The Innocent Little Knife - Why Shoot?

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.

Ferguson Protestors' Rules for Police Inspiring New Era of Negotiation

The “Don’t Shoot Coalition” in St. Louis, Missouri has presented a package of requests to police officials on how to handle protests that will occur after the announcement of the grand jury’s decision on Officer Darren Wilson, investigated for the shooting of Ferguson resident Michael Brown.



Among the requests are no armored vehicles, no rubber bullets, no rifles, no tear gas, a safe house of refuge, advance notice of the grand jury decision, community-friendly policing, no mass arrests, hands off media representatives, allowing longer and more massive occupation of spaces than normally allowed, more tolerance of minor lawbreaking (such as throwing water bottles at police), no excessive force, and a few other details.



This is a great opportunity for others who anticipate criminal activity to jump on the rules of engagement bandwagon. Narcotics peddlers can begin requesting a no SWAT response to search warrants. Bank robbers should be allowed to get an ETA on responding officers to provide a reasonable lead time for their get away. Fraudulent check writers can negotiate for no prosecution unless they write a really bad check. As implied by the Don’t Shoot Coalition, all offenders should be allowed to throw things at police officers if they are sort of small things that probably won’t really hurt that much.



Sex offenders should negotiate being allowed one false identity to avoid the harassment associated with registering all the time. Arsonists, of course, would have to hold separate talks with the fire department officials to promise low water pressure on smaller fires.  Car thieves clearly would need to be assured a full tank of gas and insurance in case they crash when pursued. Unless, of course, pursuits are negotiated out of existence.



The real beauty of this expanding plan is that eventually police officers will be allowed to negotiate on some of these terms. For example, law enforcement could ask for a label on the thrown water bottles to assure that they aren’t filled with acid, urine, chlorine, or made of glass. Or we could just go with the honor system and hope the throwers stick to their principles of assaulting officers with relatively soft things.  The advance notice concept would be very helpful on all criminal activities. Even five minutes would be nice.



As for protective equipment, perhaps a provision that if one officer or more is killed or injured by that rare antagonistic, rule-breaking criminal, then a time out is called and officers can get into their gas masks or armored vehicles as deemed necessary by a standing committee.



Snarkasm aside, protests invite police attention, to be sure. But there is no reason to believe that law enforcement would interfere unless chaos and significant lawlessness break out, as happened during the initial riots. The coalition’s verbiage heavily implies that law breaking is anticipated and planned (but just a little bit). We used to call planning criminal activity “conspiracy”, not “negotiation”.

Brown, Wilson, and the History of Cop Hate

The collective pronoun "they" may be the most dangerous predictor of a tumble from impatience to harshness to hatred. "They always do that." "They need to get their act together." "They should be shot". The beginning of bigotry's hate is the convenience of category.

Comes now Ferguson, Missouri police officer Wilson in the matter of the death of one Michael Brown. Facts and physics be damned, Wilson is carrying the weight of "they" on his shoulders. From the long dead lawmen who gathered up escaped slaves to the ones who let loose the dogs and billy clubs on the Edmund Pettus bridge, Wilson shares a badge tarnished by suspicion and cynicism.

Wilson's decisions are not allowed to stand alone in the court of public opinion. He stands with the "they" of the hatred of cops by some and the love and respect of cops by others. 

Questions of why the prisons are full of young black men stand on Wilson's shoulders. Suspicion of an ever increasing Big Brother government stands there, too. A generation of self-centered, sheltered Americans leap on him. Those who never vote but readily protest and opine climb aboard. Those who fear oppression and those who fear lawlessness comprise his stand.

Darren Wilson was not every officer any more than Michael Brown was every black teenager. The ghost of all of history may hover over every "they", but when two men make individual decisions, the judgment must be framed by those individual moments.

The law is quite settled on these matters. If activists want to change the law that is another debate, but the law as it stands is clear, should anyone care to look:

"The "reasonableness" of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments - in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving - about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation." [Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989)]

Popular opinion fails in precisely the way that the lawmaker's predicted when courts and juries and the calm, rational systems of jurisprudence were designed. The law does not have a chip on its shoulder because a cousin was treated badly by the police. Jurors must not make any correlation between some SWAT team's error somewhere and Wilson's trigger. Those who really want justice wait for truth to be distilled from the chaos of public opinion.

They are few. 

A Cause Turned Stupid

Jim Croce's ballad gave a good definition of wasted effort: You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, and you don't try to make intelligent commentary about the St. Louis area rioting. And yet, here I go.

