A ‘shoot to incapacitate' policy puts Georgia police chief and town in the spotlight


The police chief in majority-Black LaGrange, Georgia, thinks the standard shoot-to-kill training police receive is unnecessarily lethal and lies at the heart of the breach in police-community trust. So he has trained his department's officers with a Shoot to Incapacitate strategy to give them an alternative when confronted by someone not armed with a gun. The department's skeptics were won over, and one managed to save the life of a machete-wielding man by the way he shot him. External critics say this approach is impractical, though it was copied from what's worked in other countries.

Related Stories