The perils of “contagious shooting.”
Fifty bullets fired at three unarmed men last Saturday. Forty-three fired at an armed man last year. Forty-one fired at Amadou Diallo. All by New York police; all cases fatal.
Why so many bullets? “Contagious shooting,” proposed the New York Times in a front-page story on Monday. “An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too.”
It’s natural to grope for a rational or mechanical explanation in cases like these. But it’s not clear which kind of explanation this contagion is. If it’s rational, it should be judged like any rational process, and cops should be culpable for it. If it’s mechanical, it should be controlled like any mechanical process, starting with the guns supplied to police. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing: giving cops high-round semiautomatic weapons because we trust them not to blast away like robots, then excusing them like robots when they blast away.
What makes contagious shooting a handy legal defense is its mechanical portrayal of behavior. You’re not choosing to kill; you’re catching a disease. In the Diallo era, the NYPD patrol guide explained that the first shot “sets off a chain reaction of shooting by other personnel.” Officers “join in as a kind of contagion,” said the Times.
How can you control a contagion of police overreaction? By controlling the crucial mechanism: guns. The key number in the Diallo case wasn’t 41; it was 16. Two of the four officers accounted for 32 of the 41 bullets, because each of them emptied his weapon.
To see an example of this in action, here’s a video of a guy being shot 81 times by cops. Although he continually verbally threatened them and therefore, rightly thought dangerous, turns out he had a flip flop in his hand, not a gun. On the other hand, they had bullet proof shields and plenty of time to get all bystanders away. When he raised his hand, they could have waited before firing to see he had nothing. But he wanted to die and knew the cops would shoot first. Warning, very graphic.
I’m against this type of shooting because it wastes bullets plus we have to pay multiple cops to perform the shooting. Isn’t there some type of grenade that’d do the same thing to innocent flip-flop holders?!
I compare these shootings to the everybodies doing it thing. Oh the popular cop is shooting, maybe we should shoot too.
Yeah just blame cops for everything. The fact is cops go out of their way to prevent such shootings. If you or I were there, we would have shoot much more often. Nevertheless, sometimes these things happen among thousands of cops working thousands of hours each.
Someone needs to get some remedial shooting practice. These dumb-asses were probably holding their guns sideways like in the movies trying to look cool.
3,
Tell that to the familes of the guys who were shot several dozen times.
Cowardly cops seem to be the norm.
The guy is permeated with bullets, motionless for minutes, and they finally, meekly go over to check him out yelling “cover me”.
Ain’t like the movies is it folks?
#6,
Cowardly cops seem to be the norm.
The guy is permeated with bullets, motionless for minutes, and they finally, meekly go over to check him out yelling “cover me”.
They went to check and retrieve the dog, not check out the victim.
Of course the families are going to be angry, but that shouldn’t be the way of judging the police. The families of people shot up by criminals get angry when the criminals walk, so does that mean we should ignore cases where police don’t have a warrant?
They went to check and retrieve the dog, not check out the victim.
That’s because the dog was the innocent victim here, not the shithead. He wanted to die, so I don’t really give a crap about him. In this case the cops are the victims also. They have to live with the event their entire lives. Despite popular belief with most in this blog, Cops do not enjoy killing people. Many are never the same and have to go through years of therapy to cope. Suicide by cop is one of the worse things a LE officer will have to deal with.
An example along the same sad lines is something that happened here in Houston a few years ago – and the cops got away with it.
A mentally disturbed woman (i.e., a loony) with a weapon was shot and killed by police.
The woman was all of 5’1″ or 5’2″, and weighed little over a hundred pounds. Her weapon was a butcher knife. There were 8, count ’em, 8 cops, all with their guns drawn. She waved the knife around and lunged toward one of the cops. She gets gunned down.
A tiny woman with a knife versus 8 pistol-wielding cops surrounding her. The cops testified that they “were in fear of their lives.” Of course, when you’re only a few feet away from someone, it’s obviously impossible to shoot her knife arm or her leg, which would disable her and cause her to drop the knife. No, that would be too easy, so they shot to kill.
We have far too many psychotics with badges in Texas, whose sole reason for wanting to be a cop is to get away with antisocial things that get a civilian imprisoned, including committing murder. I’m serious. I’ve personally acquainted with a couple of city policemen who are eagerly awaiting their chance to kill another human being – because they know they’ll get away with it.
The entrenched mentality of too many in police leadership will never permit the use of psychological screening, because it would halt the passing-on of their amoral, authoritarian mindset.
I don’t really give a crap about him
I think we figured that out.
the cops are the victims also
I’ve known a few cops. Most of the ones I’ve known personally were not people I would WANT to be cops, but I’m not claiming that it’s a representative sample… just the random few that I went to high school with and so on.
Just like any other group of people, there are good and bad. That goes without saying (although as usual it doesn’t keep me from saying it.) The PROBLEM is that cops, like doctors, don’t do a DAMN thing to weed their ranks and get rid of the ones that ALL of them know shouldn’t be wearing the uniform. Once you’re in the brotherhood, you’re IN, and not much will change that short of something very public and very dramatic (and often not even that, which is why we’re having this conversation.)
