Posted on 08/19/2014 8:22:57 AM PDT by mandaladon
The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store.
Local St. Louis sources said Wilson suffered an “orbital blowout fracture to the eye socket.” This comes from a source within the District Attorney’s office and confirmed by the St. Louis County Police.
(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...
I don’t think that the officer intentionally shot him in the arm to disable him or anything like that.
From all I have ever heard in firearm training, you don’t expose a firearm unless you are fully prepared to use it, and once you begin using it, you shoot to kill.
Perhaps another Freeper who has received training can comment on this, but the concept of shooting to disable someone isn’t generally taught. They are taught to aim for center mass, the biggest target they can hit.
Obviously, I would imagine that certain special forces personnel are indeed taught to disable (not kill) in certain situations for intelligence purposes, but I don’t think it is even discussed outside of that specific scenario except to say never to try to shoot an extremity to disable someone.
I found this article at The Police Firearms Officers Association webpage, and it makes a lot of sense:
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Shooting to wound
Why shooting to wound doesn’t make sense scientifically, legally or tactically
Force Science re-states its case in light of recent “no-kill bill” proposal
A special report from the Force Science Institute
Do police officers really have to kill people when they shoot them? Couldn’t they be more humane and just aim for arms or legs?
As reported in Force Science News, New York state Senator David Paterson [D.-Harlem] pondered those questions in 2006 and concluded that officers were needlessly killing suspects. In response, he introduced legislation that would require officers to try to shoot offenders’ limbs instead of targeting locations that would more likely stop the threat but could also result in death. Paterson proposed that any officer who employed more than the minimum force necessary to stop a life-threatening suspect be charged with felony manslaughter. Law enforcement exploded in protest and Paterson withdrew the bill.
But the battle isn’t over.
The New York Post has just reported that Brooklyn Assembly Members Annette Robinson [D.-Bedford Stuyvesant] and Darryl Towns [D.-East New York] have introduced a “minimum force” bill that would require officers to “shoot a suspect in the arm or the leg” and to use firearms “with the intent to stop, rather than kill.”
“When I encounter civilian response to officer-involved shootings, it’s very often ‘Why didn’t they just shoot him in the leg?’” Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute, told Force Science News in a 2006 interview centered on Paterson’s proposed legislation. “When civilians judge police shooting deaths-on juries, on review boards, in the media, in the community-this same argument is often brought forward. Shooting to wound is naively regarded as a reasonable means of stopping dangerous behavior.
“In reality, this thinking is a result of ‘training by Hollywood,’ in which movie and TV cops are able to do anything to control the outcomes of events that serve the director’s dramatic interests. It reflects a misconception of real-life dynamics and ends up imposing unrealistic expectations of skill on real-life officers.”
Vice President Joe Biden agrees. When Michael Paladino, president of New York’s Detectives Endowment Association, showed him the bill he reportedly scoffed and suggested that it be called the “John Wayne Bill” because of the unrealistic, movie-like sharpshooting skills it demands of officers.
In light of this resurfacing of misguided “shoot-to-wound” thinking, Force Science News is reissuing a “position paper,” originally introduced following Paterson’s ‘06 proposed legislation, that discusses why shooting to wound versus shooting to stop is neither practical nor desirable as a performance standard. We hope this information proves useful to you in addressing any shoot-to-wound advocacy that may arise in your jurisdiction.
PRACTICAL ISSUES.
Robinson and Towns’ bill was drafted in the wake of the controversial shooting of Sean Bell who died after New York officers fired a total of 50 rounds at him and two other men. Sen. Paterson said his proposed legislation in ‘06 was motivated by the fatal shooting in New York City of Amadou Diallo, who was struck by 19 bullets when officers mistakenly thought he was reaching for a weapon as they approached him for questioning. Paterson believed that shooting an arm or leg would tend to stop a suspect’s threatening actions, precluding the need to shoot to the head or chest, where death is more probable. By requiring only the least amount of force needed to control a suspect he apparently hoped to reduce the likelihood of “excessive” shots being fired.
Studies by the Force Science Research Center reveal some of the practical problems with these positions. Lewinski explains some of the basics of human dynamics and anatomy and the relative risks of misses and hits:
“Hands and arms can be the fastest-moving body parts. For example, an average suspect can move his hand and forearm across his body to a 90-degree angle in 12/100 of a second. He can move his hand from his hip to shoulder height in 18/100 of a second.
“The average officer pulling the trigger as fast as he can on a Glock, one of the fastest- cycling semi-autos, requires 1/4 second to discharge each round.
