Expert: Little Time to React

By Paul Grondahl
The Times Union
Sunday, April 4, 2010

Given the situation he faced, was it reasonable for Albany County sheriff's deputy Vincent Igoe to shoot and kill Marcos Alvarez?

Alvarez was a small man walking alone on a darkened and deserted public road in a commercial zone. He was not committing a crime and did not display a weapon.

But as Igoe approached in a marked car, got out and told Alvarez to stop in Spanish, Alvarez threw a chunk of concrete at Igoe, according to Igoe's account. Alvarez then made a lunging move toward the deputy from about 15 feet away with one hand behind his back and the other hand in his pocket, according to Igoe.

There were no witnesses.

The scenario posed to a leading national expert on deadly force, Thomas Aveni, a former state trooper in Utah and New Jersey and now executive director of the Police Policy Studies Council in New Hampshire. He has trained thousands of police and military personnel across the U.S. and overseas since 1983.

Aveni laid it out like this: "The deputy was working alone and didn't have any immediate backup. He's dealing with a guy who's openly hostile because he's thrown a rock in his direction. He's not obeying verbal commands. His behavior is non-compliant and he makes a furtive movement with his hand.

"A healthy male with a knife can easily cover 21 feet in 1.5 seconds. It takes an officer about 2 seconds to draw his gun from his holster and fire a round. If the person is within that 21-foot zone, officers are trained to shoot because they may not even get a shot off before they're stabbed. More recent training is pushing that zone out to 30 feet.

"In this case, even if the deputy had a Taser and the man had a gun, the officer is done. At close range, a Taser is less effective. The deputy in this case had so little time to react to what appeared to be an openly hostile individual that I'd have a hard time concluding that it was anything other than an objectively reasonable shooting. The deputy was not obligated to turn and run back to his car.

"Most officers carry 20 pounds of equipment on them and turning and running means they get a knife in the back. I'm not an apologist for officers' mistakes and they do happen. About 1 in every 4 police shootings involves an unarmed person."

Aveni described a videotaped study he conducted with 307 officers from six different police agencies in a scenario similar to the encounter between Alvarez and Igoe: low light, officer alone, non-compliance to officer's orders, a furtive movement and a split second to decide. In Aveni's study, 4 out of 10 officers shot to kill.