Making Sense with Sam Harris - #25 — Behind the Gun

Episode Date: January 14, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with former SWAT operator and lead weapons and tactics instructor for the LAPD Metro Division, Scott Reitz. They discuss guns, gun control, police violence, and related topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Scott Reitz. Scott is a 30-year veteran of the LAPD. He worked in the elite Metropolitan Division and then became a member of D-Team, otherwise known as SWAT. And he finally became the lead weapons and tactics instructor for the whole Metro Division. Watt, and he finally became the lead weapons and tactics instructor for the whole Metro Division.

So he's a supremely qualified expert on the topic of guns and the use of force, both legitimate and illegitimate, and I think you'll find his perspective on these matters quite useful. And now I bring you Scott Reitz. Okay, well I'm here with Scott Reitz, otherwise known as Uncle Scotty, to those of us who have trained with him. Scotty, thanks for coming on the podcast. Absolutely my pleasure. I can't thank you enough for having me on. Listen, well, there's a lot to talk about, and I've been thinking about how to organize this conversation. I have three broad areas that I want to touch on. One is just violence in general and self-defense and related topics. The other is guns and gun control. And then finally, cops and the challenges of policing. And I think we're probably going to move back and forth between

these areas. But to start, let's just talk a little bit about your background as a police officer and just why is it that you're in a position to have an opinion on these various topics. Well, I was on LAPD from 1976 until 2006. I did my probation in the Wilshire Division, which was a very hot division back then. I was wheeled, which means transferred, after one year in the field in Wilshire. I was transferred over to Van Nuys. I worked a special problems unit there in a hive car. I was actually a heroin expert, so I developed an expertise in heroin. It wasn't too long after that that I gained entrance into Metropolitan

Division, which is an elite division within the department. At the time, it had 240 men, 60 men in SWAT, which is D platoon, 60 men in B platoon, which worked primarily the Valley, Hollywood, and 60 men in C platoon, which worked downtown. So you had D platoon, B platoon, C platoon, A platoon was administrative. And I came into B platoon, worked there for a while, and then I gained entrance into SWAT. And I was in SWAT for approximately 10 years, and both as an operator and later on as an instructor. And toward the end of my career, left SWAT, but I stayed in SWAT for approximately 10 years, both as an operator and later on as an instructor. Toward the end of my career, I left SWAT, but I stayed in Metro. A position was created for me by the department as the primary firearm statics instructor, not only for Metro, but it kind of morphed into all divisions for accelerated training,

specialized divisions such as SIS, anti-terrorism, undercover narcotics, vice, what we call the follow team, internal follow team, which would follow bad corrupt cops. And in addition to that, during my years, I've ended up having the very fortunate experience of training all over the world, pretty much all over Europe, all over the United States. I've trained SWAT teams all over, policemen from all over the world, pretty much, all over Europe, all over the United States. I've trained SWAT teams all over, policemen from all over. I've worked with groups such as GIGN, the Police Nationale. I've worked with the Italian Special Forces. I've worked with, you know, just name it. I mean, a tremendous amount of people. I had a unique opportunity working with SEAL Team 6 during the 80s and members of Delta.

So what I kind of ended up doing after all that is my wife, Brett McQueen, and I established international tactical training seminars. And this is about over 25 years ago now. So all the experience that I have learned and all the information that I've garnered over the years, we now disseminate in our classes, not only to civilians who are beginning or have never held a gun before, but all the way up to hostage rescue for SWAT teams or specialized units, such as specialized military units or special forces. And as of now, for the last 20, almost 28 years, I've been working as a use of force expert in police tactics, communications, police procedures, the application of deadly force in federal and superior court.

So I've been doing that on a constant basis. And that's quite a process. It's a real eye opener. So I think in essence, I learned about deadly force application, police procedures, and this applies to civilians as well, even the military, and ultimately applied it. I've been in a number of shootings, and then I taught it, and now I defend it. So it's really come full circle. So I've got 40 years now behind the gun. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I can say as someone who's trained with you at this point a fair amount. You really are one of the best teachers of anything I've worked with. It's really, it's just an immense privilege to train with you. And I think people are unaware, even people who own guns and shoot guns are unaware of just how much there is to know to shoot well. And the difference between working with someone like yourself and working with other people who I've trained with, it's just night and day. So people should know that you really are, in addition to just having the right biography on this topic, you're just an immensely talented teacher. Thank you. I'm blushing and I owe you a case of beer for that one, but no, thank you. And you know, I think one of the things that does come

through in all of our classes, Brett, who teaches, myself, our son Jordan kind of runs the office, but all of our instructors are current LAPD SWAT, former LAPD SWAT, everybody. All of our instructors are people that have the heart in it. They're not in it necessarily for the money at all. They're in because they care, and we understand the ramifications, the implications of the improper application of deadly force. We also understand all of them have been involved in shootings, multiple shootings. And we understand what it takes not only to prevail in the field and we're within one's home, but also you have to understand how to prevail within a court system, within a judicial system. You have to be able to accurately and honestly articulate your actions. So it is a much fuller process than what Hollywood depicts.