“There is no way an officer can react, track, shoot and reliably hit a threatening suspect’s forearm or a weapon in a suspect’s hand in the time spans involved.
“Even if the suspect held his weapon arm steady for half a second or more, an accurate hit would be highly unlikely, and in police shootings the suspect and his weapon are seldom stationary. Plus, the officer himself may be moving as he shoots.
“The upper arms move more slowly than the lower arms and hands. But shooting at the upper arms, there’s a greater chance you’re going to hit the suspect’s brachial artery or center mass, areas with a high probability of fatality. So where does shooting only to wound come in when even areas considered by some to ‘safe’ from fatality risk could in fact carry the same level of risk as targeting center mass?
“Legs tend initially to move slower than arms and to maintain more static positions. However, areas of the lower trunk and upper thigh are rich with vascularity. A suspect who’s hit there can bleed out in seconds if one of the major arteries is severed, so again shooting just to wound may not result in just wounding.
“On the other hand, if an officer manages to take a suspect’s legs out non-fatally, that still leaves the offender’s hands free to shoot. His ability to threaten lives hasn’t necessarily been stopped.”
As to preventing so-called “overkill” from shots that are fired after a threat is neutralized, Lewinski offers these observations:
“Twenty years ago officers were trained to ‘shoot then assess.’ They fired 1 or 2 rounds, then stopped to see the effect. This required 1/4 to 1/2 second, during which time the suspect could keep firing, if he hadn’t been incapacitated.
“Now they’re taught to ‘shoot and assess,’ to judge the effect of their shots as they continue to fire, an on-going process. This allows the officer to continually defend himself, but because the brain is trying to do 2 things at once-shoot and assess-a very significant change in the offender’s behavior needs to take place in order for the officer to recognize the change of circumstances.
“A suspect falling to the ground from being shot would be a significant change. But by analyzing the way people fall, we’ve determined that it takes 2/3 of a second to a full second or more for a person to fall to the ground from a standing position. And that is when they’ve been hit in a motor center that produces instant loss of muscle tension.
“While an officer is noticing this change, he is going to continue firing if he is shooting as fast as he can under the stress of trying to save his life. On average, from the time an officer perceives a change in stimulus to the time he is able to process that and actually stop firing, 2 to 3 additional rounds will be expended.
“Shooting beyond the moment a threat is neutralized is not a willful, malicious action in most cases. It’s an involuntary factor of human dynamics.
“Given what science tells us about armed encounters, this most recent proposal is a fantasy, just like Paterson’s legislation before it. They would hold officers to super-human performance and punish them criminally for being unable to achieve it.”
LEGAL ISSUES.
A shoot-to-wound mandate would “not be valid legally” because it sets a standard far beyond that established by Graham v. Connor, the benchmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on police use of force, says former prosecutor Jeff Chudwin, now chief of the Olympia Fields (IL) PD and president of the Illinois Tactical Officers Assn.
Recognizing that violent encounters are “tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving,” the Court “does not require officers to use the least intrusive method” of forcefully controlling a threatening suspect, but “only what’s reasonable,” Chudwin explains. When an officer’s life or that of a third party appears in jeopardy, shooting can be justified as reasonable.
By legal definition, the possible consequences of deadly force include both death and great bodily harm. “The law has never broken these two apart,” Chudwin says, which is what these proposals have tried to do. “The politicians who propose this kind of legislation are saying that police should only shoot someone just a little bit. Deadly force is not about ‘just a little bit.’ Any time you fire a firearm, there’s a substantial risk of great bodily harm or death. The law doesn’t even so much as suggest that deadly force should be just enough to wound but with no probability of death. That’s plain wrong legally and tactically, and sends the wrong message.”
Attorney Bill Everett, a former risk-management executive, use-of-force instructor, former LEO, and Force Science National Advisory Board member, agrees. As he explains it, use of force from a legal standpoint is a matter of “proportionality,” and there are two ways to measure it: what’s necessary and what’s reasonable.
He draws the analogy of a house being on fire. “Firefighters can pour what seems at the time to be about the right amount of water on it to stop the fire versus not using one drop more of water than necessary, even in hindsight, to put the fire out.” The former fits the “reasonable” approach, the latter is the “necessary” perspective and is the essence of the shoot-to-wound/minimal force bill.
“When you impose a standard of strict necessity, you require officers to do a whole lot of thinking in a situation where the Supreme Court recognizes there’s not a whole lot of time to think in,” Everett declares. Under a shoot-to-wound directive, “an officer faced with a suspect running at him with a jagged bottle is expected to think about getting target acquisition on an arm or a leg, while his own life is at risk.” The hesitation it is likely to create will only heighten his risk.
