Denver Post
Many factors influence police in use of force
Training, instinct both play role in pulling trigger, veterans say
Sunday, April 20, 2003 - When the call about a suicidal man with a knife went out on the police radio, the officers in the northwest Denver patrol district knew from experience it could be a bad one.
The caller, the armed man himself, told dispatchers he was thinking about killing someone. And it didn't matter to him whether it was himself or someone else. The first two officers, Cpl. Randy Murr and his partner, both with eight years of service, arrived at Lyle Larsen's house in the sparsely lit 3300 block of Navajo Street just before 1 a.m. on Tuesday. Within three minutes, Murr fired his gun and Larsen was dead. Four months into the year, Denver police have surpassed the 10-year annual average for fatal shootings. Denver officers have fatally shot four people since Jan. 1, including two in the past week. The most recent shooting happened early Friday, when officers shot to death a man they said pointed a crossbow with a laser sight at them, following a brief car chase. Police said Saturday that eight officers were involved in the shooting, which killed 20-year- old Shaun Gilman.
Friday: Denver police shot and killed Shaun Gilman, 20, in downtown Denver after he rammed a patrol car and led them on a brief chase. Officers said Gilman allegedly pointed a crossbow at them just before they shot him. April 15, 2003: Lyle Eugene Larsen, 52, was shot twice in the chest and died in the front yard of his duplex after allegedly threatening an officer and his partner with a knife. Denver police were responding to a call saying he was suicidal. March 14, 2003: Christopher Jones was killed inside his northwest Denver home after lunging at officers with a knife. Jones' friend had called police earlier in the night and said Jones was suicidal. March 7, 2003: Luis Almeida- Ponce was killed at 1:45 a.m. by three Denver police officers in the parking lot of Tequila Club, 5115 Federal Blvd. The officers opened fire after he pointed a gun at them, police said. Nov. 7, 2002: Denver police officer Kurt Peterson was shot in the cheek by Anthony Jefferson during a traffic stop on Bruce Randolph Avenue near Colorado Boulevard. Jefferson was shot and killed by officer John Super. Jan. 30, 2002: Gregory Smith was killed by Sgt. Robert Silvas and officer Jim Turney at his mother's northeast Denver home. Smith pulled a knife on officers, who were called to the house after he and his mother had argued. Officers should follow state law when using deadly force. State law holds that police officers may use deadly force to: A. Defend themselves or someone else from what they believe to be the use or imminent use of deadly force or: B. To effect an arrest or prevent the escape of a dangerous or armed felon. The level of force applied must reflect the "totality of the circumstances." Officers must select from an "objectively reasonable" range of options to use only the level of force necessary to respond to the threat. Officers are to rely on their training, experience and assessment of the situation to decide the appropriate amount of force to use. Use of force that is not reasonable or appropriate "will not be tolerated." Officers must report all use of force to a supervisor and request medical attention any time they injure a suspect or the suspect claims to be injured. Factors in determining what constitutes "objectively reasonable" force include: 1. How imminent the threat to the officers or others is. 2. How actively the suspect is resisting. 3. How "tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving" the situation is. 4. How severe the crime the suspect committed is. The greater those factors are, the greater the level of force may be used. Source: Denver Police Department
Since 1990, Denver police have shot, on average, about seven people a year, killing an average of three. 
FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS
THE HISTORY
THE POLICY
A 2001 study by The Washington Post found that in the past 10 years, Denver ranked 17th in average fatal police shootings per year among the nation's 51 largest police departments - even though Denver ranked 46th in population.
In fatal shootings per capita, and in several other statistical categories, Denver ranked in the top 10, the study found.
"I am not troubled by the fact that the number has increased this year, because each case has to be taken individually," said attorney David Lane, who has represented people shot by police in civil suits against the department. "What generally troubles me are cases when lesser degrees of force could have been used but weren't. ... It seems in Denver's cases over the years, if any argument could be made to use deadly force, they will use it."
Police officials have denied Denver has a problem with trigger- happy cops.
Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman said the department has devoted a significant amount of effort to improving so-called decisional-shooting training.
"We've done a lot of work on use of force to have (less lethal) options, to have training, to make sure everybody's up on the law," Whitman said. "We're really focused on the decisional part of it and not the shooting part of it."
Police shootings come in countless variations, involving different types of weapons, locations, people and situations. Sometimes they play out slowly over the course of a standoff, or sometimes they are lightning-fast.
But the choices that faced the two veteran officers early Tuesday were typical of those every officer in a shooting faces. Their decisions - based on the law, department policy, training and gut instinct - are some of the most crucial ones police officers ever have to make.
"The mission of police is to protect life," said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert in use-of-force training by police. "Now, you can take a life to protect a life, but you don't want to take one needlessly, even if it is a bad guy."
