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The duty assignment of the participant at the time of the OIS. For the purposes of this study:
Patrol officers wear regular police uniforms and have the primary responsibility of responding or enforcing laws.
Detectives wear plain clothes and do not overtly identify themselves as law enfacement.
Tactical officers may be SWAT, or drug-task force officers, or Marshals who are wearing vests or overt gear which identifies themselves as law enforcement.
Off-Duty are law enforcement officers working a secondary job, or incidents which occur during an officer’s non-working hour. They may or may not be wearing a regular police uniform at the time of the OIS.
Other covers situations not listed above, such as bailiff’s performing an eviction, or other law enforcement officers.
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The type of call the officer responded to or initiated prior to arriving on scene.
For patrol officers this will generally how the call was coded by dispatch, although in some cases “fight” will be upgraded to “domestic dispute” for accuracy.
For non-patrol officers this will generally be how a reasonable law enforcement officer filling the same role would classify the call.
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Of the 20 patrol shootings analyzed in the study, only 2 involved more than three officers on scene and firing their weapons. As the chart below shows, the majority of OIS’s with more than three officers on scene involved a single officer firing rounds with the remaining officers not shooting.
Additional Points:
20% of the incidents involved a solo officer.
25% of the incidents were multi-jurisdictional.
5% occurred outside the officer’s jurisdiction.
50% had a supervisor on scene when shots were fired.
20% involved a supervisor firing rounds.
No plainclothes officers were on scene for this data set.
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Of the 4 SWAT shooting incidents analyzed, all had more than four officers on scene at the time of the shooting. 2 shootings involved a single officer firing rounds and 2 shootings involved three officers firing rounds.
Additional Points:
75% of the incidents were multi-jurisdictional.
75% were outside of the officer’s jurisdiction.
50% had some video of the officers.
75% had a supervisor on scene.
25% had a supervisor on scene who fired rounds.
No plainclothes officers were in the immediate area of the shooting.
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All of the incidents in the dataset involved a single subject who posed a deadly threat. For 45% of the officers there were also bystanders on scene who were not a deadly threat.
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A bystander was considered “in the line of fire” if they were within arm’s reach of the subject who was shot at the time of the shooting, or within the same vehicle as the subject. This includes other officers for this metric.
The training relevance is how often officers are faced with difficult, hostage-type shots. No bystanders were injured by officer’s gunfire in this dataset.
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Of the 40 officers who fired rounds in the data set, 70% were outside during the shooting, 17.5% were inside, and 12.5% were inside and outside during the same shooting.
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33 officers had a portion of their shooting take place outdoors. Unlike the indoor shootings, outdoor incidents generally only occurred at one outdoor location type.
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There were 9 officers in the data set who had a portion of their shooting occur indoors. Due to the dynamic nature of shootings, more than one location could be chosen for an event, and frequently was for patrol officers. It was common for officers to fire rounds both at the doorway and inside a room.
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“Full lighting” means daylight or a fully lit room. No external light is necessary from the officer. “Mixed” would be dusk or urban night with streetlights. External lights from the officer would be optional. “None” means darkness and an external light source would be necessary to visually identify threats.
For one Tactical experience the lighting conditions were unknown.
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For 35% of the experiences in the data set either the officer who fired shots, the subject, or both were near a vehicle. The accompanying graphic offers more details on how the participants and vehicles were involved in the incidents.
For the purposes of this study, “vehicles” are passenger vehicles such as sedans, trucks, side-by-sides, etc.. that have an enclosed or partially enclosed passenger compartment. A participant was considered “near a vehicle” if they were within arm’s reach of the vehicle at some point during the shooting.
Because of their unique nature and training requirements, armored vehicles were not considered vehicles for the purposes of this study. For more details on the criteria and how data was collected, check the “Misc & Methodology” page.
