OSD 262: Shoot until the acorn is neutralized
“Why do you look at the acorn in your neighbor’s eye and pay no attention to the oak tree in your own eye?”
You know the incident timeline in a police shooting is going to be interesting when it starts with:
-0:00.033 – Acorn comes into frame.
0:00.000 – Acorn strikes the roof of Deputy [Jesse] Hernandez’s patrol vehicle.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the high-level course of events was:
A woman in Florida called police to report that her boyfriend had stolen her car and sent her threatening text messages.
Police arrived to her house to take a report. The woman showed the deputies the threatening messages and said (as shown in a picture in the messages) that her boyfriend owned a suppressor.
The boyfriend showed up at this time.
The police searched him twice, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of a police car.
A few minutes later, as Deputy Hernandez approached the car to search the boyfriend for a third time, an acorn fell from a tree overhead, hitting the roof of the car and bouncing into Hernandez’s shoulder.
Hernandez interpreted the sound and the tap on his shoulder as suppressed gunfire coming from the boyfriend in the car.
Hernandez lost control of his legs. He did two rolls away from the car, fired his entire magazine at the boyfriend in the car, then crawled to cover. From his statement to investigators: “Uh, the rolling. Um, kind of reaction to what’s going on and me realizing like my legs are not working the way I need them to work right now, but I can, I can roll to that vehicle over there. So, that’s kind of where I was trying to get to.”
Sergeant Beth Roberts sees this from about 25 yards away, Hernandez yells that he’s hit, and Roberts fires about ten shots at the car in just over three seconds.
Neither officer sees the boyfriend at any point. They’re just winging shots at the car. On the bodycam video, Hernandez’s teeth are clenched and his words are slurred, and he is struggling to breathe. He tries to stand up, but his legs aren’t working. Here’s Roberts describing why she believed that Hernandez had been shot (and by proxy why she fired): “Because the auditory tone in his voice was terror. And the way that I saw him kind of stumble to the ground and kind of get up. And then also then, I guess this is a couple seconds later watching him, the best way to describe it is like watching a baby giraffe trying to walk for the first time and trying to get out of that road.”
A few observations before we get to the more interesting takeaways:
The fortunate thing about the officers’ panic here is that it ruined their aim — nobody was hit.
There are probably some underlying issues that contributed here. As one redditor speculated, “You feel like this guy already had in his head, for a long time, that he was going to be shot on duty. Like he'd been over in his head how it was going to happen … and not in a good, healthy way that a street cop might prepare themselves for a violent incident, but in a paranoid, scared, and negative way.”
Hernandez resigned, but neither he nor Roberts were charged or even administratively disciplined. Any concealed carrier who did this would have long since been charged. This is, in fact, exactly the kind of behavior that gun control groups said concealed carriers would engage in when may-issue was struck down. This is a strange case, and there’s generally too much of a rush to believe that when anything bad happens, someone has to go to prison. But it’s noteworthy that if a concealed carrier did this, prosecutors would be bending over backwards to send them to prison whereas in this case, prosecutors bent over backwards not to bring charges.
So yes, it’s pretty easy to make fun of Hernandez here. He had to resign to, if nothing else, avoid being called Acorn by all his coworkers for the rest of his career.
We make fun because we think we’re better. And maybe we are. But how do we know? Few fail so publicly, but we all fail in more subtle ways. Hernandez woke up that morning thinking the same thing as you: I’m not a person who can be scared into potential manslaughter by a tree nut. He found out he was wrong about himself. What will the rest of us learn about ourselves when the heat is on? That we’re perfect? We’re going to learn — hopefully less severely — that we all have blind spots.
Another redditor relayed this story:
Quick story: I was training officers on room entries for active shooter scenarios. We were using less lethal sim rounds and had very strict protocols in place to make sure there was no live ammo or guns capable of using live ammo. While running a scenario, a team of officers entered a room where the shooter and victims were (role players plus the shooter with his own sim gun). The lead breacher screamed, fell to his left and clutched his groin and yelled, “I’ve been hit!” Convinced that somehow live ammo had just been used, and seeing the officer just get shot, we immediately stopped the scenario, cleared the area and started providing medical aid.
We had an EMT with us who started working on the officer within 60 seconds of being hit. While the victim held pressure on the wound (it was right on the femoral artery) the EMT got a dressing on it and a CAT high up on the thigh. We cut away the officers pants to access the wound and found… nothing. We just about stripped the ‘Ol boy naked trying to find a wound and found nothing. It took us forever to convince him he had not been shot. There wasn’t even a welt or red mark to show where he might have been hit by a sim round to cause him to think he’s been hit.
I watched him go down, and based on his actions, was 100% sure he’d been shot. Of course, he was 100% sure he’d been shot too. The human mind a strange and scary thing.
