Making Sense - Sam Harris - #25

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:39.120 today i'm speaking with scott reitz scott is a 30-year veteran of the lapd

00:00:52.640 he worked in the elite metropolitan division and then became a member of d team otherwise known as

00:00:59.880 swat and he finally became the lead weapons and tactics instructor for the whole metro division

00:01:04.780 so he's a supremely qualified expert on the topic of guns and the use of force both legitimate and

00:01:12.940 illegitimate and i think you'll find his perspective on these matters quite useful and now i bring you

00:01:18.560 scott reitz okay well i'm here with scott reitz otherwise known as uncle scotty to those of us

00:01:29.220 who have trained with him scotty thanks for coming on the podcast uh absolutely my pleasure i can't

00:01:33.800 thank you enough for having me on uh listen well there's a lot to talk about and i i've been thinking

00:01:38.240 about how to organize this conversation i really i have three broad areas that i want to touch on one

00:01:45.320 is just violence in general and self-defense and related topics the other is guns and gun control

00:01:52.020 and then finally cops and the challenges of policing and i i think we're probably going to move back and

00:01:57.760 forth between these these areas but um to start let's just talk a little bit about your background

00:02:03.020 as a police officer and just why is it that you're in a position to have an opinion on these various

00:02:07.500 topics well i was on lapd and from 1976 until 2006 i did my probation in wilshire division which

00:02:16.340 was a very hot division back then i was wheeled which means transferred after one year in the field

00:02:23.680 in wilshire was transferred over to van nuys i worked a special problems unit there on a hive car i was

00:02:27.960 actually a heroin expert so i developed an expertise in heroin uh wasn't too long after that that i gained

00:02:34.220 entrance into metropolitan division which is an elite division within the department at the time

00:02:39.500 it had 240 men 60 men in swat which is d platoon 60 men in b platoon which worked primarily the valley

00:02:46.440 hollywood and 60 men in c platoon which worked downtown so you had d platoon b platoon c platoon

00:02:53.360 a platoon was administrative and i came into b platoon worked there for a while and then i gained entrance

00:02:58.880 into swat and i was in swat for approximately 10 years and both as an operator and later on as an

00:03:04.160 instructor and toward the end of my career uh left swat but i stayed in metro and a position was

00:03:10.480 created for me by the department as the primary firearms tactics instructor not only for metro

00:03:16.180 but it kind of morphed into all divisions for accelerated training specialized divisions such as

00:03:23.100 sis anti-terrorism undercover narcotics vice uh what we call the follow team internal follow team

00:03:30.960 which would follow bad corrupt cops uh and in addition to that during my years i've ended up

00:03:37.580 having the very fortunate experience of training all over the world pretty much all over europe all over

00:03:42.420 the united states i've trained swat teams all over policemen from all over uh i've worked with groups

00:03:48.000 such as gign uh the police national i've worked with the italian special forces work with just you know

00:03:57.340 i just name it i mean tremendous amount of people uh had a unique opportunity working with seal team

00:04:02.580 six during the 80s and uh members of delta so what i what i kind of ended up doing uh after all that

00:04:11.120 is my wife brett mcqueen and i established international tactical training seminars and this is about over 25

00:04:17.500 years ago now so all the experience that i have learned and all the information that i've garnered over

00:04:23.840 the years we now disseminate in our classes not only to civilians who are beginning or have never

00:04:28.640 held a gun before but all the way up to hostage rescue for swat teams or specialized units such as

00:04:34.760 specialized military units or special forces and as of now for the last 20 almost 28 years i've been

00:04:42.920 working as a use of force expert in police tactics communications police procedures the application of deadly

00:04:48.740 force in federal and superior court so i've been doing that on a constant basis and that's quite

00:04:55.400 a process it's a real eye-opener so i think in essence i learned about deadly force application

00:05:03.160 police procedures and this applies to civilians as well even the military and ultimately applied it

00:05:09.220 i've been in a number of shootings and then i taught it and now i defend it so it's really come full

00:05:14.460 circle so i've got 40 years now behind the gun yeah yeah well i can say as someone who's trained

00:05:21.220 with you at this point a fair amount you really are one of the best teachers of anything i've worked

00:05:27.340 with it's really it's just an immense privilege to train with you and i think people are unaware

00:05:31.400 even people who will own guns and shoot guns are unaware of just how much there is to know to

00:05:37.360 shoot well and i mean the difference between working with someone like yourself and working with

00:05:41.020 other people who i've trained with it's just night and day so um people should know that you really

00:05:45.860 are in addition to just having the right biography on this topic you're just an immensely talented

00:05:50.900 teacher thank i'm blushing and i owe you a case of beer for that one but no thank you and you know i

00:05:55.300 i think one of the things that does come through in all of our classes um brett who teaches myself

00:06:00.620 our son jordan kind of runs the office but all of our instructors are current la pd swat former la pd swat

00:06:07.320 everybody all of our instructors are people that have the heart they're not in it necessarily for

00:06:11.260 the money at all they're in because they care and we understand the ramifications the implications of

00:06:16.880 the improper application of deadly force we also understand all of them have been involved in

00:06:20.980 shootings multiple shootings and we understand what it takes not only to prevail in the field

00:06:26.620 and we're within one's home but also you have to understand how to prevail within a court system

