A couple years ago Al Baker of the New York Times wrote a surprisingly sensible piece — A Hail of Bullets, a Heap of Uncertainty — about police shootings:
While popular culture has embedded both extremes — the hardened mantra of “shoot to kill” and the benevolent private eye (think Barnaby Jones) who expertly inflicts only a flesh wound — the truth is that neither practice is a staple of police guidelines. In fact, the most likely result when a policeman discharges a gun is that he or she will miss the target completely. So an officer could no sooner shoot to wound than shoot to kill with any rate of success. In life-or-death situations that play out in lightning speed — such precision marksmanship is unrealistic.
New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge:
In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent, according to the department’s Firearms Discharge Report. The police shot and killed 13 people last year.In 2005, officers fired 472 times in the same circumstances, hitting their mark 82 times, for a 17.4 percent hit rate. They shot and killed nine people that year.
In all shootings — including those against people, animals and in suicides and other situations — New York City officers achieved a 34 percent accuracy rate (182 out of 540), and a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away. Nearly half the shots they fired last year were within that distance.
In Los Angeles, where there are far fewer shots discharged, the police fired 67 times in 2006 and had 27 hits, a 40 percent hit rate, which, while better than New York’s, still shows that they miss targets more often they hit them.
Is this a matter of bad marksmanship? Not really. Police are not expert marksmen any more than they’re expert martial artists — civilian hobbyists often put in far more training time — but the real issue is context. They’re not shooting at the range:
For example, a 43 percent hit rate for shots fired from zero to six feet might seem low, but at that range it is very likely that something has already gone wrong: perhaps an officer got surprised, or had no cover, or was wrestling with the suspect.
That points to a fascinating aspect of the data: the police are more accurate from 21 to 45 feet than they are from 6 to 21 feet:
In training, scores go down as distance increases. But the number of shots at this distance [21 to 45 feet] is far lower; so it is possible the higher hit rate means there were conditions that allowed greater accuracy.
Mr. Cerar, a retired police commander, put it this way:
You take Olympic shooters, and they practice all the time, and they can hit a fly off a cow’s nose from 100 yards. But if you put a gun in that cow’s hand, you will get a different reaction from the Olympic shooter.