Same deal with the cases of officers collapsing from proximity to fentanyl in the field, from apparent transdermal overdoses. This paper reveals it as something quite different: “vasovagal syncope, or panic attacks induced by context-driven anxiety”.
It’s tempting to laugh, but when someone experiences this, it is real to them. Yes, the reason that Hernandez thought he was shot and couldn’t use his legs turned out to be funny. But the point is that Hernandez couldn’t use his legs. When an officer faints from an imagined fentanyl overdose, they actually faint. Your reaction to a situation is real, no matter how irrational or ill-founded it is.
So yeah, we make fun because we think we’re better — and also because we secretly worry that we’re not. The acorn example is an extreme, but in many cases, this isn’t the sort of thing you can predict. The only way to know how you’ll fare is to experience it. And the only way to approximate that is with good training.
From “OSD 184: It works in practice but does it work in theory?”:
[GWOT special operations veterans] spent the ‘90s practicing techniques that seemed good in training but had never been put to the test in real life. Then they went to war and realized they’d been practicing bullshido.
On one end of the spectrum you have, say, Brazilian jiu jitsu, which you can practice full-bore, with an opponent who’s resisting as hard as humanly possible. On the other end you have, say, aikido, which is practiced in theoretical terms with a compliant opponent. And gunfighting is somewhere in between.
It’s not quite that techniques you don’t practice full-bore can’t work. They might. It’s that you can’t know if they work. The definition of expertise is that your efforts predictably lead to positive outcomes. The better your expertise, the more predictable and the more positive the outcome. That’s why experts get paid well. So if you can’t accurately predict that your techniques will work, you’re not a real expert.
Put all that together and the conclusion is pretty broad: the only valid experts are those whose techniques can be practiced for real.
So where does that leave all the gun instructors on Instagram?
In BJJ you can roll with a buddy and tap if he gets you in a good choke. But you can’t go to the range and tap when he Mozambiques you.
There are a few workarounds for this.
The first is to break “gunfight” down into smaller pieces. True, you can’t fully simulate a gunfight. But a gunfight will include a holster draw or a ready-up. It’ll include fast target acquisition. It’ll include fast, precise shots. All of those subcomponents are things that you can practice at 100% speed.
The second is to include an “opponent”. The test for a technique is if it can overcome a fully resistant opponent. That could be a human, but it could also just be the surprises inherent to a real-life emergency. Get a couple airsoft guns and try out scenarios (a mugging, a home invasion, an old west standoff, whatever) with a friend. You’ll be surprised how quickly your fundamentals — day-one basics like grip and sight alignment — go out the window when you’re not the only person with a vote. And over time, as you practice, you’ll be able to navigate surprises without losing your fundamentals.
The third is to let others’ real-world experiences be your practice. Keep an eye out for defensive gun uses in the news, whether they go well or poorly. They all have lessons to teach.
Train well, and you’ll perform well. And for all of us, step zero of good training is to always approach it with the attitude that we have a lot to learn.
This week’s links
Assault sticks are now legal in California
Judge Roger Benitez (🙏) strikes down the state’s ban on billy clubs.
“Is 5.7x28mm just overpriced .22 Magnum?”
Lucky Gunner video with the technical details on this question.
The Reload breaks down the ruling in NRA’s court case
The six-member jury in the civil case found [Wayne] LaPierre did $5.4 million worth of harm to the NRA by using its charitable funds to pay for things like private jet travel. They determined he’d already paid back about a million dollars of that harm, but also that there was enough evidence to bar him from being the group’s CEO in the future.
“What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine”
From the Washington Post:
The Ukraine conflict has challenged core assumptions. The war has become an attritional slugfest with each side attempting to wear down the other, a model thought to be anachronistic, said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.
It also has complicated a long-held belief in the Pentagon that expensive precision weapons are central to winning America’s conflicts, Pettyjohn said. GPS-guided munitions provided to Ukraine have proven vulnerable to electronic jamming. Its military has adapted by pairing older unguided artillery with sensors and drones, which can be used to spot targets and refine their shots.
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It’s interesting to note that this deputy also had the best training the military has to offer and still had this reaction. Reading the report from the sheriff’s dept it states he was a West Point grad, infantry officer and spent time with special forces for 2 tours in Afghanistan.
After working in various police departments around the country, I have always been surprised how departments value military credentials over street cop experience. I’m surprised because I have found nothing shows who you will be in stressful experiences, except experience of those situations.
I reviewed this case and read the investigation report. The interesting part was this guy's partner's reasoning. She was cleared of any wrongdoing and was judged to have followed protocol perfectly because she acted as any reasonable officer in her position 'should have acted'.
The key for her was that she waited until her screaming in pain partner rolled out of the way, (which further convinced her he had actually been severely injured) before she engaged the shooter in the vehicle. His belief of being severely wounded by gunfire, convinced his partner that she had to engage to save his life and the lives of the person who called 911, whom she was standing near to, ready to protect at all costs.