What percentage of police officers have fired their weapon outside qual/training?

[ELB]

Before you click the link, pick a number.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 ... n-on-duty/

[2farnorth]

Hmmmmm. I actually thought the number would be much lower.

[mojo84]

I guessed 20%.

[Ruark]

Any idea how many officers were surveyed? N=?

[PriestTheRunner]

Any idea how many officers were surveyed? N=?

Second paragraph:

The survey was conducted May 19-Aug. 14, 2016, among a nationally representative sample of 7,917 sworn officers working in 54 police and sheriff’s departments with 100 or more officers.

[strogg]

police and sheriff’s departments with 100 or more officers

The actual figure is probably lower. I'd presume that the smaller the municipality/department, the less likely they'll need to fire their sidearms while on duty. My initial guess was 5-10%.

[srothstein]

police and sheriff’s departments with 100 or more officers

The actual figure is probably lower. I'd presume that the smaller the municipality/department, the less likely they'll need to fire their sidearms while on duty. My initial guess was 5-10%.

I am not sure. I think they may fire them more in small rural departments, but it is for a different reason. In rural areas, it is much more likely to be fired at a wild animal (snake mostly) or to put an animal down (less animal control working and more car/wild animal accidents). In a big city, it is more likely to be crime related.

I think it looks interesting and I want to see more detail on it. The question of just firing a weapon on duty includes lots more than most people would think. When I first saw the number, I thought wow, that is way high. Then I saw the question and said, nope, way too low. I know a lot of officers who would answer no but probably should have answered yes. The problem is the shot fired was borderline on being justified and hit no one, so it never got reported.

[Scott B.]

Higher than I guessed. There must be other studies. Wonder if those numbers are consistent?

[ELB]

The study notes that white and military veteran officers were more likely to report having fired their weapons. I wonder how much those two groups overlap? I remember from stats a few years ago that whites are represented in combat arms at a much higher percentage relative to their proportion in society, while minorities tend towards combat support. Rory Miller has noted in his writings that people who are used to exercising a certain level of force (like arguing loudly) are more comfortable using less force, but have a problem going to a higher level-- it feels bad to them. Someone who is trained to use more force, and may have already done so, can operate just fine at lower levels, but has no problem escalating to higher levels if he needs to.

Interesting question that should be considered in parallel with studies like this:

"What percentage of police officers SHOULD have fired their service weapons on the job, but didn't?"

No doubt it would be difficult to come up with a hard statistic on that last one, but it is not a trivial question.

Deputy Dinkheller comes to mind of course, but I have seen other situations where the cop should have shot somebody but didn't. Deputy Peterson too, for that matter.

I remember one a few years ago because there was a good video of it. Some disgruntled/deranged man went to a school armed with a handgun and chased the office staff out of their offices. He was challenged by an armed school resource officer (a sheriff's deputy I think), who drew her weapon, but didn't fire. He pointed his gun at her, she pointed hers at him, and they danced around literally at arms length pointing guns at each other for about 10 minutes with her telling him to drop his weapon. The first responding deputy from outside the scene promptly shot the guy as soon as the deputy saw him. That ended the event.

At first there quotes from the school officials and others praising her bravery (which I will grant) and her "restraint", and talk of awards and such, and then suddenly it all (including the videos) disappeared off the internet and I could never find it again. My first thought was she should have been fired as a guard/security officer/deputy, and I'm guessing that the Sheriff's department came to the same conclusion. She gave the bad guy an infinite number of chances to simply kill her, take her weapon as well as his, and go mow down school children.

I suspect the only ones who will pursue questions of like this will be the Force Sciences Institute.

[philip964]

My understanding for FBI agents it’s very low.

I guessed 25%.

[Soccerdad1995]

My understanding for FBI agents it’s very low.

I guessed 25%.

Only because very few FBI agents like to do backflips on the dance floor.

I guessed 12%. I'm surprised the number is as high as it is.

[WildRose]

Before you click the link, pick a number.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 ... n-on-duty/

That's a whole lot higher than I've ever seen posted before even by LEO sources. To say that's surprising would be an understatement.

[ELB]

Before you click the link, pick a number.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 ... n-on-duty/

That's a whole lot higher than I've ever seen posted before even by LEO sources. To say that's surprising would be an understatement.

The NYPD publishes an annual report on officer involved shootings. When I first became aware of that report some years (gulp, decades?) ago, they tracked hits and misses, and the hit rate, IIRC, varied from year to year between about 15-25%, but (again IIRC) usually 20% or lower. They were the only PD I knew of that publicly published these kind of stats, other departments may have had higher or lower percentages, I dunno.

I just read a recent copy of the NYPD report, and it seems that now they do not publish hits and misses. Instead they publish an "objective completion rate," which is essentially "we hit the bad guy and he stopped being bad." That is regardless of how many shots were fired. If an officer shoots five times and hits the subject only once, but the subject stops, that's a "pass" because he got a hit and stopped the threat. If the officer fires five rounds and the subject runs away, that's a "fail" even if the subject was hit (which is not likely to be known for sure because he got away). For 2013 their overall objective completion rate was 63%: officers got hit(s) in 25 out of 40 adversarial shooting incidents. In four incidents the subject got away, and it is implied that the remaining 11 incidents the subject was taken into custody but was not hit by officer's gun fire.

>>>>ETA: I realize I went off track on my own thread, I remembered the "hit rates," but not the percentage of NYPD officers that only used their firearm. I think that data was there, but I don't have the older reports at my fingertips.

[ELB]

They NYPD reports are at this URL: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/re ... force.page

They've changed the name of the report to the "Use of Force Report," which now includes use of non-firearm forms of force like tasers and 'rasslin'.

[WildRose]

I checked with the local sheriff as well as my sources at Texas Ranger Company B and DPS and all said this is a ridiculously inflated number compared to anything they have seen officially.

It's higher today than the less than 1% it ran for ages but no more than 3-5% based on anything any of them has seen.

In recent years it's up quite a bit due to all of the targeting of cops by the left but very few cops end up in gunfights with their attackers because unfortunately most of those are "Ambush Attacks" and they are quite successful.

The laws and department regs/polcies have changed such that cops do tend to go to the gun more frequently than in decades long past because they have fewer liability worries but still the idea we're surrounded by trigger happy cops shooting every time they get scared or think someone might be armed is simply a mith born of the anti-gun left.

Now if all the respondents to that survey were Full Time SWAT cops in majpr cities I might believe that number but tthe chances of that are somewhere between slim and none so I don't.