Colorado law allows police officers to shoot someone to defend themselves if they feel their lives or someone else's life is in danger. Officers are also allowed to shoot to stop a dangerous fleeing felon, though that rarely happens.
The Denver Police Department's official policy mirrors state law, requiring that officers use only the appropriate level of force to respond to a threat.
Denver's policy appears to be in line with that of most other major departments. The Los Angeles Police Department sets the same standard for use of deadly force, with the restriction that firing at or from a moving vehicle is generally prohibited.
Denver's policy also closely follows the model policy for lethal force of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
But Denver leaves how to apply that policy largely up to the officer. When deciding whether to use deadly force, officers are asked to consider everything confronting them.
The department's policy provides guidelines on how to do that and urges officers to consider five factors in determining how much force to use. Among them are how "tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving" the situation is, how "imminent" the threat of injury is, and how severe the crime committed was.
There is no guideline for when to fire.
"That decision is made oftentimes, most of the time, instantaneously under rapidly developing circumstances," said Denver police Cmdr. Mike O'Neill, boss of the northeast patrol district and an authority on use-of-force training. "Officers in a split second are processing this information. It's very much an individual decision."
When Murr and his partner pulled up to Larsen's house early Tuesday, they found him standing in his elevated front yard. In his hand when they approached was a butcher knife with a 10-inch blade.
The officers yelled at him to drop the knife. Larsen didn't.
Officers are trained in a variety of force options. There are simple things like using physical force or a police baton. More serious situations call for Mace.
The department has recently unveiled a line of "less lethal" weapons, such as stun guns and beanbag shotguns. But the two officers on Tuesday didn't have those less-lethal options available to them.
There are currently about 10 Taser stun guns per police patrol district, O'Neill said. More are on order, he said, but until then, each shift has to share among its officers.
Since his patrol district has received its tasers, O'Neill said, officers have used them eight times. They have been effective six times, he said.
As officers continued to talk to Larsen and ordered him to drop his weapon, the decisions and thoughts flitting through their heads would have started coming faster, experts say.
One thing the officers may have been feeling was shock, said Denver police Sgt. Michael Mosco.
Mosco was in a similar situation two years ago, when he and his partner faced a distraught man wielding a knife and a pipe who refused commands to drop the weapons, according to the district attorney's investigative summary of the incident.
Mosco and his partner eventually fired as the man closed in on them, killing him.
"I was just in total disbelief that he wasn't listening to any of the orders we were giving him," said Mosco.
Outside pressures may have also been affecting Murr and his partner, said Kevin Keough, a Delaware-based clinical psychologist and a specialist in police psychology. Officers are often scared to pull the trigger, he said, worrying about what others might think.
"Officers are waiting to the very last possible second because they are afraid they are going to get hanged out to dry by the public," Keough said.
And they were likely recalling their training. Officers are taught about the dangers posed by different weapons. Guns present a deadly threat even before they are pointed at you, officers are taught. Cars can be lethal when driven right at you.
With a knife, a lunging suspect within 21 feet could harm officers before they have time to react and shoot, said Denver Assistant District Attorney Chuck Lepley, who reviews all officer-involved shootings in Denver and instructs recruits on lethal force issues.
"Edged weapons are very dangerous and very lethal," Lepley said. "The concept of shooting knives out of people's hands or winging them and maybe you should have jumped them because you could have maybe only suffered a superficial cut - that's a dream world."
As the officers continued to order Larsen to drop his knife, investigators said, Larsen appeared briefly to want to give up. He bent down and appeared as if he was going to lay down his weapon.
But then he stood up, police said. He turned toward the officers. And he pointed the knife at one of the officers, who was less than 15 feet away, investigators said.
Then, police said, he moved forward.
Mosco said that when he made the final decision to shoot, his training took over.
That training instructs officers to shoot at the chest, or the "center body mass," Lepley said. Doing so, he said, gives officers the greatest chance of hitting the person.
Officers are taught to fire until the threat against them has stopped.
Early Tuesday, Murr fired two shots. Both of them hit Larsen in the chest. He died at the scene.
"They shouldn't have done it," said Florence Sturdivan, Larsen's mother, who lived next door in the same duplex as her son. "He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was asking for help. I'm not saying he was perfect, but he wasn't a threat to them."
Murr's life was forever changed, too.
Keough, the psychologist, estimates that 85 percent of officers involved in a shooting suffer some kind of emotional fallout from the incidents. For about a third of those officers, that stress could last months. And for 5 percent of officers, that stress could become debilitating in the long term.
Mosco said he can never forget his shooting.
"You take another human's life, it affects your family," he said. "It affects everything about your life. It's the last thing in your life you ever want to do. And you carry it with you for the rest of your life."
Denver Post staff writer Claire Martin contributed to this report.