Five undercover cops were in a strip club, reportedly following up on phoned-in tips that this strip club was a front for drug dealing and prostitution. Being undercover, I'd bet you the price of a good lunch that at least most of them, and probably all of them, were at least legally drunk. According to witnesses who were inside the club, this table full of drunks got into a drunken argument with another table full of drunks, namely Sean Bell's bachelor party. When Sean and two of his friends left the bar for the night, the cops followed them. Their story about why they were following him is contradicted by all other witness accounts, but it's not hard to guess what their real reason for leaving at the same time he did was: they were going to bust him for drunk driving to get back at him for whatever the drunken argument inside the bar was.
As Bell's car was pulling away from the curb, five cops in two cars rushed him from two different directions. Once the cops had Bell's car penned in and unable to move, they jumped out of their cars, all guns drawn and (obviously) safeties off. The cops claim that they yelled "Police!" and if the survivors from inside the car were the only ones that contradicted them, it would still be possible that they yelled it and Bell and his party didn't hear them through the closed car windows. However, at least two other witnesses have come forward and insisted that no, nobody yelled anything, the cops are lying through their teeth. Bell, seeing the drunks from inside the bar now waving guns at him, rammed the officer in front of his car, and then rammed both cars trying to clear a path to drive out of the line of fire.
NYPD use of force doctrine specifically prohibits officers from firing into a moving vehicle when the only weapon being used is the vehicle itself. So to cover their backsides, the cops are now all swearing up and down that someone inside the car had claimed, on his way to the car, that he was heading to the car to get a gun, and that as the car rammed the first officer they saw that person reach towards his waistband. The cop in front of the car fired. Hearing shots fired, the rest of the cops opened fire as well (even though, having encircled the car, they were in "ethnic firing squad" formation), targeting everything inside the car. Bullets sprayed in all directions, wrecking quite a bit of the neighborhood; miraculously, no cops nor anybody in nearby buildings nor other bystanders were hit. One officer fired 31 shots all by his lonesome: one in the chamber, all 15 in the clip, and all 15 from his spare clip, all in the space of at most 10 seconds. A total of 50 shots were fired, killing Bell and hospitalizing two other passengers. No guns were found in the car. To cover themselves, the cops swear up and down that a fourth person, the one with the gun, completely unharmed despite the hail of gunfire, must have somehow miraculously escaped from the fully-encircled shot-up car with the gun and run off without any of the cops seeing him, let alone stopping him. Multiple witnesses swear that nobody said "gun" on the way to the car and that there were never more than 3 people in the car, that the cops are again lying through their teeth. The NYPD is conducting a door-to-door manhunt for this mythical fourth gunman, and even threatened to beat the crap out of Sean Bell's minister's son if he wouldn't tell the cops the name of that fourth gunman that nobody but them saw.
I think we can all see what happened.
Let me talk about ol' drunken spray-n-pray here for a second. The police union in NY is claiming that it would be unfair to penalize that officer for "contagious shooting." They're claiming that when a brother officer opens fire, it is so natural and instinctive for all cops to provide supporting and cover fire that no matter what the rules and the law are, it's just humanly impossible for them not to go into suppressive fire mode. Now, ironically, no more than at most 1 out of 4 officers still does this. But that's still 1 in 4. So let's talk technological solutions for a minute, particularly one that's an old hobby horse of mine, one that's near and dear to my heart: the evils of the 16-shot hair-trigger semi-automatic as a police weapon. The NYPD spec for an officer's weapon is specifically designed for spray-n-pray, in that it requires that once normal trigger force is used to pull the trigger for the first round, once the weapon starts firing all subsequent shots must be on a hair trigger. They are also required to be able to push rounds into the chamber and fire them fast enough to empty the whole 16 round initial load in 4 seconds, that is to say to fire at 4 rounds per second.