00:06:32.660 within a judicial system you have to be able to accurately and honestly articulate your actions

00:06:39.080 so it is a much fuller process than what hollywood depicts yeah yeah well so before we get into the

00:06:48.060 nitty-gritty here i guess i just want to flag both for you and our listeners some what i perceive

00:06:53.300 to be the biases of my audience i think i have an audience that certainly skews to the left politically

00:07:00.040 it's also an international audience so there are many people in europe and elsewhere who

00:07:04.180 look at for instance the level of gun violence in america and just think what on earth is going on

00:07:11.180 you people have lost your minds you've got 300 million guns on the ground and you wonder why people

00:07:16.040 are getting shot right so and many people in my audience i think frankly can't imagine owning a gun

00:07:24.060 they can't imagine why any civilian would ever need a gun they think the you know rightly so they

00:07:30.740 think we are living at the the safest moment in human history and that you know it's statistically

00:07:35.260 unlikely that anyone is ever going to be involved in a defensive use of a firearm if they own a gun

00:07:40.860 so that's the kind of background assumption of many listeners uh with respect to topics like guns and

00:07:47.240 gun control and now with policing many people have seen the you know the very recent and very well

00:07:54.740 publicized misuses of force on the part of cops and um you know there's the whole black lives matter

00:08:01.420 campaign that started with trayvon martin which wasn't a police uh involved incident but then

00:08:06.440 continued with with michael brown and eric garner and and walter scott and others and the reason why i'm

00:08:12.780 i'm so eager to talk to you about this is that you know what disturbs me here and we don't have to get

00:08:16.900 into the details of any of those specific cases but what disturbs me is that there's a to my eye quite

00:08:22.780 clearly a range of police behavior and uses of deadly force and on the one hand you have just

00:08:30.920 shockingly obvious failures of training you have cops who shouldn't be cops you have cops who are racist

00:08:37.180 you have cops who belong in prison and then all the way on the other end of the spectrum you have

00:08:42.080 totally legitimate understandable uses of deadly force that any sane cop black or white would have

00:08:50.340 produced even with the benefit of hindsight and there's a total failure on the part of most people

00:08:55.960 and certainly on the part of a campaign like black lives matter to differentiate these cases so there's

00:09:01.860 just and so then we have a kind of identity politics and moral confusion about what's going on

00:09:06.800 here so i i just want we don't have to talk about specific cases unless you want to and i think on some

00:09:11.160 of these cases there are still facts coming in but there is undeniably this spectrum of incompetence

00:09:16.900 on the one hand and unfortunate uses of deadly force that are that are given the constraints of

00:09:22.160 policing unavoidable so i guess i let's start with the topic of what it's like to be a cop and what what

00:09:29.240 is it that people don't understand about the cop's point of view and how difficult it is to police and

00:09:36.460 like you know take me through a traffic stop or start anywhere you want but just tell me what it is

00:09:40.580 it that cops confront and why is it that uses of force escalate in ways that that are kind of

00:09:47.420 counterintuitive to people who have not trained in this area at all and certainly who have never lived

00:09:52.580 as cops well wonderful wonderful question and i think we're about to get into a really absolutely

00:09:58.760 fascinating area of the application of deadly force and training this is going to take a little bit of

00:10:03.880 time it's a very broad brushstroke but i worked uh the entire when i worked on the streets i worked

00:10:08.960 on the streets never behind a desk i've made thousands of felony observational arrest metro

00:10:13.380 that's all we did is felony obs arrest and you're constantly stopping people you're looking for dope

00:10:18.280 guns you're looking for suspects bad guys gang members and so forth uh wanted criminals i worked on

00:10:24.020 some of the serial killers uh such as richard ramirez as part you know uh part of that task force

00:10:28.900 looking for the night stalker in van nuys we were out there in special problems you know you'll

00:10:32.960 trying to catch uh bianco bono didn't know who they were at the time hillside strangler but aside

00:10:37.400 from that when a police officer stops anybody on the street you're looking at a very extemporaneous

00:10:43.040 event the officer may think he knows what's going on but i can guarantee you that many times

00:10:49.100 especially in very confusing uh very fluid and dynamic intense and uncertain situations

00:10:53.960 the arrest has been made whatever force has been applied and we start investigating there are always

00:10:59.720 going to be permutations that are within the incident that we didn't know about at the outset

00:11:04.640 what that means is i could stop an individual in a vehicle for running a stoplight coming to a

00:11:09.740 california rolling stop where you don't quite stop i pull them over unbeknownst to me this guy just

00:11:14.320 knocked over committed a 211 bank of america and shot four people but the broadcast has not been issued

00:11:19.140 yet so i come walking up with the intention of issuing a citation next thing i know i'm in a bloody gun

00:11:23.720 battle i can have an individual who is mentally disturbed he's just beaten his wife uh he's on

00:11:29.000 narcotic you know he's under the influence um any number of things it's such a both a fascinating

00:11:35.340 and terrifying career all in the same moment as you and i are sitting here right now there are life

00:11:41.160 and death struggles that are occurring in the united states between police and individuals on the

00:11:46.720 street the united states of america as we sit here by the time you and i have finished this podcast

00:11:51.100 there will have been probably a number of uses of forces on lapd alone here in los angeles when

00:11:56.940 i was a policeman i always expected the worst so when i came up i expected the gun i looked for it

