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.
Today we have even major police agencies teaching their officers how to fight with a pistol based on the way that real gunfights occur. These training methods incorporate close-distance target-focused shooting, one-hand shooting, and simulated fights — either force-on-force simulations or a House of Horrors type experience. And while police shooting data is sinfully difficult to get, the data we are getting and the powerful anecdotal evidence we are accumulating indicate that it is working. (I chose the adjective “sinfully” deliberately, aiming my moral arrow at the administrators who refuse to divulge the data, the lawyers who put those administrators in a bind, and the lawmakers who created the whole situation to begin with.)
So far, so good. But, there is yet a baby elephant and an adult elephant in the room that we are ignoring. These two issues go beyond the police agency and live also in the nature of the expectations of the society we serve and are part of.
The baby elephant: We are responsible for every round we fire.
Yes, we are indeed responsible for every round that leaves our guns — after all we deliberately fired those rounds. But this statement is often taken to mean that any misses are unacceptable, or that missed rounds are the mark of an unprofessional, irresponsible officer. This reflexive, unthinking implication stigmatizes officers who miss in a gunfight.
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.
Now yes, with proper training, we can expect to achieve a very high hit ratio in many of the very close-distance encounters that characterize most LE shootings — but not always 100 percent. And as the distance increases, and the complicating factors likewise increase, we may be doing very well to achieve considerably less.
It is one thing for academic commentators — in and outside of the profession — to opine that anything less than 100 percent is unacceptable and negligent, but no one who has 1) been in a large number of different kinds of gunfights (which is damn few people), or 2) has participated in a large number of realistically simulated gunfights of varying complexity, or 3) has honestly studied either with knowledge of the physiological and psychological effects of these events on the people involved, will come to that unfounded conclusion.
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.