General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Here we go again-St Louis policeman kills 18-year-old, reviving Ferguson tensions [View all]Travelman
(708 posts)Go and read any of the articles on this. The guy was shooting at a cop in uniform. He most certainly was busy shooting the officer.
And if you fail to remember a time when there were more cases of police shooting and killing people, then you must have missed the '70s and '80s pretty much entirely. There were A LOT more police shootings that killed people back then. I'll have to go and find the stat again, but going from memory, there were more fatal police shootings by the NYPD alone in 1979 (I think; again going off of memory here) than there were in the entire country last year across all departments, including the feds.
How it was done in the past is no different than how it's done today: police are trained to fire for center mass (the chest area) and to keep firing until that threat is neutralized. This is nothing new, this is nothing sinister. This has been the basis of police shooting training for many decades. This is why those silhouette targets have those circles in the chest area, not the head or the arms or the feet.
This "present trend" is simply your imagination and not reality. Sorry.
Your grandfather was among the happy majority of police officers who never have to fire their service weapon in the course of daily duty. MOST police never have to fire. Some do.