I would like to know if the cops generally yell “Put the gun down” in order to protect themselves in most situations.
That is the impression I got from the little we have heard.
they teach that in cop schools- yell your commands loud enough for all non-seeing ‘witnesses’ to hear.
problem is, if there are 3 cops all yelling different things and some of those things aren’t real...
If so, that regulation needs to change in situations like this. I cannot believe that a cop would order a person to touch his weapon. It would be the other way around. ‘Put up your hand’ and ‘keep your hands in plain sight’ etc. The same way as in a traffic stop. Everyone knows to keep your hands in plain sight during a traffic stop.
The lesson for those who read this is, even if you have 3 cops shouting 3 different sets of orders, just keep still and leave your hands in the air. Eventually (hopefully) one of them will train on you while another will approach, disarm, and arrest.
Most scenario training I have either lead or observed, teaches that you need to “freeze” a hostile scene first. That is why the military is instructed to yell “HALT” and many PD departments teach officers to yell “FREEZE”. Often this is refered to as containment. I have always instructed that if the hostile complies with containment, you yourself need to force yourself into a calmer state.
The second thing that we taught was that ONE and ONLY ONE, and most likely the most senior officer present, would issue any commands. This is true in both large and small scale.
This is where I feel the LV incident fell appart. No one person took charge of the situation. This is a failure of command and leadership.
There are a couple of other steps / considerations BEFORE you get to “put the gun down” commands. But when you mess up #1 and #2, it has already gone very bad.
They could not find any drugs on him. He had a permit for the gun. They could not plant eiher drugs or a gun on him. So, they did the next best thing, they “discovered” drugs in his system.