Is that ever a good idea? Ever? The military used to issue its troops weapons like that. And then, after reviewing the records of how weapons were actually used, they concluded that unless you design the weapon to make people stop and re-acquire the target, then otherwise every round after the 3rd is wasted. That's why all military assault rifles in the world now require extra steps to switch them from 3-round burst fire to full automatic, and why soldiers are taught to basically never use that full-auto switch. Every time I bring up the evils of the 16-round clip, somebody tells me about some hypothetical situation where the cop might need 16 rounds, might need to keep swapping fire with a target for that long or might need to engage multiple targets. Even if that were the case for anybody other than the SWAT team, go back and look at Officer Spray-n-Pray and ask yourself: having emptied all 31 rounds he had at a single target in 10 seconds, what would he have done if there had been a second target, if that mythical fourth unharmed guy with a gun had gotten out of the car? And is there any such thing as a target that can be killed by 31 rounds at that range that can't be killed by five? Or ten?
The five-shot 38 caliber revolver was the standard police issue weapon for every police force in the world for almost a hundred years. Why? Because you would be hard pressed to design a better weapon for actual normal police work. The cylinder rotates fast enough to get off five shots at the same target, but slow enough that your reflexes can stop firing if you need to. It can be reloaded by a trained operator in under ten seconds, and in the same second or two that a clip requires if you issue them speed loaders, but it requires you to look at the weapon to do it, breaking your line of sight and yes, again, making you re-acquire the target. And frankly, if you've fired five shots at the same target and not knocked them down yet, you need to be made to take that few seconds to rethink what you're doing anyway. And remember, re-evaluating the situation and re-acquiring the target is exactly what the use-of-force doctrine of every police department says that you're supposed to do, not after every five shots (let alone 16), but after every one shot.
So if the police unions say that it is unavoidable for at least one in four officers to use his weapon as if it were a fully automatic machine gun every time he hears a gun go off, why are we issuing them guns that do a good imitation of a fully automatic machine gun? Weapons that have no actual tactical advantages over the good old fashioned .38 revolver, which is substantially safer for the public and for their brother officers for them to carry? Because if there's any reason other than penis envy, the fear of showing up at a fight with a gun that is smaller than the bad guy's and therefore feeling less manly, I have yet to hear one that holds up under close inspection.
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bradhicks- J. Brad Hicks
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I can justify semi-autos for police quite readily, but it has a lot to do with multiple assailants and solo officer survival.
Real life intrudes, more later.
There are three highly interrelated problems: unrealistic expectations of human performance in a gunfight, poorly trained police, and grossly negligent supervision of undercover officers.
Your proposed solution is an engineering control -- remove the semi-auto and replace with a 5 shot .38 revolver. I believe this creates more problems than it solves.
The typical defensive officer-vs-criminal confrontation fits one of two gross categories: either one officer suddenly attacked with deadly force (possibly by multiple assailants), or an arrest-and-control situation gone out of hand with the felon now attempting to kill the officer. There are a number of characteristics of the semi-auto which are essential for officer survival in these cases.
A few facts first.
1) Bullets are freaky. One hit can kill, but it's not the outcome to bet on. To stop a deadly threat, you need to put two to three rounds into the chest or head cavities.
2) In police handgun shootings at 10 feet, police officers miss with five out of six rounds fired.
3) The average police officer, despite having cursory training at the academy, is no more prepared for a gunfight than the average dog groomer is prepared for being attacked by a pack of vicious dogs.
4) Not very many agencies have ANY tactical handgun training post-academy. Range requalifications induce fatal habits, such as failing to seek cover and being more worried about your brass than about the incoming fire.
5) "Even Hercules cannot fight two."
So given the above, here are the justifications for semi-auto:
1) At point blank, volume of fire with higher probability of stopping the deadly threat. In the single officer, single attacker scenario, the officer may fire 14 rounds and only get two solid hits. The additional rounds fired are the margin of survival. Unless the first mag stops the threat, especially against knife attack, the officer may well not survive to reload.
2) Eliminates fatal pause to reload against multiple assailants. A trained officer will engage the first threat, possibly being shot in the process (exchange of gunfire), and still have rounds remaining to hit or at least startle the 2nd attacker long enough to reload and re-engage, or crawl to cover, or at least hit the emergency transmit on the radio.
