Officer not engaging the shooter

[westernrover]

There's a book about it called "The Red Badge of Courage." It's set in the war between the States. The title refers to something a little further into the protagonist's dilemma, but the book does deal with the soldier's first and subsequent experiences in combat.

A friend of mine who experienced combat in Afghanistan with the US Marines remarked something like what was mentioned in the thread already -- that he saw the gung-ho rambo guy in his squad lose it, and the nerdy guy that nobody expected went full-on medal of honor. It's definitely a voyage into the unknown.

I don't think that unprobed depths of the human psyche are a justification for dereliction of duty. We should be aware that this happens. I recall reading someone, I don't remember who, wrote that if someone didn't hesitate to take an available shot on game, they would be willing to go into combat with that person, and if they hesitated, they wouldn't have much confidence in them. It seems like a reasonable test. The game usually doesn't present a danger and shouldn't invoke fear, but a portion of what causes avoidance is a lack of conviction to do one's part. The effect the fear of death has on a person is hard to test without assuming the risk, but the conviction to kill a game animal without hesitation seems like a reasonable and practical test for the conviction to (potentially) kill a person who needs to be stopped (potentially killed).

 

[shafter]

I understand your point, but one of the, if not the most important things our LEO's do is protect us from those who wish to harm us. Mass shootings have unfortunately been occurring long enough and often enough that they are no longer a surprise. Churches like the one I attend understand that the odds of it happening at our particular church are incredibly small, but it does occur and we therefore have armed security to protect against what happened at Lakewood. It takes a special type of person to put themselves in harms way to protect people they don't know, but that's what these officers volunteered for. I don't fault a LEO who decides they don't want to assume that responsibility and resigns or takes some type of desk job, but I do have a problem with a LEO who volunteers for the job and then fails to do the exact thing the volunteered and are paid to do. This may seem harsh, but when LEO's refuse to confront these attackers people die. I can't imagine the grief of the family members of those who died knowing that those deaths could have been avoided had LEO's done their job.

Until someone has been in a situation where gunfire is going off and you are in a wide open space with no cover it isn't possible to know how you will react.

The issue is, where are these cops going to come from? The type of person with the patience to deal with absolutely mind-numbingly stupid calls one after another while juggling the nonsense from administration is often a completely different personality profile from the person who has what it takes to run into a gunfight. The person who has what it takes to do that doesn't last long in this profession anymore and if they do they're usually "hiding" on night shift where the calls are hot and the administration is home sleeping.

So the question remains, where does the person who can do both come from and how much are we willing to pay them?

 

[Double Naught Spy]

The issue law enforcement faces as a profession is that the job description is so incredibly expansive and diverse that you can have an officer who excels at 95 percent of the job which is the day to day routine calls yet be completely inadequate for the remaining 5 percent which may happen only one or twice in a career, if ever.

Do we wash out excellent cops who help people every day and replace them with cops who will excel in the worse possible crisis yet are very poor at managing the routine? The cop who excels at both is a unicorn and it isn't realistic to expect them all to be that.

Well, here's the end user problem. We are told to wait for the cops to come and save us by all sorts of LEO and civil leaders while at the same time the courts say the cops don't have to do squat. All I know is that I have been told that I am risking my life to try to save my own life with a gun because some danged cop may just come and shoot me willy nilly, but then I am hoping and praying that a cop or cops arrive soon and when they do arrive that they aren't the Parkland/Uvalde/King Souper/Mandalay Bay/Lakewood Church kind of cops, but the Trolley Square/Frisco kind of cop.

It isn't my fault that as a citizen that I have an expectation of the cops to be able to perform their jobs. They have told me that they will do it. The civic leaders have told me they will do it. You can bet that I expect them to do it.

 

[TomJ]

Until someone has been in a situation where gunfire is going off and you are in a wide open space with no cover it isn't possible to know how you will react.

The issue is, where are these cops going to come from? The type of person with the patience to deal with absolutely mind-numbingly stupid calls one after another while juggling the nonsense from administration is often a completely different personality profile from the person who has what it takes to run into a gunfight. The person who has what it takes to do that doesn't last long in this profession anymore and if they do they're usually "hiding" on night shift where the calls are hot and the administration is home sleeping.

So the question remains, where does the person who can do both come from and how much are we willing to pay them?

Fastbolt touched on this. The place to start is to somehow stop the war on LEO's we're seeing which has led to departments not being able to find qualified candidates. I understand that this is a nearly impossible task in today's social and political climate. When I was taking LEO tests in the 80's in the Chicago area there were hundreds of applicants for each position. It was incredibly competitive and departments had their choice of qualified candidates. That's not to say that unqualified people didn't fall through the cracks, but it was a completely different situation than what we're seeing now. Under the best of circumstances being a LEO is an incredibly difficult job and I have the utmost respect for them. The hostility we're seeing towards them now has made that job exponentially more difficult. I'm not saying there's an easy solution, because there isn't, but the job being difficult doesn't excuse LEO's hiding while people are being killed and is something that should never be excused or accepted.

 

[Jeff White]

This thread has really drifted off topic. Very little that has been posted is within the scope of this subforum. You might try this topic in General Gun Discussions.