From: popovich@morningside.cs.columbia.edu (Steve Popovich)
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Re: Bad tactical position ( was Psychology in Defense)
Date: 19 Nov 92 21:06:01 GMT

In article <9211172101.AA20223@gtephx.com>,
forda@gtephx.UUCP (Andrew Ford @ AGCS, Phoenix, Arizona) writes:

#     Scene: you see a woman in a torn  nightgown running across a 
# lawn, screaming at the top of her lungs.  A man comes out of the 
# house running after her, tackles her and begins to drag her back 
# to the house.  You stop, order the man to release the woman and 
# lie face down.  He refuses.  She's still screaming.  Suddenly, 
# she breaks free and starts fleeing.  In spite of your orders to 
# stop, the man pursues and is about to catch her again.  BANG!  
# 
# Congratulations, you just shot the husband of a woman suffering
# a nervous breakdown -- and you've got a crazy woman running
# around half naked (likely to become a victim, too).
# 
# The point being you will never know for sure until after the
# smoke clears.

Then there's what happened on Tuesday this week, outside a Brooklyn
subway station.  This isn't the first report of this incident locally,
but there is an article on the front page of today's NYTimes about it.
I'll include a few carefully chosen excerpts to help reinforce the
point.  The article begins:

	A detail of three New York City transit police officers on an
	anti-crime patrol had stumbled upon an all-too-common situation
	outside a Brooklyn subway station Tuesday evening: two shabbily
	dressed men, one with a drawn gun, menacing a woman.

The result of this meeting is reported as:

	...Two of the officers from the patrol opened fire...The
	officers fired 17 shots in a matter of moments...One officer
	from the anti-crime detail emptied his six-shot .38-caliber
	revolver, and then reloaded...[Note:  The other officer's
	weapon, from which 11 shots were fired, is given in the
	article as a 9mm semiautomatic Glock, so it seems that no
	officer actually kept firing after reloading.]

In other words, a pretty emphatic BANG!  The only problem is:

	The two men were actually police officers in plain clothes,
	making what was until that moment a typical arrest on the
	second-to-last stop of the L line.  They were searching a
	suspected fare beater they had chased down a staircase and
	cornered.

In other words, a pretty emphatic OOPS!  One of the officers was hit
three times, twice in his bulletproof vest, but once in the neck.  He
was critical for a while, but as of last night was in stable condition
and was expected to recover from the shooting.  They're still trying
to figure out just how this happened.  This interesting article,
titled, "After 17 Shots, Officers See Colleagues Were Target", goes on
to say that:

	Ordinarily, plainclothes officers are instructed to wear a
	wristband or other garment in the chosen "color of the day"
	so they can be easily recognized by other officers.

The article also says that it is unknown whether the officer who was
shot was actually wearing such a garment at the time of the shooting.
So, either the officer who was shot broke the protocol by failing to
wear a distinguishing garment, or the officers who shot him broke the
protocol by failing to determine whether the gunman they were shooting
at might actually be an officer.

So although there was a supposedly well-defined protocol to be used by
the officers to determine whether a man with a gun is a dangerous
criminal or instead is a fellow officer, these presumably well-trained
officers who shot one of their colleagues also didn't have a clue as
to what they were really doing until after the smoke had cleared.  All
I can say about this is, "Be careful out there".
	-Steve