00:12:03.920 and so forth i trained to a very high standard and when you're now just linger there for a second

00:12:10.120 because that can sound like a psychological problem or a or a kind of paranoia that is unjustified

00:12:16.060 wait can you justify that expectation yeah that's a good point to point out the clarification

00:12:20.360 in other words when i make a stop i assume that it's going to go sideways i don't approach it in

00:12:25.260 that manner other than in my mind just expecting that if he were to come out if we were to do this

00:12:30.420 and we talk about with my partners you know i'm going to be cover officer you're going to be the

00:12:35.520 directing officer you're going to be the controlling officer you're the one that's having the conversation

00:12:39.140 with the individual issuing commands and so forth i'm going to cover so if i was perhaps if let's say

00:12:44.740 i was a passenger officer i would already bow to the side of the car and off and you wouldn't even

00:12:48.300 know it had happened so quickly and the car hadn't come to a full stop and then my partner's issuing

00:12:52.840 all the commands suspects let me see your hands exit the vehicle and so forth because all we do

00:12:56.860 is high risk felony stops and so not high risk type stops you know we don't issue tickets to metro

00:13:02.440 right didn't so from that standpoint we got many many guns we received many guns off the suspects

00:13:08.380 and if a suspect started making a furtive move in other words he starts going underneath the seat he's

00:13:13.420 inside the glove box i might draw my pistol low ready and we tell him to freeze we get back behind

00:13:18.300 pa system now we start issuing commands i remember at one and i talk about this in my book and we'll

00:13:24.740 discuss that later but where we made a stop and the suspect was what we call hinky there were two

00:13:30.020 suspects in the vehicle and i got out and drew the pistol low ready it's not aimed at the person but

00:13:34.400 it's a low ready and the fingers alongside the frame off the trigger and i'm issuing commands and

00:13:39.040 it's a very stern manner what we call command presence and the suspect looked and you can tell he was

00:13:44.620 somewhat hesitant and i said you know down on your knees turn around you know cross your feet hands

00:13:49.340 behind your head interlace your fingers and so forth and we came up and finally put both of the

00:13:53.380 suspects down handcuff them right away well the suspect had a shoulder hulse drawn for a 45 auto

00:13:59.280 the 45 auto was laying on the seat on the floorboard loaded cock lock ready to go full magazine one in the

00:14:06.220 chamber so that's eight rounds and i always made a point when i took guns off the suspects to ask why

00:14:11.800 didn't you make a move why didn't you go for it and i never forget to this day and this would happen

00:14:16.980 on a repeated basis they said you had me i knew it and there was no use of force i didn't have to do

00:14:23.300 anything other than put handcuffs on him now had i walked up in a slothly manner had i walked up

00:14:28.300 without anticipating something going terribly awry the outcome could have been much different he may have

00:14:34.540 decided that this was his chance right so when i'm talking about expecting the worst it's very benign

00:14:42.040 you would never know it by looking at me i mean i look like a burned out hippie you know refugee from

00:14:46.820 woodstock wearing my birkenstocks and so forth and you know not quite not quite but uh those of you who

00:14:52.320 can't see him not quite but yeah but you know i just kind of surfer dude and that that was my persona

00:14:58.420 in the street unless i realized that it was going south and then the persona we used to refer to it

00:15:04.760 euphemistically in the old days going metro would change literally in a fraction of a second and now

00:15:09.760 suddenly we're in a whole different realm but that persona actually mitigates and avoids a use of force

00:15:16.600 because you're using proper tactics to avoid the application of force and that's the important

00:15:22.060 you know component and that takes time it takes experience it takes years and years of street

00:15:27.660 smarts it takes many interactions until you finally get a handle on how you yourself as a law enforcement

00:15:33.320 officer are going to comport and present yourself to bad guys whether you are stern or not i mean i could

00:15:39.080 probably address a group of nuns in one room and walk over and address a group of ex-cons and i can

00:15:44.080 relate to both of them i mean so most people who have an encounter with a police officer i don't know if it's

00:15:51.580 most but certainly many aren't in fact bad guys right so they're they're people who for whatever

00:15:57.740 reason have been stopped by a police officer and they've perhaps noticed a cop fairly switched on

00:16:06.340 i'm reminded of a story my a friend of mine told who's a you know guy like me he's got no um you know

00:16:13.040 is objectively a not a scary looking guy and has no history of crime and he's just this um

00:16:21.300 if you need the the caricature of him he's essentially a jewish intellectual who really

00:16:26.500 wouldn't scare anyone and he got pulled over for a traffic stop and something he he was i think

00:16:32.300 talking back to the cop and in some way and probably as someone who's never trained in the use of

00:16:38.140 firearms and or even self-defense never thought about these issues probably you know were his hands on

00:16:44.240 the wheel was or his hands visible to the cop probably not right he's probably just acting like a

00:16:48.300 like the innocent person he knows himself to be and he uh once the dialogue starts with the cop

00:16:53.900 he's outraged to be detained in this way and he notices the cop unfastened the restraint on his

00:16:59.840 holster and he says what are you going to pull out your gun on me now and and he just becomes you

00:17:04.400 know irate and the cop says well tell me what does a bad guy look like right and that completely shifted

00:17:09.500 my friend's point of view he realized okay there's there's no way for the cop to know

