Chicago's ‘shoot first’ training endangers citizens and non-uniformed officers

A policy established by Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in response to a federal court ruling that blanket refusals to permit the bearing of arms are unconstitutional will endanger not only law-abiding citizens, but also any law enforcement officer not in uniform, including state and federal agents and lawfully-carrying retirees.

“I don’t care if they’re licensed legal firearms,” News in Black quoted McCarthy from a WVON 1690 am radio interview. “ … I’ll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we’re going to have tragedies as a result of that. I’m telling you right up front.”

That the person with the gun may be a citizen who was defending his or her life, or a plainclothes law enforcement officer or agent engaged in protecting their own and/or others’ lives does not seem to enter into McCarthy’s training instructions, and while no one would expect a uniformed officer to wait for a suspect to open fire before initiating defensive actions, the Superintendent's instruction is to err on the side of shooting first and asking questions later, even if it means more “friendly fire” deaths and injuries, rather than accepting that good people can have guns and incorporating that reality into crime scene response training.

The superintendent’s hostility to armed citizens and fanatical “Only Ones” bias is undisguised, despite the success demonstrated everywhere else. “[J]ust because it’s 49 states to one doesn’t mean the state of Illinois is wrong on that one,” McCarthy insisted.

That his hostility has at times manifested itself as undisguised contempt is also documented by his characterizing federal gun laws which don’t prohibit everything as “government-sponsored racism.”

Such bias on the part of a powerful police official is not only wrong, it is dangerous, and the fact that he’s willing to publicly bolster it with a position that anticipates and excuses wrongful shootings in advance not only makes him a liability to the city of Chicago from a risk management/insurance settlement perspective, but also ought to place citizens, undercover officers, retired cops and plainclothes state and federal agents on alert with the realization that that they have no obligation to wait to get shot, either.

Perhaps someone ought to ask Eric Holder how he intends to have plainclothes FBI and ATF field agents counter-trained to respond to McCarthy’s “shoot first” policy.

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