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By Ralph Mroz Police firearms instruction has come a long way over the last decade, mainly because one of the three elephants in the room that was ignored for 40 or so years has finally been acknowledged and addressed. That elephant is the reality of close-quarter lethal encounters, and the training necessary to win them. But to expect that it is humanly possible to achieve 100 percent hits in a gunfight is contrary to all logic, common sense and experience. These events are often just too chaotic and dynamic for that to be possible. So, if some of our rounds are sure to miss in the real world, what's it mean to us and to the profession? It means that our administrations and our society must accept that reality. In fact, to a large extent, they do. Police rounds miss all the time, and agencies and political units get sued for damages as a result. But, if the rounds were the result of a tragic situation in which the officers involved did their best, usually the officers themselves aren’t held responsible. What we need to do is 1) work to insure that this doesn’t change, 2) work to educate society that bad results from missed rounds are the statistical result of the actions that the bad guys force us to take, and 3) if we are now telling our officers that "misses are unacceptable," then stop it and tell them the honest reality of the situation. CAVEAT: I trust that no one will take any of the preceding as a plea to dilute our firearms training or to do less of it. In fact, I am a strong advocate of much more and much better firearms training, and believe that standards should be much higher than they are on average. The adult elephant: This is the big one — we must confirm danger to ourselves before firing. Consider the classic and not-unusual training scenario (and real-life event, too) of a subject turning on a police officer with a glinty object in his hand, held in front of him. Officers are supposed to wait to confirm the nature of the object in the hand before making a decision to fire. But, if they wait to verify that the object is a gun — instead of a badge or cell phone — we all know that it will be too late. Common sense, everyday experience, decades of demonstrations, and actual research indicate that in circumstances like the above, if we wait to confirm the threat, we will give our potential assailant a guaranteed window of time in which to harm us. In these cases, as Kelly McCann puts it so well, "confirmation of the subject’s intent will come in the form of harm to us." In some training, officers who do fire at what turns out to be non-threat targets are reprimanded, remediated, or at least made to believe that they screwed up. To often they are not told that they were placed in an impossible situation. Sometimes such "errors" are even recorded in their permanent file as a scarlet letter, waiting for the right inquisitor to come along. On the street, when officers choose to live rather than maybe die in that split second in these kinds of situations and shoot, it can be hell to pay if the subject was unarmed. Often, their own administrations and the public abandon them. They are told by their (often exclusively range-based ) trainers that they failed, and are failures. They are fired, sued, and their lives ruined, all for being forced to make a devil's no-win decision. Not always, of course. Sometimes, the officers are supported and their decision understood. And even while the vast majority of LE shootings are ruled justifiable, too often we see the situation I have just described. Of course, the actual law (and the actual morality of decisions to shoot) is that we must reasonably believe that a suspect presents a threat of death or crippling injury to ourselves (or others.) We don't have to actually confirm without doubt the threat before firing. What to do? We have to admit that if society is to have an effective police force, there will be unfortunate casualties, much as if we insist on having individual modes of transportation (the automobile), there will be unfortunate casualties (currently about 40,000 of them a year.) We have to admit that police officers sometimes have to make impossible decisions with incomplete data in time frames too short to provide accurate information. We need to educate the public that lawful gun owners never, ever turn on a police officer except very slowly and in response to direct orders form them (This is easier with state mandated, standardized education for permit holders). We should not teach our people that they are screw-ups when the situation is such that they can’t make a proper decision no matter what they do. In training, we need to focus on tactics that mitigate the advantage that a suspect has in the kinds of scenarios described above. We need to focus on verbalization skills, such as "police officer, do not move!" (which is not always possible for real), and seeking and working from cover better (which is also not always possible.) CAVEAT: I trust that no one will take the preceding as a plea to lower decision-making standards in training or on the street, nor to encourage a "shoot first and ask questions later" mentality, nor to encourage the practice of "spray and pray." I just want us to recognize that sometimes officers are asked to make a decision that is literally no-win. When we present these situations is training, we should acknowledge to the officer that it is in fact a no-win situation. When officers have to make these decisions on the street, we need to support them.
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