How often civilians and police hit bystanders

[Nickotym]

Does anyone have a source for how often police and civilians hit innocent bystanders in self defense incidents? I thought it was something like 11% for police and 3% for civilians.


Thanks in advance,

Nickotym

 

[B yond]

Similarly, I'd like to know how often bullets travel through their target and hit an innocent bystander...

I've never seen any good data for either of these.

 

[wrc376]

it makes bad press

 

[hankdatank1362]

11% seems very high. That's more than 1 out of 10.

I'm not buying it. If a "source" purported anything to that effect, I'd like to see the research methodology behind it.

 

[Diggers]

It would be amazing if one out of ten bullets hit anything!

Bullets going through and hitting someone else.....I still hear that even from law enforcement. I've been told thats why law enforcement likes the .40 better then the 9mm now. 9 tends to zip right on through and is also not that great of a man stopper.

But the through and hit thing...meh. I don't buy it.

Worry about the ones that don't hit.

 

[B yond]

I doubt a pistol bullet would have enough energy left in it to do much damage after traveling through a human body, but I'd still like to see some case studies or hard facts about it.

It would be amazing if one out of ten bullets fired by a police officer hit anything!

Fixed that for ya.

 

[coloradokevin]

I doubt a pistol bullet would have enough energy left in it to do much damage after traveling through a human body, but I'd still like to see some case studies or hard facts about it.

Generally speaking I would have agreed with you, and I'm not sure there is much hard evidence to suggest that bystanders are commonly injured/killed by the through-and-through gunshots that impact another person.

I do know of several instances where this has happened, but it is rare.

More shockingly, I recently investigated a shooting into a house in my district, and this one even surprised me a bit. In this instance the shooter was about 50 feet from the residence, and just fired randomly into the house with a .40 S&W (drug dealing issues). One of the bullets went through the screen door, through the solid door behind it (which was a "solid" light metal door filled with a foam-like insulation), through the top of the couch, and into the frame of a wall mirror at the opposite end of the living room. The mirror was broken, and the bullet was sitting upright, mostly intact, on the mantle below the mirror.

I've shot for quite some time, and have shot at various hard objects in the course of my recreational/professional life. While this certainly doesn't seem impossible, it certainly seemed improbable. Obviously I can see how this handgun bullet zipped through the screen door, the top of the couch, and busted the mirror frame. But, doing all this while still going through an insulated metal door kind of surprised me!

 

[Kind of Blued]

Kevin, if you hold the gun sideways over your head while firing, you send the bullet essentially "downhill", increasing velocity.

I'd be extremely critical of any study on this topic. There are so many contributing factors that something is bound to be screwed up. Consequently, I wouldn't use it in an argument (if that's what you're getting at).

In my mind, I imagined rebutting someone who is 100% anti-gun but ok with LEOs and the government having them. You can poke holes in that without confusing the dunce with things like two-digit numbers and percentages.

I'd also be more interested in over-penetration. I recently began considering .44Spl. and 10mm for carry and need to look more closely at "the numbers".

 

[Jeff White]

I don't think anyone collects that data. The Uniform Crime Reports aren't complete at all and that's the only nationwide collection of shootings of any kind.

 

[TAB]

I don't think anyone wants to collect that data. Lets face it, No LEA wants the public knowing how often it happens. Even if its only .000001% Thats still more then the "public" will stand for.

 

[NoneMoreBlack]

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to a conspiratorial-suppression-of-research conclusion. As coloradokevin's example illustrates, ballistics in the real world can be very difficult to predict and measure.

Just imagine for a minute how these data would actually be gathered; how would you know, for example, if a bullet that hit a bystander passed through somebody first? Or in the above example, how could you begin to measure how much energy was imparted to each object impacted by that round?

Once you start to take into account these considerations, I don't see how these data could even purport to exist, let alone to any degree of precision. Lab experiments with ballistic gel could give us an idea of how deadly a bullet is once it has left a person (under specific circumstances of gun, caliber, range, what structures it hit in the body, etc) but translating that to answering the question "how much damage would this shot do to a bystander if it goes through this baddy" is, in my opinion, impossible.

