Earlier today, well yesterday, an officer whom I know pretty well was faced with a situation where he had to make an instant decision. Here's how it went down. You are the officer.
You are called to the scene of a disturbance, that's all you have at this point. You arrive to the scene and you have two females arguing along with a large crowd. Two parties means, call for back up. You do just that and continue on. Before you intervene you need to look at the area and make sure it is safe for you before you step in. All is clear, you decide everything is alright. You yell at the ladies and start to try to break up the fight. One lady turns on you and goes after you with a knife.
On your belt you have 3 options. OC spray, tazer, and your fire arm. Let me explain these briefly...I have been put through the pain of two of the three. Remember...hopefully you have about 1 second to act.
OC spray- pepper spray takes about 2 seconds to take effect. First effects aren't too bad. After about 5 seconds you really are hating life. Your eyes burn and any sensitive skin it came in contact with burns also. Breathing can become difficult. Now, to apply this, you must unsnap your belt, make sure the very small nozzle is pointing in the right direction. Then pull the trigger. Movement is still entirely possible during all of the effects.
Tazer- Took me to the ground slowly but I was able to fight it for a second or two. Prongs need to be applied to the correct area from a bit of a distance so the prongs can spread. There have been many instances where the tazer does not work properly.
Fire Arm- Pretty instant. Always ready to fire. I takes me .380 seconds to draw my weapon and put it on target and to make an accurate shot to the chest from 7 feet. That was with a timer on my shoulder and I was expecting it to go off. So I was ready.
Now, what do you do? Pull your tazer? Pull your OC spray? Pull your fire arm?
SPOILER- This officer chose to draw his firearm. He took two instant shots. Two shots to the chest. The lady who had pulled the knife dropped dead.
Fast forward a bit to the investigation now. Remember how there was a crowd? That crowd was all her family with a few randoms. This was a white officer and the suspect was black. The family of the suspect is claiming racism. The are all claiming that the officer got out of his car while the ladies were arguing and simply shot one of them in the back. They claim the officer never warned anyone to drop a knife and that the girl never had a knife (officers recovered a knife by the body). The randoms I mentioned earlier all claimed that the officer did indeed warn the woman to drop the knife which they all claimed to have seen a knife.
The family hired a very well known defense attorney and he will be claiming that the officer should have used his tazer and is wanting to get the officer on murder charges.
Thoughts? Would you have pulled the trigger? Used a tazer?
I expect to see some riots here in Cincy. So stay tuned your news stations
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