An email writer posed this question: “If a criminal has a knife (no
other weapon), should 2 or 3 cops be able to subdue him?”
That is a good question. It is a question that, if answered
without a realistic understanding of the laws of physics and human capacity, can
result in death, imprisonment, or the end of a career for a police officer.
This particular question includes the assumption, for this
hypothetical, that the person with the knife is a criminal.
Responding
officers, of course, must assess the criminality or dangerousness of a person
with a knife in the light of whatever knowledge they have at the moment that they
make a response decision. There are two overarching issues in this proposition.
The first is the nature of the officer’s observations, the second is the set of
choices made by the knife holder.
Let me deal first with the knife holder. We often talk about
levels of persuasion used by police officers to gain compliance. This is known
as the “use of force continuum” that, until recent years, was standard policy
and training for law enforcement. The idea was that the officer was to identify
and classify the level of resistance they encountered, then calculate a level
just above that resistance and counter with the minimum necessary force to
overcome that resistance.
The continuum usually began with “officer presence” – a
uniformed, authoritative manifestation that presumably produced in the mind of
a rational lawbreaker a desire to submit to an arrest with no further violence.
The continuum was often graphically represented as a ladder or stair steps
ending in deadly force. This model has largely been rejected by both trainers
and courts for a various reasons of practicality.
My point here is that the
idea that it is the officer showing up that is the first determinant of the
wrongdoer’s behavior is erroneous. First and foremost, it is the law that
requires a lawbreaker to submit to an arrest, not the officer. In most states,
even if the arrest is not lawful, the citizen must submit because there exist
remedies that can be applied later.
All citizens, by social contract, agree to submit to authority
and comply with the laws of the land for the greater good of the collective
community. This means that criminal conduct is not only a knowing violation of
the community good, but that criminals explicitly accept any consequences of
their own behavior. Those consequences are well known and predictable.
I’m
perplexed that the current movement whose first assumption is the wrongdoing of
a police officer who uses force to gain compliance with the law, takes no
account of the choices of those against whom force is used who violate the
first rule of citizenship.
The other issue - that of the officers’ decision making
process - is that the decision of how to gain compliance is a complex one. The
factors that go through an officer’s conscious and subconscious mind involve complex
legal and regulatory standards as well as primitive survival responses to basic
brain functions governing the fight, flight, or freeze neurochemistry.
These
factors include decisions based on the officer’s experience and training, some
of which are so instantaneous and instinctive that the officer may not have a
conscious memory of them, or are so subtle that they cannot be communicated or
understood by a calm prosecutor, judge, or jury looking at the known facts from
a distance.
Many of these factors do not show up on video, and most
importantly, do not fit the template that most citizens have how violent
encounters occur because they have little in common with the images of
television and movies that are as imprinted in everyone’s minds. One could
compare television police stories and real world encounters to soap opera romances
compared to real life marriage. Expectations created by fantasy do not create appropriate behaviors in real life.
The tensing of muscles, micro expressions flashing in a
millisecond, a subtle angle of the shoulder or foot, or the change in breathing
can signal – in context – resistance or aggression. Athletes are given great
honor for such instincts in boxing or swinging at a pitch; as well as great
latitude for failure. Interpreting and reacting to the complex physics of a
pitched baseball a third of the time makes a batter a hero! By contrast, one
mistake by a police officer ends a career even if, were all possible facts
known, he or she made a reasonable decision.
As one can see, the question of whether two or three cops
can take a criminal with a knife into custody without using deadly force (the
implication of “without deadly force” being contained within the question)
begins well ahead of what the public would ever see involving many factors that
are not even visible.
If a person who an officer reasonably believes has engaged
in criminal behavior, and is displaying a knife, and who is resisting, evading,
or not complying with a police officer’s arrest, begins the question of what reasonable
level of coercion is necessary to gain the resister’s compliance with the law.
The first question that seems to capture the attention of
critics is the size of the knife. Perhaps common sense would seem to dictate
that a large knife is more dangerous than a small knife, with the scale of
dangerousness diminishing with the size of the blade. This assumption is not
true. Some considerations are the vulnerabilities of human anatomy to a stab or
incision, and the maneuverability of a blade in human hands, rather than how
big or frightening the bladed weapons appears.
Multiple areas of the officers’ body are vulnerable to pain,
disability, and mortality. We don’t have to go past the 9/11 airline hijackings
to remember the lethality of a blade as small as a box cutter.
