Shootout in Florida

[jsbhike]

I always thought bell curves indicated below average at one end, above at the other end, and the average in the middle, not the bulk being bad in the middle.

It would indeed seem like getting rid of the 44 police in question in the article would improve things greatly. Based on the article, it seems those 44 were comitting offenses that were ripe territory for getting a conviction over, so why weren't they?

[Sam]

Let's keep the "alt right" discussion out of this, stay on the topic please.

[LowSpeed_HighDrag]

Casualties occur in police work and combat. Deadly conflict is deadly and unpredictable. You cannot elimate risk but thats exactly what society demands these days in police confrontations as well as military combat engagements. You do everything you can to mitigate the risks but you cannot eliminate it from the equation. Mistakes made are learning and teaching points in TTP's. Unfortunately pinning the blame and ending careers is more important in high profile incidents.

Quoted for those who may have missed this well thought out post.

As a police firearms and tactics instructor, reviewing the AAR and footage from this and implementing it into a training scenario will be my utmost priority. But I wonder, and would like honest answers:

What do we reasonably expect the outcome of an intense urban firefight to be where bullets continue to travel through intended targets?

What do we reasonably expect officers to do when they come under intense fire in an urban environment that is congested? Stop the threat or allow the threat to continue firing?

What do we reasonably expect human beings to do when they come under intense fire in regards to taking cover behind cover or concealment?

[Arik]

One of the videos I saw, taken from a car I believe was next to the older guy that was killed, showed a crowd of people that looked like they were leaving work all walking right toward the incident, just like they would normally do, through the crosswalk. They appeared to be totally oblivious to the huge amount of police and the fact that anything was going on even though the squad cars were clearly visible and sirens were blaring. It wasn't until shots started popping off that they, as a whole, even seemed to notice something was wrong.

.

You get desensitized to that. How often you see major accidents with tons of flashing lights and sirens. Just this Saturday they're was a whole parade of cop cars near my house. Someone wasn't paying attention and slammed into the back of another car which caused a chain reaction.

[dwhitehorne]

Quoted for those who may have missed this well thought out post.

As a police firearms and tactics instructor, reviewing the AAR and footage from this and implementing it into a training scenario will be my utmost priority. But I wonder, and would like honest answers:

What do we reasonably expect the outcome of an intense urban firefight to be where bullets continue to travel through intended targets?

What do we reasonably expect officers to do when they come under intense fire in an urban environment that is congested? Stop the threat or allow the threat to continue firing?

What do we reasonably expect human beings to do when they come under intense fire in regards to taking cover behind cover or concealment?

All good questions. Unfortunately we live in the era of second guessing and litigation. Everyone sees these gunfights on TV and movies everyday and think that is reality. The good guy has hundreds of rounds in one magazine and blasts away at everything that moves without a single stray bullet. In reality when someone breaks a fingernail the politically appointed LE leadership is ready to make an example.

We have a specific JPS scenario where an man with a gun points it at the officer and the school yard behind is full of kids. More than half of the officers take at least one shot. Most don't even see the kids until we review. Then we review the course objectives and remind them of Firearms Safety Rule 4 but technically they still took the shot. Something I'm certain they would do in a real situation.

In Force on Force training many times we see the officer duck behind the citizen they are talking with when the Sims rounds start flying. Not something we like to see, but it happens. It's hard to address a reflex reaction in training.

I always refer to a phrase "training by television" because officers watch TV/movies everyday. I see them once a year for In-service and twice for pistol/shotgun quals. It's hard to compete with Keanu Reeves for an officers time and attention. David

[sundance435]

The 1986 Miami FBI shootout has been a case study for 30+ years, and rightly so. This melee on a busy interstate, I feel, will be treated much differently. It just looked like a wild free for all and we are fortunate there weren’t a lot more casualties.

I don't think this is quite the "game changer" that Miami was, but there's 33 years of hindsight, there, too. As others have pointed out, this thing was a shit sandwich from "go", with just varying degrees of bad outcomes. It makes me almost physically ill to see what happened to that UPS driver, but I don't know what I'd have done differently. I do not mean this to sound glib, but there was a one-in-a-million chance that driver was coming out the situation alive, given what we know at this point.