I given set of circumstances decide if it is shoot or no shoot situation. All of the officers are in the same situation is it a surprise that they would all come to the same decision at the same time and fire?
What would you expect them to do, reach the decision point and then stop and have a meeting on which one is going to pull the trigger?
Jeez, so many of the people that post in this blog are the very perfection of knee jerk liberalism I’ve ever seen.
I have a question, can any of you ever remember a police shooting you thought WAS justified?
The point you are missing number 12 is that justified shootings rarely make the national news. what makes the national news is usually when a person is UNARMED, or shot by police enter the WRONG HOUSE. you know why that is , cause it indicates a screw up by the police.
look we need the cops, thin blue line, anarchy loosed upon the streets yada, yada. but the cops are not perfect, and New York seems to have more than it’s share of unjustified killings of unarmed people.
and here in Chicago, an off duty officer shot and killed two men that had drawn weapons on him outside a night club. so far, it seems like a clean shoot. but remember number 12, the two dead men had guns.
This is one of the many reasons why I think it was a mistake to outfit police with semi-automatic pistols. They should have never moved beyond the double-action .357. Cops should never need high capacity sidearms and if they do, they can call in backup where you outfit them with rifles and shotguns. Further, as seen in a post a couple of weeks ago, a revolver has an almost zero chance of jamming whereas a semi-auto pistol can jam at the worst time.
Beyond that, what happened to police being responsible for every bullet that left their gun? It is a (pun intended) cop-out to claim that they were “caught up in the action” as the reason for emptying their clip. That cop needs better training and/or psychological help.
#13 Of course the mistakes make the news. But that isn’t what we are talking about here. We are talking about this contagious shooting theory and the knee jerk response it got from most of the blog regulars.
#14 You are an idiot and obviously have a real problem with police if you think the police should less well armed than the people they go up against. If carjackers or home invaders happened to grab your loved one wouldn’t you want the first officer on the scene to be able to help them?
#13 Of course the mistakes make the news. But that isn’t what we are talking about here. We are talking about this contagious shooting theory and the knee jerk response it got from most of the blog regulars.
#14 You are an idiot and obviously have a real problem with police if you think the police should less well armed than the people they go up against. If carjackers or home invaders happened to grab your loved one wouldn’t you want the first officer on the scene to be able to help them?
First off, non-shooters don’t know how easy it is to dump a mag when the adrenaline is flowing. You would do the same thing under similar circumstances. Training has very little to do with it in many instances. Second, having cops go back to 6-round revolvers instead of hi-cap semi-autos will not result in fewer shootings of this kind. Lower round counts, yes. Fewer questionable shootings, no. Finally, some folks need to take a class in statistics. If there are 1,000 incidents per year (just pulling a number out of the hat here) of police shooting at suspects, and one of them is a bad shoot, then we are doing about as well as we are ever going to do. Without figures on what percentage of shooting incidents are righteous and how many are not, these anecdotal tales are nothing more than excuses for those who don’t like cops, guns, or both, to vent their spleen. Yes, all incidents should be closely examined to find out if there are errors in procedure, training, or recruitment that can be fixed. But these incidents will never entirely go away, no matter what is done.
12,
“I have a question, can any of you ever remember a police shooting you thought WAS justified?”
I posted one recently:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=8146
#15,
Idioicy is thinking what you see happen in movies, also happens in real life.
Yah, no doubt about it, there are some bad guys out there, but in real life, the vast majority of people are in prison for non violent crimes. The vast majority of the remainder, the violent felons, are in prison for non-random crime, overwhelmingly domestic violence. The teeny tiny percentage of prisoners who are mass murderers, serial killers or violent rapists, ususally surendered peacefully, once they were caught. Im thinking Tim McVeigh, the Unibomber, and the DC sniper. Never the less, the poice deal with all of these as though they were Bonnie and Clyde.
The simple fact of the matter is, since we have seen police forces abandon broken windows enforcement with the enhanced police powers they have received over the last five years, the crime rate has gone up.
And your own argument suggests no-knock warrents are a bad idea, because if someone breaks into my house in the dark of night, without announcing who they are, I guarantee you they will be shot.
Kinda off topic, but a few weeks ago, when police trampled the union protestors in Houston (iirc), they caused the city of Houston to lose their Union Busting fight, due to public outrage.
The message to be taken by the police is, the people are back in charge, accountability will be demanded. Bad cops beware, we are comin for you.
Basically it’s another example of people refusing to take personal responsibility for their actions.
So your buddy opened fire, so what? Assess the situation before you add to the firefight.
It’s bullshit, pure and simple.
Does anyone have the video that goes with the picture for this story? It happened in New Orleans, a mentally challenged man in a suit. I never got to see it.
#15
Sorry but you are the idiot if not at the very least because you read about half of my post and went off half cocked (no pun intended).
