Police shootings occupy a strange place in American political discourse. They are statistically rare relative to the tens of millions of annual police-civilian interactions, yet they frequently dominate political debates. In 2022 alone, an estimated 49.2 million U.S. residents age sixteen or older had at least one contact with police. Only a minute fraction of those encounters ended in the discharge of a firearm. Most of these are justified. But rare events, which are not representative of the overwhelming majority of police encounters, have unfairly changed how the entire system is perceived.
In the aftermath of any police shooting, it seems as if everyone becomes a tactical expert with unlimited time and perfect information. It is remarkable how many flawless tactical decisions are made while seated behind a computer screen.
Public commentary on police shootings tends to rest on three recurring mistakes: hindsight bias, unrealistic expectations about human performance, and legal illiteracy. Video is replayed in slow motion without regard to what a reasonable officer would have perceived on scene. “Obvious” alternatives are presented without reference to time constraints and the physiological limitations of decision-making. Legal standards are replaced with naïve armchair intuitions from individuals who likely have never fired a weapon in their entire lives.
In Graham v. Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court held that claims of excessive force must be judged under an “objective reasonableness” standard. That is to say, we must take the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene. The Court explicitly warned against the distortions of 20/20 hindsight and acknowledged that officers are often forced to make split-second decisions in tense, uncertain, and rapidly changing circumstances.
Under the Graham standard, the question is not whether the outcome was tragic or whether a different tactic might have worked. It is whether the force was reasonable in the moment it was used.
What follows are ten common misunderstandings (in no particular order) that distort how the public evaluates police shootings. I approach this issue both as an ethicist and as a sworn law enforcement officer. Each issue is examined against governing case law, human physical limitations, and the realities of time, distance, and reaction. Where possible, I include links to body camera footage of real-world incidents so readers can see how these encounters unfold—recognizing that even video offers only a partial and imperfect view.
- The Myth of the “Perfect Alternative”
One of the most persistent misunderstandings about police shootings is the assumption that if another less-lethal option was possible; it was unnecessary to shoot. These options, usually imagined after the fact, typically take the form of “they could have waited,” “they could have backed up,” “they could have talked longer”, “they could have shot the suspect in the leg”, or “they could have used a Taser.”
Such reasoning rests on hindsight bias. Once the outcome is known, the path not taken always appears safer and more obvious. It is easy to critique a quarterback after the interception, or an investor after a stock plummet, when the result is already fixed and the clock has stopped. From that vantage point, better options seem plentiful.
Real world encounters (especially those that police find themselves in) do not occur under ideal circumstances. Distance closes quickly and human reaction takes time. A suspect can cover between 20-30 feet in the time it takes for an officer to recognize the threat and begin to act. A hand dropping toward a waistband may finish the motion before the brain fully processes what it is seeing.
The law does not require officers to gamble their lives on optimistic assumptions about a suspect’s intentions (as if we should give suspects the benefit of a doubt). It simply requires that their response be reasonable given what they knew and perceived under the totality of the circumstances.
- The “Least Possible Force” Fallacy
A related misunderstanding is the belief that officers ought to exhaust all other force options before opting to use deadly force. This too is wishful thinking, and anyone who tried to follow such a rule in an actual defensive scenario would quickly find themselves injured or killed.
The force that an officer may use against a suspect should be proportional to the threat. In Graham, the Supreme Court adopted an objective reasonableness standard, not a “try everything else first” rule. The question is whether the force used was reasonable in light of the threat confronting the officer at that moment. A least-force requirement would compel officers to delay in situations where delay heightens the risk.
Proportionality allows officers to immediately respond to situations that change in seconds. Encounters do not always escalate gradually up a neat ladder of force. A “routine” traffic stop can turn violent in an instant. A suspect who is merely argumentative one moment can lunge or reach the next.
Proportionality also benefits everyone. It ensures an officer’s safety by empowering him with the ability to immediately match the severity of a threat facing him. But it also ensures a suspect’s safety by prohibiting officers from using excessive force in response to a trivial threat.
When it comes to an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm, proportionality justifies a response capable of stopping it. If a suspect is charging with a knife or reaching for a firearm, it would be ridiculous to require an officer to pause and experiment with pepper spray because it sounds gentler. The law does not require officers to first deploy intermediate tools simply because they are less severe in the abstract.
