Enemy. Before you jump to that conclusion consider this, two new York City Police officers were allegedly assaulted by protesters during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge on saturday. Police say lieutenant philip khan and Patrick Sullivan were bruised all over their bodies and lieutenant khan has a broken nose. On average a Law Enforcement officer is killed every 58 hours. It comes from the national Law Enforcement officers memorial fund. What do we want from the men and women sworn to protect us and what do they want from us . Weve got Police Officers and retired officers here with us tonight and were going to be answering all of your questions. Theyll be answering them as well. Join the conversation. Make sure to use copsunder fire. Our Police Experts here. They are david clinger, a former street cop in l. A. And professor of criminology at the university of missouri, st. Louis. He shot and killed a man attacking his partner. Officer stacy lynn whos been with the lapd for 26 years, she trains patrol officers was shot through the heart in a gang shootout. Sandy wall, a retired Police Officer who as a member of the s. W. A. T. Team faced hundreds of lethal threats and shotted three gunmen. Paul hershey also retired shot two armed gunman and kneel bruntrager, an attorney for Darren Wilson, the officer in the Michael Brown shooting and began in 1981 as a prosecutor and the fifth officer we invited, an africanamerican sergeant agreed to join us but we are told he is unavailable now. Welcome, everyone. Lets have a very important conversation, lets be honest with each other. You can ask whatever questions you want. If i get to you but make sure youre respectful. I want to thank you guys for joining us. Many came a long ways. You use your weapons in the line of duty. David, im going to start with you. Your partner was attacked. We responded to a call enbarry gueded gunman was in the house on the north side of vernon. So my partner and i were moving up to button down what we call the west edge of the perimeter and one of the people across the street wouldnt leavement my partner tried to get him out of there. The next thing i knew the people stabbed my partner in the chest with a butcher knife and my partner backed away. He knocked him to the ground and as i run across the street the suspect has his hands like this, going down on my partner. Theyre fighting over the knife. I think i dont want to have to shoot this guy. Try to take the knife away. Didnt work, dennis said shoot him. I shot the guy once in the chest. Dennis was able to lock his elbows out. We fought the guy for another 30 seconds. Some other officers came up and we were able to get him handcuffed and he bled out another minute or two later. Stacy, you are on duty with the lapd. You were critically wounded. You followed your assailant. What happened after that. Well, i was following juvenile gang members. I was off duty so they were trying to steal my car. When i stepped out of my truck he pointed a important 357 magnum at my chest and turn and ran. I fired once at him and then went after him and then when he got to the back of my car he turned and fired five more times. I fired three more at him. He went down. I was losing blood so i tried to get inside my house. I massed out on my driveway from all the blood and paramedics came and defibbed me to bring my heart back the first time. Took me to the hospital. Went into surgery. Found the bullet fragment and shattered my spleen and put a hole in the base of my heart, lung, barely ribs, left about a tennis ball size hole. You told them you were a Police Officer, right . Do you regret doing that. Do you think it made the situation i dont necessarily regret doing that. Part of my training i was trying to say police drop the gun. And when i got police out he fired. So theres not a whole lot i could do about that and just reacting to the action he gave to me and, you know, anyone else would do the same thing. Just try to protect yourself and others. Paul, i understand you fired your weapon twice in the hundreds of times you were a special threat situation in houston. Why do officers shoot to kill . Explain the training to me. Well, its not actually shooting to kill. What were doing is we shoot until the threat goes away. And an example would be the shooting i was involved in. Called by our homicide investigators to serve a warrant, a murder warrant on a man who had murdered a citizen in houston, set his body on fire. They came to us because they felt like this guy was pretty violent and they wanted our the numbers and the expertise that wed bring with us to serve that warrant. The information we got was that the suspect was in a house with his girlfriend and her child. Instead of just physically serving a warrant, kicking the door in and serving a warrant on the house we thought it was a better idea to allow him to separate himself, leave the house. We knew that he would be going to work at some point in the morning. So we set up a tactical situation in terms of we had officers, s. W. A. T. Officers in uniform in marked cars and we had other officers in s. W. A. T. Officers in Tactical Gear who would support an arrest that we were going to try to effect on him. Our plan was to do a felony traffic stop on him. Let him get away from the girl much friend a nd a child. When we did that a small car chase ensued. We used spike strips to flatten his tires. He crashed out. How long did this go on and how did it end up . Literally from the time he left the house until the time i was engaged in the shooting was mabel maybe a matter of 90 seconds. The final outcome. He crashed out in a ditch off the side of the road. My partner, we crashed off into another ditch off to the right side of the road. My partner got out. He was driving. The suspect got out and was tracking my partner with his handgun getting ready to shoot him. I my partner was trying to engage him firing rounds and missed him. By the time i climbed out of the vehicle all i saw was him pointing the