3) Improved odds of standing off superior assailants until reinforcements can arrive. (i.e. North Hollywood) The extra ammo on the officer's belt, which is rarely used even in a shootout, gives a margin of safety with which to defend hard cover against a superior, heavily armed opponent(s) who otherwise would walk up and kill you.
4) Still possible to operate handgun after an officer has been shot. This is the real reason for the light trigger pull after the first round fired. In most of the single officer survival situations, the officer has already been shot, stabbed, hit over the head, etc. and must overcome wounds to engage and survive.
I could also argue the cylinder-vs-magazine debate, size of a .38 4" barrel vs. an equivalent Glock, safeties and jams and malfunction drills -- but any gun magazine runs that article at least twice a year, so I'll skip it here.
What we have in this NYCPD incident is a zebra -- undercover officers, failing to adequately identify themselves, who engage in mass fire on a vehicle and then are under enormous pressure to lie like hell to cover it up. Whether they carry .38 snubnose revolvers (which ARE a good pick for U/C work, not incidentally), high-capacity semiautos, or full auto MP-5s with folding stocks pales in comparison to the real problems:
1) Poor judgment in initiating a confrontation that is arguably unnecessary and motivated by egos rather than good police work.
2) U/C officers initiate police activity without adequately identifying themselves. Not deploying identification tools (badge, raid jacket, etc) or intermediate weapons (expandable baton, pepper, handcuffs visibly held, etc.)
3) Uniformed backup is not immediately available to intervene instead of compromising the U/C officers.
4) Little or no training in working together in a confrontation.
5) "Contagious gunfire" encouraged by agency culture.
And OK, you've justified the hair trigger pull. Maybe. I saw some of the same studies you've seen, I think, and they show that after the first bullet hit, no matter how light the trigger pull, your typical officer isn't still returning fire. Even a graze tends to knock people out of the fight for long enough that the suspect escapes.
And speaking of the suspect escaping, how often, really, does that first shot fired not actually end the fight? You don't have to hit, let alone kill, someone who realizes that they're being shot at and runs away, do you? Once you've fired five shots at someone, how often do they continue to keep coming at you? Contrary to common police officer myth, you're not fighting The Incredible Hulk out there.
People pushing guns for personal defense frequently point out that most times a weapon is drawn in personal defense, the weapon is not fired. Come to think of that, that's true of criminal uses of firearms, too. A weapon is a clear signal: stop what you're doing, or I will attempt to kill you (and have about a 1 in 12 chance of pulling it off, not that most people know that math). That tends to stop the fight right there, doesn't it?
It's interesting you should bring up North Hollywood, because I was going to cite it on my own side. Once they'd forced the cops to put their heads down, the North Hollywood bank robbers didn't put any particular effort into killing the cops. They didn't need to. All they needed to do was to escape. Every officer there emptied their weapon, emptied their spare ammo, pulled their backup weapons out of the trunks of their cars if they could get to them and emptied those, too. Against a hardened target, hitting them with 31 shots was no different in outcome from hitting them with 5. And as I keep saying when we have this discussion, stray rounds and ricochets don't just blip out of existence like video game pixels. So when a police officer engages in suppressive fire or sprays-and-prays hoping for that "million dollar BB" that will bring down a target that the first five shots didn't hit, every subsequent shot increases the odds of killing another officer or a civilian.
The first is that the officers used spectacularly shitty judgement. They should be thrown off the force for the way that they engaged the suspect -- whether or not he was guilty of anything.
