Officer Involved Shooting, this time in South Carolina.  Two white officers one black suspect.  The officers decided to arrest him and told him so. A struggle ensued, five seconds later the suspect got off his first shot.  Four seconds from the first shot the suspect was dead. Good shooting.

Between them these officers probably have hundreds of arrests under their belt.  In 99% of those arrests their tactics worked.  This time they didn’t.  Could they have prevented the shooting, had they altered tactics, I don’t know.

I do know that a suspect has three responses to an arrest, fight, flight or surrender.  Those three options cover a lot of ground. It also requires a rational response on the part of the suspect and that may be a bridge too far.

What I see in the video is a five second gap between the time the officers announce that the suspect is under arrest and the first shot is fired. I think it is safe to say that the suspect felt like fight was a viable option because the officers did not have physical control of him, had not located his weapon and did not coordinate their response (the five seconds).

A phenomena that I have observed over and over again is based on what has preceded, everybody involved knows the suspect is going to jail. However, the fight doesn’t begin until somebody points out the obvious and says “You’re under arrest.” The struggle started with the voicing of the magic words.

Put this in the context of bull riding. The cowboy doesn’t give the nod until he has his grip firmly established.  He knows that once he nods it is to late to change things. When the gate opens he’s stuck with what he’s got.

I always wanted to be ahead of the suspect, that is I had a response for his likely next step, carried out several moves ahead. If I have done things correctly, I am countering the suspect’s moves. Meantime the suspect finds himself in a problem solving mode, which is necessarily slower. He still has time to reconsider fight and opt for surrender or even flight.

The other thing that plays on officer’s minds is the “appropriate use of force.” If the suspect does X what am I entitled to do in response?  This not a TV choreographed brawl where opponents are evenly matched and the rules of Queensbury are observed.

I am not going to meet force with force.  I am going to overcome the suspect’s force with more force. If I have backup, then everybody gets a piece of the action.  Tense up and start to pull away, the suspect is going to the ground, hard. When he gets there I am going to knee drop or kick whatever is handy, because the fight ends now.  Does it look like shit?

Yup, but how does it compare to a sucking chest wound? Sometimes you have to hurt people to keep from injuring them and sometimes you have to injure them to keep from killing them.

Based on the available evidence I don’t know whether black lives matter, or not.  It seems like subjects this rhetoric is designed to protect are way to willing to give it up, way too cheaply.