 

[rmaster14145]

all these kinds of facts are in the new gun facts report found online

http://www.gunfacts.info/

rm

 

[HIcarry]

From Gun Facts ver. 5.0:

11% for police; 2% for civillians

Cited source: Cramer C and Kopel D. "Shall issue: the new wave of concealed handgun permit laws." Golden CO: Independence Institute Issue Paper. October 17, 1994

 

[Jeff White]

There is no clearing house for the raw data. That book is guessing based on news reports. As I said, the actual data doesn't exist.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

On top of that would be the circumstance information. Just like police shootings tend to be at longer distances than non-police citizen shootings, police are more likely to be in a gunfight situation with an opponent than most non-police citizens. Most non-police citizen incidents are going to be picked by their attackers whereby there aren't a lot of witnesses around.

In other words, comparing police and non-police shootings isn't wholly equitable. I mention this as in the past when such data are mentioned, they are mentioned for the purpose of argument about justification for citizens to have guns because citizens are safer than the police...which was alluded to above...

I'd be extremely critical of any study on this topic. There are so many contributing factors that something is bound to be screwed up. Consequently, I wouldn't use it in an argument (if that's what you're getting at).

From Gun Facts ver. 5.0:

11% for police; 2% for civillians

Cited source: Cramer C and Kopel D. "Shall issue: the new wave of concealed handgun permit laws." Golden CO: Independence Institute Issue Paper. October 17, 1994

So is that 11% of police shootings result in bystanders being struck or that 11% of the bystanders are struck or that 11% of the rounds fired strike bystanders? I am inclined to believe that it would be the first one (since the other two would result in much higher numbers of bystanders harmed), but I have trouble believing that 1 in 9 police shootings results in a bystander being struck by the police. I would have to see the data on that.

 

[squinty]

semantic quibble

police are civilians.

 

[Jeff White]

police are civilians.

The accepted definition in Websters is what we go by here. So don't even go there.

 

[HIcarry]

There is no clearing house for the raw data. That book is guessing based on news reports. As I said, the actual data doesn't exist.

That may be true, as is the "apples to oranges" analogies to the shooting situations police and CCW are generally involved in. However, the cited source in the Cramer and Kopel's work is another book:

Carol Ruth Silver and Don B. Kates, "Self-Defense, Handgun Ownership, and the Independence of Women in a Violent, Sexist Society," p. 153.

I haven't read that one, but so while it may be based on newsreports, we'd have to read that book to say with any authority. Anybody read it?

 

[HIcarry]

From Cramer C and Kopel D. "Shall issue: the new wave of concealed handgun permit laws." Golden CO: Independence Institute Issue Paper. October 17, 1994

Can Citizens Use Guns Competently?
Ordinary people, even if they have passed a firearms safety class, cannot be trusted to use guns competently, it is sometimes claimed. The guns will be taken away by criminals, or the gun-owners will shoot an innocent bystander by mistake, it is sometimes predicted. Wherever the concealed carry issue is raised in the future, it can be predicted with confidence that these objections will be raised by reform opponents, including many law enforcement professionals who claim expertise on the issue.

The existing body of research provides no support for these fears. The best evidence we have about what happens when people have carry permits is the experience of the 1/3 of American states that issue such permits routinely. From these states, the most detailed data are those compiled by the Dade County (Miami) police. As discussed above, the police kept track of every known incident involving the county's more than 21,000 handgun carry permitees over a six-year period. In that six-year period, there was one known incident of a crime victim having his gun taken away by the criminal. There were no known incidents of a crime victim injuring an innocent person by mistake. In some cases the handgun permit holder was successful in preventing a crime, and in some cases not, but in no case was any innocent person injured as a result of mistake by a permit-holder.

