In the line of fire, cops are on their own

Lessons from experience
Six years earlier, as a rookie, Fuhr had been involved in another showdown, with a suspect who was brandishing a rifle or a shotgun. Fuhr ordered him to drop the gun. The man swung around with the gun over his head. Fuhr made a split-second decision and concluded that the man was not going to shoot. So Fuhr did not shoot. The man dropped the gun and was arrested.

Today, Fuhr thinks he was wrong. “As he turned towards me, I should have shot him,” he said. “I made the incorrect decision, looking back on it.” 

Although the incident turned out all right, Fuhr could easily have been killed. He took a chance he shouldn’t have, because at that time, in 1983, police weapons training was rudimentary, and he wasn’t prepared.

At the firing range, “you fired from the 25-yard line. You fired a directed number of rounds,” Fuhr remembered. “It was very static, and there was no alteration from that.”

Things are different today.

At police academies across the country, would-be officers navigate their way through astonishingly realistic computer simulations. Instructors can devise an almost infinite number of variations, putting their students into almost any dangerous situation that can be imagined.

Then there are the “live fire” houses. Here, officers go into a building where a crisis situation is replicated. They learn to handle their weapons around one another, around possible criminals and around innocent bystanders. They have to shoot while walking. They have to shoot while running.

So when the same scenario arises in real life, said Scott Williams, lead firearms instructor at the Bergen County N.J., police academy, “your mind will immediately trigger and say: ‘I know what that is. That’s a gun. That’s happened before. And I’m ready to take care of it.’ ”

‘It’s something we didn’t want to do’
David Klinger also killed a man once.

It was July 1981, and Klinger was the greenest of rookies, just four months on the beat in South Central L.A. He and his partner, Dennis Acevedo, were chasing a suspect when the man pulled a butcher’s knife and plunged it into Acevedo’s chest.

Acevedo called out, “Shoot him!” But Klinger’s gun had fallen out of its holster. By the time he retrieved it, the suspect was just about to cut Acevedo’s throat. From 18 inches away, Klinger fired.

The bullet tore through the suspect’s lungs and aorta. The knife flew away, but the suspect kept struggling. It took four officers to subdue him, despite his grave injuries. Sitting on the stoop of a nearby house, Klinger watched him die.

“I managed to beat myself up for many years, because I should have been able to grab his wrists and take the knife out of his hands,” Klinger said. “I beat myself up for not being able to avoid shooting him.”

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