The second is that, yes, while most police engagements where the gun is drawn either end there, with the show of an intent to use deadly force if the suspect doesn't stop what he's doing, NOW, and comply, police officers run into other situations where automatics are a good thing, where a simple show of intent to use lethal force won't stop them. People who're crazy or high on drugs like PCP, who are still capable of functioning -- and, more to the point, still out to get the cop -- even after they've taken a non-lethal bullet. Criminals and crazies who don't have anything to lose, and crazy shit like that bank robbry where the two robbers were done up in doubled bullet-proof vests. While these are rare things, the nature of the police officer's job makes it so that they're a lot more likely to encounter them. It'd be nice if the cops could just shoot someone in the leg or something to disable them, but when you've got a guy rushing at you with a knife, you get your gun out and up, and he's a few feet away, now, and closing -- a point blank situation where aiming doesn't come into the equation -- you want to be able to shoot, and keep shooting, until the attacker is down and unable to function.
High refire rates, light pulls, and larger magazine capacities make bad situations more surviveable for the cops. The problem is when you run into the -culture- of some of these police departments, and the fact that not everyone who's carrying a gun out there as a cop should be. They're people, and people are fallable.
Because I've been assured by psychopharmacologists both legal and illegal that this PCP = super-soldier serum is a myth. So is there an actual police officer, even one, somewhere in America who can actually say, "Thank god I had that 15-round clip, or I would have been a goner, because after I shot that guy five times he kept on coming"?
This would not only bring in sober officers, but would also preserve the undercover officer's cover identity.
To split hairs, almost all police carry pistols with dual-action. For the first shot, they are "hair-triggered" only by choice, if the hammer pulled back by hand.
When my dad was on the police reserves, they all carried Ruger P85s (9mm). The 15 shot clips are standard, but expanded 17- and 20-shot clips are available. After a couple of years, they went to 10mm because the 9s "didn't have enough stopping power." That's not enough stopping power even with hollow points, their standard ammo. This in a town where the only discharge of a weapon in 10 years was a loose pitbull (officer emptied the clip, got to find a new job).
Isn't there somthing with more shots and less automatic? Like, in between the ones you described? And how to English Bobbies get by without guns at all?
In general, though, firearms crimes are rarer in the UK than they are in the US, presumably because there are so many fewer guns in circulation. There are concerns that gun violence is increasing, though.
Then how do you explain Canada, which has *more* guns per capita than the USA and still has a lower gun crime rate?
The argument that other places would have the same problem if they just had more guns doesn't hold water, because there are places with more guns than the USA and a lower crime rate, and places with more and a higher rate. There are places with fewer guns and a lower crime rate, and there *might* be places with fewer guns and a higher gun crime rate, but I don't know of any, especially since, last time I checked, the USA among the worst of the third-world countries that didn't have an active civil war going at the time.
It is, of course, pointless to argue what Britain would be like if it had lots of guns, because it never has; gun ownership has simply never been as widespread as it is in the US.
But my point was that the question was "how do British police cope without guns?" A big part of the answer is "they are far less likely to need them in the first place." You may think that the low gun crime levels and the lack of guns are a coincidence, but either way the point is that it's not something British police officers are as likely to have to deal with as US ones.
If you're really serious about getting guns, you can get them -- either pre-ban weapons now on the black market or stuff smuggled in from Europe. But it is pretty expensive and time-consuming, and can occasionally lead to weird incidents like something that happened in Nottingham this year. A guy got arrested for having a MAC-10 hidden in his girlfriend's house. The paper listed all the stuff he had for it -- so he had the gun itself, which had been modified to fire full-auto, a holster, some other piece of kit ... and like 9 bullets.
Similarly, a young woman who was shot in the head in a well-publicized crime earlier this year survived because the home-made bullet shattered against her skull rather than penetrating it. So it does seem that it's difficult for some criminals to get their hands on effective firepower.
(NOTE: I used to belong to the NRA, and I do not favor a ban on guns. I just think they're waaaaaayyy too easy to obtain as things are. Hell, here in the South it's harder to obtain a marriage license than a gun - I know from experience!)
It's getting to the point where they WANT to carry guns.
British patrols all have to wear knife-proof vests because so many of the criminals out there are armed with some really nasty weapons, including kitchen knives, ice picks and other lovely items.