Another study examined newspaper reports of gun incidents in Missouri, involving police or civilians. In this study, civilians were successful in wounding, driving off, capturing criminals 83% of the time, compared with a 68% success rate for the police. Civilians intervening in crime were slightly less likely to be wounded than were police. Only 2% of shootings by civilians, but 11% of shootings by police, involved an innocent person mistakenly thought to be a criminal. [145]

The Missouri research does not prove that civilians are more competent than police in armed confrontations. Civilians can often choose whether or not to intervene in a crime in progress, whereas police officers are required to intervene. Being forced to intervene in all cases, police officers would naturally be expected to have a lower success rate, and to make more mistakes. Attorney Jeffrey Snyder elaborates:


Rape, robbery, and attempted murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity or subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and great book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife on a woman and says, "You're coming with me," her judgment that a crime is being committed is not likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is going to shoot the wrong person. It is the police, because they are rarely at the scene of the crime when it occurs, who are more likely to find themselves in circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut, and in which the probability for mistakes is higher. [146]
In addition, the Missouri study was not restricted to "carry" situations, but also included self-defense in the home. Persons using a gun to defend their own home, who know its layout much better than does an intruder, might be expected to have a higher success rate than would persons using a gun in a less familiar public setting.

The most detailed information about civilian defensive gun use has been compiled by Professor Gary Kleck (a liberal Democrat, and member of the ACLU and Common Cause) in his book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America. In 1992 the American Society of Criminology awarded the book the Hindelang Prize, as the most significant contribution to criminology in the previous three years. In Point Blank, Kleck studied computer tapes from the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Survey, for the years 1979-85. Analyzing the data from over 180,000 crime incidents in the National Crime Survey, as well from other studies, Kleck found the following:


- In no more than 1% of defensive gun uses was the gun taken away by a criminal.

- The odds of a defensive gun user accidentally killing an innocent person are less than 1 in 26,000.

- For robbery and assault victims, the lowest injury rates (17.4% for robberies, and 12.1% for assaults) were among victims who resisted with a gun.

- The next lowest injury rates were among persons who did not resist. Other forms of resistance (such as shouting for help, or using a knife), had higher injury rates than either passive compliance or resistance with a gun. [147]

Again, it should be remembered that the above data do not separate defensive home use (where victim success rates would be expected to be higher) from use in public areas. Still, taken as a whole, the National Crime Survey data, like Missouri data do suggest that uniformed government employees are not the only class of people who can use a firearm successfully to defend self and others.

 

[Jeff White]

I haven't read that one, but so while it may be based on newsreports, we'd have to read that book to say with any authority.

You don't have to read the book to know they don't have good raw data if you know that there is no one that collects that data on a national level. The closest thing we have to national data on every shooting in the country is the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. If you look at how the data is collected for the UCR you'll see what I mean:

The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies must classify as Criminal Homicide—Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter (1a):
1.
A berserk gunman shot and killed three pedestrians. The police subdued the offender and placed him under arrest.
2.
A neighbor discovered an infant who had been beaten. The neighbor rushed the infant to the hospital. The infant later died as a direct result of the injuries. Investigation revealed that the mother was responsible. The mother was not considered mentally competent, and the district attorney did not wish to prosecute.
3.
A man shot and killed his neighbor in an argument over the location of their property line. The police arrested the man and charged him with murder.
4.
A husband and wife had an argument. The wife shot the husband and severely wounded him. He grabbed the gun and shot and killed her. The husband survived his wounds. The police subsequently arrested him.
5.
A man was in a fight on the second floor of a building. During the fight, he was knocked through a window and fell to his death. No arrest was made.
6.
While attempting to break up a fight, a man was struck over the head with an ashtray by one of the combatants. During the incident, a pre-existing aneurysm burst in the man’s head, causing his death. No arrest was made.
7.
A psychiatrist counseling a young female patient performed a criminal abortion on her. She died of peritonitis resulting from the operation. The psychiatrist fled the state and is still wanted for the crime.
8.
A teller chased a robber from a bank. The robber fired at him. His shot missed the teller but killed a woman walking on the street. The police did not locate the robber.
9.
While playing cards, two men got into an argument. The first man attacked the second with a broken bottle. The second man pulled a gun and killed the first. The police arrested the shooter; he claimed self-defense. The police found no other witnesses.
10.
A felon fleeing in her car attempted to get through a police roadblock. As a result, she struck and killed two police officers.

