The Myth of the Trigger-Happy Cop Contrary to public perception, fatal shootings by police officers are relatively rare and have gone down dramatically in places such as New York City By Charles Campisi
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-the-trigger-happy-cop-1486056851?tesla=y
As the former chief of internal affairs for the New York Police Department for almost two decades, I was personally involved in the investigation of hundreds of these incidents, including such controversial cases as the 1999 shooting of the unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo and the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell. Perhaps no one knows better than I do that some cops, when using their weapons, make mistakes, disregard their training, succumb to panic or even act with outright malice.
But I also know that, despite the impression often created by TV news and social media, not all but many law-enforcement agencies have dramatically reduced the number of officer-involved shooting incidents.
The NYPD is a case in point. Consider the numbers. In 1971, the first year that the department began compiling detailed data on police shootings, officers shot 314 people, 93 of them fatally. Two decades later, in 1991, the number of NYPD shootings had decreased to 108, with 27 fatalities—a significant reduction but still a disturbingly high number. By 2015 (the last year for which complete official statistics are available), the number of people intentionally shot by NYPD cops had plummeted to 23, with eight resulting in a fatality—a reduction of more than 90% over the previous 4½ decades.
Let me put that in context. In a city of 8.2 million people—and in a police department of more than 35,000 armed officers who in 2015 responded to more than 66,000 calls involving weapons—NYPD cops shot and killed eight criminal suspects. All of these individuals had prior arrest histories, five were carrying a gun or pellet gun, one was stabbing an officer with a knife, and two were violently struggling with cops to avoid arrest.
Eight criminal suspects shot and killed is far from a perfect record—it’s eight human lives away from being perfect—but the statistics show that the NYPD has made tremendous strides in reducing such shootings.
There are a number of reasons for this progress. For one, technological advances such as virtual-reality “shoot/don’t shoot” training exercises have helped to condition NYPD cops to react correctly to real-life situations involving potentially deadly force. The deployment of defensive devices such as pepper spray and Tasers has also given NYPD cops less lethal alternatives to gunfire for defending themselves and others against armed suspects.
Extensive data collection on every police shooting—from the number of shots fired to the officer’s number of years on the job—has helped NYPD commanders to spot trends and develop training improvements. Increased training in the “three Cs”—cover, concealment, containment—has taught officers to avoid being put into situations where they are forced to fire their weapons. “Officer restraint” has become the NYPD’s training emphasis.
There is no complete official national database on police shootings, so it is impossible to obtain accurate historical data on trends in police shooting incidents. (Creating such a database should be a national priority.) But according to an unofficial database maintained by the Washington Post, it is clear that fatal officer-involved shootings are actually statistically rare—and unjustified officer-involved fatal shootings are rarer still. CONTINUE AT SITE
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