The Tueller Principle is accepted in self-defense arguments in courts throughout the US to establish a clear and present danger to anyone. Police may set policies based on the Tueller Principle, but civilians benefit from it by having an established guidline for threat assessment.

Those cops? Certainly cretins.

@66: Drawing a gun in response to a deadly threat is merely sensible. The Tueller Drill doesn’t “require drawing a gun in response to a knife.” The Tueller Drill demonstrates the need to be conscious of threats at a greater distance than an untrained individual would normally consider. Most people think that a knifer isn’t a threat except within extreme close ranges. That’s a potentially fatal misconception which the Tueller Drill dispels. A knifer is absolutely dangerous within 21 feet. It’s also just plain stupid to consider a knife to be a significantly less deadly threat than a gun. A knife in the hands of anyone with murderous intent is terrifically effective, and the wounds it produces horrifying. Drawing a gun is a very prudent response to a knife wielding loon. After reading the article here, click on the link to graphic images: http://xavierthoughts.blogspot.com/2006/02/tueller-drill.html
Personally, I’m not interested in ever being the slashee.

Where the Tueller Drill and Tueller Principle fail is that they haven’t been adequately expanded to cover other hand weapon threats. What if your attacker has a claw hammer, hatchet, nightstick, collapsible baton or baseball bat? Do the ranges change significantly? Are you unsafe at 25 or even 30 feet if your assailant has a 32″ aluminum baseball bat or 9 iron?

There are other alternatives to drawing a gun in response to a knifer’s threats, none of which are as safe for the victim as defensive use of a handgun.

KBCraig: I disagree with your interpretation of the statute. He intended to show the knife to warn off his potential assailants.

Even the police testimony said that he held the knife (all two inches of it) point-down alongside his leg and made no threatening moves. Police testimony said that as soon as they identified themselves, he closed the knife, clipped it to his belt, and obeyed all their commands.

This was a training exercise, all right: how to write up a report to create a crime where none existed.

Thanks for all the comments pointing out that the Tueller Drill, while a valuable training aid, is smoke and mirrors when it comes to police reports.

The chief fault of the Tueller Drill is that it requires drawing a gun in response to a knife. There are alternatives.

Oh I see. You think I am a cop or something like that.

And now that you’ve demonstrated that you don’t have a clue what you are talking about, you’ve decided to move on to insults.

Good for you Timmy [pats head].

No. That’s actually not the way it is at all, and your thinking otherwise suggests you are someone who possesses a passing acquaintance with the law that one might expect from those silly “criminal justice” night classes at the community college that cater primarily to cops seeking a promotion to a bigger city department.

In reality “reasonable person” is simply the most basic summary generalization of how a written codified law, including some very specific written codified laws with even more specific and stringent standards, are read and interpreted in the public sphere and before the court. Specific crimes have specific degrees of severity, specific codified defenses and exemptions, specific conditions to define their criminality, and specific instances of case law governing their application. Most of these very specific characteristics are designed and intended to reflect equally specific variations in the mind and intent of the accused as he was committing the alleged act.

But who am I to comment on that. Practically every cop I’ve ever known considers himself an “expert” on every last detail of the law, irrespective of the truth in that claim.

“Your honor.”

But cops don’t use it that way. They use it as a magic number to determine whether they perceived a threat. And as long as anything is within about 20 feet of them they can say they “followed procedure.” That’s absurd because they are taking an anecdotal piece of wisdom, the Tueller drill, and treating it as if it were a scientific standard to determine whether or not their life was in danger.

And I don’t know what “criminal threatening” means and how that is interpreted. Some states have a “brandishing” law that criminalizes just flashing a gun – without actually pointing it at someone.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/brandish
brandish: to shake or wave, as a weapon; flourish

Having a firearm visible isn’t brandishing, whether the word is in quotes or not, because brandish means to have it in your hands and pointed in someone’s general direction.

The Tueller Doctrine is a number picked out of air, and is impossible to scientifically prove that 21 feet is the right number. I believe it’s intended more as a general number, not THE exact number. However, this assumes that one doesn’t move while the attacked moves towards you. It’s best to use as a guideline, as anyone at about that distance could be a threat. However (again), cops use it rigidly and jump at their own shadow and get away with blurting out “21 feet” and “I feared for my own life” without question. They know they are lying and saying the magic words, and shouldn’t be cops if they’re so damn scared. But we all know that some cops got into that line of “employment” so they could put their boot on your throat and up your ass for no reason other than “I can”.

That drill is a staple of self defense classes. The guy or gal with the knife almost always gets to contact distance before the defender draws, which is the point – even if you have a gun, someone with an edged weapon at that distance is a very credible threat, and you need to be moving, deflecting, etc. while you draw.

I would add that the student defenders are, IMHE, at least as competent as the average officer (in the ones I have taken, some of the students are officers trying to upgrade their skills), and aren’t using a retention holster either (retention holsters slow your draw down a little bit).

That said, prosecution seems unwarranted if he reasonably believed the officers were a threat, if they had followed after he crossed the street, etc. That’s a totality of the circumstances thing, and I don’t know all the circumstances. You do want people to be restrained about pulling out weapons. Suppose you’re following someone because they happen to be going the same place you are. When they turn and draw their gun, do you draw yours? As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong with that?

There was a PSA in the early 70s where some guy is being followed down the streets by two teens, getting more and more nervous as they get closer, then they pass a streetlight and he sees they’re Boy Scouts. None of it is unlikely.

Yep.

