Hardly a week goes by without the media broadcasting another graphic video of U.S. police shooting a subject armed with a knife. In response to the public’s outrage at the use of lethal force in such circumstances, senior officials in American policing have turned – precipitously, I will argue – to the unarmed tactics of the U.K. police as a model for dealing with such dangerous individuals.
For example, in August 2015 the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) published “Re-Engineering Training on Use of Force.” Within this document Chief Constables from England and Scotland provided insights as to how their police forces – largely unarmed — have successfully dealt with knife-armed subjects. Specifically, the report detailed British police’s use of “tactical withdrawal” and less-lethal tools such as batons and pepper spray to detain knife-wielding persons with the least force necessary. In another example, a recent New York Times article describes PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler’s trip to Scotland with a group of senior U.S. law enforcement executives to learn how Scottish officers deal with street confrontations. The impetus for Mr. Wexler’s field trip was to help senior leaders shift their thinking on tactics; as Wexler said, “We must do better.”[1]
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There can be no argument that American police agencies have a legal obligation to use force only in accordance with the Graham v Connor (1989) standard of objective reasonableness. It is also beyond debate that use of lethal force by U.S. law enforcement must always be guided by respect for the sanctity of human life, regardless of the crime a person may have committed.
Nevertheless, I will argue that the hasty calls for U.S. police to adopt the U.K’s model for dealing with subjects armed with knives, edged weapons, or other potentially deadly hand-held implements, are wrong-headed; for reasons dealing to the nature of two nations’ cultures and crime rates.
After discussing these cultures and crime rates, I will explain why British tactics for subduing knife-wielding suspects are unnecessarily dangerous to its police officers, and thus are not suitable for U.S. police forces. Finally, as a potential alternative to the U.K. tactics that holds potential to reduce the instances in which U.S. officers use deadly force-by-firearm on subjects with knives, I will argue for the introduction of a new force option in U.S policing, called Wounding Force.
Although they share a common language, the U.K. and the U.S. are worlds apart when it comes to their respective gun cultures and crime rates. By law, the U.K. is a society virtually devoid of firearms; and law enforcement is no exception. Indeed the U.K. is recognized as having some of the most restrictive firearms ownership laws in the world. Legislation to limit gun ownership has occurred following key mass shootings.[2] Following the 1987 Hungerford, England Massacre, the Firearms Act of 1988 banned the ownership of high-powered rifles and fully-automatic weapons, and enacted strict standards for the ownership of pump-action shotguns with magazines of more than two shot shells. Likewise, following the 1996 Dunblane, Scotland elementary school shooting, and with the backing of the vast majority of citizens, the Firearms Act of 1997 effectively banned the private ownership of firearms in the UK, so that today there are but 6.2 guns per 100 in England and Wales.[3] Similarly, only about 2.7% of U.K. police officers, those known as “Authorised (sic) Firearms Officers” (AFO), are allowed to carry firearms on duty.[4] (A notable exception is in the Northern Ireland Police Forces, where 100% of officers carry firearms.)
Contrast that with the United States, where the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment guarantees citizens right to own firearms. In spite of 160 Active Shooter incidents between 2000-2013 (and in large part due to the strong lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association) gun ownership in this country has continued to climb: U.S. gun ownership logs in at a whopping 112.6 guns per 100 citizens (more guns than people!)[5],[6]. In short, the U.S. gun culture is strongly entrenched, with Americans over 18 times more likely to have guns than their neighbors across the Atlantic.
Not surprisingly, this disparate gun culture translates into vastly different crime rates, especially with respect to gun crimes. According to a 2015 study by University of Sydney, homicide rate by firearm in the U.K. is 0.06 per 100,000 people.[7] This rate is dwarfed by the U.S. statistics from the same source, which shows 3.55 people in 100,000 have been unlawfully killed by guns. In other words, homicide with the use of firearms is almost 60 times more likely in the U.S. and in the U.K. This statistic has chilling implications not only for citizens in the U.S., but also for the police who are charged with being their guardians. It is clear that American police officers are vastly more likely to encounter criminals armed with firearms; hence, the fact that every sworn U.S. police officer is armed with a service pistol or revolver should be of no surprise. (Indeed, any decision by a senior police manager not to arm their police officers in operational environments where the presence of firearms is so pervasive would be tantamount to criminal negligence on the manager’s part!) Conversely, given the vastly reduced likelihood of a U.K. officer encountering an armed adversary, the decision not to issue guns to U.K. officers might be viewed as reasonable. In sum, U.S. and U.K. cops are apples and oranges when it comes to whether or not they should carry duty firearms.
