There is a reply that I have been thinking about for a long time and I believe it addresses the central disconnect that we seem to be facing. I will try and explain it...here goes.
I get the feeling that many people on here would have LE orient their tactics to the nice innocent cooperative people we occasionally meet. (The And and Barney type of LE) They pose little or no threat and therefore should, in theory, be treated like angels.
The problem with that theory is what we call the "3%" rule. Basically it states that there are a small, but motivated and determined number of criminals out there that will intentionally murder police officers. That rule states that if we treat everyone like the angels above, we will be killed when we run into a 3%er. We see this in dashcam tapes where officer beg for their lives while being stomped to death or cry that they have a wife and kids just before one of those 3%ers executes a cop with his own gun. I have seen that on tape and for the most part those cops died bc they were too nice. They treated everyone like angels and every situation as if it was low threat.
The point is that we never know what the true threat level is. High threat is easy, but how do you quantify the rest of the time? Is it low threat or just Unknown threat? I would say that there is no such thing as low threat, only high and unknown bc as soon as an officer lets his guard down and goes into angelic mode, he is open to attack.
Because of this, we can not orient our tactics to deal with only the angels. We must be on the safe side and orient our tactics to the 3%ers bc one day we will run upon one or more of them and when we do, we will die violently if we are officer friendly who is too shy to search a car or person for weapons etc.
The simple reality is that any smart LEO that wants to survive will orient his tactics to the 3%ers and not just the angels. If that offends the nice people, it is better for them to be offended than us to be dead.
I get the feeling that many people on here would have LE orient their tactics to the nice innocent cooperative people we occasionally meet. (The And and Barney type of LE) They pose little or no threat and therefore should, in theory, be treated like angels.
The problem with that theory is what we call the "3%" rule. Basically it states that there are a small, but motivated and determined number of criminals out there that will intentionally murder police officers. That rule states that if we treat everyone like the angels above, we will be killed when we run into a 3%er. We see this in dashcam tapes where officer beg for their lives while being stomped to death or cry that they have a wife and kids just before one of those 3%ers executes a cop with his own gun. I have seen that on tape and for the most part those cops died bc they were too nice. They treated everyone like angels and every situation as if it was low threat.
The point is that we never know what the true threat level is. High threat is easy, but how do you quantify the rest of the time? Is it low threat or just Unknown threat? I would say that there is no such thing as low threat, only high and unknown bc as soon as an officer lets his guard down and goes into angelic mode, he is open to attack.
Because of this, we can not orient our tactics to deal with only the angels. We must be on the safe side and orient our tactics to the 3%ers bc one day we will run upon one or more of them and when we do, we will die violently if we are officer friendly who is too shy to search a car or person for weapons etc.
The simple reality is that any smart LEO that wants to survive will orient his tactics to the 3%ers and not just the angels. If that offends the nice people, it is better for them to be offended than us to be dead.
