DATE: Saturday, August 30, 1997             TAG: 9708290004

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B6   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   64 lines

CHESAPEAKE: OPTIONS TO DEADLY FORCE POLICE NEED NONLETHAL METHOD FOR DISARMING KNIFE-WIELDING CITIZENS

In adventure movies, a bad guy with a knife is no match for a hero or heroine. Knives get shot, kicked and twisted out of bad guys' hands. No problem.

In real life, knives never get shot out of hands. No one even tries, because it's too difficult. And to attempt to kick or twist a knife loose is to risk death.

Police officers view a training film titled ``Surviving Edged Weapons.'' It shows knife wounds and leaves many officers preferring being cut over being shot. A bullet wound is local; a slash may damage a greater area. The light vests police wear stop bullets but not knife thrusts.

In 1995, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 67 Virginians were slain by knives. In 1982, Chesapeake police Sgt. John H. Cherry was killed while attempting to take a knife from a woman. If he had shot the woman he would have been criticized. But he would be alive.

In short, knives are more dangerous than movies lead people to believe.

When police face a knife-wielding person, they have to protect civilians in the area and themselves. They must make snap decisions.

In Chesapeake last week, a 26-year-old woman dressed only in her underclothes and armed with a bowling pin and a knife was shot three times by police after she cut two officers' arms.

Clearly the woman was mentally confused. Anyone with a knife who attacks police whose guns are drawn is mentally confused.

The question naturally arises: Isn't a mentally confused woman one of the citizens whom police are supposed to protect, not shoot?

But the life-and-death question is, How? How do police disarm her?

There was no time to call in a SWAT team. If the woman had holed up in a house, plans might have been laid so no one was injured. But on the street the woman posed a threat to people around her. If she had killed or wounded a passerby or one of the people pleading with her to drop the knife, police would have been criticized for not stopping her.

Under development are glue guns that coat and weigh down people without harming them and also web guns that shoot webs over people. Supposedly they're not trustworthy yet.

Sprays generally have to be shot at a person from within four to six feet, dangerously close to a knife, and the sprays don't affect all people the same. Virginia Beach has a special gun that propels a pepper-gas stream 50 feet, but usually the police on the scene must deal with the problem using weapons at hand.

Taser guns that shoot darts trailing electrical wires have not proved effective.

Still, the knife-wielding Chesapeake woman was no criminal.

The best police minds have to devise a method for disarming such a woman in a way that does not risk the lives of police and that protects other citizens.

We don't know what that way is, but we suspect too little effort is going into finding one.

Mayor William E. Ward has called for City Council oversight of the police investigation into the shooting of the woman. That's good, because rumors about the shooting are flying. The investigation should be expanded to look for nonlethal ways that police might disarm knife-wielding citizens.

In this case and in the fatal shooting of Bryan Dugan by Virginia Beach police, it's troubling that obviously irrational citizens could only be subdued by potentially deadly force.

But it is not fair to say to police, ``You took the wrong action, but we don't know what the right action would be.''

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