KevinB
Army.ca Relic
- Reaction score
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110%. My point was more that there has been clear correlation with ‘sympathetic shootings’ from verbal and physical cues from other officers.
I know one case down here that is still working its way through the courts the Grand Jury indicted both the shooter and the partner who yelled shoot.
As @Booter already pointed out there is ideally a pre brief on the mission where the UoF for sniper engagement is outlined.
Years ago when I did a few things out in LA with SIS (before their rebrand) they had a DA go over UoF and articulation before the hits.
“After the 2nd or third shot remember to say ‘Stop Police’ as the witnesses will recall that but not usually the engagement sequence”. SIS went after violent criminals on their third strike and where looking at Life in prison - so they didn’t often go quietly - as a result the result was more of a LE execution squad than a arrest unit. During the OIS’s the list of individuals at the scene was scrubbed of a lot of non LAPD and non LEO personnel. They got a bad rap due to some bad apples, and admittedly the system somewhat rewarded excesses, but it was very effective cleaning up the streets, and reducing the folks needing to be reintroduced to the penal system for life.
Later as a LEO working on the VFTF’s it became clear that very few ‘bad guys’ actually had the stones to try to shoot it out with LE when faced with a clear presence of folks willing to kill them if justified, my opinion was that the SIS setup of plainclothes raids often tended to encourage violent resistance and the resultant shootings of the felons. Most ‘tough’ criminals prey upon the weak and often kill defenseless people, and a straight up gunfight isn’t something they will be willing to do even with superior numbers. Sometimes a LEO being viewed as a stone cold killer has a very deescalating effect. It can go very sideways if the gunfighter mentality takes over though and shootings become the goal, and officers start notching their sidearms with their kills (Albuquerque and Roswell NM SWAT for example - where the State Police and Feds had to step in to break it up).
The more competent you are with a gun, to me often leaves you a greater window to react and not resort to lethal force. But also LE down here in shall issue and open carry states, you need to expect everyone is armed, and so seeing weapons isn’t necessarily an indication of an actual threat, and if you went to Taser let alone sidearm or carbine for every knife or pistol etc you saw, you’d never get anything done and your’d be dictating incident reports the entire shift and not on the road.
