I was recently interviewed by a journalist from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for an article about the fatal police shooting of a 48-year-old man. He was experiencing a mental health crisis in which the police were called to assist. Armed with a knife that he refused to drop, he was shot and killed by officers. The central questions that the journalist posed included: “can officers shoot to injure/incapacitate for certain encounters?” (specifically non-firearm threats) and “do they have to aim center mass all the time”? The journalist and her subsequent article are referring to so-called “shoot to injure/incapacitate” options in which officers can – provided that deadly force is justified – aim and shoot non-center mass (e.g., lower abdomen/pelvic girdle; arms; legs) for non-firearm threats, specifically knives/edged weapons and blunt objects, in order to reduce mortality.
Prior to last week, I hadn’t thought much about such policies/options since the summer of 2021 when I served as a panelist during a policy debate at the Peace Officers Association of Georgia’s (POAG) annual conference. That debate was chaired by John B. Edwards, POAG’s Executive Director and one of the most thoughtful minds I’ve encountered in American policing. David Klinger, Seth Stoughton, Renee Mitchell, Eric Daigle, William Lewinski, and Alexander Eastman were also panelists. The panel debate was spurred by LaGrange, Georgia’s Police Chief Lou Dekmar’s “shoot to incapacitate” policy that he enacted about a year prior. It received much attention, including both praise and criticism. You can read a bit about it here and here.
After the conference, all panelists were asked to write a short (1-2 pages) response to the question: Would any of you on this panel take this policy back to your agency to be implemented if you were my sheriff? [police chief or agency head] a simple yes or no. It was published in “The Georgia Peace Officer” – the statewide magazine of POAG.
Here was my response, which largely rings as true today as it did back in 2021:
“It is difficult for me to provide a definitive answer to this question. As one of the few panelists who has never been a sworn law enforcement officer, I have little idea what it is like to be in a situation that may call for deadly force to be used. I cannot relate to those officers who are forced to make often split-second decisions with a lack of clarity. Perhaps I would feel differently if I received standard police use of force training or even participated in role-playing shoot/don’t shoot scenarios. Therefore, I will not commit to giving a “yes” or “no.” However, I will say that this policy is certainly deserving of more attention and that it should not be dismissed outright.
Given the totality of the circumstances and the piecemeal approach of the available data, there is sound justification to further explore the utility of “shoot to incapacitate.” The policy is limited in when officers can choose to aim to injure in their attempt to avoid shooting center mass. It will not apply to the majority of police shootings, particularly when officers are being threatened by a firearm or an object perceived to be firearm (e.g., toy/replica or “threat perception failures” where an item like a phone is thought to be a gun). Instead, the policy will only come into play – as another option for officers – in situations where a citizen is in the possession of a knife/cutting instrument or a blunt object when deadly force is already justified.
If the aim of the policy is to preserve the sanctity of life and reduce mortality of those on the receiving end of police gunfire in the aforementioned specific scenarios, then there is a non-trivial number and percentage of deadly force incidents nationally that could potentially benefit from “shoot to incapacitate.” Using data from The Washington Post’s Fatal Force catalogue, from January 1, 2015 through August 14, 2021, 1,158 people were fatally shot when threatening officers with a knife/cutting instrument (18% of all cases) with another 107 who were threatening officers with a blunt object (2% of all cases). Collectively, these situations make up 20% - one-fifth – of all cases of fatal police gunfire over a six-and-a-half-year period. This means there are likely a couple hundred instances across the country each year where aiming and striking non-center mass might preserve life. Survivability is likely partially contingent on officer firearm proficiency (i.e., “hit rates”) and whether bullets can be placed in their desired locations on the body, which is another necessary conversation that needs to take place in concert with such a policy.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to consider the shoot to incapacitate policy comes from the limited information we know about mortality and gunshot location. Whether bullets strike vital organs, specifically in the head/neck and upper chest region, is a critical factor in whether a person lives or dies after being shot. These figures must be pieced together since there is a lack of systemic and consistent data collection efforts of non-fatal shootings. However, data on fatal and injurious shootings in the general population in Boston, MA (2010-2014) as well as police shootings of citizens in California (2016-2019) (see below images) indicate that wounds to the head/torso are most likely to be fatal, while shots to arms and legs are most likely survivable.
From Anthony Braga’s (2021) essay for the Manhattan Institute.
From Nix and Shjarback’s (2021) article in PLoS ONE.
Departments should take all these factors into consideration during the decision-making process, including an analysis into their own history of deadly force and where each agency is geographically located. If, for example, a department’s officers commonly use their firearms in situations with threats of knives/cutting instruments or blunt objects, then “shoot to incapacitate” may warrant more attention. For other departments that largely use their firearms in response to gun threats, such a policy might be less relevant and unnecessary. If the goal, again, is to preserve life, then community context should also be explored. In rural or remote areas where the time and distance to trauma centers is greater, such a policy could be more beneficial to survivability chances. Each and every one of these dynamics – that are department-specific – should weighed by leadership.
A few members of the panel highlighted the idea of unanticipated backfire or revenge effects from this policy. More specifically, an officer who would have otherwise decided not to shoot now takes the shot because he or she is simply shooting to injure/incapacitate. This is a valid concern that we should study and monitor closely. Providing more options for officers may be akin to “net widening” in other criminal justice contexts where newly created intermediate sanctions (e.g., home confinement, electronic monitoring) grew the supervised population even more. However, it is also possible that such backfire/revenge effects can be addressed and minimized by specific policy language with clear guidance that is reinforced by training. Additionally, panelists made the point that we should be restricting officers from taking the shot to begin with if we want to save lives. I wholeheartedly agree, although I do not think this idea and “shoot to incapacitate” are mutually exclusive. The two can work in concert with one another. When applying the Swiss cheese model of accident/failure causation to preserving life in police-citizen encounters, “shoot to incapacitate” policies can be viewed as an additional layer once an officer’s decision to discharge the firearm cannot be avoided.
I will conclude with one final thought. This policy debate is not uncharted territory. American law enforcement has been down this road before. In fact, the history of the profession is ripe with countless examples of departments and their officers both making and responding to drastic changes – some external and others internal. Think about the US Supreme Court’s “due process” revolution in the 1960s (e.g., Mapp v. Ohio, Miranda v. Arizona). Some at the time thought it was going to be the end of policing. Most relevant to the current discussion is the evolving deadly force standards that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The prevailing “fleeing felon” legal standard allowed police officers to shoot in order to prevent the escape of a person(s) they believed to have committed a crime. In 1972, New York Police Department Commissioner Patrick Murphy narrowed officer discretion through a more restrictive administrative policy to only shoot only in “defense of life” situations where there was a risk of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others present. Departments across the country followed suit through the 1970s and early 1980s. An overwhelming body of empirical research found that such policies resulted not only in fewer police shootings of citizens in general, but the largest reductions took place among the most controversial, highly discretionary incidents where officers discharged their firearms against unarmed citizens who were running away. The more restrictive changes did not jeopardize officer safety like many had feared. When the US Supreme Court finally ruled on the matter of legal standards for deadly force in Tennessee v. Garner in 1985, the decision had little impact on American policing since the vast majority of departments had already adopted the more restrictive standards even though they had not been required to do so legally – an argument brought up on panel. The “shoot to incapacitate” debate is eerily similar to this very transformation in in the 1970s/80s. What can we learn from our collective history? The policy is worthy of future discussion and, of course, evaluation and critical assessment.”
