“We shoot to stop the threat,” said Lawrence O’Toole, a lieutenant colonel with the St. Louis Police Department. “You could be endangering the public by shooting and missing.”
Law enforcement officials are slamming Joe Biden’s suggestion that police officers should shoot violent assailants in the leg to avoid a potentially fatal altercation, with experts arguing that police are trained to do exactly the opposite of what Biden advised in order to minimize harm during violent confrontations.
In an extended exchange with a questioner during his Philadelphia town hall event with host George Stephanopolous Thursday, Biden laid out his vision for police reform, including his opinion of how police officers should utilize deadly force while on the job.
“There’s a lot of things we’ve learned, and it takes time,” he said, “but we can do this. You can ban chokeholds … but beyond that, you have to teach people how to de-escalate circumstances.”
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