So it is a much fuller process than what Hollywood depicts. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so before we get into the nitty gritty here, I guess I just want to flag both for you and our listeners some what I perceive to be the biases of my audience. I think I have an audience that certainly skews to the left politically. It's also an international audience. There are many people in Europe and elsewhere who look at, for instance, the level of gun violence in America and just think, what on earth is going on? You people have lost your minds.

You've got 300 million guns on the ground, and you wonder why people are getting shot, right? And many people in my audience, I think, frankly, can't imagine owning a gun. They can't imagine why any civilian would ever need a gun. They think the, you know, rightly so, they think we are living at the safest moment in human history and it's statistically unlikely that anyone is ever going to be involved in a defensive use of a firearm if they own a gun. arm if they own a gun. So that's the kind of background assumption of many listeners with respect to topics like guns and gun control. And now with policing, many people have seen the very recent and very well-publicized misuses of force on the part of cops. And there's the whole Black Lives Matter campaign that started with Trayvon Martin, which wasn't a police-involved incident, but then continued with Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Walter Scott and others. And the reason why I'm so eager to talk to you about this is that what disturbs me here,

and we don't have to get into the details of any of those specific cases, but what disturbs me is that there's a, to my eye, quite clearly a range of police behavior and uses of deadly force. And on the one hand, you have just shockingly obvious failures of training. You have cops who shouldn't be cops. You have cops who are racist. You have cops who belong in prison. And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you have totally legitimate, understandable uses of deadly force that any sane cop, black or white, would have produced, even with the benefit of hindsight. And there's a total failure on the part of most people, and certainly on the part of a campaign like Black Lives Matter, to differentiate these cases. And we have a kind of identity

politics and moral confusion about what's going on here. So we don't have to talk about specific cases unless you want to. And I think on some of these cases, there are still facts coming in. But there is undeniably this spectrum of incompetence on the one hand and unfortunate uses of deadly force that are given the constraints of policing unavoidable. So I guess let's start with the topic of what it's like to be a cop and what is it that people don't understand about the cop's point of view and how difficult it is to police? And take me through a traffic stop or start anywhere you want,

but just tell me what is it that cops confront and why is it that uses of force escalate in ways that are kind of counterintuitive to people who have not trained in this area at all, and certainly who have never lived as cops? Well, wonderful, wonderful question, and I think we're about to get into a really absolutely fascinating area of the application of deadly force in training. This is going to take a little bit of time. It's a very broad brushstroke, but I worked the entire, when I worked on the streets, I worked on the streets never behind a desk. I've made thousands of felony observational arrests. Metro, that's all we did, is felony obs arrest. And you're constantly stopping people. You're looking for dope

guns. You're looking for suspects, bad guys, gang members, and so forth. Wanted criminals. I worked on some of the serial killers, such as Richard Ramirez, part of that task force looking for the Night Stalker. In Van Nuys, we were out there in a special problems unit trying to catch Bianco Bono, didn't know who they were at the time, Hillside Strangler. But aside from that, when a police officer stops anybody on the street, you're looking at a very extemporaneous event. The officer may think

he knows what's going on, but I can guarantee you that many times, especially in very confusing, very fluid and dynamic and tense and uncertain situations, the arrest has been made, whatever force has been applied, and we start investigating, there are always going to be permutations that are within the incident that we didn't know about at the outset. What that means is I could stop an individual in a vehicle for running a stoplight, coming to a California rolling stop where you don't quite stop. I pull him over. Unbeknownst to me, this guy just knocked over, committed a 211 Bank of America, and shot four people. But the broadcast has not been issued yet.

