Help me build this resource: Documented shootings involving duty calibers.

You might want to look at the Marshall-Sanow data collection efforts, and get an idea of the challenges they faced categorizing on-duty shootings; not to give it away, they're enormous.

At the least, any scientific data collection will start with a form or set of questions created by the researcher, and criteria for answering each; just saying 'tell me what you know about these incidents' and collating it will be nearly impossible to draw reliable data from.

Larry

Many others have been doing this for 30-40 years. There is lots of data out there.

grampajack said:

I thought it might be useful to have a resource that compiled medical and after action reports on shootings involving duty calibers. If you know of any high quality cases, please post them here in this thread. If we get enough, I will compile them into a pdf and upload it to the resources.

Please give all the pertinent details and refrain from discussion or arguments. I will copy and paste your post directly into the pdf, so please be concise and pay attention to grammar. Please document the case by giving details such as names, medical examiners offices, police departments, etc. Provide a link if available.

It needs to at least be clear what caliber was used, and even better if we know the weapon and bullet details. Additionally, it needs to be clear whether the final result was a failure to stop, a psychological stop, or a physiological stop.

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This is the sort of thing that usually is the start of a grant request.
Which will have spelled out all sorts of parameters for collecting data, how that data will be handled, who will handle the data, and how confidentiality *court required or departmental) will be maintained.
Further, there's something like 15,000 law enforcement agencies in the US--random anecdotes from less than a dozen will not create a useful population sample.

In effect you are asking for precision in hearsay. Functionally, requiring an interlocutor to state that Lucinda's eyes rolled through exactly a 35º angle while relating Mrs LaVaca's last bout of dipsomania.

I understand the impulse--the concept of, well, if somebody writes it down, it will exist. The problem of it them being JoEl said this about that, which happened this one time, this one place, and something happened.
The fundamental problem being that, the one thing uniting LEO weapon discharges is that a weapon was discharged. Everything else is likely to be different. And those differences matter.

The attached link may be helpful.

https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/alternate-look-handgun-stopping-power

I tend to think that the Facklerite methodology of looking at tissue damage after the fact rather than in-fight reactions is largely driven because that data is more objective and available... not because it's actually more important. It's just measurable.

ATLDave said:

I tend to think that the Facklerite methodology of looking at tissue damage after the fact rather than in-fight reactions is largely driven because that data is more objective and available... not because it's actually more important. It's just measurable.

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With the increase in video surveillance, it is foreseeable that sufficient quantities of objective and accurate in-fight reactions may eventually be available.

Interesting thought.

Berger.Fan222 said:

With the increase in video surveillance, it is foreseeable that sufficient quantities of objective and accurate in-fight reactions may eventually be available.

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If the video is correlated with AAR or ME reports, perhaps-otherwise, most will show "shot(s) by X, reaction by Z", leaving out the important facts of where hits were made, what bodily functions were disrupted, etc.

Larry

DT Guy said:

leaving out the important facts of... what bodily functions were disrupted, etc.

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That's the Facklerite method. If you have universally-available video to see what reactions occurred in-fight, you wouldn't really need to know that at all. We've gone down that path (and the path of wound volume, ballistics gel, etc.) because of the huge obstacles to real data about in-fight/real-time human reactions/results.

ATLDave said:

That's the Facklerite method. If you have universally-available video to see what reactions occurred in-fight, you wouldn't really need to know that at all. We've gone down that path (and the path of wound volume, ballistics gel, etc.) because of the huge obstacles to real data about in-fight/real-time human reactions/results.

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Well, I think it goes a bit beyond Fackler-for instance, on video you can't even (usually) tell when a shot connected. Parsing 'psychological stops' from physical ones is fairly basic, I'd think-

Larry

DT Guy said:

Well, I think it goes a bit beyond Fackler-for instance, on video you can't even (usually) tell when a shot connected. Parsing 'psychological stops' from physical ones is fairly basic, I'd think-

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That's separate from the analysis of "what bodily functions were disrupted." Yes, you'd probably need to know how many hits there were.

The notion that all stops are either "pyshcological stops" or "permanent wound injury to major bodily functions" is the unstated assumption of the Fackler method and one I'm not sure is right. Getting punched hard in the solar plexus will stop most people from fighting, but it wouldn't show up as anything in a medical examination afterward.

This is why real in-fight data, if truly available and reliable and reasonably consistent, would be more useful than the Facklerite approach. But that data isn't currently available and reliable and consistent. If it were, it would be the more valid data for purposes of figuring out what ammo/guns to use for SD or law enforcement work.

ATLDave said:

That's separate from the analysis of "what bodily functions were disrupted." Yes, you'd probably need to know how many hits there were.

The notion that all stops are either "pyshcological stops" or "permanent wound injury to major bodily functions" is the unstated assumption of the Fackler method and one I'm not sure is right. Getting punched hard in the solar plexus will stop most people from fighting, but it wouldn't show up as anything in a medical examination afterward.

This is why real in-fight data, if truly available and reliable and reasonably consistent, would be more useful than the Facklerite approach. But that data isn't currently available and reliable and consistent. If it were, it would be the more valid data for purposes of figuring out what ammo/guns to use for SD or law enforcement work.

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I see what you're saying, but I can't get around the idea that to actually turn this data into something remotely predictive, we're going to have to know where the rounds landed; "Hit twice and went down immediately" would be all you'd get from the video data, wouldn't it?

Larry

If you got that, you'd be pretty lucky.

But, over a large sample size, it would be plenty.

Getting the very large sample size is the problem. Yeah, we have lots of video cameras around. We are a very long way from universal, hi-res surveillance (which is probably good) that would give us enough data to work with.

If you had a large sample size, you wouldn't really need that. You could do a top-down analysis, rather than a bottom up. The variables would wash out over a large sample size.

But, as we agree, there's not currently a good way to get that sample size, so we're mostly stuck with the Facklerite method of looking for wounding mechanisms and treating those as a proxy for incapacitation mechanisms.

ATLDave said:

If you had a large sample size, you wouldn't really need that. You could do a top-down analysis, rather than a bottom up. The variables would wash out over a large sample size.

But, as we agree, there's not currently a good way to get that sample size, so we're mostly stuck with the Facklerite method of looking for wounding mechanisms and treating those as a proxy for incapacitation mechanisms.

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That would take a *very* large sample size; I'm curious if all the police-involved shootings in the past 10 years would create a meaningful predictive tool with that model.


Larry

That's the beauty of it: it's not a model.

Not sure why you'd limit it just to police-involved shooting. If one gang-banger shoots another with a 9mm and the one who gets shot falls over immediately, that's not less valid as a predictive tool for whether the next person shot with a 9mm will fall over immediately than if the shooter had a blue shirt and a badge.

There are too many variables, even if you looked at a large number of shootings, to draw many conclusions. It will be hard for non-scientific minds to understand this.