00:17:14.820 there's you know reasonable expectations based on what somebody looks like but you know if your

00:17:19.020 hands aren't visible and you know you could have a gun behind the door and if a cop has doesn't have

00:17:23.820 his gun out uh and you have yours out uh he or she is already behind the curve and so just walk me

00:17:30.020 through that a little bit well what you're looking at there if it is contempt of cop you know and so

00:17:35.900 what happens sometimes you have look policemen unfortunately you don't know what's going on in their

00:17:40.500 lives uh some policemen and i'll be very honest shouldn't be a policeman absolutely should not be

00:17:46.000 a policeman there's no doubt about it takes a special person to be an effective police officer

00:17:50.320 just having the badge means nothing it's like having a steinway right have one but it's just going

00:17:54.960 to be gathering a lot of dust to be an effective police officer you really have to have compassion for

00:18:00.520 the people you're trying to serve now sometimes officers don't like being challenged and they come up

00:18:06.340 and somebody says well why did you stop me and especially if you get the quasi pseudo uh attorney

00:18:12.300 that knows his rights and they all seem to um sometimes that throws officers off a little bit

00:18:18.200 now they become it's well again contempt of cop and that's how the police i'm just saying this is how

00:18:22.560 some police officers might perceive it whereas a rational police officer who's literate well educated

00:18:28.140 who has the background and knowledge would be able to say look this is why i stopped you these are

00:18:32.820 this is the probable cause as to why i stopped you and i intend to do this and so forth you're

00:18:38.820 willing to cooperate and so forth you can be very nice very gentle and very soft and the guy keeps

00:18:43.160 on coming back at him and some policemen start building up basically resistance because what

00:18:47.140 they're taught is that people should follow your commands but people don't always follow your

00:18:51.900 commands with seasoning you learn how to winnow out very quickly and very rapidly kind of who's a good

00:18:58.600 guy and who's a bad guy and this would especially be true in some place like los angeles you have

00:19:04.700 officers that work certain divisions which we would call hot divisions there are murders and stabbings

00:19:09.620 uh ambulance shootings and stabbings or fights there's pursuits it's just really nasty and it it is

00:19:16.100 non-stop in one watch and then suddenly they take that person now they shift them and let's say they bring

00:19:21.240 them out to beautiful bucolic uh beverly hills and the first thing he does he pulls this guy over

00:19:27.820 that runs a stoplight and the guy gets back in his face and this officer has been used to four or five

00:19:32.220 years of basically combat right right um it's probably not going to go well for the you know he's going

00:19:37.760 to probably cite him for no gloves in the glove box he's going to find anything he can in order to issue

00:19:42.940 out that ticket and that is that a problem yeah it can't be and the selection of of officers when i came on

00:19:49.620 in 1976 my understanding they had well over 2500 applicants i think it was like 25 000 and i came

00:19:56.340 out from the university of new mexico drove out here and had to wait uh over 24 hours in line at

00:20:02.160 van ays high school just to put an application and go back take midterms drive back out for a written

00:20:06.780 exam believe it or not with you know four-year degrees it was insane they actively processed 2500

00:20:12.300 people if i remember correctly and they only took 91 almost everybody in my class had it had a graduate

00:20:18.320 degree had it we're not upper graduate we had a couple guys with masters but most guys had

00:20:22.280 four-year degrees right so you're saying you're saying it's become less selective or well that is

00:20:28.100 the general consensus with people that i've talked to because they're trying to get people to come on

00:20:32.040 i think a lot of policemen a lot of individuals now shy away from law enforcement uh due to the fact

00:20:38.100 of all the negative publicity and they say i don't want the headaches and i can understand that to a

00:20:42.180 degree um the standards and who they bring on and who they don't i've seen some wonderfully

00:20:47.200 uh gifted individuals who have tried to get on the department that for whatever reason were disallowed

00:20:53.460 from getting on the department one of the more humorous ones was an individual who has a law degree

00:20:58.000 from cambridge and he did he wanted to become a reserve on lapd and he wrote they asked him i

00:21:04.440 apparently at one point you're supposed to write a not a dissertation but just you know some type of a

00:21:10.020 written uh form and just freehand and so he wrote it and because they didn't understand it they

00:21:16.560 thought he was illiterate this is a guy with a law degree from cambridge right and you're disallowing

00:21:21.400 him from coming on because you're claiming that he doesn't understand the english language

00:21:24.700 this boggles the imagination so that's kind of humorous you know to a degree i don't know what

00:21:31.680 the solution is um policemen you know receive fairly good wages for uh what they do but by the

00:21:39.820 same token it's an inherently dangerous job you don't know what's going to happen you can uh one of

00:21:44.860 the shootings i worked on at the beginning of last year the officer's first hour in the field

00:21:50.740 in san bernardino sheriffs he's been involved in a shooting his first day first hour in the field

00:21:57.600 he's involved in a shooting i mean what are the odds wow so that when you say worked on this is now in

00:22:02.680 your capacity as someone who's consulting on on cases on legal cases yes defend defending him yes

00:22:07.820 defending him in a uh in the application deadly force in a lawsuit because it was called wrongful death

00:22:13.240 right so i'm defending the officer in that instance but what you bring up is a wonderful

00:22:17.980 point and that is that policemen don't know who they're stopping and not all policemen are going

00:22:23.240 to be great not all policemen have good people skills they don't have good communicative skills