So I come walking up with the intention of issuing a citation. Next thing I know, I'm in a bloody gun battle. I can have an individual who is mentally disturbed. He's just beaten his wife. He's on narcotic, you know, he's under the influence. Any number of things, it's such a, both a fascinating and terrifying career, all in the same moment. As you and I are sitting here right now, there are life and death struggles that are occurring in the United States between police and individuals on the street in the United States of America, as we sit here. By the time you and I have finished this podcast, there will have been probably a number of uses of forces on LAPD alone here in Los Angeles. When I was a policeman, I always expected the worst.

So when I came up, I expected the gun. I looked for it and so forth. I trained to a very high standard. And when you're... Now, just linger there for a second, because that can sound like a psychological problem or a kind of I assume that it's going to go sideways. I don't approach it in that manner other than in my mind just expecting that if he were to come out, if he were to do this, and we talk about with my partners, you know, I'm going to be cover officer, you're going to be the directing officer, you're going to be the controlling officer, you're the one that's having the conversation with the individual issuing commands and so forth, I'm going to cover. So if I, perhaps, let's say I was a passenger

officer, I would already bow to the side of the car and off, and you wouldn't even know it had happened so quickly. And the car hadn't come to a full stop. And then my partner's issuing all the commands, suspects, let me see your hands, exit the vehicle, and so forth. Because all we do is high-risk felony stops, not high-risk type stops. We don't issue tickets to Metro. We didn't. So from that standpoint, we got many, many guns. We received many issue tickets to Metro. We didn't. So from that standpoint, we got many, many guns. We received many guns off of suspects. And if a suspect started making a refertive move, in other words, he starts going underneath the seat, he's inside the glove box, I might draw my pistol low ready and we tell him to freeze. We get back behind cover, we get on the PA system,

now we start issuing commands. I remember at one, and I talk about this in my book, and we'll discuss that later, but where we made a stop, and the suspect was what we call hinky. There were two suspects in the vehicle, and I got out and drew the pistol low ready. It's not aimed at the person, but it's a low ready, and the finger's alongside the frame off the trigger, and I'm issuing commands. It's a very stern manner, what we call command presence, and the suspect looked, and you can tell he was somewhat hesitant, and I said, you know, down on your knees, turn around, you know, cross your feet, hands behind your head, interlace your fingers and so forth. And we came up and finally put both of

the suspects down, handcuff them right away. Well, the suspect had a shoulder holster on for a 45 auto. A 45 auto was laying on the seat, on the floorboard, loaded, cock-locked, ready to go. Full magazine, one in the chamber, so that's eight rounds. And I always made a point when I took guns off of suspects to ask, why didn't you make a move? Why didn't you go for it? And I never forget to this day, and this would happen 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 anything other than put handcuffs on him. Now, had I walked up in a sloppy manner, had I walked up without anticipating something going terribly awry, the outcome could have been much different. He may have decided that this was his chance. So when I'm talking about expecting the worst, it's very benign. You would never know it by looking at me. I mean, I look like a burned out hippie, you know, refugee from Woodstock wearing my Birkenstocks and so forth. Not quite, but those of you who can't see him, not quite. But, you know, I just kind of surfer dude. And that was my persona in the street, unless I realized that it was going south. And then the persona, we used to refer to it euphemistically in the old days,

going metro, would change literally in a fraction of a second. And now suddenly we're in a whole different realm. But that persona actually mitigates and avoids a use of force because you're using proper tactics to avoid the application of force. And that's the important component. And that takes time. It takes experience. It takes years and years of street smarts. It takes many interactions until you finally get a handle

on how you yourself as a law enforcement officer are going to comport and present yourself to bad guys, whether you are stern or not. I mean, I could probably address a group of nuns in one room and walk over and address a group of ex-cons and I can relate to both of them. group of nuns in one room and walk over and address a group of ex-cons and I can relate to both of them. So most people who have an encounter with a police officer, I don't know if it's most, but certainly many, aren't in fact bad guys, right? So they're people who, for whatever reason, have been stopped by a police officer and they've perhaps noticed Kopp fairly switched on. I'm reminded of a story a friend of mine told who's a guy like me,

he's objectively not a scary-looking guy and has no history of crime and he's just this, if you need the caricature of him, he's essentially a Jewish intellectual who really wouldn't scare anyone. And he got pulled over for a traffic stop and something, he was, I think, talking back to the cop in some way. And probably, as someone who's never trained in the use of firearms or even self-defense, never thought about these issues, probably, you know, were his hands on the wheel? Were his hands visible to the wheel? Were his

hands visible to the cop? Probably not, right? He's probably just acting like the innocent person he knows himself to be. And he, once the dialogue starts with the cop, he's outraged to be detained in this way. And he notices the cop unfasten the restraint on his holster. And he says, what, are you going to pull out your gun on me now? And he just becomes, you know, irate. And the cop says, well, tell me, what does a bad guy look like? Right. And that completely shifted my friend's point of view. He realized, okay, there's no way for the cop to know there's reasonable expectations based on what somebody looks like. But, you know, if your hands aren't visible and, you know, you could have a gun behind the door. And if a cop doesn't have his gun out and you have yours out, he or she is already behind the curve. And so just walk me through that a little bit.

