I just retired form my department on 12/01/21. Under current policy if you upholstered your taser or a firearm and had it a a low ready position, not pointed at a person. It was still considered a use of force. meaning your body camera turned on to record, You had to write two reports, one for the incident, one for the use of force. Next, the incident had to be reviewed by the use of force committee. They would determine if the force was appropriate or not. Also, they have to look at the frequency of that deputies UOF incidents over the last three year period. The review includes all type of force Taser, ASP, firearms, verbal, and physical. Depending on the number incidents the Deputy could be punished to include termination! This brings to light what the story public does not know about. Most agencies no longer write policy's to support the Deputies they write them to weaponize the Deputies and allow the agency to fire for anything ant any time for just about anything. Yes, the job is very difficult. Freezing on incidents might be understood by some people.
Cs2blue that is a formula to get a cop killed. I was a cop in a big city for 37 years and 13 years with a state agency. I spent most of my time with the PD in an area the DEA called "The Bad Lands". The DEA posted a listed of dangerous assignments and "The Bad Lands" was more dangerous than Columbia or Pakistan. There were a lot of guns and a lot of shootings, sometimes 4 or 5 on a tour.
Whenever you get a cop to second guess his or her decision the bad guy is going to win. Fortunately most of the cops who worked that area were savvy or became savvy real quick.
This bring up the Colorado incident. Many years ago I was working with a Texas Ranger who was riding with our SWAT unit which at the time was called the Stakeout Unit. He was an expert in hand to hand combat. After the Onion Field incident in LA (1963) during which two detectives were kidnapped and assassinated the LAPD wanted to find out if the detectives could have saved themselves. He was asked to participate in the study to review the incident because of his hand to hand combat expertise.
He told me that had the detectives acted quickly and decisively they may have saved them selves but unfortunately that was not the case. He said they did a lot of testing of reaction time using police officers, military people and even Olympic athletes. There was one interesting fact they learned from the reaction time testing. Cops had a pause he referred to as "stop police response" that added seconds to a response. The military participant's response was "bang". There was no hesitation to use force. I suspect the Colorado PO responded as she was trained.
FYI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion_Field