- The “Unarmed Means Harmless” Assumption
A third misunderstanding is the claim that a shooting cannot be justified if a suspect was unarmed.
The problem with this claim is that “unarmed” is not equivalent to “incapable of inflicting death or serious injury.” The absence of a physical weapon does not mean an officer is not facing a lethal threat. A person can kill with hands, feet, or blunt force, especially if the victim is on the ground or physically overmatched. An officer knocked down in a struggle can lose control of a firearm in seconds. A vehicle can be used as a weapon. A sudden attack at close range can create a lethal threat even in the absence of a visible weapon.
Moreover, whether a suspect is “unarmed” is determined after the fact. An officer can never truly know whether someone is unarmed until after the person is arrested and searched (and even then, mistakes are sometimes made). Until then, someone can only be apparently unarmed.
Without actual knowledge that a suspect is unarmed, an officer can only respond to what they can see. A rapid reach toward a waistband in low light may present the same cues as drawing a firearm. A charging suspect who ignores commands may force a decision before anyone knows with certainty what is in his hands.
Defensive shootings are always reactionary, and waiting too long to react could get an officer killed. In that respect, suspects always hold an inherent advantage over officers. If a suspect suddenly starts grabbing under his waistband or reaching in unknown spaces in his car, an officer who waits until he is able to identify what the suspect is trying to produce may be killed.
But mistakes do happen. What if the officer is wrong? What if the perceived weapon turns out to be a phone, or the waistband reach produces nothing at all?
Courts have long acknowledged that reasonable officers are allowed to make reasonable mistakes. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable conduct, not imperfect judgment made under pressure. Officers are often forced to act on incomplete information and rapidly developing cues.
If an officer reasonably (but mistakenly) perceives a lethal threat, the analysis does not hinge on whether the perception was later proven wrong. Again, it turns on whether the mistake itself was reasonable under the totality of the circumstances. Suppose that police shoot a suspect who claims that he has a gun and reaches into his waistband. The fact that no weapon is later found does not retroactively eliminate the danger that reasonably appeared to exist at the moment of decision.
- “You Can’t Shoot Someone Who is Fleeing!”
Another argument is that deadly force is unlawful once a suspect begins to flee. The image of a person shot “in the back” is treated as decisive. However, a suspect in flight can still be a deadly threat.
In Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court rejected the common law rule that allowed officers to shoot any fleeing felon. But it did not prohibit shooting fleeing suspects altogether. Rather, it held that deadly force may be used when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a reasonable threat of death or serious physical injury. Flight by itself isn’t sufficient, but flight combined with a serious threat may justify deadly force.
Body position by itself does not rule out a threat. A suspect can be running while armed. A suspect can turn partially away while pointing a firearm backward over the shoulder. A suspect can walk toward a crowd while holding a weapon. There have been many cases where suspects were shot in the back after they reached for a weapon that was dropped while fleeing. Again, the relevant question is whether the suspect posed an imminent danger at that moment.
The fact that a suspect’s back is turned does not, by itself, signal retreat or surrender. In a gunfight, people move instinctively. Someone who is being shot at may reflexively turn away to shield vital organs. A suspect may also pivot or angle his body while repositioning, finding cover, or creating distance before reengaging.
- Multiple Shots Prove Excessive Force
Owing in large part to unrealistic portrayals of shootings in cinema and television, many expect that a single shot should end the encounter. When that does not happen, the perception is that something has gone wrong or the shooting was excessive.
But that would be a mistake. First, the human body is surprisingly resilient, and the effects of a gunshot are not always felt immediately. Many wounds are lethal, but their lethality is not instantaneous. A suspect who is shot can still pose a deadly threat. Indeed, individuals who have strong willpower or are under the influence of narcotics are often able to stay in the fight even though they might have wounds that, in due time, prove fatal.
There are plenty of real world examples where multiple shots were required to stop an assailant. In one case, an assailant was shot 14 times before finally being incapacitated.
Second, real gunfights do not unfold in discrete, evaluative “steps”. Gunfights (both civilian and law enforcement) typically unfold in bursts measured in fractions of a second. Police officers are trained to continue firing until a perceived threat is neutralized, which often results in multiple rounds being discharged in rapid succession. Once force is initiated in response to a perceived lethal threat, the sequence continues until the threat appears to stop. Counting rounds after the fact does not, by itself, determine whether the force was excessive.