Well, what you're looking at there is contempt of cop. You know, and so what happens sometimes, you have policemen. Unfortunately, you don't know what's going on in their lives. Some policemen, and I'll be very honest, shouldn't be a policeman. Absolutely should not be a policeman. There's no doubt about it. It takes a special person to be an effective police officer. Just having the badge means nothing. It's like having a Steinway. You can have one, but it's just going to be gathering a lot of dust. To be an effective police officer, you really have to have compassion for the people you're trying to serve. Now,

sometimes officers don't like being challenged. And they come up and somebody says, well, why did you stop me? And especially if you get the quasi-pseudo attorney that knows his rights, they all seem to, sometimes that throws officers off a little bit. Now they become, again, contempt of cop. And that's how the police, I'm just saying, this is how some police officers might perceive it. Whereas a rational police officer who is literate, well-educated, who has the background and knowledge would be able to say, look, this is why I stopped you. This is the probable cause as to why I stopped you. And I intend to do this and so forth. You're willing to cooperate and so forth. He can be very nice, very gentle, and very soft. And the guy keeps on coming back at him, and some policemen start building up basically resistance, because what they're taught is that people should follow your commands, but people don't always follow your commands. With seasoning, you learn how to winnow out very quickly and very rapidly kind of who's a good guy and who's a bad guy. And this will especially be true in some place like Los Angeles. You have officers that work certain divisions, which we would call hot divisions. There are murders and stabbings, ambulance shootings.

And with stabbings, there are fights. There's pursuits. It's just really nasty. And it is nonstop in one watch. And then suddenly they take that person. Now they shift them. And let's say they bring them out to beautiful, bucolic Beverly Hills. And the first thing he does, he pulls this guy over that runs a stoplight,

and the guy gets back in his face, and this officer has been used to four or five years of basically combat. Right, right. It's probably not going to go well for the, you know, he's going to probably cite him for no gloves in the glove box. He's going to find anything he can in order to issue out that ticket. And is that a problem? Yeah, it can be. And the selection of officers, when I came on in 1976, my understanding, they had well over 2,500 applicants. I think it was 25,000. And I came

out from the University of New Mexico, drove out here, and had to wait over 24 hours in line at Van Nuys High School just to put an application and go back, take midterms, drive back out for a written exam, believe it or not, with four-year degrees. It was insane. They actively processed 2,500 people, if I remember correctly, and they only took 91. Almost everybody in my class had a graduate degree. We're not upper graduate. We had a couple of guys with master's, but most of the guys had four-year degrees. Right. So you're saying it's become less selective? Well, that is the general consensus with people that I've talked to because they're trying to

get people to come on. I think a lot of policemen, a lot of individuals now shy away from law enforcement due to the fact of all the negative publicity. And they say, I don't want the headaches. And I can understand that to a degree. The standards and who they bring on and who they don't. I've seen some wonderfully gifted individuals who have tried to get on the department that, for whatever reason, were disallowed from getting on the department. One of the more humorous ones was an individual who has a law degree from Cambridge. And he wanted to become a reserve on LAPD. he wanted to become a reserve on LAPD. And he wrote, they asked him, apparently at one point, you're supposed to write a, not a dissertation, but just, you know, some type of a written form,

and just freehand. And so he wrote it, and because they didn't understand it, they thought he was illiterate. This is a guy with a law degree from Cambridge, and you're disallowing him from coming on because you're claiming that he doesn't understand the English language. This boggles the imagination. So that's kind of humorous to a degree. I don't know what the solution is. Policemen receive fairly good wages for what they do. But by the same token, it's an inherently dangerous job. You don't know what's going to happen. One of the shootings I worked on at the beginning of last year, the officer's first hour in the field

in San Bernardino Sheriff's, he's been involved in a shooting. His first day, first hour in the field, he's involved in a shooting. I mean, what are the odds? Wow. So when you say worked on, this is now in your capacity as someone who's consulting on cases, on legal cases. Yes, defending him in the application of deadly force in a lawsuit that was called wrongful death. Right. So I'm defending the officer in that instance. But what you bring up is a wonderful point, and that is that policemen don't know who they're stopping. And not all policemen are going to be great.

