Officers are faced with different situations everyday, each of these situations may result in the officers death. So how do you protect yourself from being killed each day you put on the uniform and go to work? How do you ensure your family that you will be home for dinner? The simple answer is you don't you never know what the day will hold when you leave in your patrol car all you can do it train for these situations. But you cannot train enough for actions of criminals. Criminals will shoot just to kill you and than move on with the rest of the life wither it be killing, serial killers, or thieves it doesn't matter they will kill you.
Working through one of the biggest challenges I have faced in school I had the choice to shoot or not to shoot when a situation became deadly. I didn't really know that this was going to be so hard for me to work through and to watch and become aware but it was. It had challenged all of my thoughts and knowledge about the legal things we have learned and about the situations and the angles and movements of a suspect. Wither of not if I was going to be killed was the biggest challenge and the scariest thing I have ever mentally been put through. And I was standing in a classroom with a rubber gun and starring at a computer screen. How will I react if I'm actually put in a building with someone who basically is out to kill me?
The situations they had put us in had been one with a deaf person coming closer and closer without showing his one hand. But the officer yelling at him to stop and not move had not known that he was deaf and the man who was deaf and coming closer had just been trying to show him his wallet that identified him as being disabled. It obviously had been a no shoot situation because he was an innocent man. Another one had been a possible child molester who was in the park around children. He shot at the officer taking the call and than took off running. The officer had the decision to shoot or not shoot. The surrounding and the children playing had made this a no shoot situation. There was a house in the background with its light on indication that there was a person inside. The suspect had ran behind the bushes but a child had ran out from them at the time the officer approached and there were children all throughout the park. The officer had not shot because he could have killed the children or that child coming from the bushes. The students in the classroom had shot both the deaf man and the child and shot toward the suspect when he went through the children playing in the field.
Two individual citizens were put into the same situation as I was but they were actually with the officers in a police department with a remotely similar gun to the ones used in the line of duty. The citizens had both had an opinion that the officers working in their city should not be aloud to use the kind of force they use when they are placed in situation like the ones they later experience. Each of these people than took the test and shot when they shouldn't have and didn't shoot when they should have. They proven that looking at the screen and taking this test is difficult for the average person along with an officer whose trained. Both of these citizens had also shot the deaf man and had shot the innocent child running from the bushes.
This simulation of the real life events that officers may face everyday or may face once a year was scary but in a way made me want to challenge myself to the struggles of police work, to allow myself to train and help the people around me. I had been one of those students who shot the deaf person.When he had been coming closer to me I saw that his hand had not been visible and that he may be holding a gun. He had come closer and closer he had not been stopping and he could have killed me, I shot him when I saw him pull out an unknown object from his back pocket. I shot him twice. He was not a threat to my life at all he had been deaf, he never even knew what i was saying. That put me into a strange feeling it had been like oh my gosh what did I do. I had not been able to wrap my head around the fact that I would have just killed an innocent person. Would you have shot ?
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