CCW Shot by Police - Video

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Bartholomew Roberts

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A concealed carry permit holder was attempting to break up a fight in Portland, when he fell to the ground and his pistol fell out of his holster. As he attempted to retrieve the pistol, Portland State University police officers on the scene shot and killed him.

A bystander captured video of part of the situation. I thought there might be some useful insights to be learned.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/20...-carrier-who-dropped-gun-during-street-fight/
 
That was a very bad situation. The guy with the gun made mistakes. the cops all made mistakes. Here goes another catastrophic period.
 
Don't attempt to break up fights. That is where he went wrong. Looked to me like someone just had to play the hero and try and intervene with a bunch of drunks. When you're armed and carrying, these types of situations are textbook example of ones to avoid, and any good trainer will tell you that. The fact that this was done with a cop a couple of feet away is even more perplexing, let him handle it!

The sooner people understand the SELF in self-defense (unless your family and friends are involved), the better.
 
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Definitely shouldn't have involved himself in that scuffle unless that was a close friend or relative involved. One thing I noticed was how his weapon almost looked like it was loosely hanging on his shorts. Seemed like a holster retention problem. The police could have probably handled it better but the guy seemed to have brought his problems upon himself from the video.
 
Can't tell a whole lot what was going on there but it looked to be a terrible job by the police of taking control of the situation and making people behave like adults.

Some lessons I would go with:

- Use a proper holster with an active retention device
- Don't involve yourself in confrontations that don't concern you, especially if the police are around
- Don't get in to physical altercations and drunken brawls
- If you find yourself in one anyway and the police show up then withdraw, retreat and reassess
- Don't have a gun in your hand during a brawl with a bunch of police around
 
Poor choices. Rule is , even for cops, is the first uniformed officer arriving takes command . Never have a gun in hand when cops arrive. Easy for them to assume anyone with a gun is the enemy [safer too ]. Entering any brawl fueled with booze and drugs is dangerous .
Put the gun away and back out of the scene .
 
the worst thing about this situation is that one unusual and abnormal incident is going to be used to create policy.
 
I spend plenty of time surfing news sites, this is the first time I’ve seen this story. Recent protest violence in Portland got much more coverage. I’m sorry the guy was killed.
 
He was shot by the police while doing something dumb even though he was not an active threat to the police at the time.

But he was white.

Not much of a news story there in 2018.
 
MTT TL said:
...even though he was not an active threat to the police at the time.
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How do you know? More to the point, how would the officer know at the time. Your imagined knowledge is based on information collected only after the incident.

What matters, however, is how a reasonable and prudent LEO would have perceived things at the time based on the information he had at the time. And what the cop probably saw, based on what the video shows, is a guy involved in a scuffle who picked up a gun and didn't immediately comply with an order to drop the gun. So while the guy who got shot might not have had the intention of being a threat to the cop, he looked like one.

A cop, or anyone else, isn't a mind reader. He can only infer someone's intentions from that person's actions. If someone looks like a threat he will be treated as a threat.

None of us has "certified good guy" tattooed on our forehead.
 
How do you know?
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Haven't seen the "somebody knocked my gun loose so I better pick it up and run away from the police to get a better vantage point from which to shoot them from trick" before. I guess it is possible just like all things are possible. I'd say its a very low probability event.

how would the officer know at the time
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He likely wouldn't as there are too many moving parts in his field of view; but like we have seen so many times in the past few years that fact hasn't stopped all the protests and ridiculous media stories that so often crop up after the fact.

These days the expectation is perfection, understandable since lives are at stake. Anything less than perfection is proof of incompetence, failures of leadership and/ or racism and especially grounds for a lawsuit. The dynamics don't play for racism here so... no big media story. It doesn't help that the victim is not a sympathetic person due to his continuing to engage in dumb behavior after the police show up.
 
This is the third story I've seen in the past few weeks where poor firearm retention led to shots being fired. It amazes me that people spend hundreds of dollars on a pistol only to carry it in a $8 nylon holster or no holster at all!

