Mistake Of Fact Shooting Essay
Often time’s darkness causes mistakes to happen, that is no different when it comes to police action shootings. Mistake-of-Fact shootings happen all too often. Although officers are trying some less lethal options, 18% of police action shootings in LA in-between 1998-2002 were thought to be mistake-of-fact shootings. Steps need to be taken to lower numbers of mistake-of-fact shootings. In my opinion officers need more low-light training, less lethal training, and usage of sight alignment. A lot of mistake-of-fact shooting are due to three major things: misidentification of threat level due to impaired visual “contrast sensitivity” in low levels of ambient light, precipitating suspect behavior, and context-based expectations relative to the
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I believe this is a great alternative to shooting first and more officers should be trained to use these before shooting someone. A couple reasons officers should result to less lethal alternatives are: officers experiencing “associative threat assumption,” which means one or more officers conclude that the officer that initiated fire correctly identified an imminent lethal threat, or one or more officers experiences a “mistaken origin of fire” phenomenon, whereby an officer believes shots being fired by another officer are in fact shots fired by the suspect. Basically by officers making mistakes innocent people can be severely hurt or die. Both of these scenarios can lead to pointless, deadly consequences that could have been prevented had the officers used less lethal alternatives. In 1981, NYPD’s SOP made a statement that good sight alignment is essential to target shooting. Sight alignment is available for a reason and yet a significant amount of officers don’t take advantage of it. Sight alignment is there to help officers. In my opinion, if sight alignment is there to help you and improves accuracy, then why not use it? Once again, I feel as if officers were trained in similar to real life scenarios that they were required to use sight alignment it could significantly improve police action
I believe this is a great alternative to shooting first and more officers should be trained to use these before shooting someone. A couple reasons officers should result to less lethal alternatives are: officers experiencing “associative threat assumption,” which means one or more officers conclude that the officer that initiated fire correctly identified an imminent lethal threat, or one or more officers experiences a “mistaken origin of fire” phenomenon, whereby an officer believes shots being fired by another officer are in fact shots fired by the suspect. Basically by officers making mistakes innocent people can be severely hurt or die. Both of these scenarios can lead to pointless, deadly consequences that could have been prevented had the officers used less lethal alternatives. In 1981, NYPD’s SOP made a statement that good sight alignment is essential to target shooting. Sight alignment is available for a reason and yet a significant amount of officers don’t take advantage of it. Sight alignment is there to help officers. In my opinion, if sight alignment is there to help you and improves accuracy, then why not use it? Once again, I feel as if officers were trained in similar to real life scenarios that they were required to use sight alignment it could significantly improve police action