Agencies must not classify the following as Criminal Homicide—Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter (1a):
•
Suicides • Accidental deaths
•
Fetal deaths • Assaults to murder
•
Traffic fatalities • Attempts to murder
Suicides, traffic fatalities, and fetal deaths are excluded from the UCR Program; however, some accidental deaths are classified as Criminal Homicide—Manslaughter by Negligence (lb). (See page 18.) Attempts and assaults to murder must be classified as aggravated assaults. (See page 23.) 16 Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, 2004
Situations in which a victim dies of a heart attack as the result of a crime are not classified as criminal homicide. A heart attack cannot, in fact, be caused at will by an offender. Even in instances where an individual is known to have a weak heart, there is no assurance that an offender can cause sufficient emotional or physical stress to guarantee that the victim will suffer a fatal heart attack.
The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies must not classify as Criminal Homicide—Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter (1a):
11.
A man was despondent over the breakup of his marriage. Police officers discovered his body
in his home office with a bullet wound to his head and a revolver still in his hand. They also
found a suicide note in the victim’s handwriting on his desk.
12.
A woman was attacked by her boyfriend, who struck her several times in the abdomen with a
baseball bat. The victim was eight months pregnant at the time of the attack. Her baby was
stillborn. (Refer to Aggravated Assault, page 23.)
13.
A woman swerved her vehicle to avoid hitting a dog in the road. She struck and killed two children playing near the roadway. Situations in which
a victim dies of a
14. A convenience store clerk was robbed at gunpoint. The victim, who was under a doctor’s care from previous heart surgery, had a heart attack as the heart attack during the robbery. He collapsed and died in the store. result of a crime are (Refer to Robbery, page 21.)
not classified as criminal homicide.
Justifiable Homicide
Certain willful killings must be classified as justifiable or excusable. In UCR, Justifiable Homicide is defined as and limited to:
•
The killing of a felon by a peace officer in the line of duty.
•
The killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen.
NOTE: To submit offense data to the UCR Program, law enforcement agencies must report the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one individual by another, not the criminal liability of the person or persons involved.
The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies would consider Justifiable Homicide:
15.
A police officer answered a bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the robber.
The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in such cases.
16.
When a gunman entered a store and attempted to rob the proprietor, the storekeeper shot and killed the felon.
NOTE: Justifiable homicide, by definition, occurs in conjunction with other offenses. Therefore, the crime being committed when the justifiable homicide took place must be reported as a separate offense. Reporting agencies should take care to ensure that they do not classify a
Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, 2004 17
killing as
justifiable or excusable solely on the claims of self-defense or on the action of a coroner, prosecutor, grand jury, or court.
The following scenario illustrates an incident known to law enforcement that reporting agencies would not consider Justifiable Homicide:
17. While playing cards, two men got into an argument. The first man attacked the second with a broken bottle. The second man pulled a gun and killed his attacker. The police arrested the shooter; he claimed self-defense.
Criminal Homicide—Manslaughter by Negligence (1b)
Definition: The killing of another person through gross negligence.
As a general rule, any death caused by the gross negligence of another is classified as Criminal Homicide—Manslaughter by Negligence (1b).
The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies must classify as Criminal Homicide—Manslaughter by Negligence (1b):
18.
While two juveniles were playing with a gun, one playfully pointed it at the other. The youth pointing the gun fired it and killed the other. At the time of arrest, the juvenile claimed no knowledge of the gun being loaded.
19.
A target shooter was practicing in an unincorporated wooded area near some houses. One shot missed the target and killed a resident. The police arrested the shooter.
The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies must not classify as Manslaughter by Negligence (1b):
20.
A man was riding his motorcycle without a helmet and ran off the roadway. He was killed in the subsequent crash.
21.
A woman slipped on her neighbors’ icy sidewalk and died as a result of the fall.
22.
A woman was a passenger in a man’s car. The man drove through an ungated railroad crossing.
A train struck the car, killing both the driver and the passenger.
23.
A man drove his pickup truck recklessly and exited the interstate at a high rate of speed. While attempting a right turn at the first intersection, he lost control of his vehicle and struck and killed three pedestrians standing at a bus stop. The police arrested the driver at the scene for vehicular manslaughter.
NOTE: Deaths of persons due to their own negligence, accidental deaths not resulting from gross negligence, and traffic fatalities are not included in the category Manslaughter by Negligence. The findings of a court, coroner’s inquest, etc., do not affect classifying or scoring; these are law enforcement statistics.