There was a time, despite the distortions of the Michael Brown shooting, that the opportunity to really talk about justice and race in America was an open door. Although the premise that Officer Wilson shot Brown because of their respective pigmentation remains unsubstantiated, sympathetic minds saw the pent up frustration of a segment of Americans burdened by a legacy of discrimination. Prisons full of black Americans and reports of profiling are compelling.

Then it turned stupid, and thinking citizens are increasingly rightfully embarrassed by the whole affair.

Please take note that when I use the word "stupid", I am only borrowing from our President who has used the word in reference to the police. His endorsement of the word makes it clear that it is not a racist term and that it is appropriate among bright thinkers in discourse of sober matters.

The turning point for most observers was rioting after a black male attempted to kill a St. Louis police officer who shot the man after dodging three bullets. To think that Officer Wilson assassinated Brown at high noon on a Saturday for jaywalking was implausible to begin with, then the subsequent wild anger overshadowed any attention to potential facts. The latest rioting because an officer defended himself from a murder attempt is stupid in the first degree.

The important dialogue was lost early when leaders failed to lead. The discussion was framed by Missouri's Governor acting stupidly by sharpening the pitchforks of the mob and urging swift prosecution of Officer Wilson. Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Johnson acted stupidly when he inflamed the crowd by apologizing for wearing the uniform. Al Sharpton acted just as expected, so I can't say he acted stupidly. But he did fail to act wisely when there are bridges that need to be built and not burned.

And every citizen, regardless of color, who has failed to vote in his or her own back yard has no claim on the shape and color of their local government. Complaining about white rule when 77% of the voting population is black sounds more like consent than rebellion. We are still a democracy and one that was fought for at great, tragic price in the civil rights era by courageous black men and women, and allies of every stripe who should be the heroes whose voices are heard today. One vote is more powerful than any brick thrown through a window.

Protesters who wear shirts that say "Don't shoot me because I'm black" make a mockery of black murder victims where all but 200 of the 2,648 black homicide victims (2012) were killed by one of their own race. And nobody wants to hear that over 40% of officers murdered were killed by black offenders.

The blindness of the whole mess is in the implicit claim that racial disparity in the land is singularly because of the police. If black Americans get relatively poorer prenatal care, have less stable family structures, get lower quality education, worse nutrition, less quality health care, more inadequate housing, less mental health support, fewer opportunities for banking, and all of the host of seen and unseen differentiation in our society why is it that an encounter with a police officer is blamed for our prison population? Let the police be accountable for what is traceable to their discretion. Fixing the police - if indeed they are broken - will not fix the systemic problem that the protesters ostensibly decry.

The fixing that needs to happen will begin with real dialog, real data, and finding out who the real heroes are.

Obama's Hypocrisy on Mistrust of the Police

I try to be honest enough with myself to admit when I agree with something said by somebody with whom I usually disagree . When I saw the headline about President Obama's remarks on mistrust of the police I began my deep breathing exercises in anticipation of another blood pressure spike. To my surprise and delight, the President made several statements with which I agree during a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. Obama spent a significant amount of time on the issue of justice, giving the topic highlighted attention among other sobering topics of war, disease, and the economy. The President, although entertaining applause for the parents of Michael Brown, declined to be accusatory and avoided referring to Brown as being "murdered". Obama accurately said that "the anger and the emotion that followed his death awakened our nation" to the "gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement" rather than saying the shooting was a direct result of racism as is declared by many.

Obama observed that "many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement", using restraint to acknowledge that the problem is one of perception that may or may not be sustained by reality. The President also made references to the perception of inequality in the criminal justice system as a whole rather than going for the easy applause of blaming the police only.

The President also acknowledged that government can't raise America's children, and called for more collaboration with private groups to meet the challenges young people face.

Most interesting is Mr. Obama's use of the phrase "strong policing". In declaring that mistrust harms "the communities that need law enforcement the most" and need "strong policing", this President, for the first time I can recall, acknowledged the value of police officers.

This from the man who famously referred to Cambridge, Massachusetts police officers investigating a reported break-in as "acting stupidly". The facts of the case are that the officers responded to a citizen report of a man attempting to break down the front door. The officers confronted an unknown person whom they asked for identification. The person was a friend of Obama, and is a prominent black scholar who was the homeowner. According to the police report, the man immediately started yelling "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK MEN IN AMERICA!"

Obama refused to back down from his "stupidly" comment, to which he had added an angry polemic about racial profiling, but did make a sideways apology for adding to the "media frenzy" over an issue that is "still very sensitive". The President stated two days after the remark that his words had "I think, I unfortunately, I think gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge police department or Sgt. Crowley". The closest to an apology that I can infer is that, as the President said, "I could have calibrated those words differently", which was perhaps an apology for not finding an acceptable replacement word for "stupid" to refer to the police.

