RANDOLPH — “Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”
“Let me get my wallet. You wanna see my ID?”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Seven simulated gunshots, all in quick succession, ripped through the darkened training simulation room in the basement of the Massachusetts Police Training Committee offices. The man in the interactive movie screen in front of me slumped to the ground, dropping a gun, and not his wallet, beside him.
“Ugh, you shot me,” he said.
The simulated shooting was part of a recent training exercise for members of the media, including The Republican, that was put on by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Using the training academy’s MILO simulator, which projects realistic scenarios onto a screen, reporters reacted to people armed with knives, traffic stops gone bad, an armed robbery and, in my case, an aggressive man who drew a gun.
The point of the exercise was not to train reporters how to shoot, but to demonstrate how quickly even routine police encounters can go sideways, and how in those moments police are justified in resorting to using deadly force.
In my scene I responded to a reported domestic assault. The husband met me in the driveway and screamed for me to leave. Then he turned sideways and reached for his back pocket on the pretense of going for his wallet. When he pulled out a gun, I opened fire, squeezing off seven shots a little over a second.
When police use lethal force, we were told, they are trained to shoot and keep shooting until the threat is no longer a threat. With a semiautomatic pistol capable of discharging a round every time the trigger is squeezed, it can mean, depending on the situation, an officer will unload 6, 7, even 12 rounds in a second or two.
“After you shot him the first time, why did you shoot him six more times?” asked ATF senior special agent James Balthazar, one of two instructors for the course.
Answering his own question, he said, “Because these things happen really fast.”
Balthazar and ATF deputy chief Paul Massock have been crisscrossing the country for the past few months, meeting with members of media in major markets. The sessions are intended to give reporters an understanding of what police are going through when they use force, but also the thought processes leading up to it, and the legal background for determining when the use of force is justified or not.
Prior to Boston, Massock and Balthazar had been in Philadelphia and New York.
Steve Cooper, a reporter with WHDH-TV in Boston fires at a simulated image of a man with a knife. He was one of the media involved in an ATF training session.
April Langwell, chief of the ATF Public Affairs Division, said the sessions began in April 2020 when agents gave a presentation to reporters in Washington, D.C. Members of the D.C. media appreciated it so much that they recommended ATF take it on the road to news outlets nationwide.
In March, when the coronavirus pandemic started receding, agents began going on the road to three cities a week. Prior to coming to the Boston area, Balthazar and Massock were in New York and Philadelphia.
“We’re trying to hit the 50 largest cities in the country over the next 18 months to two years, Langwell said.
The hope, she said, is that by explaining the use of force to the press, they will be able to covey that information to the public.
“A little information goes a long way,” said James Ferguson, special agent in charge for the Boston office of the ATF.
He said his hope for the session is that members of the media will gain an understanding of the difficulty in police work, the need to make split-second decisions in matters of life or death.
“Every day a police officer walks into events that can escalate from zero to 100 just like that,” he said. “Hopefully what you take away with you is a better appreciation for what law enforcement is dealing with.”
Balthazar and Massock each recognized the rise of anti-police sentiments nationwide amid the rise of the Black Live Matter movement in response to a series of deaths of unarmed blacks, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Briana Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
Amid all that, they said, the public is left with several misconceptions about the use of force by police, when it is acceptable and when it is not.
Balthazar said police departments continually train their officers on proper use of force. There are policies that must be adhered to, and rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court that dictate when and how police can use force.
“I can’t emphasis enough how officers look at the use of force,” Balthazar said. “They don’t take it lightly. It is as serious as a heart attack to us.”
The day-long session had three parts: a legal review of how the courts define appropriate use of force, the physical response and reaction to a deadly situation, and a simulated use of force scenario on the training simulator.
Before 1985, there was no national standard for use of force. The rules varied from state to state and even jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Tennessee v. Garner in 1984 and Graham v. Connor four years later, introduced the concept of reasonableness.
Tennessee v. Garner ruled the use of force to stop a fleeing suspect who posed no immediate threat was “constitutionally unreasonable” under the terms of the 4th Amendment.
Graham v. Connor ruled the decision to use force must be judged from the perspective of “a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”
In other words, the court ruled officers may be justified in using force if they believe themselves or the public to be in danger.
Putting a blue plastic handgun on the table and backing way, Massock said, “What if I were to say, ‘I’m going to walk over there, pick up that gun and shoot you with it.’ When do you feel you are in imminent danger?”
He took one step and everyone in the classroom said, “Now!”
Massock said that while the courts have introduced reasonableness, they have not defined it.
“The definition of reasonable? There isn’t one. It’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography; you know it when you see it.”
The same applies to unreasonableness, Massock said.
“The courts have established guardrails for reasonableness. Unreasonableness is anything that falls outside of those guardrails,” he said. “A little or a lot, it’s unreasonable.”
The ruling recognized that police officers in moments of crisis must make split-second judgments about the use of force based on their own experience and by what they see and hear in front of them.
“With the use of force, the question is not could the officer have done something else. The question is was the use of force reasonable,” Balthazar said.
Police use of lethal force was thrust into the national spotlight with the police killing of an unarmed Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.
