perhaps mag dump isn't always the best tactic

The issue isn't really the "mag dump." The issue is that the officers needed to go 1-for-1 on hits to the perp, with none in the hostage, regardless of the number of rounds fired - and they weren't able to do that.

What bothers me is that the first shot taken by the police was done without success. I can`t imagine taking that shot, missing and following with a mag dump. Lots of risk and unknown consequences. I know, I wasn't there but it doesn't make sense to me.

Seems to me it was a failure in the cops all advancing at once, which caused more desperation on the part of the perp. Some time should have been taken to see if the situation could be de-escalated as there was a bystander close to the perp, which I don't understand why the officers didn't announce to the victim bystander to flee as the perp headed her way as they advanced. It seems to me the officer closest to the perp should have held back the other officers while he maintained his good position for a head shot, as he had the clearest and easiest shot to make.

The article makes it seem like the perp had begun to cut the hostage's throat thus escalating the situation to where there needed to be shots fired in an otherwise risky situation.

All of my thoughts are based on what I saw in the video and read so obviously there are a lot of holes in what had happened previously and what the officers did that couldn't be seen or heard by the two body cameras.

What an unfortunate turn of events for the bystander and their family as well as the officers who have to live with that. Tough situation, officers have to deal with the scum of the earth and often the choices they are faced with are incredibly difficult and sometimes very hard to live with.

Being an officer in California is going to get incredibly difficult with the porous border, early release of offenders (including some violent) as well as reducing theft under $950 to a misdemeanor. Criminals will be emboldened to have increased activities, all the more reason that citizens of California to take their own safety into consideration in leaving their house.

The Officer on the far left should have taken the shot....the guys on the right had the hostage between them and the bad guy. Seriously...if you can't head shoot someone at 10ft you have NO business carrying a firearm. A single shot to the head would have ended the confrontation....but panic and mag dumps seem to be the norm now a days. Sad....

Wow, that was pretty horrific, not because the hostage got shot, but how terrible the shooting was at such short range...on a stationary target.

I know police budgets are tight and the politicians aren't willing to spend money on better and more police officer training, they only want to spend it on harmful social programs that buy them votes. Police officers here where I live are underpaid as are EMT personnel and there aren't enough of them. When they get a bit of experience they move on to a larger city that pays more for their service. This incident is a glaring example of poor or insufficient training of their police or poor selection criteria for them at hiring time.

I've long felt that something is wrong with how LEOs are trained. I know LEO training officers and I know them to be very conscientious and many details of police shootings have been falsely reported by the press, but there have been way too many murderous failures lately. LAPD should be the best of the best as should California's POST, but this time they behaved like imbeciles. POST, which dictates training for CA LEOs should be held accountable or nothing is going to change since they are the governing body when it comes to LEO training in CA.

Double Naught Spy said:

Wow, that was pretty horrific, not because the hostage got shot, but how terrible the shooting was at such short range...on a stationary target.

Click to expand...

It is horrific because a citizen was murdered in cold blood by the people charged with protecting her.

John Joseph said:

It is horrific because a citizen was murdered in cold blood by the people charged with protecting her.

Click to expand...

Don't worry, somebody will find a way to blame the victim.

Anyway you slice it that was completely uncalled for, unless SOP is to not give a damn about the hostage.

That’s pretty bad. I don’t understand abandoning the long guns and switching back to handgun though. Poor tactics on top of poor decision making all wrapped up with horrendous marksmanship.

Somehow I bet it was the guns fault.

WestKentucky said:

I don’t understand abandoning the long guns and switching back to handgun though.

Click to expand...

The long guns appear to be shotguns loaded with bean bag rounds.

Deanimator said:

Don't worry, somebody will find a way to blame the victim.

Click to expand...

In a way they are, by the authorities and media continually mentioning that she was a "transient," etc. That's entirely irrelevant to the narrative.

She was an innocent bystander. The advance of the officers channeled Perez back towards her (error), and the officers on her right opened fire without a reasonably clear shot.

I don't think officers had designated assignments, except maybe the bean bag gun. The tendency is for everyone to shoot at once, without clear assignments. In my mind, if you can't make the shot, you don't take the shot. A very tragic outcome.

It’s LAPD. Not to bag on LAPD, but this type of action seems to be getting more common, not only with LAPD but with many departments. If there is not a quick resolution, empty your mag. But, as far as LAPD is concerned, after working with them (not for LAPD) on and off for 50 years, they are one of the reasons I moved to Arizona.

Twiki357 said:

It’s LAPD. Not to bag on LAPD, but this type of action seems to be getting more common, not only with LAPD but with many departments. If there is not a quick resolution, empty your mag. But, as far as LAPD is concerned, after working with them (not for LAPD) on and off for 50 years, they are one of the reasons I moved to Arizona.

Click to expand...

Hence the near slaughter of the paper deliverywomen and the surfer. They didn't even pretend that there was a REASONABLE fear, just FEAR.

Yeesh.

I understand that things can get a lot less clear when a real violent situation occurs, but I also think that people revert to their training in such situations.

This is one of the reasons I question the overall trend to high-capacity pistols over other guns. Sure, if you can get the high capacity it is a positive, but at the expense of other traits? How important is that 17th round in the gun?