Still, the question remains: armed or not, should U.S. police officers adopt U.K. tactics to resolve encounters with knife-wielding subjects? Before answering the question, let us summarize the tools and tactics used in such situations. The following listed tools (or force options, if you will) are not necessarily listed in order of priority or frequency of use; they simply depict those options most typically utilized by U.K. police in knife-wielding suspect situations:[8]
- Verbal persuasion – use of oral communications in the form of commands and/or negotiation to get the subject to drop the knife.
- Pepper spray – also known as OC (oleoresin capsicum) spray. Can cause irritation to subject’s eyes to the point of temporary blindness. This option only is effective out to about 15 feet, and when the subject is not wearing glasses. All U.K. police officers are equipped with this option.
- Electronic Control Weapons (ECW) – also known as tasers. ECWs operate on the principle of electro muscular disruption: the temporary “locking up” of the subject’s large muscle groups. This weapons was formerly only issued to AFOs, but the U.K. forces are now moving to equip all officers with ECOs.
- Batons – used to strike the subject and induce pain compliance. This force option requires the officer to be in close proximity to the subject. The only option more dangerous than this might be hand-to-hand combat (this is an option so hazardous to police officers that it does not warrant further discussion). All U.K. police officers are equipped with this option.
- Shields – used in conjunction with helmets and pads, and is used both indoors and outdoors. Numerous officers deploy the shields simultaneously to press and contain the subject, whereupon disarming can occur. As with the baton, this technique requires intimate contact with the subject. Shields are kept in police officer’s patrol vehicles.
- Flexible baton round – also known as bean bag or rubber bullets. Fired from a standard shotgun or grenade launcher, these rounds can be fired accurately up to 50 yards. It is unclear if only AFOs are equipped with this force option.
- Firearms – only for AFOs. On duty at all times to support non-AFOs. Only 2% of most of the U.K. police forces.
It’s important to note that American police have these same tools and employ most of these options as well. It is only when one understands the tactics employed to resolve these situations that one fully appreciate the inherent danger to officers that the U.K method represents.
The British approach leverages the tactical principle of overwhelming the subject’s decision-making processes by presenting that suspect with multiple, and at times simultaneous, stimuli. The first step is to use verbal persuasion to seek voluntarily compliance, but more importantly to gain time for other officers to respond to the scene. Second, the officers – either simultaneously or in pairs – approach the subject and employ their pepper spray or ECW, tools that have effective ranges of 3’-12’ and 7’-15’, respectively. Again, the primary goal is to seek compliance; failing this the multiple simultaneous approaches serve to disorient the suspect and set the officers up for the third step – intimate contact with the intent to disarm. This last contact phase often consists of multiple officers closing on the suspect with shields; ultimately using the shields to trap the suspect against a fixed object (e.g. a wall or a fence) and pinning the suspect’s knife arm to facilitate a hands-on knife takeaway technique.
The riskiness of the British technique can only fully be appreciated by seeing it in action – YouTube has plenty of video examples. The method can be described as human bull-baiting; multiple officers alternatively lunging at, then retreating from the knife-wielding individual, in an un-choreographed, death-defying dance, designed to confuse and eventually overwhelm the law-defying subject. Bull-baiting, a popular “sport” from the 13th through the 18th centuries in England, consisted of numerous dogs simultaneously attacking a bull with the goal of biting off the bull’s nose. Unsurprisingly, most of the dogs were seriously injured or killed during these events.[9]
The number of officers injured using the British technique has never been adequately evaluated, since the UK’s Home Office does not publish official statistics on this metric.[10] However, the technique’s similarity to bull-baiting suggests the risk level is unacceptably high and thus makes the technique unsuitable for American police officers. U.S. policing culture does not accept the premise that its officers should risk serious injury or death in order to arrest a resisting/non-compliant criminal with a knife. Simply put, the value of our law officers’ lives trumps that of dangerous criminals – we don’t do human bull-baiting. So the question remains, what can U.S. police do to stop knife-wielding suspects after all less lethal force options have been exhausted, and only the lethal force option of firearms deployment remains?
The answer may be a new and heretofore untried force option – that of Wounding Force.
