After the number of shootings by Metropolitan Police Department officers rose in 2024 from the year before, Metro Assistant Sheriff Fred Haas said one crucial factor should be considered when thinking about how to reduce what are known as officer-involved shootings: experience.
Statistically, the majority of officers in officer-involved shootings have fewer than five years of experience at Metro, Haas said.
The department has seen controversial police shootings in the past, including a shooting by veteran officer Jesus Arevalo in Dec. 2011 that killed 43-year-old Stanley Gibson, who was unarmed.
Gibson’s death prompted a federal investigation into Metro, which brought changes to the department’s use-of-force policies. But today, younger officers, Haas said, “have no memory of some of these older, high-profile cases that we’ve been through, because they weren’t here.”
In 2024, Haas said most of the officers who made the decision to use their firearm had one to two years of experience on the force. In total, there were 17 shootings by police officers last year, nine of which were fatal. In 2023 there were 10 shootings, five of which were fatal.
While Metro’s annual use-of-force report for 2024 is not yet available, data from 2023 showed that 69 percent of officers who opened fire had fewer than five years of experience.
This number stood at 59 percent in 2022.
In 2021, 29 percent of officers who opened fire had fewer than five years of experience, a number that was surpassed that year by the percentage of officers who opened fire who had six to ten years of experience, which was 36 percent.
More than half of the officers who opened fire in 2020 also had fewer than five years of experience.
‘The future of this training’
“They just don’t have the reps and the experience of going through those situations, and that’s the importance of training,” Haas said.
Officers with fewer years of experience attend different training than their more experienced colleagues, Haas explained.
Some of this training takes place at the Reality Based Training Center, where officers are immersed in a more realistic version of a scenario they might encounter out in the field, he said.
“That is the future of this training,” Haas said. “There is a difference in actually putting that officer into that stress inoculation of that scenario in a real environment that they have to work through.”
The goal of this training is to give officers the ability to “redo” a scenario and take a deep breath, creating distance and weighing options, Haas explained.
“We know that if we communicate, we address our options, we pre-plan on the front end and we slow the momentum down, we can reduce these shootings even more,” Haas said.
Officers who have opened fire get reentry training when they return from administrative leave, Haas said. During this training, officers will undergo a simulation of the shooting that prompted their leave, with a few details altered, he said.
This gives Metro the ability to see whether or not officers have any “stress scars” or whether they are implementing new skills to avoid escalating a situation.
David Sweeney, an expert witness on police use-of-force who retired from the Seattle Police Department, previously told the Review-Journal that experience factors into whether or not an office chooses to use lethal force.
“It’s unfortunate that when you mess up at a restaurant and you’re a new server, somebody didn’t get their meal properly. When you mess up and you’re a police officer — you’re brand new — someone can lose their life,” Sweeney said.
Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estelleatkinson.bsky.social on Bluesky and @estellelilym on X.
