Warrior or Guardian or Both? Effective counter terrorist tactics and police integrity, to shoot or not to shoot: is this the question?

Abstract

As we proceed to safeguard democratic principles, with the assistance of law enforcement organizations on the ground, we continue to encounter the challenges of the mandate to use coercive force as one of the most extreme tools in the toolkits of our officers. It has been a long term belief of this author, that the more civilized we become as a society the more we resent the concept of coercive use of force as a solution to the myriad of problems we need to solve to safeguard the so highly cherished democratic principles. This article will focus on the three challenges we need to address and incorporate into law enforcement training and especially counter-terrorist training, at the basic academy level, in order to achieve a more effective and less criticized performance of the officers charged with delivering the impossible: preventing and solving violent crimes with much less violent means. In order to do the impossible we need to integrate the following 3 concepts: technology, quality and performance. While the first concept appears to be fairly self-explanatory the two others seem to be more complicated. Yet, enabling the best possible future had always been one of the main challenges facing scholars and not just in the field of law enforcement and this attempt to identify what needs to be done is just another endeavor to create the best possible template for effective and respected law enforcement.