Third, we must also take into account the limits of human reaction time. Human beings are not machines capable of instantly terminating action the moment conditions begin to change. There is an unavoidable delay between perceiving a change in threat, deciding to stop shooting, and physically executing that decision. As noted by the Force Science Institute:
“Everything an officer does takes time. It takes time to perceive that a threat level has changed and it takes time to decide to stop shooting and to mechanically activate that decision. When officers are engaged in continuous rapid fire, as their training requires for defending their lives, the stopping process is more complex and generally takes longer.”
Empirical research supports this point. One study found that “if an officer were to take 0.56 seconds to react to a stop-shooting signal, three to four rounds could be fired by the officer as part of an automatic sequence after the signal to stop had already occurred. Because these numbers stand as more realistic measures for officers under high stress situations, the number of anticipated rounds fired following a stopping signal may stand at anywhere from zero to four. These results apply in real-world shooting situations if the officer is shooting, assessing, and attempting to simultaneously recognize a stop-shooting signal or indicator as the primary reason why they stop shooting.”
Even highly trained shooters cannot instantaneously halt a firing sequence the moment a threat changes. There is a lag between perception, decision, and motor response, and officers cannot be faulted for failing to do what is physically impossible.
- Shooting Suspects in the Leg or Arm
Some ask, “why couldn’t an officer have aimed for the suspect’s leg or arm?” This proposal, which is likely the result of inaccurate portrayals of shootings in cinema and television, faces numerous problems.
First, the idea of shooting a limb to wound a suspect misunderstands the purpose of defensive shooting. When police discharge their firearms, it is to stop a threat, not necessarily to wound or kill. The best way to do that is to target center mass, as it furnishes the largest available area to maximize the chance of stopping a suspect. The goal is neither to wound nor to kill, but to incapacitate. Often, the only reliable way to do so is to cause damage that is inevitably fatal.
A suspect who is shot in the leg or arm can still pose a deadly threat. Hitting an extremity does not reliably shut down voluntary action and relies mainly on pain compliance. Center mass shots maximize the probability of rapid incapacitation by causing massive disruptive trauma.
Another reason that officers are trained to target center mass is that fine motor skills degrade considerably under stress. To get an idea of how this affects shooting ability, imagine plunging your hand into a bucket of ice water for thirty seconds and then attempting to thread a needle. Now replace the needle with a moving target that may be firing back. Add darkness, noise, bystanders, an elevated heart rate, and it becomes clear why shooting center mass is the best way to ensure that one’s shots hit their target. Asking officers to aim for arms or legs in a rapidly unfolding encounter increases the probability of misses and unintended injuries.
Finally, aiming at a limb is not a “lesser” use of force in any legal sense. In general, any act of discharging a firearm at a person is deadly force, regardless of the intended target. Indeed, a bullet that strikes the femoral artery can cause fatal blood loss in minutes. A round that misses a small, moving target will continue toward whatever lies beyond.
- The Belief That Less Lethal Tools Are Reliable Substitutes for Deadly Force
Some argue that less-lethal tools such as Tasers and pepper spray provide dependable alternatives to firearms and should be an officer’s first recourse instead of shooting.
This view overstates both the reliability and the immediacy of less-lethal force. Taser deployments routinely fail, and many common Taser models have a very limited cartridge capacity. The X26p only has one cartridge loaded at a time, with the X2 and 7 each having two. Even the groundbreaking Taser 10, with 10 cartridges (of which two must make contact) is still considerably less than the standard 17-round capacity of a Glock 17 magazine.
For conducted electrical weapons to achieve neuromuscular incapacitation, both probes must make contact with sufficient spread. This can be defeated by heavy clothing, poor angles, partial probe contact, or even just simple movement.
Chemical agents take time to impair vision and breathing, can affect officers, and are ineffective against sufficiently motivated suspects. Impact munitions require distance and accuracy and are not guaranteed to incapacitate. While less lethal options are indispensable in modern policing and are often used very effectively to resolve volatile encounters, they are clearly not dependable alternatives to firearms.
Moreover, less-lethal tools require time – time to draw, time to deploy, and time to take effect. In encounters involving an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm, that time may not exist. A suspect charging with a knife or reaching for a firearm compresses the decision window to seconds.