When I spent half a year in Scotland, I got to watch their version of "Cops" on the telly, and the bad guys all know the cops don't have guns. As a result, they have no deterent to starting a fight with a UK cop. This is why you'll never see a lone police officer in the UK. They're always in teams of two or more.
There'll be rare occassions where the overall police and camera presence allows officers to be on their own, but that's because they know backup in only a few seconds away.
But I did notice, that once the rest of the cops arrive on the scene, there is some MAJOR beat-downs being handed out. Catching an ASP across your kidneys or the back of your knees will take down anyone.
The Brits may have that stiff upper lip thing going on, but their cops will give you a busted one.
They don't carry tasers, pepper spray, and the like?
The NYPD has a history of shooting unarmed people of color, of excessive use of rounds and number of guns, and a lack of accountability. The so-called "War On Drugs" has caused so much misery mainly because it's given law enforcement too much power in one way or another.
The killing of that poor guy is an atrocity, and we really need to get a handle on law enforcement or these events will keep repeating themselves. The video camera has been the best modern tool to control police abuse, so I would look for solutions that put police action on video as part of the solution.
But video cameras alone won't do it. We need to create true oversight, and prosecute any police officer who kills without warrant as was done here. A few cops sent to prison would speak volumes. I also believe there are more good solutions, but I just cannot think of any at the moment.
Great post, though! I really like reading your stuff!
As others have pointed out, the problem here isn't that the police officers had semi-automatic handguns with extra high-capacity magazines. The problem here was one of judgment. IF what you say is true, then the police have committed murder here. They intentionally escalated the situation, and then shot and killed others who were trying to de-escalate (by getting away). If the police can get away with committing murder, then what gun they carry really doesn't matter, does it?
I guarantee you that, if the police actually screwed up here, then the investigating officers know it, and it will come out eventually. The NYPD has gone beyond the days of Serpico and "American Gangster" and Thank God for that. And, some civil attorney will smell blood (money) in the water, and come a-suin'.
What's needed here is training. One of the biggest myths about police is that they actually know what they're doing when it comes to handguns. Too often, especially in large cities like New York, where an anti-gun mentality has prevailed for, what, a century? the police generally encounter criminals who have little or no training with firearms. The police win gunfights against armed criminals not because the police are so good, but because criminals are generally extremely bad. It's not like there's a New York Criminal Academy with a pistol range where they can train and practice. So, the police get the mindset that they can just wave a gun and the world will comply... but sometimes, for whatever reason, that doesn't happen, and if the resister is truly a Bad Guy, you want an M60 when the battle flag goes up, not a piddly Glock.
Now, speaking as to whether the police should carry semi-automatic pistols with multiple high-capacity magazines, I'm in favor of this, just as I'm in favor of law-abiding citizens of all types being able to carry semi-automatic pistols with multiple high-capacity magazines. In a self-defense situation, the smart person plans for the worst-case scenario. "Worst-case" includes multiple attackers, misses, etc. What do you do when you've blown through all five rounds in your .38 Special snubnose? WRT crackheads and PCP freaks, I've known of a police officer who was killed fighting someone on PCP. I've known numerous police officers who have been in fights, trying to subdue someone who was 'dusted.' They've literally broken a guy's arm by having him in a compliance hold, increasing the pressure to try and get the guy to quit fighting back, and after the arm snaps the 'duster' just looks at them, smiles, and keeps on fighting. How do you compel someone to stop resisting, when you've just broken their arm and they're still trying to beat the hell out of you?
If you really don't believe that PCP freaks are almost immune to pain, go to YouTube and search for 'PCP', and watch a few of the videos.
The science is all on my side here, as are all the user experience reports. PCP doesn't make you immune to pain. Sufficient fear, however, makes you willing to go to heroic lengths despite the fact that you're in agonizing pain. If in the grips of a PCP hallucination, or even if (like Rodney King) you don't trust police officers not to kill you, you conclude that surrender is not an option and you absolutely must get away, no matter how badly it hurts, or you will die? No amount of pain will stop you. That's not the drug. That's desperation.