On Deadly Force
Here I get into some detail about firearms training and use and the effects of firearms on the human body. My use of language may seem detached and clinical in places; it is deliberate as this is a subject from which distance is a good thing for me. Trigger warnings apply.
One has to wonder how, in such a situation as officers deemed it necessary to shoot, the bullet hit such a vulnerable mark as a head, given that police are trained to not shoot fatally where possible. (Edit: It seems that this is not so universal as I’d thought; Lauredhel’s understanding is that police are trained to not shoot unless they have to shoot someone at once, in which case the only reliable way is a kill shot.)
-- No title for this one.
It's a fairly common misconception that police are trained to shoot people in non-fatal ways where possible. Bad information about firearms is, as they say on this internet thing I keep hearing about, relevant to my interests as I have personal experience with gunshot wounds and their aftermath. The point being this isn't a criticism at all of the person who wrote the post; Chally is for one thing awesome with a heaping side of win and is a gorgeous person from her very marrow all the way out and is for another thing from a country which does not have the sort of fucked up cultural gun-fetish the US does. In no wise should she be expected be carrying gun shit about in her head.
There are two faulty ideas at work here and both are commonplace even in the US (I blame TV for not being violent enough): Police are trained to shoot to incapacitate not kill or are trained to shoot to kill. It is possible to shoot a human with a high degree of confidence xe will not die from it.
The way to make the suspect stop what xe is doing is to put the suspect on the ground and to do that reliably they need to hit a large bone or do a lot of damage very quickly. The most efficient way to do that is to aim for the suspect's center of mass. Aiming for the suspect's head is poor weapons use; it's a difficult shot with a pistol unless one is very close.
If a police does try shooting at a suspect's weapon or at a body part they think might be incapacitating but not fatal xe will likely be chewed out for doing foolish things with guns and putting lives at risk. If the police's use of firearms was particularly foolish and risky xe may have the privilege of carrying a firearm taken away until xe passes a training course.
A bullet through any part of the chest is likely going to result in a sucking chest wound which will ruin anyone's day. A bullet through any part of the abdomen may hit any of several organs many people find useful for continued existence. It is likely to perforate the intestine at some or several points and introduce intestinal microbes into places one would really rather not have them. Shoot someone through the fleshy parts of the upper arms or legs and you'll do a lot of soft tissue damage at the least; if you hit bone (which is not unlikely) it's all too easy to sever the large arteries that run next to those bones. Shoot someone through the forearm, hand, lower leg, or foot, and they may never use that part again. They will likely never regain full use of it.
People do survive the most horrific things, especially with modern surgical techniques and antibiotics available. But that doesn't ever make shooting a person any kind of safe.
Television Lies to You, Part the First: Many -- most -- USian police go their entire careers without ever drawing their service weapons outside of training, never mind firing it. Police who do fire their weapons must account for every cartridge fired with paperwork, hearings, psychiatric/psychological evaluation and/or care, and the possibility of criminal charges and/or civil wrongful death/police brutality/civil rights violations litigation. It is an enormous pain in the ass. One of the many, many, many reasons I loved The Wire [SPOILER WARNING] was I recall them showing precisely one incident where a police shot a person. And that someone was another police. There were none of the goddamn Heroic Totally Justified Shootings that are all over the mainstream fucking cop hagiography dramas.
Go on ask me how much I hate fucking CSI. So. Much. Hate.
(Police who shoot people while in the line of duty are nearly always found to have been justified in so doing even in the most appalling circumstances. This is the system protecting itself. It's still a pain in the ass for the individual police involved in the shooting.)
Television Lies to You, Part the Second: Gunshot wounds are horrifically messy. Recovery is complicated and takes a long time. Mine was self-inflicted and sort of deliberate. I was deeply depressed, probably in a state of depressive psychosis. (I have been psychotic other times also and may be headed there now if I'm not already. It's such a fun way to be crazy y'all. There are no guns in the house now. Just so y'all know.) At the time of the event I was not terribly present; I felt detached from myself and my body as if I was watching as nobody in particular went about my day doing stuff.
The bullet went through the center of the palm of my left hand and in just the thickness of my hand -- about 2.5cm/1in -- it went from an entry wound about 1cm/0.4in to an exit wound 5cm/2in across. There was a stupendous amount of blood. There were scraps of flesh and bone sprayed across a wide arc of my apartment -- I was cleaning bits of me off the ceiling when I got home from hospital. My apartment had 3m/10ft ceilings; I'd been sitting; the bullet track was angled a bit towards the floor.
