It all comes back to A-O-J.
This is common training standard throughout the US at least, and I like to call it "The triangle that makes things square".
It is comprised of three things:
ABILITY (Is this person/this group physically capable of carrying out the threat?) : Does this person possess an advantage in size/strength, weapon or dangerous instrument, known fighting skill( known by you before or during the incident; finding out after the fact is inadmissible), Able bodied v. disabled ( Disability does NOT have to be visible or obvious), male v. female, force of numbers, young v. elderly and so on.
OPPORTUNITY ( is this person/this group physically close enough to carry out the threat without any obstacle or impediment stopping them?) : For example, as exemplified in the Tueller Drill, a person with a knife is a deadly force threat at 21 feet, but not at 200, across four lanes of traffic. Ability exists but there is no Opportunity, and therefore no Jeopardy.
Swap out the knife with a rifle, and Opportunity is REintroduced.
JEOPARDY (Is this person/this group in the process of carrying out the threat, or otherwise behaving in such a way that a reasonable person in your place would conclude that they were in IMMINENT DANGER ( I.E.
"If I wait any longer to do something it will be too late to do ANYTHING") of death or grave bodily harm( Protracted injury/loss of use of limb, organ or sense, rape, and in many jurisdictions, arson or kidnap) : You see a guy with rifle at 200 feet away. he is slinging it over his shoulder and is dressed in hunting gear. Ability and Opportunity are both present but no Jeopardy exists.
Swap the scenario around and have the guy unsling his rifle, work the bolt and level the muzzle at YOU, and all three elements are present and you are in the clear to respond with deadly force should you have the means.
All three elements must be present
at the same time for you to be in the clear as far as deadly force, but they're a good idea to keep in mind even in cases of nondeadly force( after all if there's any group that understands that even hands can kill, it's us).
Where private citizens are concerned, some jurisdictions add a fourth criteria:
PRECLUSION. It can basically be boiled down to say that if you are not precluded from escaping
in complete safety( I.e. you are not required to turn and walk away right as a punch/stick/stab is inbound or close enough to be) that you must do so or attempt to do so before your use of force can be justified.
I do not use this fourth category except for informational purposes since I reason that, if I can escape in complete safety, "Imminent danger" has not manifested.
Now let's see how those apply to the Diallo case:
from wikipedia:
In the early morning of February 4, 1999, Diallo was standing near his building after returning from a meal. Police officers Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy passed by in a
Ford Taurus when they thought Diallo matched the description of a (since-captured) serial
rapist and approached him. The officers were in plain clothes. The officers claimed
that they loudly identified themselves as NYPD officers and that Diallo ran up the outside steps toward his apartment house doorway at their approach, ignoring their orders to stop and "show his hands".
As the suspect reached into his jacket, Carroll believed Diallo was drawing a firearm and yelled "Gun!" to alert his colleagues. The officers opened fire on Diallo and during the burst McMellon fell down the steps. The four officers fired forty-one shots, hitting Diallo nineteen times. Investigation found no weapons on Diallo's body; the item he had pulled out of his jacket was not a gun, but a wallet.
On March 25, a
Bronx grand jury indicted the officers on charges of second-degree
murder and reckless endangerment. On December 16 a New York
appellate court ordered a
change of venue to
Albany, New York, stating that pretrial publicity had made a fair trial in New York City impossible. On February 25, 2000, after two days of deliberations, a mixed-race jury in Albany acquitted the officers of all charges.
Why did those juries acquit those officers? The part I bolded holds the key here.
In general police procedures, flight=guilt.( This is why in any self defense course, armed OR unarmed, that knows what the hell they're talking about, the student is urged at the earliest safe opportunity to be the first to get their side told to the police).
Diallo fled after being notified the four were police officers. Looks bad from the beginning.
He then failed to comply with directions to stop and show his hands. Since "flight=guilt", and since Diallo was not complying with any directions given this puts a much less innocent perspective on a sudden reach into clothing.
Under the AOJ Triad, you only need to possess the "Reasonable person standard": If a reasonable person in your place, with your knowledge and your training, would have been placed in reasonable fear of imminent death or serious harm as described above, that perception is all that matters--the person need not actually be armed. It's the same with cases where someone was shot for pointing a toy gun at someone--that person has no way in hell of knowing at that time it's a toy--if you wait to see the gun, you're gonna see what comes OUT of it.
Intention is nothing,
Perception is
ALL.
Now, were the actions of thoise four officers within the reasonable person standard? BOTH juries agreed that they were, in any case.
Now the Sean Bell case. According to wiki this is the story of the incident:
The night of the shooting, Bell was holding his bachelor party at Club Kalua in the
Jamaica section of Queens, a venue that was being investigated by seven undercover police detectives, as a result of accusations that the owners of the club had been fostering
prostitution.
[11]
The
New York Post reported that,
according to an unnamed undercover officer, Guzman had an argument inside the club with a woman and threatened to get a gun. One of Bell's friends was heard to say "yo, get my gun" as they left the scene.[12] Fearing a shooting might occur, African American plain-clothed officer Gescard Isnora followed the men to their car while alerting his backup team, prompting the team to confront Bell and his companions before they could leave the scene.
[12] Isnora "held out his badge (by his account), identified himself as a police officer, and told the car to stop."[13]. Instead, Bell accelerated the car and hit Isnora, then hit an unmarked police minivan.
[2] By all accounts, Gescard Isnora thought he saw Guzman reach for a gun while in the car, yelled "gun" to other police at the scene, and opened fire on the car. The other officers and detectives joined him in shooting at the car, firing 50 bullets in a few seconds.
Not so innocent as the papers tried to make it out to be. An officer overheard someone threatening to commit a crime( telling someone to "get my gun" after an argument,) and then the suspect used a deadly weapon (his vehicle) to attack police officers. What did they expect? The officers cannot let someone leave the scene and continue to pose a risk to innocents, and they've just been attacked with deadly force, and so pretty much HAD to stop them right there. They had the ABILITY( Someone heard them voice intent to arm themselves, they had a group, they had the vehicle which they did in fact use as a weapon), they had the OPPORTUNITY ( They were close enough to hit the cop with the car and could have been reaching for the weapon that at least one party was overheard to voice intent to get before the fact) and JEOPARDY of IMMINENT danger of death existed( he's just run over one of the cops for crying out loud).
Were their actions within the reasonable person standard of the AOJ triad? The jury that tried them decided so.
This has been in place for YEARS as a measuring stick but people only know what they see on TV or what the news media wants them to.
THAT's why the bill's sponsors need to be sent on a 2 week suspension up to LFI (
www.ayoob.com) and forced to take LFI-I and LFI-II back to back as punishment.
