Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.
There are times when police officers overstep when using deadly force, and times when they do not—and body cameras have proved essential in determining the facts in those cases. On April 22, 2020, Daniel Hernandez caused a five-car accident in Los Angeles, and, according to a 911 call, was cutting himself with a knife.
Officers responding to another call drove up to the accident at about the same time that dispatch put out the call that the driver had a knife. One of the two officers on the scene was Toni McBride, 23, who was also the daughter of the police union director.[i]
Daniel Hernandez approached the officers with a knife, ignored commands to drop the knife, and was shot. He was shot twice, dropped to the ground, got up, and was then shot again four times. He partially dropped to the ground again after the third shot and was then shot for the fifth and sixth time as he staggered to the side.
The Los Angeles Police Inspector General said that the final two shots were against policy, but the Chief of Police, Michel Moore[ii] said that all six shots were justified. The matter then went to the Civilian Police Commission, which, in a 4-1 vote, took the side of the IG over Chief Moore.
Moore’s right, and the others are wrong, and he’s got the background to back it up. First, he’s been in that situation before and did what he had to do, risking his life in an effort to protect the innocent. Next, he’s done the job of evaluating police use of force, serving as the chair of the Use of Force Review Board, where he’s viewed all kinds of use of force incidents.
Those who want Toni McBride fired and prosecuted have brought up, inappropriately, what she does outside of the department. You see, McBride is an attractive woman and has done some modeling outside of work, including for Tartantactical, a local firearms company that has a pretty good resume. She’s also apparently a very good shot and enjoys the practical shooting sports.
That apparently drew the attention of Hernandez’s lawyers, who filed the inevitable lawsuit for excessive force and wrongful death. In addition, one of the Hernandez attorneys, Narine Mkrtchyan, is an idiot, claiming that the fact that McBride enjoys shooting and celebrates her skills somehow meant that the Police Department employed “McBride, [] whom LAPD knew, or who reasonably should have known, to have reckless violent and homicidal propensities. . .” and that “I’ve never seen a police officer enjoying shooting to that degree and joking about it.” The first comment is just over the top, and the second comment just means that she’s never hung around cops before.
I would have loved to be able to shoot competitively like McBride, but I didn’t have the money and don’t have the looks to get a sponsor. In addition, most police officers who do shoot like that are assigned as departmental firearms instructor at departments that are big enough to have a full-time range staff.
None of that has any impact on the shooting and whether it was justified or not.
What does have an impact is whether the force was necessary, and the hard part is already done. Everyone (except the Hernandez family) agrees that the first four shots were justified. If someone is coming at you with a knife, you don’t invite them to discuss it over a cup of coffee. You shoot them. And you continue to shoot them until they stop.[iii] So McBride executed a series of three double-taps,[iv] and stopped when Hernandez was on the ground. These are stills of the shooting:
Like I said, the first two shots were clearly justifiable.
And here, everyone agrees that shots 3 and 4 are also justifiable, and as far as I’m concerned, so are shots 5 and 6. What those who have not been there don’t understand is that when these incidents happen, it’s not long and drawn out, it happens with less than a second between shots.
According to the medical examiner, the first two shots killed Hernandez, but as we can clearly see, they didn’t stop him. Perhaps it was some form of manic desire, perhaps it was the meth in his system, but he continued to try and get up. We’ll never know what was going through his mind, but we can know what we see, and that justifies the shots, all of them.
I’ll also point out that while I am in favor of civilian oversight, it needs to be fair oversight. It needs to objectively view the cases it reviews, not take a biased view of issue. Remember that this is the same review panel where a former commissioner called for a moment of silence to honor those who have been shot and killed by the police. Let that sink in for a second. Is an officer going to get a fair hearing by that body?
[i] Jamie McBride, her father, is director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
[ii] Chief Moore, as an officer, earned the LAPD Medal of Valor in 1987 for taking out a killer with a rifle who had just killed his wife and had turned the rifle on Moore.
[iii] A number of police firearms experts have stated that you fire in two-round groups, pause to evaluate, then fire again if necessary, and repeat until the subject is no longer a threat. That procedure was obsolete twenty years ago, and we taught to fire at least two rounds, assess, and then continue to fire until either the threat was stopped, or your slide locked back. Assessment should be continuous.
[iv] A double-tap is not just two shots fired as fast as one can; it is two shots, each fired deliberately, as rapidly as one can while keeping the second shot within four inches of the first, and normally done at a range of 9 to 21 feet (3 to 7 yards). Anything further isn’t double-taps. They are controlled pairs, and anything closer is just firing as quick as possible at contact range.
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