By Dr. Peter A. Barone, Esq.
In review officer involved shootings everyday in my effort to complete my study of 6,000 OIS's cases nation wide. Today when I was reviewing a couple of cases two in particular caught me attention, and they really made me stop and think about what trainers have been saying is one of their worst fears concerning officers encountering deadly force situations on the street.
CASE ONE:
The first case comes out of the City of Chicago and eventually ended up as an OIS where the subject had to be shot and killed to stop his attempted murderous actions against law enforcement officers.
The officers were dispatched to a call where a troubled 25 year old man was threatening to commit suicide. When the officers who were dispatched to this call arrived on the scene they observed a young man sitting there with a knife in his hand. As soon as the officers exited their police vehicles the young man immediately left the area where he was standing and literally charged directly at the officers who were dispatched there to try to assist this 25 year old man.
This 25 year old man focused on one of the police officers, for no apparent reason, and actually came up on him and then stabbed the officer not once, but two times in his vest. After stabbing the officer two times in the vest he was allowed to walk away and began to walk, still with his knife in hand, in an eastbound direction from the area where he had just stabbed the Chicago Police Officer in his vest two times. At this time the officers decided they should engage him since he did still have the knife and did demonstrate that he was a danger to them and anyone else that might be around the area he was walking in at the time. The officers engaged him and asked him to put his weapon down at which time his response to the officers request was to once again charge at the officers trying to stab one of them for a second within minutes. It was finally at this point in time that the officers used deadly force against their attacker. He was shot twice in the torso and was transported to the hospital where he was later pronounced dead.
The part of this that concerns me is the question which goes like this: "Did they wait too long after having one of the officers stabbed twice and then being charged a second time to actually use deadly force, or any force at all?" and if so "did they do this due to what has been happening all over the country with the major focus being in Ferguson and New York City?"
SECOND STORY:
The second story comes out of Dallas Texas and in this incident the officer was very lucky and did not have to fire his weapon to subdue the armed subject.
Tuesday night while on his way to work in an plainclothes capacity this officer noticed out of the corner of his eye that there was an altercation going on outside of a liquor store and so decided to pull into the parking lot of the store. He later stated: "I really did not want to get out if I didn't have to" and he then advised "I very quickly figured out that it was possibly a robbery and the guy had a gun."
The suspect was fighting with two store clerks as the officer approached them in front of the store. The officer tried to intervene by struggling with the suspect for almost five minutes. The officer advised that the suspect then pointed his revolver at him and tried to shoot him. The officer was able to place a finger between the trigger and the back part of the trigger guard so when the suspect pointed the gun at his head and tried to shoot him he was not able to get the trigger back far enough to have the weapon fire. The officer was able to grab hold of the extractor rod of the revolver and was able to empty out the rounds in the revolver rendering the weapon safe. The suspect was taken into custody and the officer received high praise from his agency.
I absolutely understand that what he did was heroic and I also totally understand, from studying the marshal arts for decades, what it takes to do something like he did. However, my concern again is "Was his desire to not really want to have to get out and get involved and then not use any weapon of any kind risking his life and possibly the lives of those clerks and anyone else around him because of what has occurred in Ferguson and New York City?"
I cannot answer this question because I am not either one of these individuals and I was not there; however, I review these types of cases every single day and have done so for the past year or so and have interviewed officers, and continue to do so for my studies and book, who have been involved in officer involved shootings and the facts of these two cases concern me. I am also truly very glad that both of these incidents resulted in only one Chicago officer sustaining minor injuries and no other officers were injured.
Do these incident now vividly demonstrate that we now have a reason to really be concerned for the safety of officers?