Not all policemen have good people skills. They don't have good communicative skills. They are not able to think on their feet. They don't necessarily like being braced. You have a lot of policemen that are maybe perhaps a little too aggressive, too militaristic. Right. Well, I guess I was emphasizing the other side of this. And again, we have a spectrum, but my point, I guess the lesson I drew from my friend's experience was that many people just don't know. They're so fundamentally ignorant of the dynamics of the escalation of force and what cops experience with other people and how many cops either know someone or have heard of someone who just got shot in the face the moment he pulled someone over for a traffic stop. And so we have assumptions about what is a legitimate escalation of force as a civilian. I'll give you a clearer case for me. So for instance, there are people who wind up in wrestling matches with cops, right? They go hands on a cop without understanding the implications. From my point of view, as a martial artist and as someone who's thought about these things, from my point of view, the moment you go hands-on a cop,

you have totally legitimized his use of deadly force, but for the fact that he or she doesn't actually want to kill you unnecessarily and will rely on some other tools, either their own hand-to-hand training or their own less lethal tools to contain you. But the issue for a cop, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that he doesn't know, first of all, he has a gun, he or she, just for simplicity, I'll keep saying he here, but he has a gun on his belt. He doesn't know what you're going to do after you knock him out or after you get him down and dominate him physically if you're stronger or bigger, more athletic or more skilled. And he cannot afford to wrestle with you or box with you, certainly in any kind of sustained way. And certainly if there's more than one of you, going hands on a cop is a disaster. And he has to assume you're going for his gun at some level. And so people

think that cops should be, if someone's wrestling with them, he should be wrestling with them. If the person only has a knife, well, then that doesn't legitimize the use of a firearm. And people have no idea what can be done with a knife and how disastrous it is to be wrestling with someone who has a knife, even an unskilled person with a knife. So talk about just how force may escalate in surprising ways around cops. These are phenomenally great questions and subjects that you bring up. So let me put it this way. An officer never knows when you're stopping somebody, you have no idea what their intent or ability is. Let's lay that as a groundwork foundation. If I lose consciousness,

every time a police officer is involved in an interaction with an individual, there's a gun on the scene. So there's always a firearm. If I become unconscious, I have no control over myself or the safety of others around me. Okay. That's number one. If I am, if I end up sustaining injuries, which diminish my ability to a substantial margin where I'm unable to defend myself or others, effectively, that also endangers not only my life but those around me as well. So when you're looking at escalation of force, what you're using is what we call a continuum of force. The first force is my simply coming out and saying, Sam, I need you to stop right there, please. And that's just nothing more than command presence, being nice.

Now, you don't. I might be a little bit sterner. Now I'm going to issue you commands. At this time, you start advancing toward me. At that point, I might take out perhaps, and let's say for the sake of argument, you're unarmed. But you take a fighting stance. Well, I may take out the baton. I may take out, perhaps, and let's say, for the sake of argument, you're unarmed, but you take a fighting stance. Well, I may take out the baton.

I may take out the pepper spray. If I had the taser, I might take out the taser and say, you need to really rethink this whole situation. So I have some other options. So we go from verbal, we have command presence, which is just being in uniform or having a badge on telling you to do something. Then we have your less, what we call non-lethal, which are basically the baton, your OC spray, oleo-resin capsicum. You have the taser.

You have joint locks. You have, obviously, there's bar arms and carotids. And then finally, you end up with deadly force. And there's less lethal munitions, such as the shotgun bean bag round that comes out. You'll see the lime green shotguns. Most departments have them. Not fun to be hit by. It's like getting hit with a baseball bat. Not much of a party.

But you have options, but you're not always able to bring those options to readily bear on a situation. A lot of the situations, all of my shootings occurred within two seconds. In other words, from the time that I realized I had to apply deadly force, the instant from my physical application of deadly force to cessation of activities of applying that deadly force, under two seconds. Very fast. I don't have the luxury or latitude of scrolling through 150 options. And this is where Supreme Court law comes into play. And this is a fascinating subject in and of itself.

