Officers of Buffalo Police Department went 4 years without fatal shooting: CNN

[Stuart G]

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/politics/state/buffalo-police-shooting

The officers of the Buffalo Police Department went more than four years and 2 million calls without a fatal shooting. What did they do right?_______________________________________________________________________________________

This city gets heavy snow in the winter, hard rain in the summer, and the occasional gun falling from the sky. Maybe it clatters onto a roof, or clangs into a garbage can, or splashes down in an open field. Wherever it falls, two men may come looking for it: Officers Mark Hamilton and Michael Acquino, who confiscate more illegal guns than any other pair in the Buffalo Police Department.

These transactions often start on the sidewalk, when someone acts just a little off: talking too fast, volunteering too much information, pretending to be on the phone, and maybe they reach for the waistband, and maybe they start to run. This is when the evidence goes airborne. The average loaded handgun weighs about two pounds, roughly six times as much as a baseball. You’d be surprised how far a man on parole can make one fly.

One day a few years ago the officers went after a runner who did not throw the gun. He was a big man, almost 300 pounds, reluctant to go back to prison. They told him to stop, and he didn’t. They told him to drop the gun, and he wouldn’t. They caught him in a driveway and Acquino tackled him and Hamilton grabbed his arm and still he wouldn’t drop the gun. They fought for more than a minute, which felt much longer, and finally Acquino got free and pulled his own gun and took aim with a finger on the trigger.

For every police-involved shooting that makes the news, there are countless others that almost happen -- thousands of moments when an officer finds a way not to use what would be legally justified deadly force. Most veteran officers have a story like this, and some have five or 10 or more. They have a lot of these stories in Buffalo, also known as the City of Good Neighbors, which is one reason the police department went from December 2012 to May 2017 without a single fatal officer-involved shooting -- a streak of more than four years.
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Fascinating read.....very worthwhile