Personally, I'd rather go with a higher powered, accurate and ergonomic gun than something that has high capacity and does not point well. I understand that ergonomics is subjective and police departments cannot buy one type of gun that feels "right" for all officers.

A bad ending to a bad situation. Did things go wrong? Yes. We’re mistaks made? Yes. But where any of you there? No. It’s easy to sit and watch a video and think of all the things that should of or could of been done different. If you have never been in a similar situation, it’s hard to explain how fast things happen in the moment, but don’t seem to happen that fast in a video.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending the actions of the officers, but I’m not going to judge them either, that’s someone else’s job.
I don’t see how Mag dump has anything to do with the situation. I watched the video a few times and two of the officers guns can be seen and it’s clear that the slides are not locked to the rear once the shooting stopped.

I'd say this is one of those instances where not one single second of additional footage nor an iota of further input is needed to show that that woman was the "victim" of the Cops - noting that she was put there by the perpetrator.

I defy anyone to raise a remotely reasonable explanation outside of what was shown to explain this ASTOUNDINGLY irresponsible and excessive behavior by the Cops.

I am steadfastly a "benefit of the doubt" guy where Cop involved violence is concerned and I can fine ZERO possible reasoning for their behavior other than; bad hiring, bad training, individual "culture" interpretation by the Cops, stimulants, mental defect or supplements.

Nine kinds of wrong.... FULL STOP!

RecoilRob said:

The Officer on the far left should have taken the shot....the guys on the right had the hostage between them and the bad guy. Seriously...if you can't head shoot someone at 10ft you have NO business carrying a firearm. A single shot to the head would have ended the confrontation....but panic and mag dumps seem to be the norm now a days. Sad....

Click to expand...

Rob is correct - only the officer on the left should have fired as he was the only one with a clear shot. Why he couldn't make a head shot at that short distance on an almost stationary target is beyond me. I had always thought LAPD was pretty good in the firearms training area but this incident certainly shows massive deficiencies.

So the analysis I see is that 3 officers shot 18 rounds (6 rounds each on average) and the lady was hit by 2 of them. From the angles I see from the body cameras, 1 officer had a clear shot at the criminal...the guy who was face to face. The other 3 to the right had no clear shot unless they tried for his body or legs, MAYBE. From my training (not backyard Bubba target shooting, actual SRT training), at that distance a single, precise head shot should have been easy the way the 2 targets were arranged, even if the officer was moving.

As she was laying on the ground, it looks like there was blood coming from her upper shoulder, but I have no idea if that is her blood or the criminal's. The article does not say where she was hit or even how she died. It looks like she was fatally shot, but because her face was blurred it's possible she bled out from her throat being cut and we can't see it. The recovered knife was bloody.

I don't understand why the beanbag shotguns weren't emptied while the guy held the chair in front of him to keep him occupied and away from the woman, but that's easy decision making 20/20 hindsight talking.

A lot more rounds were fired than were necessary IF the officers had any shooting skill at all. Decision making by the officers to the right and obscured by the woman was terrible as they had no angle and no clear target. I actually heard someone say "move up", so they advanced on the criminal which cornered him and almost forced him to take the woman hostage. It was a perfectly classic hostage profile target that I have shot many times (paper of course, not actual people). I couldn't see the sawing motion to cut her throat, but if that was what happened, the only officer who should have shot was the face to face officer and NONE of the officers to the side. There were a lot of bad decisions made and I'm willing to bet that once the officers heard the first shot, the rest joined in reflexively. Bad decisions.

Flechette said:

Yeesh.

I understand that things can get a lot less clear when a real violent situation occurs, but I also think that people revert to their training in such situations.

This is one of the reasons I question the overall trend to high-capacity pistols over other guns. Sure, if you can get the high capacity it is a positive, but at the expense of other traits? How important is that 17th round in the gun?

Personally, I'd rather go with a higher powered, accurate and ergonomic gun than something that has high capacity and does not point well. I understand that ergonomics is subjective and police departments cannot buy one type of gun that feels "right" for all officers.

Click to expand...

Actually, we can. I have always been a proponent of letting the officers carry their own firearms (within certain limits). Let the department set criteria for calibers, makes, and models, and let the officers carry whatever fits them best. NY city, where officers are required to purchase their own sidearms, gives them a choice of 3 (Glock, Smith, Sig) 9mm pistols. A selection of a dozen would provide better chances of a good fit but this is still much better than requiring everyone to adapt to a single gun.

LEO training in CA is under the auspices of POST
LAPD ought to be the best of the best but the cold blooded murder of that poor woman is unconcionable.
Yes LEOs are criminally misrepresented by the media
Yes camera angles don't show the whole situation
Yes nerves come into play and difficult decisions need to be made
BUT
Not in this situation. That not one but three officers are involved in a bad shooting indicates a failure in training and especially in situational awareness. All that is taught and re-taught according to POST standards. California LEOs receive extensive, regular training.
POST needs to be held accountable or this will continue and LAPD will loose what little integrity remains with the public.
Cold blooded? Yes. That many rounds discharged at a hostage is cold blooded since they willfully fired with nothing to gain other than the deaths of both people. Consider that if a firearm had to be discharged one of the officers might have shot the legs out from under the perp. The hostage likely would still have been hit but the shooting would likely have been more survivable than the hail of center of mass and head shots.