As for what LE should've/could've done differently, I wasn't there - you can't create a policy for that situation if the perp was firing from behind the hostage, especially considering there were occupied cars around the officers. Hostage situation ROEs go out the window when the hostage-taker is shooting back. If this situation is analyzed anywhere near as much as Miami, I have no doubt that the wrong conclusions will be drawn and SOPs/ROEs will change and produce unintended consequences of their own. It's a perpetual pendulum.

You hit several things in your very thoughtful post.

The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department.[/I]

from Million Dollar Murray, an essay by Malcolm Gladwell

The point being, that while there were problems, the public perception that LAPD was a force full of badge heavy racists intent on using excessive force, was wrong. In reality, it was a very small percentage of officers who were the problem. Obviously, this slant wasn't widely reported, as it didn't have a powerful visceral impact.

I've always thought this about LAPD, without having read what you posted (which I will now). LAPD's "problems" were magnified and distorted because of politics and the media, but that's probably not a shock to many on here. Same thing will happen to some degree here, but writ large for all LE. I'm always amazed when I look at LA, twice the size of Chi, with half of the offers, and yet they have a lower violent crime rate with homicide rates not even comparable. I think a lot of the credit for that belongs to LAPD and LASD. I don't have anything to back this up, but in my mind, that's because LAPD prioritizes putting better-trained officers on the street vs. just "more" for political talking points than a lot of big departments.

We have a specific JPS scenario where an man with a gun points it at the officer and the school yard behind is full of kids. More than half of the officers take at least one shot. Most don't even see the kids until we review. Then we review the course objectives and remind them of Firearms Safety Rule 4 but technically they still took the shot. Something I'm certain they would do in a real situation.

In Force on Force training many times we see the officer duck behind the citizen they are talking with when the Sims rounds start flying. Not something we like to see, but it happens. It's hard to address a reflex reaction in training.

I always refer to a phrase "training by television" because officers watch TV/movies everyday. I see them once a year for In-service and twice for pistol/shotgun quals. It's hard to compete with Keanu Reeves for an officers time and attention. David

Couldn't agree more. It's very eye-opening to see as an individual when you go through scenarios like that, as far as what you think you'd do and how you'd perform vs. what actually happens - all without the stress of the real situation. You also can't discount one bit the amount of influence TV and movies have on real-life events like this.

One thing I would like to see as a result of this and other events is a push for better-trained officers, not just putting as many as you can on the streets to score political points.

[Firefly]

FWIW I was told by an old Nam era salt, “Toss enough lead around and somebody gonna catch it”

Not everybody is a sniper or a cleric from Equilibrium.

So I do wish people online would dial back how they could have “done better” when they never been shot at before.

Get shot at a few times. It’s way different when people are shooting back.

[OH58D]

Rule of thumb - If you shoot at Police, they will shoot back.

Looking at this incident and you wonder what the tactics would be in a crowded shopping Mall like Mall of America in Minnesota or Destiny USA in Syracuse, NY? If you have criminals shooting in a crowd towards pursuing Police and at average citizens, what does Law Enforcement do? I guess you could disengage but what if that doesn't stop the criminals shooting?

These are the types of no-win scenarios where I would hate to be the one making that split-second decision and hope that your training is sufficient to handle the situation. This is why I never had any desire to do police work. I had enough of it working urban combat zones just from my aerial platform.

[WillBrink]

Rule of thumb - If you shoot at Police, they will shoot back.

Looking at this incident and you wonder what the tactics would be in a crowded shopping Mall like Mall of America in Minnesota or Destiny USA in Syracuse, NY? If you have criminals shooting in a crowd towards pursuing Police and at average citizens, what does Law Enforcement do? I guess you could disengage but what if that doesn't stop the criminals shooting?

These are the types of no-win scenarios where I would hate to be the one making that split-second decision and hope that your training is sufficient to handle the situation. This is why I never had any desire to do police work. I had enough of it working urban combat zones just from my aerial platform.

If what you posted prior is accurate, that there was a screw up in how the traffic was directed and those in pursuit were caught flat footed when they came to that intersection, and it ended up as it did, would explain a lot I thought.

[Firefly]

I wish to preemptively state that before anybody jumps on the officers trying to clear gridlock traffic, that it is very hard to manage that many vehicles that fast especially with people wanting to be looky loos or simply not taking it seriously.