Feeding: Aggressiveness of Action

The above video is from a body worn camera of an officer of the Albuquerque PD, responding to and then, pursuing a robbery suspect who shot at the officer several times during the pursuit.  The video is long so I want to highlight a few time points.



1:19 - the robbery suspect shoots at the officer and the officer calls it out over radio, shortly after he confirms via radio to a monitoring supervisor that he did in fact see a pistol
4:45 - officer stops car and begins to take controlled and aimed shots at the driver.
5:30 - you can hear quickly over radio "get your rifles ready" and then at around 5:41, officer pops out of his vehicle, takes slow aim and does not fire, after tracking on the vehicle for a second or so.
6:35 - officer PIT's the white van and then gets into foot pursuit.
6:50 - one hand is concealed, running towards a store full of people, officer fires 6 rounds in about 1.7x-2.0 seconds, downing the guy who was actually unarmed.

To start off, the concept of "Feeding" is a term I learned from Tuhon Tom Kier which is, roughly, described as being in control of a given situation determining the path it will take.  The opposite is being the "Receiver" which is a person being controlled by the feeder, in a given situation.  This is very clear in violent physical confrontations.

This situation shows how an aggressive, but controlled officer, feeds a particularly dangerous, developing, situation.  The officer stays on the suspect as much as possible, pushing the suspect to make hasty decisions while the officer falls back on his training.  He takes his time and does not waste ammunition and does not appear to be out of control.  While I have absolutely zero doubt he is operating in the black in terms of heart beats per minute (you can see how his breathing becomes very rapid if you watch the whole video), he was on autopilot, even though it did not seem like it.  If he was wearing a heart rate monitor it would likely show a standard operating heart rate of around 150+ to spikes of 180+ BPM.

The officer stayed on the suspect, taking his time aiming and making sure he was taking thoughtful shots.  No timers, no Bill drills, nothing fancy like you see on IG, just taking his time, making sure every time he pulled the trigger the round counted.  He was more concerned with putting the suspects movement and dangerous actions to a stop rather than how cool he looked or how fast he can dump a magazine.  At one point he aim, followed, probably began to squeeze off a round and stopped, got back in his car and continued the pursuit.  That is a huge logical action, done so under extreme stress.  That is the reason why you train, that is the reason why you have to consider you actions logically because in the real world timers do not matter. 

Lastly, after the PIT he dumped his car and began the foot pursuit seamlessly, no pistol in hand and it was not until he saw the direction of the foot pursuit was towards a densely populated store, he took swift action.  This officer shot the suspect several times hitting him enough to stop the foot pursuit and once he saw that the male was unarmed he no longer continued to fire.

Stopping the threat before it escalates is very important, especially when the genera public does not know what is going on and sees a rapidly dangerous developing situation.  This the exact type of situation which I referred to in a previous article - "De-escalation and Worst Case Scenario" - If this officer did not stop the threat more people could have been put into harms way.  He saw this and used the force necessary to stop the immediate threat to the general public, the other officers and himself. 

From start of the video to the end of the video he was feeding this very violent confrontation.  According to KRQE local news, this was officer O'Guin's third shooting  Be like this officer, be the feeder.