PONDERING THE USE OF DEADLY FORCE

By Greg ‘The Gadfly’ Doyle

Having been witness to the media circus and our president lecturing law enforcement regarding the use of deadly force, I would like to address the accepted standard established decades ago by our court system and implemented country-wide. What are my qualifications to do so?

Unlike our president, I served in both the military and as a peace officer. I spent four years in the US Army and over 28 years as a cop.

I was trained at age 12 in the use of firearms by my father through an approved NRA course. In 47 years of my familiarity, ownership, handling, and safe storage of firearms no one in my family, neighborhood, or community has ever been assaulted or injured by any of my weapons.

However, as a private citizen armed with a pistol, I have personally taken three suspects into custody by aiming my firearm at them and overwhelmingly convincing them of my willingness to kill them if they did not comply with my instructions. To their credit, all three suspects were not willing to die for their crimes at the point of a gun.

As a peace officer, I had aimed my sidearm countless times at persons I believed were an immediate threat to my life or the lives of other officers or citizens, or engaged in criminal conduct. By the grace of God, the only one I ever had to shoot and kill was a Rottweiler dog whose owner(a parolee)had sicked on me before being unwillingly taken into custody.

Shooting that dog was traumatic. But nothing compares to killing another human being. My best friend and one time neighbor, a fellow cop shot and killed a drug dealer during a narcotics transaction in the early 1990's. I will never forget sitting with my friend and consoling him afterwards.

The suspect was seated next to my friend in a car in Montclair, California. A narcotics team was nearby listening in to the drug buy transaction between my friend (an undercover officer)and the suspect.

Within seconds of the transaction, the suspect decided he wanted to rob my friend of the dope he had just sold to him. The suspect pulled a gun and my friend drew his weapon, fired, and shot the man to death.

It was hours before I could speak to my friend because of the internal affairs and Sheriff's shooting investigation that immediately ensued after the incident.

I am glad to report that my friend was cleared of any wrongdoing. He has since retired from police work a few years ago. But that shooting haunted him his entire career, even though it was completely justified.

And for the grace of God and good police training, I could have spoken at my friend's funeral instead of sitting with him at a Denny's restaurant later that evening.

Identifying a threat is not as easy as one might surmise. There are many factors such as the number of suspects, the ratio of suspects to officers, level of compliance by the suspect(s), presence of weapons, visibility, surroundings, movements of suspects preceding contact, escalation of threat by words, sudden unexpected movements, and non-compliance with commands by officers to name but a few.

All of these aspects have been tried and tested by court trials. Officers train in police academies, at their departments, and in state-mandated college courses throughout their careers on the best tactics in hostile circumstances.

And I would not concur with the president's assessment that police officers need more training. Officers are trained to take control. That is their duty when they are called into action. That is why they run toward gun fire. That is why they chase criminals. And that is why they engage suspects with force.

Police officers are not in the business of loving bad people into better choices. It is their business to neutralize threats. Perhaps our president might be more effective in his role as Commander-in-chief if he took some lessons from cops back to the Oval Office:

1. Deadly force is a last resort unless it is the only resort.

2. The vast majority (millions upon millions) of people who are involved in encounters with police (armed or unarmed) have not been killed, regardless of ethnicity.

3. Cops are not trained to wound suspects. A wounded suspect can still kill you.

4. Cops utilize many non-lethal forms of violence to subdue suspects and gain control (to overpower) over them.

5. The rule of law regarding police conduct and the use of force has been established for years. As a constitutional lawyer, our president knows or should know this.

6. The media's general narrative against White cops claiming prejudice against unarmed Black males is not factually based. The media's biased attempts at race-baiting has had a deleterious effect on the morale of current law enforcement personnel and encouraged agitated militants to assassinate police officers.

7. All citizens who abide by the law need not fear contact with American law enforcement. Unlike Washington bureaucrats and elected officials, bad cops do get fired, arrested, tried, and sent to prison for misusing their authority, violating agency rules, and breaking the law. Policing agencies do effectively police themselves to weed out bad cops.

8. Cops have moments in which all of their knowledge, training, and abilities are tested by people they most often are meeting for the very first time.

Most often, these people are agitated, hostile, fearful, and capable of great violence.

Most often they have already committed one or more crimes before being contacted by a cop.

And occasionally they are armed.

And whatever they face in those moments of great threat, POLICE OFFICERS ARE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR DECISIONS AND ACTIONS--- by the public, by the media, by the government, and the courts.

ALWAYS!!!

If only we had a president, government, and media held to the same standard.