00:22:27.420 they are not able to think on their feet they don't necessarily like being braced you have a lot

00:22:32.460 of policemen that are maybe perhaps a little too aggressive too militaristic right and uh well i guess i

00:22:39.460 i was emphasizing the other side of this and again here we have a spectrum but my point i guess the

00:22:44.540 lesson i drew from my my friend's experience was that many people just don't know they're there's

00:22:50.540 they're so uh fundamentally ignorant of the the dynamics of the the escalation of force and what

00:22:56.820 cops experience with other people and how many cops either know someone or have heard of someone who

00:23:02.120 just got shot in the face the moment he pulled someone over for a traffic stop and so we have

00:23:06.480 assumptions about what is a legitimate escalation of force as a civilian i'll give you a clearer case

00:23:12.700 for me so for instance there are people who wind up in wrestling matches with cops right they go hands

00:23:18.760 on a cop without understanding the implications from my point of view as you know as a martial artist

00:23:23.680 and as someone someone who's thought about these things from my point of view the moment you go hands

00:23:27.580 on a cop you have totally legitimized his use of deadly force but for the fact that he or she doesn't

00:23:37.240 actually want to kill you unnecessarily and uh will rely on some other tools either their own hand-to-hand

00:23:44.060 training or their own less lethal tools to contain you but that the issue for a cop and correct me if

00:23:51.040 i'm wrong is that he doesn't know first of all he has a gun he or she i'll just for simplicity i'll keep

00:23:56.480 saying he here but he has a gun on his belt he doesn't know what you're going to do after you knock

00:24:02.740 him out or after you get him down and and and dominate him physically if you're stronger or bigger

00:24:08.440 more athletic or more skilled and he cannot afford to wrestle with you or box with you in certainly in

00:24:15.520 any kind of sustained way and certainly if there's more than one of you you know going hands on a cop is a

00:24:20.480 disaster and he has to assume you're going for his gun at some level and so people think that that

00:24:27.500 cops should be if someone's wrestling with them he should be wrestling with them if the person only

00:24:33.780 has a knife well then that doesn't legitimize the use of a firearm and people have no idea what can

00:24:39.560 be done with a knife and how disastrous it is to be wrestling with someone who has a knife even an

00:24:44.240 unskilled person with a knife so talk about just how force may escalate in surprising ways

00:24:50.180 around cops these are phenomenally great questions and subjects you bring up so uh let me put it this

00:24:56.960 way an officer never knows when you're stopping somebody you have no idea what their intent or

00:25:00.960 ability is let's lay that as a ground groundwork foundation if i lose consciousness every time a

00:25:07.600 police officer is involved in an interaction with an individual there's a gun on the scene so there's

00:25:12.260 always a firearm if i become unconscious i have no control over myself or the safety of others around

00:25:18.220 me okay that's number one if i am if i end up sustaining um injuries which diminish my ability

00:25:26.420 to a substantial margin where i'm unable to defend myself or others effectively that also endangers not

00:25:33.040 only my life but those around me as well so when you're looking at escalation of force what you're

00:25:39.360 using is what we call a continuum of force the first force is my simply coming out and saying

00:25:45.920 sam i need you to stop right there please and that's just nothing more than command presence being nice

00:25:51.800 now you don't i might be a little bit sterner now i'm going to issue you commands at this time you

00:25:57.820 start advancing toward me at that point i might take out perhaps and let's say for the sake of argument

00:26:03.000 you're on arm but you take a fighting stance well i may take out the baton i may take out the pepper

00:26:08.500 spray if i had the taser i might take out the taser and say you need to really rethink this whole

00:26:13.420 situation so i have some other options so we go from verbalite we have command presence which is just

00:26:19.540 being in uniform or having a badge on telling you to do something then we have your less lit what we

00:26:24.840 call uh non-lethal uh which are the basically the baton your oc spray oleo resin capsicum you have the

00:26:33.200 taser you have joint locks you have obviously there's bar arms and carotids and then finally

00:26:38.720 you end up with deadly force and there's uh less lethal munitions such as the shotgun bean bag round

00:26:43.780 that comes out you'll see the lime green shotguns most departments have them not fun to be hit by

00:26:49.040 it's like getting hit with a baseball bat not much of a party but you have options but you're not always

00:26:54.740 able to bring those options to readily bear on a situation most of the a lot of the situations all of

00:27:00.280 my shootings occurred within two seconds in other words from the time that that i realized i had to

00:27:04.620 apply deadly force the instant from my my physical application deadly force to cessation of activities

00:27:10.600 of applying that deadly force under two seconds very fast i don't have the luxury or latitude of

00:27:16.420 scrolling through 150 options and this is where supreme court law came comes into play and this is a

00:27:23.180 fascinating subject in and of itself when i came on the department 1976 all states had different laws

00:27:29.520 regarding the application of deadly force and if my memory serves me correctly at the time you could

00:27:35.860 shoot a fleeing felon okay in the in los angeles if i'm not if i'm not mistaken on this there was a

00:27:43.760 law in the books that stealing more than seven dollars worth of avocados was a felony now this was

00:27:48.220 probably drafted in the early 1800s when seven dollars worth of avocados was a wagon load yes so those

00:27:55.280 those better be some good avocados there's some great avocados so let's say for the sake of argument

