Point Guns at Innocents

[John Hearne]

Somebody, somewhere around here has cautioned everyone, including LE, about pointing guns at people who don't need to be shot. Rarely do we get a "perfect storm" case that really test this idea well. Since it's a copyrighted essay, let me summarize quickly:

• New/inexperienced officer incorrectly enters a vehicle's tag while running it.
• Typo generates an NCIC hit for a stolen vehicle.
• Backup is summoned and officers conduct a felony stop.
• The driver is with his wife and kids and is a former police officer.
• Adults are removed from vehicle, proned out, and handcuffed.
• Kids are proned out but not cuffed.
• Vehicle occupants maintain that guns were pointed at them and their children during the stop.
• After clearing the vehicle and rerunning the tag, the error is made and family released

For more details and the results see:
http://www.patc.com/weeklyarticles/p..._v_fuentes.pdf

[Luke]

I'm not a cop, but how does this test that theory?

[S Jenks]

Always confirm the plate.

[BehindBlueI's]

Always confirm the plate.

That's the lesson. Along with "comply, we'll sort it out later in court if need be."

[Hauptmann]

Always confirm the plate.

Confirm the correct vehicle too.

[Dagga Boy]

This will be interesting. I have warned of this for quite awhile. It sure is a lot better if you screw up something like this...which happens, if you don't compound it by pointing guns at people with a finger on the trigger......and in the case of the kids and passengers....likely no crime. I would much rather have mistakenly displayed a firearm that is quite reasonable, then the actually act of pointing it at a bunch of folks who were truely innocent.
Also......when things seem "weird"....you need to say something. I prevented one of our guys from getting into a serious situation on one of these because he was not processing that the driver was a deaf mute.

[voodoo_man]

Guns get pointed at people some times. Stuff happens in the heat of the moment.

No one got shot, right?

[Dagga Boy]

Guns get pointed at people some times. Stuff happens in the heat of the moment.

No one got shot, right?

It sounds like guns got pointed at a prone woman on the ground with a trigger on the finger and kids......no one got shot is not the standard of a professional. If one of you your co workers muzzled your head with a finger on the trigger during a call....would "well you didn't get shot" be an okay excuse.......or would you knock the crap out of him?

But if that is the standard you work under....I just lost a ton of respect for you.

[coldcase1984]

It's just not newbies either.

At an agency of immediate concern to me I was present for a brief on large buy bust which included a UC officer inside the car. He was at the briefing, everybody knew him and everyone was told arrest him but don't put a gun on him. So, a far-less-than stable general dick goes straight to the UC, rips him out of the vehicle jumps on his back and shoves a Glock 27 into the back of his head while screaming at the top of his lungs...wait for it...with his FINGER ON THE TRIGGER.

Having been present on three different occasions when this same guy AD'd on narcotics vehicle takedowns, while he was in a combined city/county unit with me. Once he came to our agency I was present for several ADs on range and bi-annual slicing of his thumb when he'd forget he was no longer shooting a Smith revolver (and he was younger than me). And no one would do anything about it. He was shown the door last year for reasons far less important...

[Mr_White]

This has been discussed here before, and I thought the range of responses from the working LEOs was very interesting. There were some important points from the previous discussion that I think bear repeating. I don't know that I would have called these settled - there was still some amount of disagreement about them, or at least about the rubber-meets-the-road application. I'd like to hear more about these points if anyone has anything they think is relevant.

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Little, if any, time is gained by mounting the gun and aiming it before the decision to fire has been made, versus keeping the gun in a ready position that doesn't directly muzzle the person or block the vision until after the decision to fire has been made.

Potential massive time loss by mounting the gun and aiming it before the decision to fire has been made, thus blocking part of the vision and possibly delaying the decision to fire that will enable the rest of the engagement process.

Finger on the trigger when not engaging is a separate point, but it is basically settled science that it nets virtually no time gain, but a hugely increased risk of ND.

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Increased compliance was the factor that seemed most cited by advocates of pointing guns at people not yet being actively engaged. There were mixed reports on this - some posters had experienced both increased compliance as well as total disregard of being muzzled by criminal suspects.

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Speaking purely for myself and from the private citizen perspective: you LEOs have my support. I don't harbor the idiotic misunderstandings about the dynamics of use of force (both ignorant and willful) that drive so much of the anti-police hate going on. That's not me. At all. If I found myself in a LEO contact, and they pointed their guns at me, I'd be very open to hearing the reasons for doing that. I might know them already, like if I just had to shoot a person in self-defense and they are coming to a report of a shooting and here I am with a visible gun. I am not a use of force ignoramus. Observable, articulable factors - I get that. Generic "I need to go home at the end of my shift", "sometimes stuff happens", etc., would not cut it and I would be super pissed off, filing complaints, maybe getting a lawyer, and if the circumstances were right, reading that cop or supervisors the fucking riot act over their fucked up procedures, unjustified threat of deadly force against me, and their shitty gun skills.