It's not like television.
Suspects don't fall with one bullet. Police aren't all perfect shots.
And Tasers don't always stop suspects in their tracks, says a patrol sergeant who trains city officers how to handle explosive situations.
Last weekend, police shot and killed a 28-year-old man witnesses said was carrying a machete near Sargent Avenue and Arlington Street. It was the first police-involved shooting of 2010 in Winnipeg.
Witnesses said two officers fired at Eric Russel Daniels three times, with two bullets hitting a pizza shop in the city's West End. A witness said officers instructed him twice to put the machete down.
Daniels' girlfriend said he was walking towards officers and was about 1.5 metres from them when they shot him. Patrol Sgt. Jason Anderson, with the Winnipeg Police Service Training Academy, said when police encounter stressful situations where people are at risk of serious injury or death, they rely on their training.
"Police officers, like everybody else, are human beings, and under high stress and acute stress, certain things will break down," he said. If an officer has determined that he or she must shoot someone, they're trained to shoot "centre mass," otherwise known as a person's torso.
Anderson said it can be "insanely difficult" for officers to hit an extremity if a suspect is moving quickly.
"In these dynamic, very stressful, acute, high-stress situations when targets are moving and things are happening very fast, shooting at the arms and the legs doesn't necessarily stop the threat from advancing on the officer," he said. He said shooting a person's arm or leg once or twice doesn't guarantee a person will stop before they hurt or kill others, especially if they're driven and in close distance.
He said police aren't trained to shoot a particular number of times, but to stop a suspect from posing a threat.
"There are very few things that will stop a person immediately," Anderson said. "I guess people have this conception that if you're hit with a bullet -- boom, you're done or you fly backwards out the window... but that's not reality."
He said fine motor skills of officers can also deteriorate in stressful situations. They can also experience lack of hearing, problems with distance perception, and tunnel vision. Anderson said stun guns are classified as intermediate weapons, like batons or pepper spray. The stun gun delivers an electric shock after it shoots out two probes that attach to a person's skin or clothing.
He said the weapons are not effective when officers must use deadly force.
In situations in which someone has a weapon like a knife, he said the stun gun's probes may not hit the person, and the person can continue an attack.
"It is absolutely, 100 per cent, positively the wrong choice in a true deadly-force encounter unless a lot of other things are in place to keep the people around there safe," he said. He also said: "You cannot rely on the Taser to be a weapon of precision."
Officers must do one day of mandatory gun and stun gun training each year.
The federal Criminal Code says peace officers can use force "intended or... likely to cause death or grievous bodily harm" if they believe someone could be seriously hurt or killed, including themselves.
Anderson said police must make quick decisions about how they'll handle suspects they perceive as a threat, sometimes in five- to seven-second windows.
"It's an unbelievable emotional thing... it's not TV," he said.
"Shooting somebody and taking somebody's life, it's not an easy thing for anybody."
Under the province's Fatality Inquiries Act, there is an automatic inquest that examines circumstances around a death involving on-duty police officers.
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