The critical issue of officer survival aside, Everett predicts that the kind of legislation proposed would “substantially expand the civil and criminal liability of police officers.” He asks, “What if an officer tries to wing a suspect and ends up hitting an innocent bystander? What about the liability there? What if an officer tries to shoot an offender’s limb but shoots him in the chest instead? How does his true intent get judged?
“Right now under the Supreme Court’s prevailing standard lawyers and judges in a large percentage of police shootings can look at the facts and conclude that there is no basis for allowing a civil suit to go to trial. But if you change the standard, there’ll be a lot more cases going to juries to evaluate: 1) did the officer intend to wound or did he intend to kill the suspect and 2) was the suspect’s death absolutely necessary. A trial will become the rule rather than the exception.
“Who in their right mind would become a police officer in a jurisdiction where shoot-to- wound and standards of strict necessity became the law? Those ideas may have some humanitarian appeal, but once you go beyond the Disneyish attraction and face the reality, support for this thinking has to evaporate.”
TACTICAL ISSUES.
Modern training teaches that when an officer uses deadly force the intent should be to stop the suspect’s threatening behavior as fast as possible.
In the words of firearms trainer Ron Avery, himself a championship shooter, head of the Practical Shooting Academy and a member of the Force Science Technical Advisory Board, shooting for an assailant’s center mass is usually considered the most effective first option because the upper torso combines a concentration of vital areas and major blood vessels within the body’s largest target. “When the risk of failure is death, an officer needs the highest percentage chance of success he can get,” Everett notes.
Shooting instead for a smaller, faster-moving arm or a leg with the intent to wound rather than to incapacitate invites a myriad of tactical dilemmas.
For instance:
• An officer’s survival instinct may exert an overpowering influence on target selection. “I don’t care how good a shot you are,” says Avery, “if your life is threatened you’re going to go for the surer thing first and worry about your assailant’s life being saved second. If a guy is running at me with a blade, the last thing I’m going to be thinking is ‘I’m going to shoot him in the arm.’” Hence, shooting for center mass may become a psychological default.
• Poor shot placement is bound to increase. Even when officers are trying to shoot center mass, they often miss. Lewinski recalls a case he was involved in where an officer firing under high stress just 5 feet from an offender failed to hit him at all with the first 5 rounds and connected with the next four only because the suspect moved into his line of fire. “Hitting an arm or a leg on a moving suspect with surgical precision will be virtually impossible,” Avery asserts. “I could probably count on one hand the individuals who can make that kind of shot under the pressure of their life on the line. Expecting that level of performance by police officers on an agency-wide basis is ludicrous.” Misses may well go on to injure or kill someone else.
• Use of certain weapons might be discouraged. “Because of the spread pattern, an officer might be precluded from grabbing a shotgun, for fear of hitting more vital areas when he tries to shoot to wound,” Everett speculates. “If the offender has a fully automatic weapon, say, should an officer be prevented from using the best defensive weapon he may have because it might have sweep or rise?”
• “Successful” shots could be dangerous to people besides the suspect because of through-and-through penetration. “Virtually every police round today is designed to penetrate heavy clothing and 10 to 12 inches of ballistic gel,” explains Chudwin. “Rounds with that capability will penetrate even the biggest arms” and could, like misses, then travel on to hit unintended targets in the background.
• “Successful” shots that don’t persuade an offender to quit leave the officer still in peril. When we know from street experience that even multiple center-mass hits don’t always stop determined, deranged or drugged attackers, “how many officers would be murdered by offenders who get shot in a limb and are still fully capable of shooting back?” Chudwin asks. Indeed, Avery believes that shooting an offender without incapacitating him “may just infuriate him, so he doubles his effort to kill you. There is no dependable correlation between wounding someone and making them stop.”
• “Shooting to wound reflects a misapplication of police equipment. “Less-lethal options should be attempted only with tools designed for that purpose,” Avery says. “If you deliberately use deadly force to bring people into custody without incapacitating them, you’re using the wrong tool for that job. Also if you shoot them in the arm or leg and you destroy muscle tissue, shatter bone or destroy nerve function you have maimed that person for life. Now attorneys can play the argument of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and pursue punitive damages for destroying the capacity of your ‘victim’ to earn wages and so on. You don’t try to just wound people with a gun. Period.”
The experts we consulted agreed that advocates who push a shoot-to-wound agenda appear to understand little about human dynamics, ballistics, tactics, force legalities or the challenges officers face on the street. Chudwin has found that these critics of police practices can often be enlightened if they are invited to experience force decision-making scenarios on a firearms simulator.