The August 2015 attack on a Belgian train was stopped by two
trained U.S. military men and a civilian. The three did subdue the attacker,
but one of our heroes suffered a cut from the attacker’s box cutter than nearly
severed his thumb. Addressing, again, the ethics of use of force, a lawbreaker
does not earn the consideration of the lawful actors’ (the good guys) willingness
to have a life altering injury to prevent injury to the lawbreaker. The
lawbreaker has forfeited any such consideration by law and social convention.
The human heart is typically less than three inches from the skin. Stab depths are effected by the elasticity and compression
of the body so that the length of the blade is not the limit of the depth of a
stab wound. Although ballistic material is often worn by police officers, the
material is designed to spread the force of a blunt bullet, not a thin blade.
Therefore a knife could penetrate a bullet resistant vest that can stop a bullet.
Again visiting the ethics of use of force, the fact that an officer has tools,
training, and protective gear for dealing with violent resistance does not,
therefore, justify any concession of advantage to the lawbreaker.
Add to the risk of a single fatal stab, the vulnerability of
eyes, arteries, and fingers to a slashing incision, one can imagine that a
police officer attempting to gain control of a resisting subject who has a
blade might be distracted or disabled by pain, blindness, or dysfunction with
one intentional or accidental slash or stab.
The swiftness of a knife wielding person would obviously be
affected by the size of his blade. A long samurai sword swung in an arc would
take longer to maneuver than a paring knife. This makes the paring knife
potentially more lethal than the sword in close encounters. A ten year old
little league pitcher can hurl a baseball at 50 MPH. A thrusting or swinging
motion with a blade is very fast and can be happening in literally an infinite
number of angles. Add to that any running motion that might be a part of
resistance or attack, even assuming an additional 3 MPH of body motion, makes
any police attack on the knife as a target highly unpredictable.
Many training exercises police use involve a static dummy
target, or role players who simply can’t accurately replicate a person motivated
and willing to kill another person. What our imaginations envision of what a standoff between a
bad guy and some cops would look like is not reflective of the speedy and deadly attack of a
resisting felon in a real confrontation.
The argument that officers can use a night stick to create
distance and knock a knife from a person’s hands assume an officer’s eye hand
coordination under extreme physiological stress is accurate enough to be a
certain success (since a second chance is by no means guaranteed!) The dynamics
of movement, the speed and the infinite possibilities of direction makes
getting close enough for a stick strike too much of a risk.
Not only is hitting the target an uncertainty, the effectiveness
of an accurate strike is not certain either. Resisting criminals may be under
the influence of alcohol, other drugs, or just adrenaline. All of these
chemicals reduce response to pain. This means that a strike must not merely
hurt enough for a person to drop their weapon, the strike must be powerful
enough to break the anatomical structure enough to stop the control of the
attacker over the weapon. That means interrupted nerves, broken bones, and
damaged musculature.
Meanwhile, a motivated aggressor not limited to fighting
just with his or her knife, but with the other hand as well as feet and head
and teeth. Moving in close enough to do anything suggested by a non-lethal
response presents the officers with too many threat variables to effectively
control. I liken it to trying to reach into a blender to stop the blades from
spinning without getting cut.
Another argument is that a gun is never a “fair fight” with
a person who has a knife. A few points to remember are that 1) the resistor is
making a choice to resist the law and the agents of that law and therefore is
not entitled to any fairness until he or she is in custody; 2) just because a
resistor is displaying one weapons doesn’t preclude the possibility that he or
she has an additional weapon; and 3) a bladed weapon, as this writing has shown,
is a deadly weapon and therefore merits a deadly weapon in response – not as a
matter of some street fighting ethics but as a matter of tactics designed for
the good guys to certainly win.
Keep in mind that a failure by the police in terms of
allowing an officer to be wounded or killed, or to allow a dangerous person to
escape and thereby threaten the peace and lives of other citizens, is a very
high cost financially and morally to the community.
The TASER, or other electronic control device (ECD), is not
appropriate as the first choice against an edged weapon. Best practice is to
deploy an ECD against a person with a deadly weapon only if at least one other
officer is present with lethal cover (i.e. with his or her firearm drawn) in
case of ECD failure. ECDs have limitations and conditions for success that make
the outcome of their use too unpredictable to be used as the primary option
when facing a bladed weapon.
It must be noted that even deadly force is uncertain, as in many documented cases of attackers' continued aggression after sustaining a deadly injury. Once again movies have convinced us that people who are shot fall dead immediately, which is rarely true.
The simplest answer to the initial question is no, multiple
police officers should not attempt to arrest a criminal who is armed with a
knife without an immediate deadly force option. The best outcome is always for
the person who has chosen to be armed with a knife to then choose to submit to the lawful
orders of our laws representatives – the police officer.
