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Real life defensive encounters are
seldom as clean as we might
like. Hi everyone, it's John with
today's active self-p protection lesson
from Baltimore, Maryland. It's an
officer involved shooting here that
teaches all of us, both law enforcement
and CCW, about how chaotic real
gunfights are, about how important it is
to be able to hit a moving target even
when you are moving, and about making
the decision to use deadly force. We're
going to listen in to the explanation
given at the press conference when this
video was released. This is the body
camera of officer David Kinland and they
are chasing a young man named Curtis
Deal. And we're going to listen in to
his description and then we will come
back and learn some lessons.
This is graphic for those watching at
home.
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4931. Shots fired. Shots fired.
This is a slowed down version. Um,
again, starting from the
alleyway. In this slowed down version,
you can see the gun in the suspect's
right hand.
And at this point, the suspect's going
to turn and begin to raise his weapon
towards the
officer. Officer fires several
rounds, striking the suspect in his
front body area.
The audio is muted on this part because
it was slowed down.
And uh just as a reminder for those of
you uh uh as you understand more about
the body cameras, there's a 30-se
secondond buffer that goes back before
the sound uh activates. This was a
relatively quick event that took place
out there. So, um you didn't have a lot
of sound leading up to the actual event
itself.
Okay, let's go back and think about some
of these lessons here. And as we see it
slowed down, you're going to see that
that the officer here runs past. He's
running past what was going on around
him. I mean, you you know, you don't
blame him for that. And just as he sees
out of the corner of his eye, you can
see the bad guy here, he's got the gun
in his hand and he's running away. Now,
what I find very interesting is that you
see officer Kimland here draw his
firearm. That's the first time the
firearms out in the fight and he's got
it out and on target because he has a
threat in front of him. But one thing
that I do notice is this is a fleeing
threat. Certainly, if you go read uh you
know uh what the police use of force
laws and shooting a fleeing felon,
Tennessee versus Garner and all that, he
certainly could have taken a shot there,
but he didn't. And that shows remarkable
restraint in my opinion. He's trying to
get after him and get this guy to
surrender. You know, they police
officers go through their whole career,
they don't generally want to shoot
people. They'd rather not. So, but what
happens here is you see Deal starts
raising the gun. And you can see it
right there that that gun is coming up.
He's looking back and he's going to take
a shot at that officer for sure. Now,
officer Kinland only has one hand on the
gun here. Really hard to run with both
hands on the gun. It's one of the
reasons we talk about if you need to
move, move, and if you need to shoot,
shoot. But thankfully, he was very good
with his firearm here and put the shots
on target exactly where they needed to
be. Now, you say, why did his body
camera move? Because he pushed that gun
out with his dominant hand, and
therefore, that turned his chest away
from him. Now, as soon as he can, he
knows he's not going to be running. You
notice that officer Kinley puts both
hands on the gun, but he stops shooting.
Why does he stop shooting? Because you
can see right there that the gun is on
the ground. He can see that the gun is
on the ground. So, the threat for the
moment has ended. However, we don't know
if he has anything else on him. We don't
know if he has additional weapons on him
or if he's still in the fight. So, he
starts giving him commands. And I think
that was excellent. He waited until that
threat was imminent, took the shots at
the exact right time, put them where
they needed to be, and stopped shooting
when he needed to. One more bit that I
want to see here is when his partner
comes across to get that gun out of the
way. Notice that officer Kinland drops
his firearm, he has excellent muzzle
awareness here and does not muzzle his
partner. He waits until he gets past and
then the gun comes right back and on
target so that he can protect himself
and his partner. So that shows excellent
muzzle awareness under stress. This is
something that you got to train and
train and train to do well. So I think
that officer Kinland here did an
excellent job of only shooting when he
had to, of stopping shooting when the
threat was over and it wasn't imminent
anymore, of maintaining his muzzle
awareness, protecting himself and his
partner, and covering his ASP.
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