- The Dismissal of Knives and Close-Range Weapons as Minor Threats
A suspect with a gun is obviously lethal, but some insist that a suspect with a knife, blunt objects, or other common items are inherently less lethal. That is not always true. To treat these weapons as minor threats is to confuse lack of range with a lack of lethality.
Knives are deadly weapons. The human body contains multiple vulnerable areas (e.g. neck, femoral artery, abdomen) where a single well-placed strike can cause catastrophic injury within seconds. A determined attacker can close distance faster than most people expect, particularly at ranges commonly encountered in street policing. At close quarters, knives and blunt objects are anything but minor.
Training videos on reaction time illustrate this point. Studies examining draw times and suspect movement have shown that individuals can cover significant ground in the time it takes an officer to recognize a threat and begin to fire. Traditionally, this has been formalized as the “21-foot rule” or “Tueller principle.” However, recent research has indicated that the distance needed for an officer to adequately react is closer to 30 feet.
Like knives, blunt objects such as a baseball bat, a metal pipe, a hammer, and even a chain can fracture a skull or cause catastrophic blunt force trauma in seconds.
When a suspect armed with a weapon advances despite being ordered to stop, the threat presented is immediate and potentially deadly and warrants a proportionate response.
- Shooting at Vehicles Is Automatically Unlawful
Some claim that shooting at a vehicle is always reckless and unjustified. After all, officers can just move out of the way. Firing at a moving vehicle only compounds the danger. But this too is a mistake.
A vehicle can be a deadly weapon. Courts have repeatedly recognized that a car used to pin an officer, strike a pedestrian, or accelerate toward a crowd presents a lethal threat.
The legality of shooting at a vehicle depends on the threat, not on the object’s category. In Scott v. Harris and Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court highlighted the risk posed to the general public by dangerous vehicle flight and rejected the claim that officers must allow a lethal threat to continue simply because it is in motion.
Of course, this does not mean that shooting at moving vehicles is tactically ideal. Many departments discourage it except in narrow circumstances. But discouraging a tactic as a matter of policy or tactics is not the same as its being unlawful
When a vehicle is accelerating toward an officer pinned between cars, toward a group of bystanders, or after the driver has already used the vehicle as a weapon, there is an immediate deadly threat. In those moments, the question is the same as in any other use of force: does the suspect pose an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm?
- Tragic Outcomes and Reasonable Mistakes
The final misunderstanding is the belief that if a shooting turns out to have been a mistake, it must have been unlawful. While understandable, it does not reflect how use of force decisions should be judged.
Under Graham, use of force must be evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, not through hindsight. Thus, if officers confront an aggressive individual who points what appears to be a firearm at them, the presence of a perceived deadly threat justifies the use of deadly force. The later discovery that the object was a nonfunctional replica does not render the shooting unjustified. A reasonable officer facing an apparent firearm does not have the time or obligation to determine whether the weapon is real before responding.
Police officers make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. They do not know, in the moment, whether an object is a firearm or a phone, whether a suspect who claims to have a gun actually does, or whether a sudden waistband reach will produce a weapon.
There have been cases where suspects brandished realistic replica firearms or BB guns that were indistinguishable from real handguns in low light. There have been cases where individuals were shot after rapidly producing cell phones that, in the split second of motion, appeared consistent with a draw. In some incidents, the suspect explicitly claimed to be armedbefore making movements consistent with drawing a gun. In others, officers were responding to reports of an armed individual.
Once it is known that the object was a phone or a replica, public perceptions of a shooting are often judged against that knowledge. But that is not a fair standard, as it requires officers to have knowledge that would be impossible to ascertain without putting themselves at extreme risk of being killed. The relevant question is whether a reasonable officer, in that environment, with that lighting, at that distance, under that time pressure, could have perceived a lethal threat.Reasonableness, not omniscience, is the governing standard.
It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that a shooting can be both lawful and tragic. The law permits the possibility that a perception, later shown to be mistaken, was nonetheless reasonable at the time. But the alternative rule would require officers to wait for absolute confirmation before responding to a perceived lethal threat. In many cases, that would mean waiting until the gun is fully raised and firing. Neither the law nor morality imposes such a requirement.