I said that cops should never need high capacity SIDEARMS. I have no problem with cops having semi-automatic rifles and shotguns in the trunk. Give me a situation where a cop has a high capacity rifle in the trunk and would need a high capacity sidearm. Learn something about firearms before you stick your foot in your mouth. If you are in a fire fight, a sidearm of any type is not the weapon of choice and without question the most effective weapon is the radio.
> If carjackers or home invaders happened
> to grab your loved one wouldn’t you want
> the first officer on the scene to be able to help them?
First there is issue of the officer actually showing up. Second, if a cop cannot handle the situation with a standard sidearm then a semi-auto that let’s him reload 1/2 as often isn’t going to make a difference. Having a gun that never jams however could make a huge difference.
Did that guy forget his college library card? People never learn. sigh
Come on. This type of thing is just wrong. Okay we all know what types of things happen in urban areas. But too shoot a guy because you think he may have a gun ? That just seems wrong. All of us black people dont have guns. And not all of us want to kill the white man. Cant this kinda of thinking end ?
I don’t disagree with your police should use .357 revolvers and there are 7 or 8 shot .357 revolvers. A .357 is still the best man stopper out there. I am a little concerned with reload time on one however, even with a speed loader, but training should take care of that. The other issue I see is with the high capacity rifle in the trunk. Rifles in urban settings can be dangerous with over penetration issues, as rifles are far more powerful than handguns. I think a better idea would be a shotgun with 00 or 000 buckshot. Most shootings happen in 7 yards or less and a shotgun will take down anyone (even in body armor) at that range and be less dangerous to bystanders than a rifle would be. SWAT teams should be issued the rifles more than the regular officers. And as for all the shots being fired and not many hitting, that is very common and stress shooting of a handgun is not a easy skill to acquire and if you wanted police to master it they would need to train nearly every day and would be able to spend far less time on the streets.
One stupid question: did the dog survive? I ask that because I think it’s pretty clumsy to release the dog just when you’re starting to shoot… The whole film is out of context and I don’t know anything about what was going on in there, and yes, cops go through a lot and really don’t have a death wish, so probably they were just being morbidly careful, but it really seems, to the non trained eye, a completely incompetent way of dealing with this problem…
Just my two cents…
#22 I read your post and you must be an idiot if you think just reducing the number of rounds a police officer can have in his gun is going to have any effect on anything. Six rounds in you or 22 I doubt you will notice the difference.
Another issue you do realize that the .357 Mag is a much more powerful round than the 9mm or .40 S&W most officers carry today. Being more powerful it does things like go through the person you are shooting at an hits bystanders.
I’ll bet you think that this gun is in some way more powerful and deadly than this gun.
#24 I assume you are talking about the video? If so the police thought he had a gun because he told them he did and was hiding his hands.
50 bullets fired versus 50 bullets hitting the target is not the same thing. The reporting on these stories is incomplete.
If you ever read FBI statistics on police gunfights, if I recollect correctly, something on the order of over 70% occur within a space of 8-10 FEET (as crazy as that sounds), yet the accuracy rate is typically only between 8-15%. That is a huge miss ratio, especially for people who are trained and practiced in shooting firearms, so realistically officers usually need to fire more shots simply to hit the target.
Still, that being said, so many officers shooting so many bullets at a single person begs the question as to whether the adrenaline (or anger at a suspect not complying with orders) made them lose complete control. As someone who shoots various caliber firearms, I find it hard to understand how so many cops could completely empty their magazines before assessing whether the suspect was contained.
I really hate to see a handful of lousy cops soil the reputation of ALL cops!
#26
RE: “Going through people”
This is a strawman argument. A .357 has far more stopping power than 9MM which means a person will be stopped in their tracks with fewer rounds. The reverse strawman against the 9MM is that it has a greater tendency to ricochet and thus hit more bystanders. I believe a .357 also has more stopping power than a .40 but I’m not sure. A .40 has more mass but less powder. Further, don’t tell me that firing 14 rounds with a given miss ratio is better than firing fewer rounds in terms of innocent bystanders.
RE: Your gun comparison.
The LOOK of the gun makes absolutely, positively no difference. It was this kind of idiotic thinking that brought us the assault weapons ban. The first gun might be a .22 for all I know. To answer the question accurately, I would need to know what each shoots and whether the first gun is fully automatic.
RE: Fewer rounds
Certainly having fewer rounds would prevent officers from emptying 14 rounds from a sidearm into a person. Again, an officer should not need 14 rounds in a SIDEARM. If there really is a situation requiring heavy artillery, they should be carrying that in their trunk and they should be calling for backup.
Of course, you have completely ignored the greatest reason for a revolver which is that it cannot jam. There are many stories of cops that fired off a round and the cartrige jammed in the slide of their semi-automatic.
#27, If a cop’s hit ratio is 8% that is pretty scary. Part of that might be explained by a comfort factor in having many rounds and thus being less disciplined in their shooting.
I think they pepper the person with bullets because it’s cheaper to deal with a dead person than an injured person because it can sue.