Excerpt from article: FORCE SCIENCE NEWS: Transmission #194
"It was just a knife and the officer had a gun. Why
didn't the officer just disarm the subject?""Some people think an
individual armed with a knife is not a dangerous threat to an officer,"
Lewinski says. "From our research and the research of others, we know that
not to be true. Knives can actually be more dangerous than a gun....Force
Science studies show that "a young person in reasonably good shape can
cover as much as 31 feet in the time it takes an officer to draw his gun,
point, and fire 1 round. If a person is 7 feet away, the officer could even
have his gun in the low-ready position, and by the time he raises the gun and
fires even once, he could be stabbed. "A stab from a knife or a stab and
upward cut can be extremely quick. Each cut or slash can occur at less than
one-quarter second, and any one could be lethal for the
officer....""Why not shoot the gun or knife out of their hand? Why
not shoot to wound the subject? "Lewinski recalls TV and movie westerns in
which the hero defeats an attacker with this kind of precision shooting.
"It's one of those Hollywood myths," he says. "It looks good on
film but doesn't work in the real world. Officers do not have the ability to
fire and hit that accurately in a dynamic encounter." Even if officers aim
for center mass, they "tend not to be as accurate as they might be on the
range because the dynamics by which people move in a real-world encounter are
such that center mass is a constantly changing target...."To stop the
threat, the goal of police deadly force, "the best place an officer can
aim for is center mass," Lewinski explains. "Even then it's not a
guarantee," but it's more realistic than the extraordinary challenge of
intentionally hitting only an arm or a leg
No comments:
Post a Comment