gun at my partner and fired six rounds and he fell. At that point i was shooting only to the threat goes away. He fell to the ground and then he still had the gun and he tried to raise the gun, i fired two more rounds and killed him. I can still see its hard for you to say that. Yeah, nobody wants to do that. I thought he was firing rounds at my partner. The whole situation as it unfolds, its so fluid that youre just a reactant to what youre seeing in front of you. As i understand when it happens many times its like tunnel vision. You dont really know whats happening many of the times and you sort of if youre in a corridor, the corridor seeps longer than it is. Time speeds up or slows down depending what happened. Explain what it means to be in a situation like that. You were involved in three shootings in the 22 years you served. You revert back to your training. One thing we were talking about earlier, its more of a conscious thought not to shoot than it is to shoot because you react to what youre seeing and revert to your training and engage. And youre in fear of your life or in fear of another persons life and doing what you have to stop that act. But in one of my shootings i remember looking at the barrel and thinking, thats an automatic or semiautomatic handgun. Its either chrome or Nickel Plated and thinking its a 45. All of that happened in a millisecond and im thinking this while i should be defending myself and i thought i was and its amazing what the mind decides to focus on in those instances and dr. Klinger wrote a book about that. Its amazing what the mind decides to focus on. Kind of automatic. Absolutely. I want to go down to neal. He represents Darren Wilson the officer involved in the mike brown shooting. What is the biggest misconception you think about Darren Wilson in the situation in ferguson . I think people assumed that whatever happened that day happened because darren was somehow angry or had gone out that day in an effort to hurt somebody. When people started to look at the evidence i think that that was dashed but i think that misconception is a strong one and that was at least in part fed by there was such a long period of time where we couldnt say anything because of the Ongoing Investigation and only one side of the story was being told. There were, many misconceptions but that was the worst. Stand by. Before we go further i want to take a look at a day in the life of a Police Officer. Heres cnns kyung lau. Reporter facing off with protesters in the streets of ferguson. A manhunt through pennsylvania. Dangerous duty for americas police, but this image isnt always reality. The average cops job often ordinary. In 2012, 780,000 officers patrolled americas streets. Average pay for those officers, about 57,000 a year. Every cop in america carries on the duty belt a semiautomatic handbegun but youll notice the duty belt has whats called less lethal weapons. In 2007, 60 of Police Agencies used tasers or stun guns. 93 , batons. 97 pepper spray. The officer wearing the belt and badge increasingly female. The latest department of justice report from 2007 shows one out of eight officers is a woman. A majority of Law Enforcement remains white. 75 . 12 are black. 10 latino. 2 , asian. Regardless of race, age or gender officer down. They all face one of the highest rate of illnesses and injuries in america. 76 officers died in the line of duty, 27 killed nearly all by firearms. 49 killed accidentally in car crashes. Nearly 50,000 officers were assaulted while responding to calls and making arrest. What we couldnt find, a comprehensive National Database when Police Officers fire their weapons. An fbi report from 2008 shows 375 officerinvolved shootings. But that data is only a small sampling of the real number of Police Shootings in the united states. The biggest Danger Police face isnt the suspect they confront while on patrol. National data shows officers were twice as likely to commit suicide than they are to be killed in the line of duty. Danger on the job and in their own lives. Kyung lah, cnn, los angeles. Much, much more to come with our Police Experts and studio audience. Next well put you in the shoes of a cop on the beat in a lifeanddeath situation. What would you do . First take a look at what can happen during a routine traffic stop. This dash cam video in middlefield, ohio n. March of 2013 comes from our affiliate woio. [ applause ] welcome back everyone to our live cnn tonight special cops under fire. Police officers face life and death situations every single day from the outright dangerous life con fraptsing gangs to traffic stops. Even those can be daddily. In those situations what would you do . Well give you a chance to find out. David klinger, stacy lim, sandy wahl, paul hershey and, of course, he is a current retired officer. They are neil bru nchbrunrager. We have some videos. Its part of a lab study at Washington State university. They actually partly funded by the Defense Department in a simulation now. Youll be responding in this simulation to a Domestic Violence call and ill rafiqullah you what would you do . First lets watch it. Officers [ bleep ]. Come here. [ bleep ]. Come here. Okay. So there you go. In a lab during simulation you might hear the officer int interacting with a virtual suspect yelling at him to stop it. At this point you cannot see his right hands so we just played it. But the question is what would you do if we rack it back. What would you do where you couldnt see his hands. How many would shoot him . How many of you would shoot . Raise your hands if you would shoot. You would shoot . In that situation you would shoot . Okay. Why is that before we go back to the video. Because youre putting this individual in a room where his hand is hidden, hes already engaged in violent activity. He is going to turn at you and do harm to you or the individual thats there. Under those circumstances the courts have not only can you but maybe you should. Six or seven said she would not shoot or would not shoot. Lets let i play