I have no idea how long I was in surgery the first time. There was a second surgery, grafting bone from my forearm to my metacarpals. The third and fourth left metacarpals are still a centimeter or so shorter than they ought to be; some bits are gone entirely and they had to just sort of put the shattered bits that were left in the same place with wires to hold them steady and hope they grew back together. The fourth healed in such a way the finger attached to it flexes in a plane not parallel to the other fingers on that hand; it's rotated a bit. I spent months doing occupational therapy to keep the tendons that move my fingers from getting bound up in the scar tissue. I spent months debriding the wound twice a day, careful to get all the gray stuff out lest there be pockets of dead tissue left in my hand. In the earliest stages I got far better acquainted with what my own living bone and tendon look like than I ever cared to; the hole was deep. I had to teach myself how to type again, how to play video games again.
I'm wired to be ambidextrous -- so much so I don't even have a dominant eye. There used to be a lot of things I did equally well with either hand. Most of those are gone now. It hurts most of the time. It's a very good barometer and it aches a lot when it's cold. The scars and the foreshortened bones and the off-rotation finger seem terribly obvious to me though almost no one else sees it unless I point it out.
I was ludicrously ridiculously stupendously lucky. You have no idea. The bullet itself -- a .357 Magnum hollowpoint round (it's at the big fucking gun end of things for y'all without personal experience of such) -- didn't expand as it was designed to and did less damage than it could have. For all the damage I did to the bones and soft tissue I managed to not damage the big tendons that run across the back of my hand. Somehow I still had vascular response in my fingernails despite the BIG FUCKING HOLE through my hand. (Those of y'all with experience in the medical professions will be unsurprised to know I was a sensation in Emergency. Every physician and med student in the department came by to see the person with the BIG FUCKING HOLE who still had vascular response in the fingernails. As they'd given me a shitload of morphine and the bleeding had finally slowed to something reasonable I didn't particularly care just then. The orthopedic surgeon they called was The Guy on the west coast of the U.S. for extremities surgery.
I could have done more nerve damage than I did. (Some of the third common digital nerve grew back and there's some sensation though it's... odd.) I could have lost those fingers entirely. I could have lost most of that hand or the use of it.
Thirteen years and twenty-six days ago I harmed myself in a big way. I still have not worked out how to forgive myself for it.
[1] Obviously there are officers who use force in inappropriate ways. There are many who do for many reasons. They may even justify their use of force as falling within training and policy. I'm only talking about the training. What they actually do, of course, varies.
[2] More generally police are trained (see note [1] about the relationship between training and what police actually do) to evaluate all situations where a person is engaged in undesirable behavior and use only the amount of force appropriate to that undesirable behavior (it is not appropriate to shoot to death a person who is already in restraints and on the ground and not resisting the police's commands -- to choose an example at not even a little bit random[3]) necessary to get that person to stop the undesirable behavior without undue risk to police or bystanders.
[3] BART Police Department Officer Johannes Mehserle's contention that his shooting Oscar Grant in the back of the head while he was in restraints and on the ground was not murder because he was reaching for his TASER and drew his pistol by accident is bullshit on many levels.
This entry was originally posted at http://kaninchen.dreamwidth.org/2432.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
One has to wonder how, in such a situation as officers deemed it necessary to shoot, the bullet hit such a vulnerable mark as a head, given that police are trained to not shoot fatally where possible. (Edit: It seems that this is not so universal as I’d thought; Lauredhel’s understanding is that police are trained to not shoot unless they have to shoot someone at once, in which case the only reliable way is a kill shot.)
-- No title for this one.
It's a fairly common misconception that police are trained to shoot people in non-fatal ways where possible. Bad information about firearms is, as they say on this internet thing I keep hearing about, relevant to my interests as I have personal experience with gunshot wounds and their aftermath. The point being this isn't a criticism at all of the person who wrote the post; Chally is for one thing awesome with a heaping side of win and is a gorgeous person from her very marrow all the way out and is for another thing from a country which does not have the sort of fucked up cultural gun-fetish the US does. In no wise should she be expected be carrying gun shit about in her head.
There are two faulty ideas at work here and both are commonplace even in the US (I blame TV for not being violent enough): Police are trained to shoot to incapacitate not kill or are trained to shoot to kill. It is possible to shoot a human with a high degree of confidence xe will not die from it.
- Police are trained to shoot to incapacitate not kill or are trained to shoot to kill.
