MATTHEWS, N.C. — On the heels of a deadly shooting in Minnesota where an officer claimed she accidentally grabbed her gun instead of her Taser, Charlotte-area law enforcement agencies are sharing policies they use to prevent incidents from happening.
“We train over and over and over, hundreds of hours, all the time,” Officer Tim Aycock, a spokesperson for the Matthews Police Department, said.
Aycock has been in law enforcement for 15 years. Use-of-force training has become more critical than ever before in his career, he said.
“It’s always been important but we’re at the pinnacle of importance now,” Aycock said.
On Sunday, an officer fatally shot 20-year-old Daunte Wright a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb. The veteran officer can be heard on her body-worn camera shouting, “Taser! Taser! Taser!” She later told investigators that she grabbed her gun by mistake.
RELATED: Live updates: Officials say Kim Potter could be charged soon for fatally shooting Daunte Wright
Since then, protests have erupted in the community, which is just a couple of miles away from where bystander and police camera video showed former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds on May 25, 2020.
The trial for Chauvin is currently underway.
Aycock said his police department, along with many departments across North Carolina, has policies to help ensure that officers don’t grab the wrong weapon.
“We require officers to have their firearm on their strong side,” Aycock explained. “And then their Taser is required to be placed on their duty belt on their opposite side which is their support side.”
Aycock said officers are trained to grab the Taser using their non-dominant hand, or to use a cross-body grab. That motion is something they practice hundreds of times each year, he said.
“With that split-second decision we don’t want to take a chance that’s why we want it separated on the officer’s body as much as we can,” he said.
Aycock said the Taser also has a different weight and grip. Many of the ones issued in his department also have a brightly colored strip on their handle.
However, Aycock said, their training also teaches them not to look at the weapon while they pull it out. They are trained to keep their eyes on the suspect and the situation in front of them at all times, he said.
Repetition and building muscle memory are a big part of their training techniques, Aycock said.
“It’s an ongoing thing constantly for us,” he said.
High-stakes mistakes have happened with deadly consequences before the incident in Minnesota this week.
In 2015, a volunteer deputy said he accidentally fired his handgun instead of his Taser when he killed Eric Harris. Harris was unarmed and already on the ground.
In 2009, a case became the inspiration for the movie “Fruitvale Station.” A transit officer fired his gun instead of his Taser, killing 22-year-old Oscar Grant.
Aycock said training in the last few years has increasingly focused on de-escalation tactics. While officers still spend hours learning when and how to pull a gun or less-lethal force, Aycock said more and more of the teaching surrounds methods that involve no force at all.
“We try to de-escalate everything without having to use any intermediate weapons at all,” Aycock said. “Our goal is to never use force, that’s any officer’s standard. You don’t want to hurt anyone, you want to keep the community safe, and you want to do it with the least amount of force if any possible.”
The Matthews Police Department keeps all of its use-of-force policies online. To read more, click here.