out so that everybody can see it. [ gunshots ] i mean what that shows is how quickly it happens. Everybody in here, the majority of those who would not shoot, the woman ends up dead, the officer could end up dead and the suspect ends up dead, as well, right. Go ahead. Its tough. I mean thats the situation and ive interviewed about 300 cops around the country. Been involved in shootings and some in similar situations such as that and as neil pointed out, the courts would permit an officer to shoot in that circumstance but i think an awful lot of officers would do what most of the audience did and that is hesitate. What wed be doing is giving verbal commands to the individual, show the hand or something, let go of the woman but you have to have your gun up and out and have to be ready to pull the trigger so as soon as you see that gun you have to start shooting. Im going to get up and can i borrow this microphone . So who back here i want to say who would not shoot you said you wouldnt shoot. I wouldnt. You wouldnt shoot. You see what happened. Yes, but i wouldnt assume he had a gun right away so i probably would have been caught off guard. When you paused it i wouldnt have shot. You wouldnt have shot. And you . After watching the video i definitely would have shot. But before you would not have. [ laughter ] this is to see how quickly the situation changed like in a matter of seconds. And she could end up dead. I could have ended up dead. The officer could have ended up dead so after is seeing the video i would have shot. Lets look at it again. [ screaming ] [ bleep ]. Come here. [ bleep ]. Come here. Every guy in the neighborhood [ bleep ]. [ gunfire ] after we are hear about officer involved shootings after looking at that does that change anyones mind do you feel like maybe sometimes the public at large jumps to conclusions about officerinvolved shootings. Anyone here . Right here . Does that . Would that does that change anything. Certainly. That showed us you really cant, you know, you cant know what theyre going through unless youre actually in the situation. Myself, i would have hesitated too because i wouldnt have i would not have assumed he had a gun. That was the last thing on my mind. That he a gun. A lot of this has been race has been brought into it and we talk about race. Do you think do you in that moment think about race to even have time to by if the suspect is white, black, brown, asian. Do you have time to think about that. No, you dont have time to think about if its male, female, adult, kid. Youre looking at the situation itself. Stacy situation what happened. She steps out of a car and saw a gun pointed at her. She didnt even see the kid ha she shot. The officers, you all would have shot . No. You would not have shot. No, no, as you played the video, this is a perfect depiction of action is faster than reaction. Meaning the actions of that suspect its going to be faster than the reaction of the officer. The best youre going to get is a 50 50 draw. Youre going to lose. Youre going to get shot but as the video rolled there was a corner its a hallway so theres a corner in the kitchen. I would have taken a barricaded position on that hallway, making verbal commands. I wouldnt have shot until he pulled the gun out but i would have shot him. Cops are human beings and everyone is going to act differently based on your training and perceptions and personality. Youre never going to go threat this is how all cops would do it. They found while volunteers of all races often view africanamerican suspects more threatening as white ones they were more restrained in shooting africanamericans they were than they were white suspects. Absolutely. I was part of that research and i was a coauthor on a followup study to that and basically what happens is the implicit bias that everybody is talking about where you push buttons. What brian and lois and other states at Washington State was make it more realistic. They found when its more realistic its the social. The entire situation, when that happens race does not play a major role in terms of the decision to shoot and, in fact, the officers are slower to shoot with black suspectss and also less likely to shoot. We talk about that in terms of a counterbias. Scientific research is fact. Its not the end all, be all but this study is pretty powerful. You know where im going. How many of you believe that . [ laughter ] how many of you believe that . I hear you laughing and someone back here. Wait, why dont you believe that. Because i mean what hes saying it just happened that so many black young black men just end up dead when no weapon and nothing. I mean if youre so slow to shoot a black man, most of them would be alive today where we dont have about white mens getting killed without a gun. We have white men with guns and they dont get killed. What i would say is the data shows unarmed white men are killed. Another thing i think is real important for everybody to understand all of us have been involved in multiple situations particularly sandy and paul where we had absolute lawful right to shoot people, white, black, hispanic and we held fire. We dont want to shoot people and so what the Research Suggests is that that notion of being restrained is coming out in this experiment. Okay. Lots more to talk about in our cnn tonight special, cops under fire. Are body cameras the next important tool for Police Officers and would they change anything. Well get answers and opinions from our experts and a demonstration of how body cameras really work. Make sure you stay with us. Celebrate whats new, the bigger, better menu at red lobster with more of what you love try our newest woodgrilled combination maine lobster, extra jumbo shrimp, and salmon so hurry in and sea food differently. Dad,thank you mom for said this oftprotecting my future. You. Thank you for being my hero and my dad. Military families are uniquely thankful for many things, the legacy of usaa Auto Insurance could be one of them. If youre a current or former militar