Just last week in a city close to me a guy lost his pistol in an Ikea store while shopping. Apparently it wasn't in holster either and slipped out of his pocket. It was found by some kids who fired a round not knowing it was a real gun. Nobody was hurt, but his carelessness could have cost someone their life.

In the case linked above, I can hardly blame the officers. They see a man with a pistol in hand in the middle of a street brawl and react accordingly. If the man felt he had a civic obligation to help control the situation until the police arrived, that's his prerogative. But as soon as officers arrived on the scene he would have done well to step back and allow them to deal with it.

Just my 0.02 cents
 
Just last week in a city close to me a guy lost his pistol in an Ikea store while shopping. Apparently it wasn't in holster either and slipped out of his pocket. It was found by some kids who fired a round not knowing it was a real gun. Nobody was hurt, but his carelessness could have cost someone their life.
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This baffles me.

he was carrying it loosely enough that it could fall out. Kinda dumb.

Now the rest of the story is that it fell out and he didn't feel it sliding out of his concealed site? he didn't hear it clunk on those heavy ceramic floors? He wasn't thinking about his gun when he squatted, or did whatever he did to lose it in the first place? He didn't feel the loss of that weight, or the lack of pressure on his waist?

Where in hell was his situational awareness? where was his physical awareness?

Right now I can feel four things in my jeans. Cigar cutter and lighter(not certain about the lighter). Phone and keys, and My wallet. they were there this morning and I can feel that they are still there. Strangely enough, there aren't any cats in the room, but the mail is due and I'll hear it when it's delivered. any hour, any time any day, you could ask me what time it is and I could get it within ten minutes either way, 95% of the time. It's 12:27, I had just estimated it at 12;30

It's hard for most people to divide their attention like this. To reach out with their senses and process the information. In the matter of a heartbeat that openness will be replaced by tunnel vision, obviously.

But back to the problem at hand. I cannot comprehend how a person can "lose" a gun at an Ikea unless he's drunk and doing backflips.
 
Haven't seen the "somebody knocked my gun loose so I better pick it up and run away from the police to get a better vantage point from which to shoot them from trick" before. I guess it is possible just like all things are possible. I'd say its a very low probability event.
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and you seemingly have allowed a media report to paint the complete picture for you. The video does not show any of what is "speculated" about the gun or what the guy was doing in the moment before the shot was fired. Did he appear to be a danger or an imminent threat to the officer or anyone else?? We don't know [yet]

What matters to me is the evidence and its currently not available in any completed sense. I will reserve judgment until the investigation is complete but if you want to allow a superficial news report to satisfy all your questions about it, I guess you can.

What I will say about what is seen in the video is that the guy seems to have a very poor holster system. It almost looks like its clipped to his pocket. I cringe at the sight of someone OCing in the middle of a brawl.. its a nightmare just waiting to happen.
 
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KY blkout said:
Definitely shouldn't have involved himself in that scuffle unless that was a close friend or relative involved. One thing I noticed was how his weapon almost looked like it was loosely hanging on his shorts. Seemed like a holster retention problem. The police could have probably handled it better but the guy seemed to have brought his problems upon himself from the video.
Click to expand...
It looked like he had one of those "clip grip" or "grip clip" thingies, with the pistol just clipped to the pocket of his shorts. That's a really poor way to carry, IMHO, and I felt that way even before seeing this video.
 
The world is not changing for the better . Now we have a phrase that's new to me .
" Police held him at the 'the point of a taser ' ":rolleyes:
 
College reaction - https://www.chronicle.com/article/D...5d891&elqaid=19642&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9047

Obviously, the guy who got shot made very bad decisions. I would opine (worth what you paid for it) that the intense emotional situation blocked rational responses and his attentional abilities. Meaning that he was focused on the interaction and when he lost the gun, he could only focus on that. He probably didn't even process the officers' commands during his fixation on retrieving the gun.

We have continuing nighttime fights and gun fights in San Antonio - even in 'nice' areas. Young men out late at night and drinking - you have a diminution of cognitive ability and an enhancement of monkey dance emotions.
 
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