As you can see the guidelines for reporting homicides say nothing about a situation where either a civilian or peace officer hits an innocent bystander while shooting at felon. The guidelines for reporting aggravated assault with a firearm don't cover hitting bystanders either:

ASSAULT (4)
Definition: An unlawful attack by one person upon another.
Agencies participating in the UCR Program must collect assault information on the offenses that are aggravated in nature, as well as on those that are not. Assaults that are not aggravated are classified
by the national Program as Other Assaults—Simple, Not Aggravated (4e).
Aggravated Assault
Definition: An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm.
•
Firearm
•
Knife or Cutting Instrument
•
Other Dangerous Weapon
•
Hands, Fists, Feet, etc.
•
Other Assaults—Simple, Not Aggravated Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, 2004 23
The UCR Program considers a weapon to be a commonly known weapon (a gun, knife, club, etc.) or any other item which, although not usually thought of as a weapon, becomes one in the commission
of a crime.
The categories of Aggravated Assault (4a–4d) include assaults or attempts to kill or murder; poisoning; assault with a dangerous or deadly weapon; maiming; mayhem; assault with explosives; and assault with disease (as in cases when the offender is aware that he/she is infected with a deadly disease and deliberately attempts to inflict the disease by biting, spitting, etc.). All assaults by one person upon another with the intent to kill, maim, or inflict severe bodily injury with the use of any dangerous weapon are classified as Aggravated Assault. It is not necessary that injury result from an aggravated assault when a gun, knife, or other weapon that could cause serious personal injury is used.
Occasionally, it is the practice of local jurisdictions to charge assailants in assault cases with assault and battery, disorderly conduct, domestic violence, or simple assault even though a knife, gun, or other weapon was used in the incident. This type of offense must be reported to the UCR Program as aggravated assault (4a–4d).
Aggravated Assault—Firearm (4a)
The category Aggravated Assault—Firearm (4a) includes all assaults in which a firearm of any type is used or is threatened to be used. Assaults with revolvers, automatic pistols, shotguns, zip guns, rifles, etc. are included in this category.

The following scenarios illustrate incidents known to law enforcement that reporting agencies must classify as Aggravated Assault—Firearm (4a):

1.
A man had an argument with his girlfriend. She left and later returned with a gun and shot the man, attempting to kill him. He recovered from his gunshot wound. The police arrested the woman. She was prosecuted for attempted murder.
2.
While an officer was attempting to serve a warrant, the individual ran from her. The subject turned and fired on the officer, wounding her. Assisting officers caught and arrested the individual.

Basically, unless the criminal was charged with a crime because the bystander was hit, it's not reported.

Any data that anyone has on this is going to be purely anecdotal. You might get good data on police shootings where bystanders were hit from a specific agency for a specific time period, i.e. the NYPD SOP 9 report, but it's a big stretch to extrapolate that number across the entire nation. And that data for one agency over a given time period would only include officer involved shootings. To get the same data for armed citizens one would have to spend weeks going through police reports and again that data would only be good for the jurisdiction you looked at in the given time period you looked at. No way you can raw nationwide conclusions from that data.

And as Double Naught Spy stated, it's going to be an apples and oranges comparison.

 

[benEzra]

I doubt a pistol bullet would have enough energy left in it to do much damage after traveling through a human body, but I'd still like to see some case studies or hard facts about it.