When I came on the department in 1976, all states had different laws regarding the application of deadly force. And if my memory serves me correctly, at the time you could shoot a fleeing felon. Okay. In Los Angeles, if I'm not mistaken on this, there was a law in the books that stealing more than $7 worth of avocados was a felony. Now, this was probably drafted in the early 1800s when $7 worth of avocados was a wagon load, yes? Those better be some good avocados. There's some great avocados. So let's say for the sake of argument, I'm working wheelchair, we get avocado theft, farmer's market. So I race up there. It's 115 degrees. I'm in my LAPD blue wool serge uniform.

And I've just had code seven, which is eating. I don't feel like running. And I run up and the grocer goes, he's going that way. What did he steal? Avocados. How many? $8 worth. So I drew out my pistol and shot him.

Theoretically, that would have been a judicious application of deadly force under the law. Now, it's ridiculous. I mean, that's an extreme example. But there were states that had different protocols. There were departments that had different shooting policies. Now, Supreme Court finally said enough of this. And they started to come out with different standards. And one of the standards was basically a four-prong test. And that was initially that you looked at the nature of the crime. You looked at the nature of the intrusion. This is the app by intrusion.

They're talking about the force applied toward the individual. You looked at the nature of injury sustained by the individual as a result of your application of deadly force. And then you adjudicate as to whether or not that was reasonable. It was very complicated. Nobody really got a handle on it. So two different Supreme Court decisions came out, Tennessee v. Garner in the 80s, and then the most seminal one of all is Graham v. Conner. Tennessee v. Garner, and I won't go into it, you can look it up, but ultimately, officers cannot shoot a fleeing felon unless they can articulate the weight or nature of the state's interest outweighs the interest of the individual's civil rights. In other words, I've got a murderous suspect, active shooter, classic.

He's running 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? Absolutely. Yes, obviously. That's, again, one example. Then we go to Graham v. Conner,

and Graham v. Conner really sets the standards. And what they say is when an officer applies any kind of force, it has to be objectively reasonable versus subjective. It has to be objectively reasonable. And this is going to be weighed in by the city attorney, district attorney, by the FBI, by Department of Justice. It's a very extensive process. When I work on these cases, there are thousands and thousands of pages on some of these cases. It takes forever, walkthroughs, and all the facts and evidence, blood spray pattern analysis, trajectory, it's on and on. It's fascinating. And ultimately, in front of a jury, whether it's in a civil action or criminal action, the jury or the court, if they decide to go with a court-mandated trial, is going to decide

as to whether or not the officer's application of force was reasonable, objectively reasonable. And one of the things that Chief Justice Rehnquist came out with is an opinion stating that because police situations are tense, dynamic, fluid, and uncertain, that it is unfair for individuals to apply 20-20 hindsight, absence the presence of an uplifted knife. Now, that's a wonderful wording because what it's saying is, look, this gets into the meat of the matter, what we're talking about. When you look at something on TV, and some of these are bad shootings, there's shootings that I would tell you right now, I couldn't defend them and you need to settle. The officer was completely out of line. Some of them need to go to prison because they're lying. And when you're looking at these cases,

what you're looking at is, is it reasonable for the officer at the time, given the facts and circumstances known to the officer at the time that the shooting transpired, his background and training? In other words, I cannot hold a rookie with two weeks in the street to the same standard I hold myself. I've got 40 years behind the gun and all the different cases. For me to apply deadly force, it's got to be off the charts. Now, for a younger officer, I might be able to say, look, he doesn't have the experience that I did. He doesn't have the technical expertise. He certainly doesn't have the mechanical ability. He doesn't have the presence of mind or the experience to have formulated maybe a proper decision. It may not have been a great decision. It may be mechanically impure. But according to the law, it was objectively reasonable that he applied force, whatever force that may have been, in this circumstance. And that's what throws a lot of people because why aren't the officers in prison? Because of the jury instructions. Right. Well, that's interesting. I'd never heard that, that courts will hold officers to a different standard based on their experience in these cases or?

Almost. Yeah. Basically, each shooting is adjudicated on its own merits. So you can't say, well, because this shooting went down this way, this one should have gone down in a similar manner. It's impossible. There are too many variations and permutations in each shooting that are unique unto themselves. So when you become involved in these shootings, each shooting has to be adjudicated on its own merits. The facts in evidence, the circumstances known to the officer at the time that the shooting or use of force transpires, his background knowledge of the entire incident, as well as his training. Now, there's also one other thing, and now we get into precipitative factors. Was the officer legally justified in being where he was? Did he make the right tactical decisions?

