Peter T,

You ask some questions that are kind of difficult to answer because the answers are so layered.

What I can suggest is the older I get, the more I've noticed that so many stressful decisions that are made are based in life experiences and for us, in good training. For example, if a person is not adept at highly stressful experience encounters, then their reaction is much different than one that is (I can't tell you how many times a citizen under stress is like a bouncing BB and then sees those that aren't not responding that way and then says something like, "DO SOMETHING!!" when the emergency responder isn't crapping in their pants).

So much of our training is not that good because good training is really hard to accomplish. It is very time consuming, expensive and relative to the trainee, too (sort of like if the individual is receptive to it).

Citizens, I have found, are all over the board in their behavior. Often times, they become more behaviorally animated. An assumption to gun play would be they probably would not be as cognizant about the concern where their bullets go as a trained person might.

And being in this occupation for some time now, I try to remind those younger that in this job that the greatest weapon is the mind and the greatest misfiring weapon is one's mouth.

Lastly, what a lot of lay people just don't understand about American policing is that to really have an understanding of it, it involves study and observation. This is not to excuse the terrible things being captured on video in this current era, but one must also recall that out of the relatively small number of video captured police encounters, many, many, many more go on each and every day that are not recorded or viewed (and this is not to say that in those encounters there are unrecorded incidents of misconduct,too).

Don't know if this answered your questions or not...