FMJ pistol rounds can definitely exit with enough energy to kill someone behind the aggressor. I've seen a few writeups of deaths and injuries that resulted from FMJ rounds from pistols exiting the perpetrator and hitting someone behind him, and at least one case of a 147gr 9mm subsonic (an older deep penetrating design, IIRC) exiting a perpetrator and killing another police officer.

It is far more likely with FMJ than with any JHP, though.

 

[HIcarry]

You don't have to read the book to know they don't have good raw data if you know that there is no one that collects that data on a national level. The closest thing we have to national data on every shooting in the country is the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. If you look at how the data is collected for the UCR you'll see what I mean:

Jeff,
I am well aware of the FBI's UCRs, as I am with the many of the criticisms of it. I also know that not all statistical analyses require level one evidence. In fact, even in the much touted and desired push for evidence based medicine, there is room for, and decisions made, on what available data we have. Even if some of the available data is from lower level and anecdotal data.

As someone who frequently requires "facts" for any discussion lest it be termed ill-informed, it is better, IMHO, to use what facts are available, with full disclosure of the reliability of those facts, than to just say no facts exist. To on one hand claim that you don't need to read the book to know that the information is useless, and on the next suggest that someone could garner useful information from examining police logs seems somewhat contradictory. How do you know that the authors of the book you didn't need to read didn't get their information from police reports or other available sources?

No one (at least not me) is saying it's conclusive data, but if it has some basis in fact (and admittedly it may not, I haven't read the book) and has used acceptable methods of extrapolating data from a small population to a larger one (done all the time in research and statistics) it should be recognized as provinding some usable information.

 

[Jeff White]

I also know that not all statistical analyses require level one evidence.

Statistical analysis without level one evidence is worthless. Especially in a nationwide study. If you pick and choose where you take your data from, you can draw all kinds of conclusions and all of them would be wrong when applied nationwide.

To on one hand claim that you don't need to read the book to know that the information is useless, and on the next suggest that someone could garner useful information from examining police logs seems somewhat contradictory.

You could not garner information that was useful nationwide from the NYPD's SOP #9 for the simple reason that there are no uniform training and use of force standards throughout the country. NYPD's firearms training is more then many departments get and also much less then a lot of departments get. There are also almost as many use of force policies as there are different police departments.

For a study to produce useful data on nationwide trends it would have to have nationwide data. There are too many different training standards and use of force policies to to come up with nationwide data that had any meaning at all.

No one (at least not me) is saying it's conclusive data, but if it has some basis in fact (and admittedly it may not, I haven't read the book) and has used acceptable methods of extrapolating data from a small population to a larger one (done all the time in research and statistics) it should be recognized as provinding some usable information.

Where do you think the phrase "Damned lies and statistics" came from? We make too many totally wrong decisions in all aspects of our society based on incomplete research. It would not be hard to actually come up with real data, all it would take would be someone to write a DOJ grant and have enabling legislation that mandates reporting from all police agencies on officer involved shootings and civilian shootings that they investigate and in 8-10 years you would have be able to draw some real conclusions. Until that is done, all we have available is guesswork, based on small samples that is easily manipulated to show bias in one way or another.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Another study examined newspaper reports of gun incidents in Missouri, involving police or civilians. In this study, civilians were successful in wounding, driving off, capturing criminals 83% of the time, compared with a 68% success rate for the police. Civilians intervening in crime were slightly less likely to be wounded than were police. Only 2% of shootings by civilians, but 11% of shootings by police, involved an innocent person mistakenly thought to be a criminal.

So the percentages stated are not for the whole of the US, but from a study of newspaper articles from Missouri? There is a lot to be said for the amount of non-representation of data from newspaper stories as the basis for such statistics.

I also noticed that it did not say that police shot bystanders 11% of the time as suggested above, but they mistook wrong people as bad guys 11% of the time.

 

[dawg23]

1. The previous poster is correct. Cops are civilians in every legal sense of the word.

2. The 11% number isn't too awfully unbelieveable when you compare it to the documented "miss rate" of cops ................... which has held steady at 81% for the past five years.