The way to make the suspect stop what xe is doing is to put the suspect on the ground and to do that reliably they need to hit a large bone or do a lot of damage very quickly. The most efficient way to do that is to aim for the suspect's center of mass. Aiming for the suspect's head is poor weapons use; it's a difficult shot with a pistol unless one is very close.
If a police does try shooting at a suspect's weapon or at a body part they think might be incapacitating but not fatal xe will likely be chewed out for doing foolish things with guns and putting lives at risk. If the police's use of firearms was particularly foolish and risky xe may have the privilege of carrying a firearm taken away until xe passes a training course.
- It is possible to shoot a human with a high degree of confidence xe will not die from it.
A bullet through any part of the chest is likely going to result in a sucking chest wound which will ruin anyone's day. A bullet through any part of the abdomen may hit any of several organs many people find useful for continued existence. It is likely to perforate the intestine at some or several points and introduce intestinal microbes into places one would really rather not have them. Shoot someone through the fleshy parts of the upper arms or legs and you'll do a lot of soft tissue damage at the least; if you hit bone (which is not unlikely) it's all too easy to sever the large arteries that run next to those bones. Shoot someone through the forearm, hand, lower leg, or foot, and they may never use that part again. They will likely never regain full use of it.
People do survive the most horrific things, especially with modern surgical techniques and antibiotics available. But that doesn't ever make shooting a person any kind of safe.
Television Lies to You, Part the First: Many -- most -- USian police go their entire careers without ever drawing their service weapons outside of training, never mind firing it. Police who do fire their weapons must account for every cartridge fired with paperwork, hearings, psychiatric/psychological evaluation and/or care, and the possibility of criminal charges and/or civil wrongful death/police brutality/civil rights violations litigation. It is an enormous pain in the ass. One of the many, many, many reasons I loved The Wire [SPOILER WARNING] was I recall them showing precisely one incident where a police shot a person. And that someone was another police. There were none of the goddamn Heroic Totally Justified Shootings that are all over the mainstream fucking cop hagiography dramas.
Go on ask me how much I hate fucking CSI. So. Much. Hate.
(Police who shoot people while in the line of duty are nearly always found to have been justified in so doing even in the most appalling circumstances. This is the system protecting itself. It's still a pain in the ass for the individual police involved in the shooting.)
Television Lies to You, Part the Second: Gunshot wounds are horrifically messy. Recovery is complicated and takes a long time. Mine was self-inflicted and sort of deliberate. I was deeply depressed, probably in a state of depressive psychosis. (I have been psychotic other times also and may be headed there now if I'm not already. It's such a fun way to be crazy y'all. There are no guns in the house now. Just so y'all know.) At the time of the event I was not terribly present; I felt detached from myself and my body as if I was watching as nobody in particular went about my day doing stuff.
The bullet went through the center of the palm of my left hand and in just the thickness of my hand -- about 2.5cm/1in -- it went from an entry wound about 1cm/0.4in to an exit wound 5cm/2in across. There was a stupendous amount of blood. There were scraps of flesh and bone sprayed across a wide arc of my apartment -- I was cleaning bits of me off the ceiling when I got home from hospital. My apartment had 3m/10ft ceilings; I'd been sitting; the bullet track was angled a bit towards the floor.
I have no idea how long I was in surgery the first time. There was a second surgery, grafting bone from my forearm to my metacarpals. The third and fourth left metacarpals are still a centimeter or so shorter than they ought to be; some bits are gone entirely and they had to just sort of put the shattered bits that were left in the same place with wires to hold them steady and hope they grew back together. The fourth healed in such a way the finger attached to it flexes in a plane not parallel to the other fingers on that hand; it's rotated a bit. I spent months doing occupational therapy to keep the tendons that move my fingers from getting bound up in the scar tissue. I spent months debriding the wound twice a day, careful to get all the gray stuff out lest there be pockets of dead tissue left in my hand. In the earliest stages I got far better acquainted with what my own living bone and tendon look like than I ever cared to; the hole was deep. I had to teach myself how to type again, how to play video games again.
I'm wired to be ambidextrous -- so much so I don't even have a dominant eye. There used to be a lot of things I did equally well with either hand. Most of those are gone now. It hurts most of the time. It's a very good barometer and it aches a lot when it's cold. The scars and the foreshortened bones and the off-rotation finger seem terribly obvious to me though almost no one else sees it unless I point it out.
