CHARLES KONG SOO

Law en­force­ment con­sul­tant and com­bat spe­cial­ist Paul Daniel Na­hous says Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith is on the right track with the use of force pol­i­cy.

He said while some may not agree with his ‘one shot, one kill’ state­ment, it is sound as an over­all pol­i­cy di­rec­tion for the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS).

Na­hous said there was some con­fu­sion over the state­ment be­cause mem­bers of the pub­lic sought to ap­ply their own mean­ing to rather than look an­a­lyt­i­cal­ly at what Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith meant.

“His state­ments re­flect­ed not on­ly sound use of force prac­tice but al­so a high stan­dard of of­fi­cer re­sponse to a dead­ly threat. An of­fi­cer has first and fore­most the right of any cit­i­zen to pro­tect them­selves from a di­rect at­tempt on their life,” he ex­plained.

“Fur­ther­more, an of­fi­cer has an ex­tend­ed du­ty of care to the pub­lic to not on­ly neu­tralise an im­me­di­ate lethal threat to the pub­lic but to do so in a man­ner that is most like­ly to re­sult in the threat be­ing stopped in the quick­est and safest to in­no­cent by­standers. This would boil down in its sim­plest way to shoot­ing an armed as­sailant be­fore he can kill an of­fi­cer, civil­ian, or es­cape to be a lethal threat to any­one else they may im­me­di­ate­ly en­counter.”

Na­hous, a US cer­ti­fied SWAT sniper, sniper train­er and op­er­a­tor, said the quick­est way to neu­tralise an as­sailant is to shoot to the body and/or head de­pend­ing on the skill and train­ing of the of­fi­cer. Shoot­ing a limb not on­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­creas­es the chance of miss­ing and en­dan­ger­ing the pub­lic with stray bul­lets, but is much less like­ly to stop the as­sailant.

He said the longer any fight goes on, es­pe­cial­ly a gun­fight, the high­er the odds of the of­fi­cer and in­no­cent by­standers be­ing in­jured or killed.

He said the re­sponse of po­lice of­fi­cers to any threat needs to be tak­en against the back­ground of the use of force.

Cit­ing the In­ter­na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Chiefs of Po­lice de­scrip­tion of the use of force as the “amount of ef­fort re­quired by to po­lice to com­pel com­pli­ance by an un­will­ing sub­ject”, Na­hous ex­plained that the con­cept varies slight­ly in its in­tri­ca­cies from agency to agency but gen­er­al­ly fol­lows the same broad con­tin­u­um.

He said the US Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Jus­tice man­dates that of­fi­cers use lethal weapons to gain con­trol of a sit­u­a­tion on­ly if a sus­pect pos­es a se­ri­ous threat to the of­fi­cer or an­oth­er in­di­vid­ual.

He added that in­ter­na­tion­al case rul­ings, while out­side of T&T’s law, pro­vide a bet­ter idea of the ap­pro­pri­ate in­stances to use lethal force. This is es­pe­cial­ly true as some coun­tries set the stan­dard of in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice.

Na­hous said in the 1985 case of Ten­nessee v. Gar­ner, the US Supreme Court said “dead­ly force may not be used un­less nec­es­sary to pre­vent the es­cape and the of­fi­cer has prob­a­ble cause to be­lieve that the sus­pect pos­es a sig­nif­i­cant threat of death or se­ri­ous bod­i­ly harm to the of­fi­cer or oth­ers.”

This was ex­pand­ed in 1989 with the rul­ing in Gra­ham v. Con­nor which stat­ed that “ob­jec­tive rea­son­able­ness” in a sit­u­a­tion “must be judged from the per­spec­tive of a rea­son­able of­fi­cer at the scene—and its cal­cu­lus must em­body the fact that po­lice of­fi­cers are of­ten forced to make split-sec­ond de­ci­sions about the amount of force nec­es­sary in a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion.”