Shoot? Don’t Shoot?

Last week I attended Writers' Police Academy sponsored, in part, by the Sisters in Crime. This year it was at a wonderful facility outside Appleton, Wisconsin. That’s less than a four-hour drive for us (right around the block in Yooper terms), so Jan and I both attended.

I was lucky enough to sign up for several special small-group classes. Crime Scene photography was excellent; it helped me understand how those folks actually work a scene using digital photography. I won a lottery and participated in a “Simunitions” exercise in which three of us attempted to extract an armed person for whom we had a warrant from a house. We were not sure if other people, including a baby, might still be in the house.

The class I want to discuss today is called MILO, an extremely realistic interactive training program.

For fifteen minutes two of us worked with an instructor and the MILO simulator. The instructor first provided a refresher on the basics of handgun control (both of us had experience shooting handguns). Next we discussed when it is appropriate for a police officer to fire his/her weapon: the key being that an officer should not shoot until feeling endangered.

The two of us took turns with the simulations. The first simulation had an angry man brandishing a knife. In scenario one he was (I think) thirty-one feet away. Was I endangered? No. I had plenty of time to shoot before he could run at me with the knife. When he did finally run, I shot. Because he kept moving, I kept shooting until the guy went down.

Lesson one: keep shooting until danger is removed.

I repeated the knife-wielding man scenarios with the guy at twenty-one feet and eleven feet. At eleven feet there is very little time between the man making a threatening move and the necessity of shooting. Very little time.

I managed those three scenarios successfully. The other student waited too long in the eleven-foot scene and was “killed.”

A little cop humor

We did several other scenarios. In all cases I correctly chose when to shoot. However, I did die in one scenario. I responded to a bank robbery by an armed man. He exited the bank, money in one hand, gun in the other. I made the correct decision of when to shoot, but then I made a rookie error. I developed tunnel vision, focusing on the downed gunman because he might not be dead and he still had the gun in his hand.

I missed seeing a car parked at the curb with the getaway driver. The screen went red when that person got off several shots before I located the problem and fired back.

Our last scenario involved both students. We were in a two-person patrol car and had made a traffic stop of an erratically-driven car. Out pops a guy pointing a gun at his head, threatening to blow his head off if we come nearer. Then he starts taunting us to shoot him. This was possibly a suicide-by-cop situation. We’re yelling at the guy to drop his gun and stay by his car. Eventually, he started moving toward us, still waving the gun more or less at his head.

Shoot? Don’t shoot?

He’s still coming toward us, waving the gun more or less at his head.

Shoot? Don’t shoot?

The waving gun is now pointed less frequently directly at his head, the gestures become loopier.

Shoot? Don’t shoot?

Crime scene photography

Both of us made the wrong decision. My partner never shot. Once the gunman reached the back bumper of his car (the line I had mentally drawn in the sand), I fired a shot into the dirt and when he kept coming, I shot his leg. According to the instructor, given the gunman was not following directions and was waving the gun around (and could easily change one of those loops into a shot at us), I had chosen the correct time to fire. However, I should have aimed for the center mass. Police officers do not shoot for extremities (or shoot the weapon out of the person’s hand). They are trained to focus on the chest through head area.

One thing the two of us didn’t do in that exercise, which many students do and which also happens a lot in real life is fire solely because the other person fires. It’s a tension-induced reflex. Combined with training to keep shooting until the opponent is no longer a threat, this reaction is often responsible for the massive number of bullets fired in some shootouts.

The exercise provided me with insight into police shootings I would never have gotten from television and printed news. Sometime it may even make it into a story.

~ Jim

http://jamesmjackson.com

This blog originally posted at Writers Who Kill

Five Ways to Generate Story Ideas

One question I often get at writers' conferences or meeting people in bookstores  is "Where do you get your ideas?" Here are five suggestions for your consideration:

1. Eavesdrop. People say and do the most interesting things; all you have to do is pay attention to them. My two favorite places to eavesdrop are standing in long lines and eating in restaurants. In both situations I can easily overhear people conversing and observe their behavior. Sometimes I’ll overhear a snippet of conversation and wonder how the conversants got to that line—and therein lies a story. Sometimes, I can’t hear a thing, but I can observe body language and start to wonder about their story—which I then start to invent.

2. Hear something on the radio or read something in the paper that strikes an interesting chord. For example, small-town police blotters are a wonderful source of oddball incidents. Again, I am not interested in lifting the real-life event and transporting it to the page. The incidents suggest precursors or aftermaths that contain the interesting story. I keep a folder of these tidbits and peruse them from time to time.

3. Project a concern or fear I have onto a character or situation. For instance, how would I react if confronted by someone breaking into my house? Would it change if they were armed with an AK-47 and spoke Chinese? What if I were only six? What if I had been six and had repressed it and now fifty years later remembered something—or maybe I thought I did, but in fact I had made it up. Keep spinning the idea until one variation calls out, “Write ME!”

4. If you like Thrillers or Science Fiction, try taking a current trend and pushing it forward to a logical, but startling, conclusion. For example, accelerate the melting of the polar icecaps to the point the Arctic Ocean is open for supertankers for much of the year. Does the Northwest Passage replace the Panama Canal? Does China plan to invade Canada to secure safe shipping for their goods to Europe? Toss your character into that ocean of possibilities and see where it takes you.

5. Take two characters, lock them in a room and consider what would happen. For example, put Rush Limbaugh and Barack Obama in a jail cell together in Caribou, ME. Because of budget cuts, the jailer is part-time. The jailer just went home for the evening. No one knows they are there. Oh yes, they both have diarrhea and there is only one toilet and only a few sheets of toilet paper.

You can consider these kinds of situations with real people, fictional characters, even your close family. Then take what you’ve projected and apply it to fictional characters.

There you have it: five approaches to generate story ideas.

~ Jim

A version of this post originally appeared at Writers Who Kill