Befitting the low status of a police officer, the President, Joe Biden, the professor, and Sgt. Crowley were invited to talk over peanuts and beer in the Rose Garden of the White House. There was reportedly no apology that arose from that condescending photo op.

While I have yet to forgive the President's harmful remarks in favor of his professor friend, I liked Obama's remarks to the Congressional Black Caucus last week. With a small hope that the inflammatory anti-police sentiment might be turned down a notch by the White House, I'm still waiting for a full statement that America's law enforcement officers, and therefore the public whom they serve, have been put at greater risk by the frenzy of criticism from spineless politicians patronizing black citizens for headlines and votes.

Mr. President, at the time of this writing, seventeen police officers have died in the line of duty since Michael Brown was shot. Seven of those were murdered. Did any Department of Justice representatives attend their funerals, or are words of condolence and support reserved for anyone else but those in blue?

Too Bad It’s Not A Game

I have come to grips with a condition I have struggled with since I was boy. I have LSI (Low Sports Interest). There apparently is no cure. I think I was born this way even though I tried to fight it. I was embarrassed as a young boy when my Dad caught me reading a book about how to throw a football. “You can’t learn to throw a football by reading a book”, he said compassionately. I was confused. After all, the name of the book was “How to Throw a Football”. In junior high and high school I found my leadership and teamwork niche in student council and cut my competitive teeth in debate tournaments. But I still struggled with LSI. Let’s just say that Dad was pretty happy when I joined the Army.

Now the tables have turned. Whereas once I was the wonder of a father who couldn’t understand my lack of manly interest in sports, I am now a father whose son cannot understand my lack of manly interest in sports. My son is a sports fan with notable athletic achievements dating from T-ball and peewee basketball. To try to relate and cement those father-son bonds I will occasionally try to have some quality sports moments. Those don’t last very long because my competitive spirit, honed in the sweat-drenched classrooms of weekend debate tournaments, makes me hate to lose. So, I quit playing when I quit winning. That means that driveway hoops, rec center handball, golf, chess, and thumb wrestling were all bitter memories by the time he went off to seventh grade.

I still attend an occasional pro sports event with him and we have a good time, although I suspect when he finishes college and gets a job my companionship (i.e. buying the tickets) will be less sought after. I still don’t really understand football, or basketball, or the nuances of baseball, soccer, hockey, or the reason I spend a hundred bucks to sit in the middle of screaming intoxicated adults in extended adolescence while trying to read the local paper between plays, or downs, or quarters or whatever they are.

The one advantage that my LSI has provided is that I don’t do any Monday morning quarterbacking; no second guessing of the millionaires who obviously have reasons for making the decisions that their entire lives have been devoted to being able to make. When a batter stands with a thin wedge of matter held above his shoulder, he faces a small sphere that will be hurled in his direction and arrive from the pitcher’s hand to the batter’s torso in about a third of a second. Since the batter’s brain takes a quarter of a second to command the arms to begin his swing, there is less than one tenth of a second to make a decision to swing or not swing. This doesn’t count the milliseconds for the retina to translate a few million inputs, or the micro-adjustments the muscles must intuitively make in order to make the kind of swing most likely to rocket the ball in a certain direction.

Similarly, who am I to question a pass from a quarterback being assaulted by a horde of adversaries anxious to knock him silly, looking into a swarm of movement where the field of opportunity changes with every fleeting moment. Spectators may moan about moves they wouldn’t have made had they been in the batter’s box, but they soon forgive and forget and go about their business.

I wish the public would give the same consideration to officers making their split second decisions. A police officer is thrust into the fight of his or her life. The outcome will not decide who gets a Super Bowl bonus or World Series ring, but who lives and dies. The spectators – always late to the game and depending on replays – will have no experience with which to judge the winner and yet they will be vocal in their opinions while the survivor must remain silent. The field of encounter is not cleared for the contest, it happens right in the middle of the real world. There is little notice, no fanfare, and the adversary plays by no rules while the officer has many. The contest cannot be flagged for penalty, because it is the final play and it will be a sudden death decision.

Fine motor skills will be dulled by primitive body chemistry while those same instincts will focus the senses in ways the officer cannot possibly consciously control. With neurons firing at lightning speed, the officer’s brain will simultaneously reflect on training, emotions, calculations of time and space, moral considerations, and will balance all the training to shoot against all the powerful indoctrinations not to shoot. While the body accounts for movement, light, and all the micro-data accumulated over a lifetime, all comes to focus in one small finger pressing against a very small trigger to create a very small hole in the opponent that may or may not end the encounter. If the officer wins, he or she gets to spend the rest of their career explaining why they chose not to lose.

As it turns out, I signed up for the toughest game of all.