Avery has a more dramatic, if fanciful, idea. “Put them in a cage with a lion,” he suggests. “Then let’s see if they shoot to wound.”
Special thanks to Ron Barber at In the Line of Duty whose e-newsletter alerted Force Science to this recent Assembly bill.
Even police officers that are trained to ‘shoot to kill’ can have religious and moral objections to such actions, and would, if confronted with such a scenario, most likely aim to wound and unarmed suspect.
In this particular instance, the officer himself was wounded, having had his eye socket shattered, and possibly unable to aim well enough to avoid killing his attacker.
The media will not explore this avenue, they will say only that he was shooting to kill............................
Relevant aphorisms:
- Those who know, don’t talk. Those who talk, don’t know.
- Don’t talk to people who don’t matter about things that don’t matter. Talk to people who matter about things that matter.
In this case, the general public doesn’t need to know the details, and (on the whole) doesn’t WANT to know the details - most people just want whatever fragments support their prejudices. The correct details, in context, are too complex/verbose for the rioters. The people who matter are the defendant/cop, witnesses, legal system, and jurisdictional political officials; gather the facts and present/discuss with them, make the facts _available_ to the public, and leave it at that.
Um, actually that’s all clearly understood by investigators. Police forensics know the answer to those; insofar as they may not, they’ve got a good handle on probabilities.
The four in the arm weren’t fatal if treated properly in a sensible time. Unless a major artery was severed (a fact examiners know either way), blood loss was manageable and the injury repairable.
The one in the eye socket could have been fatal, or (depending on terminal ballistic trajectory) survivable or not immediately incapacitating (lethal some time later).
The one in the top of skull was a brain shot. That’s usually instantly incapacitating/lethal. If it had occurred before any other shot, he’d have dropped before that other shot. (I’ve seen how animals drop after a brain shot: like dropping a ball or turning off a light.)
Direction? we know about where the cop was, and about where Brown was. Knowing that and the position of entry wounds, we can determine with good certainty which way his body was positioned (E/W/N/S, standing, slouching, bending over, prone, arm position, etc). Every theory of Brown’s position would have to match up with the physical reality of one shooter firing from a very limited range of positions in a very short timeframe (say, if Brown was lying face down when shot, there’s no way he could have front entry wounds).
Yes, examiners do have locations & angles of entry. In addition, they can establish that at least one shot entered the arm, exited, then entered the torso - establishing exactly how his arm was positioned for that shot, and in turn the positioning of most of his body at that point _and_ the location of the shooter. Once those are established, and knowing the timeframe (from witnesses), we can limit the range of possible positions involved in other shots, as there was little time & reason to move in complex/contortionist ways.
Crime scene examiners aren’t idiots. They have objective facts, and a long history/science/study of sensibly interpreting what those facts objectively mean.
As for cones marking casings, that’s common. Do you have anything indicating they weren’t used?
You’re a hoot.
I’m gonna keep harping on this: regardless of his _intent_, the objective _fact_ is the first FOUR shots were “wounding” shots. In addition, a shot HAD been fired even before that. Brown had AMPLE WARNING of imminent lethal harm if he did not halt his attack ... yet he continued until he had his brains blown out.
Brown made the wrong decision, to charge a cop that he had already wounded, and the first four shots did not make him change his mind. The fifth one did......................
When you jump into the middle of an argument you can really make a fool of yourself. Good job!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleeing_felon_rule#U.S._Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner
They are already saying that over in DUmmie land.
Thanks.
(1)The “X_Ray” pic is from a stock photo from 2007, not from Officer Wilson. http://webeye.ophth.uiowa.edu/eyeforum/tutorials/trauma.htm (2)The “confirmation” of this story has been recanted by the “reporter”, This whole “story” is fake. https://twitter.com/ChristineDB.../status/501788192727498752
Good point.
I'm going to bring my psychic side out and prophesy that, should the officer involved be found innocent and that he acted in self-defense, riots will occur in big cities nationwide.
Last 2 shots at downward angle means either the cop is 7 ft tall or the thug is lower.
If the thug was charging directly at the cop pointing gun (some people are that stupid), in sandals and tube socks (not olympic sprinting wear for sure), where are the scrape marks on Brown’s knees, hands? Charge, shot, skidmarks. No forensics. Only head.
No forensics showing gun shot residue on Brown’s hands from supposed gunshot going off in car, through car, outside the window, etc.
So far, lots of hearsay, prejudices dictating beliefs going on all over. Can’t believe much at this point in my opinion. Hopefully forensics investigation will be done sooner rather than later!