Did he employ the right communications? Did he surround? Did he request backup? Did he request less lethal? It gets really involved. It's unbelievably involved. And I get attacked with this all the time in depositions in court. Well, why didn't the officer do this? Or I may have an attorney said, well, Officer Reitz, would it have been reasonable for the officers to have done this? I said, absolutely.

But they didn't, did they? No. Could they have done this? Yes. Would that have been reasonable? Yes. And they didn't do it, 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 they do all those? Well, because they didn't have time. Right. What about the intuition that many untrained people have? Why can't you just shoot the person in the leg? Okay. And this comes back, I get jury questions all the time. Why didn't they shoot the knife out of his hand? Why not use a baton against the guy with the knife? First of all, let's look at this. Again, we could have days doing this. This would be fascinating. But let me explain something. Let's say pepper spray, OC, is an irritant. It's not an incapacitator. Okay, so it's irritant. I've been sprayed in the face by my partner when I had an altercation with a suspect because my partner was a terrible aim. I was still able to fight. I was still able to bring the suspect under control. We look at the taser. It's not an infallible process. So sometimes the darts don't go in.

They don't separate enough because it's a neuromuscular, basically, disruptor. And it causes the muscles to violently, if you will, twitch, contract 16 times a second. It'll get your mind right. But both of those probes have to make contact. And then the electrical conduit is between those two contacts. Baton strikes don't always work because you get glancing blows and so forth. Less lethal munitions from the shotgun. Sometimes guys get hit and they go, give me more.

And you go, you got to be kidding me. What's this guy on? And I fought suspects that have been unbelievably tough. It's just scary. So when you're looking at the application of deadly force, when you're looking at less lethal and people say, why didn't you shoot him in the leg? Well, if I rip your femoral artery open and you bleed out in 20 seconds, guess what? It's a fatal. Also, rounds. We're talking about terminal ballistics. Rounds do very interesting things in side bodies. And I have seen rounds that have struck. I had one shooting about three years ago where the round struck the suspect's hip inboard about an inch and a half, and then it ricocheted off the hip.

It basically made a 70-degree angle turn, upward trajectory now, because it was a slight downward angle, and went through the heart, bottom of the heart, top of the heart, exited out through the suspect's right clavicle, and he was dead on scene, expired on scene. Well, theoretically, that's a glancing or a peripheral hit. And so shooting a knife out of somebody's hands, you better be really, really good. That's damn near impossible.

So all these things that you see in the movies, it's Hollywood. And officers don't have, and we'll get into training, but the officers themselves don't necessarily have the ability to make this pinpoint accuracy when you work with handguns and just shoot them in the leg and wound them or shoot something out of the suspect's hands. On the contrary, there are stories of shootings in elevators where 17 shots are fired and no one is hit, or 100 rounds from five different officers are fired and the subject is hit twice. But perhaps we should get into the standard to which most cops are trained now and just what any illusions we have about that. Yeah. Well, I will put it this way. This is one thing that has irked me for years and years. I recently came back from the East Coast

where the department, really good department, great chief, really understood. And so they had me come out and I trained their entire department in four sessions and over a space of two weeks. And the standard of training that I train people to far exceeds the minimalistic standards that most officers are trained to. Officers are trained to what they call post standards, which are police officer standards and training. You have to get a lot of people through academies. So you have a base level of performance that an officer must qualify with a firearm, certainly go through written exams and understand this and that. So everybody wonders, why are the officers, the hit rates are terrible for police? I mean, it's in the low teens, the actual numbers of hits. Far more misses in the

field in actual field documented shootings than there are strikes on suspects. We have sometimes excessive amount of rounds going downrange, although there is a brand new Supreme Court decision that just came down regarding that. However, that being said, the jurors sometimes will ask in written, well, why did the officers fire so many rounds? Why are there so many officers engaged in shooting? And the analogy I like to use, and I think all your listeners can probably latch on to this. Imagine if I taught you how to drive a stick-shifted Volkswagen Bug. That's what I trained you to do. Here's your little VW Beetle from the 70s, woodstocked out.