It is a commonly acceptable principle in U.S. policing that when officers discharge their firearms at suspects who present an immediate threat of serious bodily injury or death, their goal is to immediately stop that threat; this translates into lethal force. Officers are trained to stop the threat through immediate incapacitation, with the firearm’s aiming point either center of body mass (to achieve a stop through rapid blood loss) or the head (to attain the stop through cranial vault disruption). Shooting to wound is seen as being impractical since the accuracy required is almost always to difficult to effect, given the close-quarters, high stress nature of typical lethal force confrontations, most of which occur at the 3 to 10 foot range. However, during typical stand-offs with knife-armed suspects, U.S. police officers armed with carbines (also known as patrol rifles, AR-15 style, .223 caliber rifles mounted with parallax-free dot optics) often times provide cover at distances of 15 yards or more for other officers employing verbal and other less lethal means to gain suspect compliance. At these distances, patrol rifle officers are positioned outside the “immediate threat” range of the suspect, and could potentially provide the capability to surgically wound the suspect by delivering a bullet to a non-lethal part of the suspect’s body, like the leg or arm. This wounding force would typically (but not in all instances) not result in the suspect’s death, but would certainly offer a pain-induced incentive for that suspect to comply with officers’ orders to discard his knife. The result – suspect alive and in custody, without unacceptable risk to police officers.
The article has explored both the cultural and the gun crime-related factors that render the British police method of mitigating the knife-wielding suspects unsuitable in U.S. law enforcement. U.S. policing is not disposed to unnecessarily risking its officers’ lives to arrest an unreasonable criminal offender equipped with a knife. Recognizing that the our industry is under significant public pressure to find a non-lethal option for dealing with suspects armed with non-firearm deadly weapons, we have offered a new force option that may be employed under the right circumstances – Wounding Force. We urge the U.S. law enforcement industry to explore Wound Force as an innovative means to meet the expectations of the public while simultaneously acknowledging the sanctity of police officers’ lives.
Blair Alexander, (Colonel US Army Ret.), is currently an Inspector with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Blair retired as a Lieutenant from Oakland PD (CA), where he served for over 20 years, holding positions as SWAT Tactical Commander & Entry Operator, Patrol Watch Commander & Supervisor, Violence Suppression Unit Commander, Internal Affairs Officer-Involved Shooting Investigator, Field Training Officer, and Departmental Range Master. Blair also retired as a Colonel (Infantry) from the US Army with 30 years of combined active & reserve service, including a deployment to Iraq as a member of the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team. He is a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, NY (BS -81), Santa Clara University in CA (MBA – 92), and the US Army War College inPA (Masters of Strategic Studies – 05).
[1] Al Baker, “U.S. Police Leaders, Visiting Scotland, Get Lessons on Avoiding Deadly Force,” New York Times (New York, NY), December 11, 2015.
[2] “Firearms-Control Legislation and Policy: Great Britain,” Law Library of Congress, accessed December 27, 2015, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/greatbritain.php#Firearms
[3] “Gun homicides and gun ownership,” Washington Post, accessed December 27, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/gun-homicides-ownership/table/
[4] Derived from latest British Home Office Statistics ending March 31, 2015. “Police workforce, England and Wales: 31 March 2015,” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-workforce-england-and-wales-31-march-2015/police-workforce-england-and-wales-31-march-2015 and “Police use of firearms statistics, England and Wales: April 2014 to March 2015,” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-financial-year-ending-31-march-2015/police-use-of-firearms-statistics-england-and-wales-april-2014-to-march-2015
[5] “A Study of Active Shooter Incident in the United States Between 2000 and 2013,” U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Washington, D.C. 2014.
[6] Christopher Ingraham, “There are now more guns than people in the United States,” Washington Post, Washington, D.C. October 5, 2015.
[7] “Compare the United Kingdom, Rate of Gun Homicides per 100,000 People,” GunPolicy.org, accessed December 27, 2015, http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/192/rate_of_gun_homicide/194
[8] In providing information on U.K. officers’ force options, the author relied on an answer provided by Adey Hill to the question: “How do British police officers manage to stop knife-wielding suspects safely when they don’t carry firearms,” Quora, accessed on December 27, 2015, https://www.quora.com/How-do-British-police-officers-manage-to-stop-knife-wielding-suspects-safely-when-they-dont-carry-firearms
[9] Catherine Marien-de Luca, “Bull Baiting,” Bulldog Information, accessed April 1, 2016, http://www.bulldoginformation.com/bull-baiting.html
[10] Alberto Nardelli, “How many officers are harmed in the line of duty,” The Guardian, (London, England), October 15, 2015.