00:27:59.880 i'm working wilshire we get up avocado theft farmer's market so i race up there it's 115

00:28:05.280 degrees i'm in my lapd blue wool serge uniform and i've just had code seven which is eating i don't

00:28:11.700 feel like running and i run up and the grocer goes he's going that way what did he steal avocados

00:28:17.400 how many eight dollars worth so i drew out my pistol and shot him theoretically that would have

00:28:23.320 been a judicious application deadly force under the law now it's ridiculous i mean that's an extreme

00:28:29.860 example but there were states that had different protocols there were departments that had different

00:28:35.380 shooting policies now supreme court finally said enough of this and they started to come out with

00:28:42.300 different standards and one of the standards was was basically a four-pronged test and that was

00:28:47.400 initially that you looked at the nature of the crime you looked at the nature of the intrusion

00:28:53.460 this is the app by the intrusion they're talking about the force applied toward the individual you

00:28:58.400 looked at the nature of injury sustained by the individual as a result of your application of deadly

00:29:03.160 force and then you adjudicate as to whether or not that was reasonable it was very complicated nobody

00:29:07.600 really got a handle on it so two different supreme court decisions came out tennessee versus

00:29:12.060 garner in the 80s and then the most seminal one of all is graham versus connor tennessee versus

00:29:17.400 garner bay and i won't go into it you can look it up but ultimately officers cannot shoot a fleeing

00:29:23.360 felon unless they can articulate the weight or nature of the state's interest outweighs the interest of the

00:29:30.720 individual's civil rights in other words i've got a murderous suspect active shooter classic he's running

00:29:35.840 away i can't catch him he's got a rifle in his hand can i put him down shoot him in the back without

00:29:40.060 absolutely yes obviously that's again one example then we go to graham versus connor and graham versus

00:29:46.480 connor really sets the standards and what they say is when an officer applies any kind of force

00:29:51.040 it has to be objectively reasonable versus subjective it has to be objectively reasonable

00:29:55.780 and this is going to be weighed in by the city attorney district attorney by the fbi by department

00:30:00.680 of justice it's a very extensive process when i work on these cases there are thousands and thousands

00:30:05.200 of pages in some of these cases it takes forever walkthroughs and all the facts and evidence blood

00:30:10.480 spray pattern analysis trajectory just it's on and on it's fascinating and ultimately in front of a jury

00:30:15.980 whether it's in a civil action or criminal action the jury or the court they decide to go with a court

00:30:21.440 mandated trial is going to decide as to whether or not the officer's application of force was reasonable

00:30:27.680 objectively reasonable and one of the things that that chief justice rehnquist came out with

00:30:33.060 is an opinion stating that because police situations are tense dynamic fluid and uncertain

00:30:40.580 that it is unfair for individuals to apply 2020 hindsight absence the presence of an uplifted knife

00:30:48.760 now that's a fact that's a wonderful wording because what it's saying is look this is this is gets

00:30:54.500 into the meat of the matter what we're talking about when you look at something on tv and some

00:30:57.780 of these are bad shootings there's shootings that i would tell you right now i couldn't defend them

00:31:01.440 and you need to settle right the officer was completely out of line some of them need to go to prison

00:31:05.840 because they're lying and when you're looking at these cases what you're looking at is is it reasonable

00:31:13.480 for the officer at the time given the facts and circumstances known to the officer at the time that the

00:31:19.820 shooting transpired his background and training in other words i cannot hold a rookie with

00:31:24.480 two weeks in the street to the same standard i hold myself i've got 40 years behind the gun

00:31:29.440 and all the different cases for me to apply deadly force it's got to be off the charts now for a

00:31:34.500 younger officer i might be able to say look he doesn't have the experience that i did he doesn't

00:31:39.120 have the technical expertise he doesn't certainly doesn't have the mechanical ability he doesn't have

00:31:43.260 the presence of mind or the experience to a formulated maybe a proper decision it may not have been a

00:31:47.700 great decision it may be mechanically impure but according to the law it was objectively reasonable

00:31:55.060 that he applied force whatever force that may have been in this circumstance and that's what

00:32:00.160 throws a lot of people because why aren't why aren't the officers in prison because of the jury

00:32:04.520 instructions right well that's interesting i i'd never heard that that courts will hold officers to

00:32:10.320 a different standard based on their experience in these cases or or almost yeah basically each

00:32:16.780 shooting is adjudicated on its own merits so you can't say well because this shooting went down this

00:32:21.820 way this one should have gone down in a similar manner it's impossible there are too many variations

00:32:25.780 and permutations in each shooting that are unique unto themselves so when you become involved in these

00:32:30.720 shootings each shooting has to be adjudicated on its own merits the facts in evidence the circumstances

00:32:37.640 known to the officer at the time that the shooting or use of force transpires his background knowledge

00:32:43.600 of the entire incident as well as his training now there's also one other thing and now we get into

00:32:50.600 precipitative factors was the officer legally justified in being where he was did he make the

00:32:56.480 right tactical decisions did he employ the right communications did he surround did he request backup did he request

00:33:03.140 less lethal it gets really involved it's unbelievably involved and i get attacked with this all the time

00:33:08.500 in depositions in court well why didn't the officer do this or i may have an attorney said well officer

00:33:14.300 reitz would it have been reasonable for the officers to have done this i said absolutely but they didn't