And then I ship you across the ocean. I put you into a Formula One in the Le Mans 500 at night in driving rain. And you crash and burn at the first turn. And you're astounded. Well, I trained you to one standard when an entirely different standard was called for in the field. And this is what happens. When you do a qualification course, by necessity, you have to have some measure of proficiency. You have to

have some standards that you can go back and say, look, the officer qualified, here are the records. But it's just, it's so vast, the mechanics, and I'll just rip through a list very quickly. You're looking at all varied positions, braced, unbraced, rollover prone positions, reverse positions. You're looking at shooting firing support hand, firing hand only. You're looking at low-level light problems. You're looking at high-speed moving targets, knife attack targets, hostage situations, vehicles, barricaded suspects, all the impediments that may be interposed between yourself and a downrange target, partial targets. You're looking at distant targets. You're looking at

targets that articulate and present awkward angles and so forth. That is a lifetime of study. Yeah. Now, when you go and you stand in front of a silhouette that has clearly delineated scoring rings, I've never seen that on a suspect. I've never seen a suspect wearing a shirt with a silhouette. And I will right now on the record will state that the first ex-con that comes out with an LAPD silhouette tattooed all over his entire body, I'll buy him a dinner at Morton's Steakhouse. I'm sure that's going to come out someday. But that's not what you get. So we train to one standard and most qualification

courses are nominal at best. And you're doing the same course. When you come back six months later, for 30 years on LAPD, our combat qual course remains the same. This is a standard. You're looking at budgets. You're looking at manpower, pulling all the officers out. You have 10,000 officers. How are you going to train them all? How are you going to get them qualified? So for me, it's a real double-edged sword. And the interesting thing is that the most, well, let me put it this way, the greatest watershed event an officer will ever experience and the most seminal event, literally impact an entire department, is the application of deadly force. And yet it traditionally, throughout law enforcement, it is that aspect, the application of deadly force, the mechanics, knowledge of the law, articulation, that is the least trained to, that the least amount of money is budgeted for.

So what you've just described is certainly troubling. It's something to which we don't have much, even with the use of body cameras and this ubiquitous practice now of recording what the cops do, we don't have a ton of evidence of the poor performance of cops in the application of deadly force or just the obvious lack of training. I mean, because it's interesting, we should probably talk about the significance of video and the way in which video can even be misleading. But from a hand-to-hand, weaponless altercation point of view, there's now so much video evidence of cops not being trained in just how to physically restrain people. So there's just some amazing videos I could show you. And I think I'll put one or two online when we post this podcast. I'll put them on my blog.

There's some amazing video of cops wrestling with suspects. There are three cops trying to figure out how to subdue one clearly unarmed, small... Literally, it's one video I'll show you. These videos get circulated in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community because people are just aghast that no one really knows at this point, you know, 20 years after the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there are still cops who don't have sort of basic hand-to-hand skills in grappling in particular. So there's this one video that has made the rounds and has commentary from Henner and Hiran Gracie, who are great jujitsu teachers. And it's, I believe, three cops, all of whom look like they're

220 pounds, trying to control an obviously drunk, much smaller, shirtless, unarmed man, shoeless man. He's in stocking feet in a McDonald's on a slick floor. He's got literally no shoes. Three of them are trying to figure out how to bring him down. And they can't solve the problem. And they go to a taser. Ultimately, they go to a taser. One tries to throw a front kick at him and can't do that. They ultimately tase this guy repeatedly, right? And it's just the most just ghastly incompetence from a martial arts point of view. And I'm not actually judging the cops here. I mean, the problem is they haven't been trained, they haven't been given the tools they need to solve this

problem. And there's another video which perhaps you've seen of what becomes a wrestling match that then winds up in a lethal force or at least in a shooting in a Walmart parking lot with a kind of deranged family that just attacks the cops. I think this family had been harassing employees at this Walmart. And the cops come on scene, and you see this all from dash cam video. And there's, you know, it's a family of like eight people, men and women. And one cop says, okay, we need to separate this group here. And they wanted to, he wanted to control them by at first separating them. But the family refused to be separated.

And they just like on cue became like the zombie family that was going to attack the cops. And it becomes this insane, protracted, 10-minute wrestling match where the cops use every tool on their belts from pepper spray to batons to tasers. Totally ineffectually, one has his gun wrestled away from him, and it's all on camera. And it looks like, honestly, from the point of view of a trained

martial artist, and again, this is not to judge these specific cops, but it looked like everyone had been dosed with some sort of neurotoxic agent where they just couldn't function properly. I'll show you these videos later. But in any case, so there's a, I think, a reasonable understanding of what you can't do in a situation to control an agitated, strong, athletic person non-lethally would, in many cases, dictate an escalation of force on the part of a cop. Well, you know, you're wonderful points again. And this is, you know, when I worked on the streets and still do. I work out all the time. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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