I was ludicrously ridiculously stupendously lucky. You have no idea. The bullet itself -- a .357 Magnum hollowpoint round (it's at the big fucking gun end of things for y'all without personal experience of such) -- didn't expand as it was designed to and did less damage than it could have. For all the damage I did to the bones and soft tissue I managed to not damage the big tendons that run across the back of my hand. Somehow I still had vascular response in my fingernails despite the BIG FUCKING HOLE through my hand. (Those of y'all with experience in the medical professions will be unsurprised to know I was a sensation in Emergency. Every physician and med student in the department came by to see the person with the BIG FUCKING HOLE who still had vascular response in the fingernails. As they'd given me a shitload of morphine and the bleeding had finally slowed to something reasonable I didn't particularly care just then. The orthopedic surgeon they called was The Guy on the west coast of the U.S. for extremities surgery.
I could have done more nerve damage than I did. (Some of the third common digital nerve grew back and there's some sensation though it's... odd.) I could have lost those fingers entirely. I could have lost most of that hand or the use of it.
Thirteen years and twenty-six days ago I harmed myself in a big way. I still have not worked out how to forgive myself for it.
[1] Obviously there are officers who use force in inappropriate ways. There are many who do for many reasons. They may even justify their use of force as falling within training and policy. I'm only talking about the training. What they actually do, of course, varies.
[2] More generally police are trained (see note [1] about the relationship between training and what police actually do) to evaluate all situations where a person is engaged in undesirable behavior and use only the amount of force appropriate to that undesirable behavior (it is not appropriate to shoot to death a person who is already in restraints and on the ground and not resisting the police's commands -- to choose an example at not even a little bit random[3]) necessary to get that person to stop the undesirable behavior without undue risk to police or bystanders.
[3] BART Police Department Officer Johannes Mehserle's contention that his shooting Oscar Grant in the back of the head while he was in restraints and on the ground was not murder because he was reaching for his TASER and drew his pistol by accident is bullshit on many levels.
- If his equipment were arranged such that the TASER and the pistol were in that close proximity it was a serious violation of weapons safety principles. A highly-lethal weapon (a pistol) and a less-lethal weapon (a TASER -- they are not non-lethal; they are only less-lethal) which might be possible to confuse -- if they have similar shapes and are operated in similar ways -- should be separated spatially to reduce the likelihood of such confusion actually happening. The pistol goes on the right side of the belt, for example, and the TASER goes on the left. Sure it slows you down when you draw one or the other but the idea here is safety not to be the quickest draw in town, asshole. People fucking die. (I keep forgetting that No Humans Involved thing. Fucking cops.)
- Even though a pistol and a TASER have similar shapes and are operated in similar ways they have very different masses. The trigger pull -- the amount of force required to cause the weapon to discharge -- should be very different. How was it you were unable to recognize the differences between your weapons in this highly controlled unthreatening unstressful situation? (Actually I'll come back to trigger pull from another direction in a bit.)
- Why were you going to zap this guy who was already in restraints and on the ground in the first place? A TASER is, like all your weapons, meant to be used only to cause a person to stop an undesirable behavior. What exactly was Mr. Grant doing that the use of even TASER-level force was appropriate? I strongly suspect if you had intended to use your TASER on the man you were doing it with the intent of using it as an instrument of punishment, not to get him to stop doing something. As a police punishment is no part of your job. Punishment is no part of any police's job. Punishment is a judicial function. You are part of the executive branch of government in the US.
- We're back at firearms safety protocols, Officer Mehserle. You carry a semiautomatic pistol, Officer Mehserle. Safety protocols tell us your sidearm should be worn with the safety on, uncocked, and with the firing chamber empty of a cartridge. To shoot Mr. Grant in the back of the head, Officer Mehserle, you should have had to draw your pistol, unsafe your weapon, and chamber a round and cock the hammer by pulling the slide back. Video evidence shows you doing none of these things, Officer Mehserle, save perhaps unsafing your weapon with the thumb switch; you drew your weapon and fired. Even if you had ignored safety protocol and worn your service weapon with a cartridge in the firing chamber, Officer Mehserle, why was your weapon cocked? A double-action trigger pull -- in which the action of pulling the trigger both cocks the hammer and discharges the weapon -- should have been very noticeably different from that of your TASER. A single-action trigger pull should have been different. Tell us, Officer Mehserle, had the trigger pull on your service weapon been altered to discharge the weapon with less force than is required by factory settings? If it had been altered, why? Given the many ways in which you demonstrated unsafe firearms handling -- indeed, Officer Mehserle, unsafe firearms handling forms the centerpiece of your defense -- why should the public trust you ever again with the use of deadly force even if you are acquitted of the criminal charges you face?
This entry was originally posted at http://kaninchen.dreamwidth.org/2432.html. Please comment there using OpenID.