught and punished. So if there are sorts of crime where perpetrators are unlikely to be caught, we should at least expect more future crime. And it's reasonable to sometimes expect cultures of criminality to take root as a result.

Yes. I think a lack of accountability among police causes them to behave with indifference towards citizens.

I think an important distinction is between speech in general and testimony in a courtroom.

"Defending" in the sense of publicly arguing that the accused officers are innocent is your basic right in a free society. I don't think this sort of speech results in responsibility for future deaths. It doesn't seem very rational for a potential murderer to be encouraged to commit the crime by the knowledge that there are some people out there who will argue that he is innocent. After all, there are lots of examples of people who end up behind bars despite having a large number of supporters.

"Defending" in the sense of presenting pseudo-scientific testimony that sways a jury is IMHO perverting justice. Moreover, it shows potential murderers exactly how they too can get away with it, so there is a fair argument that such testimony does result in future deaths.

Not sure I can accept the premise, because as the article states, Lewinski doesn't just defend, he also actively trains officers and publishes papers on reasonable use of force.

So if they draw a gun, do not comply and lie down on the ground instead ? Hell at this point, it would start to get safer to consider shooting the cop, since there is a high change he will shoot you by this logic ! Or do WE have to start wearing bullet proof vests ?

Are you black? If yes, seems clearly well past time to start wearing a vest. If you're white? Just don't be armed. Probably.

How many police officers are shot yearly? This seldom gets much press.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/03/us-usa-shooting-te...

Just knowing this stuff happens must make police edgy.

How many black lives are lost yearly? And those that aren't by chance caught on video tape get zero press.

Just knowing the stuff that happens must make people edgy.

I tried to look it up. The Post has police shootings at around 400 people. Half were white and half were minority. 2/3 of the minority were black. So, I think around 133.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shooting...

From the article you link to:

"Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred."

But statistically they appear to be involved in a high number of homicides. I don't know the details of the shootings. How many people were armed/unarmed for example. Where did the shootings take place? Traffic stops on highways, for example.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/02/...

The time window on that particular number isn't actually a full year, but the year up till may 30 when the article was published. Considering that crime tends to go up in the summer months instead of staying flat over the year you're probably better off looking at last year's numbers, instead.

According to http://www.rawstory.com/2015/04/black-americans-killed-by-po... (which cites killedbypolice.net), at least 238 black people were killed by police in 2014. That's about double the total number of police killed in that year.

Police officer doesn't even crack the top 10 most dangerous professions, and a large number of those police deaths are due to traffic accidents.

I'll give police officers some slack as soon as we start allowing 7-11 clerks or cab drivers (both an order of magnitude more dangerous than police work) to murder their customers with impunity.

> and a large number of those police deaths are due to traffic accidents.

I wonder if the fact that cops don't normally obey speed limits affects this at all...

Nobody is forcing them to be cops. Accept the danger or find another job.

The guy who was killed was a Marine who served in Iraq. He probably figured it couldn't be any more dangerous. Police could also take a more hands off approach. Unfortunately, crime rates tend to increase:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/60352506f481415c8edf3fc35b6f8...

to be fair, maybe his daddy cop created a large incentive

126 cops killed in 2014 [1] and 623 citizens killed by cops in 2014 [2]

1. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/u-s-police-officer-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Those numbers are total police officer deaths across all causes, not just shootings, which was what the parent was talking about.

Reading further, it's actually 50 officers who were killed by firearm in 2014, and it's not clear whether that number includes suicides.

This number is trending downwards since in the mid-seventies.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/u-s-police-officer-...

Would guess the downward trend is due to more widespread use of body armor. I seldom if ever see a uniformed cop who's not wearing a vest.

Actually, gun violence has been on a downward trend since the early nineties across the entire population. You'd expect police firearm fatalities to trend downward accordingly, regardless of the use of body armor.

Police wearing body armor, armored cars, AR-15s, and the like are part of a different trend: the militarization of US police using surplus equipment from the Department of Defense, in a DOD program 1033.

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-reporting-on-the-...

It's worth reading through at least some of the particulars. About half seem to involve people also shooting at the police. Assuming the police are at fault every other time, I don't know how else one would expect a shootout with police to end. For that matter, even if it happens to be a fake gun, waving it around and refusing to put it down is probably a bad idea.

And then there's murder suicides by people who happen to be cops, but I don't think killing your own family is something that comes up in the line of duty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

http://killedbypolice.net has more details on most of the cases of people killed by police.

It's interesting to combine that with traffic stop data to get an idea of how risky it is for a person who is pulled over.

There are at least 17.7 million people pulled over for traffic stops per year in the US. If we attribute ALL of the deaths to traffic stops to get an upper bound of 3.5 deaths per 100k for people in traffic stops per year.

That puts the probability of getting killed during a traffic stop in a given year at about the same as the probability of dying that year from stomach cancer. It's about half the probability of dying by suicide from firearm, and 3 times the probability of dying by influenza.

That's a very generous upper bound. Only 2% of the descriptions at Wikipedia mention traffic, but that is too low because some do not have descriptions. Let's be generous and go with 10% to get a more realistic bound than the 100% I used earlier. That would give a death rate from traffic stops of 0.35 per 100k.

That would put the probability of dying when you are pulled over as similar to the probability of dying that year from Hodgkin's disease, and about 1/3 the probability of dying from malnutrition [1].

[1] malnutrition deaths are way higher than I would have expected in the US!

I don't know about injuries, but regarding fatalities, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund claims 117 officers were killed in the line of duty in 2014 (http://www.nleomf.org/facts/enforcement/). Meanwhile, 385 people were killed by police Jan 1-May 30th 2015: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shooting...).

Are we looking for some kind of parity in dead cops vs. dead civilians?

How many of the 385 people were killed as a consequence of criminal actions? Cop shooting unarmed civilian gets a lot of play in the media, but that describes a small percentage of police involved shootings.

Strictly speaking, I'm looking for parity in the sense that both those numbers should be 0. But, realistically speaking, some percentage of those civilian deaths are completely justified, and police are better armed than civilians in general, so we'll obviously never get there.

I'm saying we have a problem because American police killed more people in March 2015 than UK police killed in the entire 20th century (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/american-cops-killed-people...). I'm saying there's a problem because it's more dangerous statistically to be a bystander in an NYPD shooting incident than the target (citation escapes me, unfortunately). And, I'm saying it's ridiculous that an unarmed suspect can be charged with assault because the police shot and wounded two bystanders while trying to deal with him (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-ch...)

Something's got to give here.

Just checking: are you saying it's fine to shoot criminals?

How minor does the criminality have to be before it's not okay to shoot them?

(Let's ignore the "innocent before proven guilty" and right to trial stuff here.)

Here are some more statistics, which seem to show that police work is not getting any more dangerous.

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7430943/police-killed-statisti...

Around 50 per year die due to shootings, according to data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (www.nleomf.org) for 2003-2014.

About as many as die per year from auto crashes/getting run over.

Contrast that with around 400 deaths per year caused by police officers (2003-2009 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf , that study seems to have stopped then).

Edit: the ~130 numbers from some of the other posts are closer to the total number of police officers dying in the line of duty, rather than shootings specifically.

http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.h...

Shot & killed? Around 50/year.

Perhaps, just perhaps, they might get shot less if they had two orders of magnitude less of a habit of shooting others on basically no provocation whatsoever.

This isn't some abstract dream scenario, it's basically how it is in every other modern democracy. It's only the US that has this problem. Clearly we are screwing up, somehow. It's long past time to come to terms with that.

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