00:33:19.960 did they no could they have done this yes would that have been reasonable yes and they didn't do it

00:33:24.620 did they no and he might do 15 of those in a row and then finally he'll look at me and say well why didn't

00:33:29.240 they do all those well because they didn't have time right what about the the intuition that many

00:33:34.720 untrained people have why can't you just shoot the person in the leg okay this and this comes back i

00:33:42.980 get jury questions all the time why didn't they shoot the knife out of his hand right why not use a

00:33:47.640 baton against the guy with a knife first of all let's look at this again this is this is we could have days

00:33:52.760 doing this this would be fascinating but let me explain something let's say uh pepper spray oc is an

00:33:57.940 irritant it's not an incapacitator okay so it's irritant i've been sprayed in the face by my

00:34:02.960 partner when i had an altercation with the suspect because my partner was terrible aim i was still able

00:34:07.400 to fight i was still able to bring the suspect under control we look at the taser it's not an

00:34:12.340 infallible process so sometimes the darts don't go in you know they don't separate enough because it's

00:34:17.360 a neuromuscular basically disruptor and it causes the muscles to uh to violently if you will twitch

00:34:24.580 uh contract 16 times a second it's not much it's it'll get your mind right but both of those probes

00:34:30.780 have to make contact and then the electrical conduit is between those two contacts uh baton strikes don't

00:34:36.080 always work because you get glancing blows and so forth uh less lethal munitions from the shotgun

00:34:40.940 sometimes guys get hit and they go give me more and you go you gotta be kidding me what's this guy on

00:34:45.900 and i fought suspects that have been unbelievably tough it's i've it's just scary so when you're looking

00:34:52.600 at the application of deadly force when you're looking at less lethal and people say why didn't

00:34:56.340 you shoot him and they're like well if i rip your femoral artery open and you bleed out in 20 seconds

00:35:01.640 guess what it's a fatal uh also rounds we're talking about terminal ballistics rounds do very

00:35:07.080 interesting things inside bodies and i have seen rounds that have struck i had one shooting about

00:35:12.180 three years ago where the round struck the suspect's hip inboard about an inch and a half and

00:35:17.440 then it ricocheted off the hip it basically made a 70 degree angle turn upward trajectory now because

00:35:23.320 it was a slight downward angle and went through the heart bottom of the heart top the heart exit out

00:35:27.680 through the suspect's uh right clavicle and he was dead on scene expired on scene well theoretically

00:35:33.480 that's a glancing or a peripheral hit and so shooting somebody's a knife out of somebody's hands you

00:35:40.940 better be really really good that's damn near impossible um so all these things that you see in the

00:35:45.920 movies it's hollywood yeah and officers don't have and we'll get into training but the officers

00:35:51.520 themselves don't necessarily have the ability to make this you know with pinpoint accuracy when

00:35:56.140 you're working with handguns and just shoot them in the leg and wound them or shoot something out of

00:36:00.060 the suspect's hands on the contrary there are stories of you know shootings in elevators where you

00:36:06.000 know 17 shots are fired and no one is hit or a hundred rounds from five different officers are

00:36:12.020 are fired and the subject is hit twice but perhaps we should we should get into the standard to which

00:36:18.600 most cops are trained now and just what uh any illusions uh we have about that yeah well i will

00:36:25.740 put it this way this is one thing that has irked me for years and years um i recently came back from

00:36:31.920 the east coast where the department really good department great chief really understood and so they

00:36:37.500 had me come out and i trained their entire department in in four sessions and uh over a

00:36:42.320 space of two weeks and the standard of training that i train people to far exceeds the minimalistic

00:36:48.720 standards that most officers are trained to officers are trained to what they call post standards which

00:36:53.220 are police officers standards and training you have to get a lot of people through academies so you

00:36:58.500 have a base level of performance that an officer must qualify with a firearm certainly go through

00:37:04.500 written exams and understand this and that so everybody wonders why are the officers the hit

00:37:09.580 rates are terrible for police i mean it's in the low teens the actual numbers of hits far more misses

00:37:15.060 in the field and actual field documented shootings than there are strikes on suspects we have sometimes

00:37:20.820 excessive amount of rounds going down range although there is a brand new supreme court decision that

00:37:25.940 just came down regarding that however that being said the jurors sometimes will ask and written well why did the

00:37:33.920 officers fire so many rounds why are there so many officers engaged in shooting and the analogy i like

00:37:39.640 to use and i think all your listeners can probably latch on to this imagine if i taught you how to drive a

00:37:44.760 stick-shifted volkswagen bug that's what i trained you to do here's your little vw beetle from the 70s

00:37:50.180 wood stocked out and then i ship you across the ocean i put you into a formula one and the lemans 500 at

00:37:57.660 night in driving rain and you crash and burn at the first turn and you're astounded well i trained you

00:38:03.780 to one standard when an entirely different standard was called for in the field and this is what

00:38:08.460 happens when you do a qualification course by necessity you have to have some measure of

00:38:14.100 proficiency you have to have some standards that you can go back and say look the officer qualified

00:38:18.060 here's here are the records but it's just it's so vast the mechanics and i'll just rip through a list

00:38:24.160 very quickly you're looking at all very positions braced unbraced rollover prone positions reverse

00:38:29.780 positions you're looking at shooting firing support hand fire firing hand only you're looking at low