Many, if not most, of our criminal laws and civil torts are based on a “reasonable person” test which not scientific and relies on anecdotal guesstimation. That’s the way it is.

“In such a scenario, would it not be better that the person in front show his armament and intention to resist attack, while there is enough distance for the parties to safely reconcile their misunderstanding, than for him to wait until the people in back were closer?”

That sounds like a bad idea, to me: people pulling out their weapons to display them to insure there are no misunderstandings. It seems to me that “misunderstandings” multiply once the weapons are out. Just sayin’.

Suppose the people in back weren’t cops, but merely innocent people who hadn’t intended to intimidate or distress the person in front. In such a scenario, would it not be better that the person in front show his armament and intention to resist attack, while there is enough distance for the parties to safely reconcile their misunderstanding, than for him to wait until the people in back were closer?

The police claim that they felt threatened is preposterous if, as they claim, they were walking toward the accused and the accused was trying to walk away from them. By the time the police reacted to the guy’s knife, it should have become clear that he wasn’t a threat; if he would have intended to attack them without their advancing further upon him, he would have already done so.

Too many Massholes moved in. It’s now the “Try to Live Free and Die” state.

Advice from someone who lived in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn: When your only weapon is a jackknife with a 2″ blade, the proper response to being followed late at night by two men is to run like hell.

The New Hampshire law is posted right above you in #32. It specifically requires that the threatening act be purposeful. A defensive draw of a knife against suspicious persons who are later learned to be cops is not a purposeful threat.

New Hampshire law also allows a person to act in self defense if he believes he is being threatened by another, as the knife guy clearly thought of the men following him.

http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/LXII/627/627-4.htm

As for the “Tueller Drill” – it is not accurate to call it a study as it was not a study of anything but rather an advice column on self defense – if it is not scientific and relies only on anecdotal guesstimation then how can you advocate basing a policy with life and death consequences upon it? That is all I am asking of it, and the answers you are giving border on the absurd.

Probably, unless you like to be disappointed.

“They followed him down a dark street in the middle of the night.”

Did they? Or were they just walking behind him? The clip doesn’t say.

“He turned around and glared at them no less than three times and they continued following him.”

So he was “glaring”? The clip says he “looked” at them. Anyway, what is your proposed rule here? If person A is walking down the street in front of you and he or she turns and “glares” are you supposed to stop? Turn and walk the other way? And, remember that the story said it was dark so even if the nervous nelly was “glaring” the two cops might not have been able to notice. Heck, they might not have even known that he turned to look at them.

“He also asked why they were following him as he turned around the fourth time, knife in hand in case they intended him harm. That course of action under those circumstances should not only be permissible and encouraged as a basic precept of self defense in our society. It should be openly acknowledged as a fundamental right of a human being to protect his own person from threats.”

What was the threat, exactly? Walking behind him? Wearing “dark” clothes?

“And to put it bluntly in case you still don’t understand me: given what we know of how the cops handled the situation, he might have even been justified in using his knife had they persisted further in their antics.”

What were these “antics” again? Perhaps you know more about this situation than I do but last time I checked it was permissible for people to walk down the street after dark even if there is someone walking in front of them.

“We don’t know all the facts yet”

“There might be more to this story”

Yet when it’s a cop’s word versus somebody else in a news story, those excuses strangely seem not to apply.

You need to relax a bit.

I don’t have the statute in front of me, but I am guessing that it prohibits conduct that a “reasonable person” would find threatening. You understand that the “reasonable” person is mythical, right? It isn’t “replicable, controlled scientific, etc.” If you get enough people on a jury to say they would have felt threatened, they guy goes to jail.

So I think your focus on the Tueller study or whatever is misplaced. I agree with you completely that it is not scientific. But that really doesn’t matter at all.

The idea that something has to be “scientific” (whatever that is) is pretty alien to interpreting most statutes.

I certainly care. Or is it improper of me to expect that the police my tax dollars employ are competent and well trained at what they do? I’m sorry, but a doughnut-huffing fatass with a slow draw has no more business being a cop than a guy who can’t swim has at being a lifeguard.

“I would just ask you to do this: Do we, as a society, want to permit (and thereby encourage) people to turn around on the sidewalk, pull a knife, and demand to people behind them that they explain themselves?”

They followed him down a dark street in the middle of the night. He turned around and glared at them no less than three times and they continued following him. He also asked why they were following him as he turned around the fourth time, knife in hand in case they intended him harm. That course of action under those circumstances should not only be permissible and encouraged as a basic precept of self defense in our society. It should be openly acknowledged as a fundamental right of a human being to protect his own person from threats.

Those two cops were a far bigger threat to the knife guy than he was to them. And to put it bluntly in case you still don’t understand me: given what we know of how the cops handled the situation, he might have even been justified in using his knife had they persisted further in their antics.

Let me get this straight.

A claim has been put forth that it takes about 1.5 seconds for a knife-wielding assailant to travel 21 feet. Those numbers are also the basis of policy and training at police departments all over the country.

If that is indeed the case, then surely those numbers must originate somewhere. And surely that origin must have some sort of grounding in reality – i.e. replicable, controlled scientific testing of human speed and reaction times in various situations. Otherwise the numbers put forth would be purely anecdotal, and therefore a poor basis for either policy or training.

But – oh wait – we do know the origin of those numbers. They came from a 1983 advice column in a cop magazine, and it was indeed entirely anecdotal. You accordingly have no grounds to assert that a threat necessarily existed simply because the knife guy was 20 feet away.