Читать книгу Force Decisions. A Citizen's Guide to Understanding How Police Determine Appropriate Use of Force онлайн

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Further, courts and sensible people everywhere acknowledge that the officer can only be responsible for what he could have reasonably known at the time. He will never know if the three-hundred-pound man trying to take his gun has a heart condition, or that the drug dealer running from him is basically a nice person. He cannot fight differently or choose different ways to avoid fighting based on things he doesn’t know.

Monday-morning quarterbacks and armchair generals are clichés in our society. The academic expert on application of force is no more credible.

Officers “are often required to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary…”^*

HARD TRUTH #4

Sometimes an officer will be forced to make a decision in a fraction of a second on partial information where the BEST choice will leave a corpse, a widow, two orphans, and someone who needs therapy.

Listen up, recruit—

You will make mistakes. A lot of them. You will have only the information you can gather in a few seconds and you will act on that partial information in a heartbeat. Almost every time, you will make the best decision you could have made. You will, however, be judged by people who have the leisure and resources to do research.