00:38:34.300 level light problems you're looking at high speed moving targets knife attack targets hostage situations

00:38:39.080 vehicles barricaded suspects all the impediments you know that may be interposed between yourself and a

00:38:44.520 downrange target partial targets you're looking at distant targets you're looking at targets that

00:38:48.880 articulate and present awkward angles and so forth that is a lifetime of study yeah now when you go

00:38:55.200 and you stand in front of a silhouette that has clearly delineated scoring rings i've never seen that

00:38:59.840 on a suspect i've never seen a suspect wearing a shirt with a silhouette and i will right now on

00:39:05.580 the record will state that the first ex-con that comes out with an lapd silhouette tattooed all over

00:39:11.120 his entire body i'll buy him a dinner at morton's steakhouse uh i'm sure that's going to come out

00:39:15.460 someday but that's not what you get so we train to one standard and most qualification courses are

00:39:21.760 nominal at best and you're doing the same course it's when you come back six months later uh for 30

00:39:28.380 years on lapd our combat qual course remains the same this is a standard you're looking at budgets

00:39:34.720 you're looking at manpower pulling all the officers out you have 10 000 officers how you're going to train

00:39:39.000 them all how you're going to get them qualified so for me it's a real double-edged sword and the

00:39:43.680 interesting thing is that the most well let me put it this way the greatest watershed event

00:39:49.600 an officer will ever experience and the most seminal event literally impact an entire department

00:39:56.900 is the application of deadly force and yet it traditionally throughout law enforcement it is

00:40:03.600 that aspect the application of deadly force the mechanics knowledge of the law articulation

00:40:09.440 that is the least trained to that the least amount of money is budgeted for so what you've just

00:40:15.780 described is certainly troubling it's something to which we don't have much even with the the use of

00:40:22.600 body cameras and and and and this ubiquitous practice now of recording what the cops do we don't

00:40:28.660 have a ton of evidence of the poor performance of cops in the application of deadly force or just the

00:40:35.320 the obvious lack of training because it's interesting we should probably talk about the significance of

00:40:39.960 video and the way in which video can even be misleading but from a hand-to-hand you know weaponless

00:40:47.400 altercation point of view is that there's now there's so much video evidence of cops not being trained

00:40:55.020 in just how to physically restrain people so there's just some amazing videos i could show you and i'll

00:41:00.420 i think i'll put one or two online when we post this podcast i'll put them on my blog there's some

00:41:07.480 amazing video of cops uh wrestling with suspects uh you know three cops trying to figure out how to

00:41:15.800 subdue one clearly unarmed small i mean literally so one video i'll show you this gets these videos get

00:41:24.180 circulated in the brazilian jujitsu community because people are just aghast that you know no one really

00:41:28.620 knows at this point you know 20 years after the ultimate fighting championship there are still

00:41:33.740 cops who don't have sort of basic hand-to-hand skills in in in grappling in particular so there

00:41:39.920 was there's this one video that that has made the rounds and has um commentary from henner and here

00:41:44.980 and gracie who who are great jujitsu teachers and it's i believe three cops all of whom look like

00:41:51.680 they're 220 pounds trying to control and obviously drunk much smaller shirtless unarmed man shoeless

00:42:01.600 man he's in stocking feet in a mcdonald's on a slick floor he's got he's got literally no shoes

00:42:06.800 three of them are trying to figure out how to bring him down and they they can't solve the problem and

00:42:13.460 they go to a taser ultimately they go to a taser one tries to throw a front kick at him and can't do

00:42:18.380 that they ultimately tase this guy repeatedly right and it's just the most just ghastly incompetence

00:42:25.280 from a martial arts point of view and i'm not i'm not actually judging the cops here i mean the problem

00:42:29.340 is they haven't been trained in in they don't haven't been given the tools they need to solve

00:42:33.360 this problem and there's another video which perhaps you've seen of a what becomes a wrestling

00:42:38.020 match that then winds up in a lethal force or at least in a shooting in a walmart parking lot with

00:42:44.020 a kind of deranged family that just attacks the cops i think this family had been harassing

00:42:48.900 employees at this walmart and the cops come on scene and you see this all from dash cam video

00:42:53.960 and there's you know it's a family of like eight people men and women and one cop says okay we need

00:43:00.340 to separate this group here and they wanted to he wanted to control them by at first separating them

00:43:05.180 but the family refused to be separated and they just like on cue became like the zombie family that

00:43:10.060 was going to attack the cops and it becomes this insane protracted 10 minute wrestling match with

00:43:16.940 it that where the cops use every tool on their belts from pepper spray to batons to tasers totally

00:43:23.600 ineffectually one has his gun wrestled away from him and it's all on camera and it's you know it looks

00:43:28.220 like honestly from the point of view of of a trained martial artist and again this is not not to judge

00:43:33.800 these specific cops but it looked like you know everyone had been dosed with some sort of neurotoxic

00:43:40.660 agent where they just couldn't function properly i'll show you these videos later but it in any case

00:43:45.540 so there's a i think a reasonable understanding of what you can't do in a situation to control a an

00:43:51.680 agitated strong athletic person non-lethally uh would in many cases dictate an escalation of force

00:43:59.100 well you know your wonderful points again and this is you know when i worked on the streets

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 14, 2016

#25 — Behind the Gun

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