The shooting of the Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, by a white police officer led to days of rioting, violence and looting in Ferguson.
No charges were fired against the officer, Darrin Wilson, who later resigned from the department.
A Department of Justice review determined the shooting resulted from a confrontation between the officer and Brown that began with Wilson telling Brown to get out of the road and use the sidewalk.
At some point in the confrontation, Brown is said to have reached inside the police car and punched Wilson. Wilson attempted to draw his gun, and he and Brown struggled over the weapon. The gun discharged inside the car and Brown was struck in the hand.
The report says Brown ran approximately 180 feet from the police car with Wilson running after him. Although witnesses accounts vary, blood evidence in the road indicates Brown turned and began to move toward Wilson. Wilson opened fire, discharging 10 shots and hitting Brown 6 times.
The report concludes there was no basis to pursue criminal charges against Wilson, and that once Brown turned and approached Wilson, the decision to open fire “was not objectively unreasonable and thus not a violation.”
Since Brown’s death and the fallout from Ferguson, many departments nationwide have revised their use of force policies. And over that time, instances of lethal use of force by police have not changed.
Following Ferguson, the Washington Post has kept a database of every fatal shooting by on-duty police officers in the United States. Since 2015, it has logged 6,471 incidents were police fatally shot someone.
The number has been consistent from year to year, with no fewer than 990 cases in 2018 and no more than 1,021 recorded last year.
So far in 2021, there have been 523 fatal shootings by police, which is roughly the same pace as each of the previous five years.
The number is considerably higher than comparable countries. Canada in 2021 had 36, Australia 21, and Germany 11.
The Washington Post database of fatal police shootings reports 46% are white, 24% Black, and 26% Latino. The people shot are overwhelmingly male and between the ages of 20 and 39.
Also 91% were armed with some weapon, the majority, 59%, were armed with guns.
The research and advocacy group, Mapping Police Violence, reports that in 2020 the majority of most instances where police used lethal force started out with police responding to non-violent offenses, traffic violations or where no crime was reported. Fewer than 30 percent started out with police responding to a suspected violent offense.
Balthazar said that when an officer identifies a suspect is a threat and the use of force is justified, the means for stopping the threat is almost irrelevant.
Balthazar noted how Dallas police in 2016 used a robot fitted with a bomb to stop a sniper who killed five police officers. There have been instances where police have stopped armed suspects by running them over with their cruisers.
If someone is determined to be a serious threat, force is justified until the threat level changes. If someone with a gun is running away from police, they remain a threat and police are justified shooting them in the back, he said.
A lot of what the agents do in the sessions is to counter what they called TV show myths.
“The use of force is not pretty,” Balthazar said. “It’s not Hollywood.”
Very rarely in real life does a single shot incapacitate someone, he said. It’s difficult to shoot someone in the leg, and practically impossible to shoot the gun out of someone’s hand.
Police are trained to aim at the biggest part of the target’s body, the torso, and then shoot until the suspect is no longer a threat. At five to six rounds a second, that can mean the suspect will be stuck multiple times.
Balthazar said that action will always be faster than reaction.
Studies have show that the average time to raise a gun and fire is 0.26 seconds. The average time for a police officer to draw a gun from a holster is 1.92 seconds.
To shorten the gap between action and reaction, police tend to be always scanning and assessing situations.
“Time is critical. Time is valuable,” Balthazar said.
Police in talking to suspects are trained to watch how the person acts. Are their hands in their pockets? Are they balling their fists? Are they moving to a fighting stance? Are they looking around to see if there are any witnesses? Is the person saying things like they are not going back to prison?
Noticing any of those, an officer may react by becoming aggressive, by barking commands, or even by reaching for their taser, baton or gun.
Members of the public witnessing this will see the cops as the aggressors, when they are actually reacting, Balthazar said.
“What I want you to understand is that when an officer reacts that way, he is cheating the timeline,” he said. “Citizens don’t understand why police get aggressive when someone won’t take their hands out of their pockets. They don’t understand why (it’s dangerous), while we know why.”
Northampton lawyer David Hoose, who has handled several lawsuits charging police brutality, told The Republican he found the idea of traveling ATF agents teaching journalists about the use of force to be both interesting and disingenuous.
“Did they talk about how overwhelmingly more likely to shoot a Black people instead of white people?,” he asked.
Hoose said it bothers him that public funds are being used to teach journalists about the use of force and then they didn’t present the whole story. “They talked only about half of it.”
A member of the Northampton Police Review Commission, Hoose said no one is suggesting doing away with armed law enforcement. “ATF deals with some dangerous, bad people,” he said.
But for the majority of calls to a local police, there is no reason why an armed officer needs to respond to it, he said. There are numerous instances where police respond to a non-violent situation, such as a routine disturbance or even a traffic stop, and then it goes sideways and police end up using lethal force.
“The evidence is overwhelming. When firearms are present at an encounter that goes bad, they are going to be used,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming. People of color are more likely to be shot than a white person.”
He favors more cities adopting models where social workers and mental-health professionals are dispatched to non-emergency calls, rather than armed police officers.
“Given what we know, the only solution is to reduce the role of the police, and that reduces the number of possible shootings that could happen.”
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