I still can’t get over how Ferguson squad cars don’t have video cameras in them? That’s a firing right there, and a liability lawsuit one would think.
I guess due to shock I did not feel any pain at that point in time. Was not knocked down.
By the time I got to the hospital my mouth was hurting like hell.
Had to wear wire on my teeth (like braces) for a month afterwards and couldn't eat anything but baby/soft food and soup cause I wasn't allowed to chew.
I guess the body does some sort of protective work in the case of sudden and unexpected trauma.
The point I was trying to make is that there is no entity or police force out there that trains people to shoot to wound (with the possible exception of Special Forces who might have specific needs to do just that for intelligence ends, and even then I am only guessing at that)
In this case, I have to believe the officer was not shooting to kill, he was most likely just shooting to hit any part of the man advancing on him and it didn’t even enter his mind what part, be it arm, foot, or face that he might hit.
If he could make choices like that in that compressed time frame, he is a far more capable person mentally than I could hope to be.
That said, I did have a situation once where I was doing about 50 mph in an MG Midget in the left hand lane, and came over the crest of a hill to see a car stopped there about a few yards in front of me.
Everything kind of stopped in my head, and I was thinking slowly, deliberately and clearly “I am going to hit this car. I can’t stop. I can’t go into the left lane as there are cars there. I can only go up over this six inch curb onto a narrow concrete apron. It’s my only choice.”
So in the blink of an eye, I cut the wheel, smashed over the curb and came to a screeching stop with the guard rail a few inches from my door on my side, and the cars stopped in the left lane a few inches off my right door. Not a scratch on the car.
But the thing I remember most was seeing out the corner of my eye, the posts holding up the guard rail, painted white, in slow motion going by...whiff...whiff...whiff...whiff. There was no noise of course, but when I look back on it, it was as if my mind was making its own sound effects. All this took place in the span of about three seconds.
I have always wondered if that is what it is like for great athletes like Larry Bird or Ted Williams, where things slow down like that.
Or what it may be like for someone like this cop who had to make the choice and pull the trigger on a huge man rushing at him. So you may be right. But my commonsense tells me it probably happened so quickly that it might be huge pieces of what was going on that he didn’t see at all. He might remember the grease stains on the front of the fat guy’s shirt, but never even saw the faces of people watching directly behind the guy rushing at him or cars whizzing by on the street just inches away.
Strange how the human mind works.
swelling is usually delayed, I got punched once quite badly when I was a youngster, woke up with a swollen face that was not there the night before.
A dog bite gets worse before it gets better...you get the picture, happy to help out!
Hannity had the Brown family lawyer on tonight. Lawyer, yada, yada, shot in back. Hannity points out no evidence he was shot in back. Lawyer, then claims the officer missed….etc., etc.
Got to love the grasping at straws by blacks, the guv and others involved in Ferguson. They want the county prosecutor, though voted in four times because of his credibility, removed because of his ‘bias’ because his dad was an LEO killed by a black, but, crickets that Eric Holder should be involved who had ‘distrust’ of police when younger pointed out in his speech in Ferguson. He speaks of ‘transparency’ when that doesn’t apply to Fast and Furious.
Crickets from the author, the media, Sharpton, Jackson, the MO Guv, et al about this gem provided to me by FReeper ltc8k6 from Wiki involving the shooting death of a 15-year old black.:
Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985)[1], was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that under the Fourth Amendment, when a law enforcement officer is pursuing a fleeing suspect, he or she may use deadly force to prevent escape only if the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.
The facts behind that case:
At about 10:45 p.m. on October 3, 1974, Memphis Police Department Officers Leslie Wright and Elton Hymon were dispatched to answer a burglary call next door. Officer Hymon went behind the house as his partner radioed back to the station. Hymon witnessed someone running across the yard. The fleeing suspect, Edward Garner, stopped at a 6-foot-high (1.8 m) chain-link fence. Using his flashlight, Hymon could see Garner's face and hands, and was reasonably sure that Garner was unarmed. The police testified that they believed Garner was 17 or 18 years old; Garner was in fact 15 years old. After Hymon ordered Garner to halt, Garner began to climb the fence. Believing that Garner would certainly flee if he made it over the fence, Hymon shot him. The bullet struck Garner in the back of the head, and he died shortly after an ambulance took him to a nearby hospital. Ten dollars and a purse taken from the burglarized house were found on his body.
Hymon acted according to a Tennessee state statute and official Memphis Police Department policy authorizing deadly force against a fleeing suspect. The statute provided that "if, after notice of the intention to arrest the defendant, he either flee or forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest."
bkmk
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