I think the point is that your rights and their duties will only be significant when your family sues after you're dead.Preclusion includes deescalation, and it's the duty of police to attempt to deescalate before rushing to judgment and shooting an innocent person who's lawfully exercising his/her Constitutional right to "bear" arms in self-defense
That is tue for police offices and for private citizens.Deadly force justification is not necessarily about being right, it's about the reasonable belief of the person at the time that the incident was taking place.
Excellent put.That is why, for example, shooting someone who is using a realistic toy gun while committing a violent felony would be justified. Even though the defender was wrong about the gun being real, if their belief was reasonable at the time, they would be justified.
Unfortunately, this is one of those situations that can't really be fixed. The best that can be done is to find some sort of balance. People need to understand that there's inherent danger in being visibly armed in the middle of a violent felony, both from the person committing the felony and from other responders. If you pull your gun and go towards the sound of shooting, there's a real chance that someone's going to figure you're a threat and act accordingly. I'm not saying that should drive people to inactivity, but the
it's easily possible to confuse a shooter with a hostage with an armed civilian or off duty cop guiding someone to safety
The only problem with this is that there will be multiple reports and other citizens will see someone armed and call 911 and report another shooter. If you look at active shooter incidents you will find that initial reports are almost always multiple shooters. Often the search for other shooters isn’t called off until well after the incident is over and interviews with those involved give a clear picture of what actually happened. Virtually everyone carries a cell phone these days and 911 lines are often overwhelmed. The tele-communicators don’t have time to sort through all of these reports and pass them on to the responding officers. Add in the fact that every officer has a lot of experience responding to a call for service where the actual situation is nothing like it was dispatched.When the situational report is a guy in black shooting up the mall with a long gun, the man with a sweater and slacks cowering beyond a concrete planter with his family is probably NOT your target.
The only problem with this is that there will be multiple reports and other citizens will see someone armed and call 911 and report another shooter. If you look at active shooter incidents you will find that initial reports are almost always multiple shooters. Often the search for other shooters isn’t called off until well after the incident is over and interviews with those involved give a clear picture of what actually happened. Virtually everyone carries a cell phone these days and 911 lines are often overwhelmed. The tele-communicators don’t have time to sort through all of these reports and pass them on to the responding officers. Add in the fact that every officer has a lot of experience responding to a call for service where the actual situation is nothing like it was dispatched.
Two comments...
First- Unfortunate events have proven that hasty deployment / hasty re-concealment is the best practices "order of the day" in an active shooter defensive scenario. Minimize the time your weapon is visible, and do not fiddle with any perp weapons beyond perhaps kicking them away from the suspect if absolutely necessary. Johnny Hurley learned this the hard way.
Second- I would hope that current LE training is beginning to acknowledge the potential presence of armed citizens at public shooting locations, and developing how better process such information in real time substantive threat assessment. When the situational report is a guy in black shooting up the mall with a long gun, the man with a sweater and slacks cowering beyond a concrete planter with his family is probably NOT your target. He is still NOT your target even though he happens to have an exposed 642 in his hand, and the mall is supposedly a "gun free zone".
The only things protecting the trainee from a blue-on-blue mistake by a second responding unit would be a uniform and empty hands.The responding officers are reacting to a person with a gun and a hostage. Whether the hostage is being rescued or being held is something they can't know. They "know" there's a hostage and someone with a gun holding the hostage. They see a person with a gun and a hostage and they react on the information they have identifying the person with the gun as hostile.
USCCA has a few videos that show how important it is to secure or lay down your firearm and raise your hands as law enforcement arrives. This should be a part of any basic defensive pistol class.
Yes, it requires individual responding LE to make good judgements about what they are seeing in real time, and conduct active threat assessment in real time. I understand it's not going to be a perfect science, but I would like to them to professionally acknowledge that armed citizens will likely be present in these scenarios, and that they are accounting for that in their training in some manner. I do not have answer for exactly what that training should entail, but it definitely needs to be part of the regimen.
The issue is that armed citizens are not nearly as common as gun owners. America is jam packed with guns but not all that many people carry and of those that do, they aren't typically doing so in places where active shootings occur.
If there were good protocols, then officers would never shoot other officers thinking they were criminals. The whole reason it's important for people to understand this is precisely because there is no good way for two armed people who don't know each other and who meet during or in the wake of a shooting to instantly verify to each other that they are "good guys" and not deadly threats.What are the protocols for encountering off-duty or other uninformed personnel, like armed three letter guys, especially when those individuals may be in the middle of a tunnel vision/audio episode?
In this case the officer wasn't criminally culpable. https://apnews.com/article/colorado...t-settlement-0f784cf0d5d4bac475a462141971b194is criminal negligence and a civil rights violation.
So what are you trying to say? Just ignore the possiblity of armed citizens? What are the protocols for encountering off-duty or other uninformed personnel, like armed three letter guys, especially when those individuals may be in the middle of a tunnel vision/audio episode?
This is not an ethereal discussion for me. The local King Soopers wasn't out primary grocery store, but a secondary one, and where my wife filled her monthly prescriptions. When we lived in Arvada, I was a frequent patron of the military surplus store that Johnny Hurley departed to engage the deranged cop killer across the street.