If immediately after police officers accidently shoot nine innocent people while shooting just one bad guy is it “dancing in the blood of the victims” if private citizen gun owners point out the following?
A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.
The study cited above isn’t exactly fair to the cops in the Empire State Building shooting. They correctly identified the bad guy. They had a bad situation with a lot of innocent people in the background. From the latest reports I have read at most ten shots out of 16 hit the bad guy. That is actually an above average hit rate for a self-defense shooting.
I think I could do better in those same circumstances but until you are actually staring down the barrel of someone else’s gun you don’t really know how well all your faculties are going to work when the rest of your life might be measured in milliseconds.
Not sure if we can / should dance in the blood, but pointing this out as a notable example of cop accuracy and side-effects is certainly warranted. 90% of the people these two cops shot were innocent bystanders, and the cops face no charges or serious penalties. More than half of the shots fired by the cops missed the perp and hit bystanders, at a range of less than 6 yards max, some closer to what looks like 2 yards or so, and the target was nearly stationary. Only one of the cops is shooting with a two-handed grip, the other was one-handing it for no obvious reason. It definitely makes a great counter-argument for those that say cops are qualified to carry guns and shoot back.
“More than half of the shots fired by the cops missed the perp and hit bystanders…”
That must be some of that fuzzy math since they fired 16 times and apaprently hit the bad guy 10 times. That would seem to mean to me that more than half of their shots hit the intended target. The bystanders possibly were not all hit with direct shots, or so it is believed. It is thought some were hit by bullet fragments. Others may have been hit by bullets grazing or passing through either the bad guy or another bystander, thus the possibility of more people injured than stray shots fired.
From what you said about the distsance and about how the cops fired, it sounds as if a video, or pics, of the incident have been posted. Can you supply a link please. Thanks.
All the best,
Glenn B
I meant that as a reply to Rolf’s comment.
Glenn – 9 bystanders got shot, out of 16 rounds fired by the cops. 9/16 is more than 50% (56.25% to be precise). If the bad guy was hit 10 times (I’ve not yet seen a specific number on that in the news reports), it means some of the bystander hits were either pass-throughs, ricochets, multiple minor hits from fragments of a single round, or some other sort of bad side effects of not using good bullets and/or not having good shot placement and backstop awareness. I don’t expect perfection, but I don’t want to expect a total Charlie Foxtrot.
The video of the shooting is a couple of posts down the blog under “my next stage design.”
Also In read that some of the wounded were injured with concrete spall when missed shots hit concrete building facades.
So technically multiple people could have been injured by a single stray bullet. Especially if the bullet fragmented or shed its jacket on a ricochet before coming to rest in a bystander.
It seems pretty confirmed that one person was hit directly by a stray police bullet.
We’ll know the specifics when the inevitable lawsuit comes out.