"It's part of the Hollywood factor, I guess, that we have to deal with: People just think that we can Steven Seagal guns and knives out of people's hands, and that's just not the way it is," said Fawcett.

Fawcett notes that few people realize how quickly a life-or-death decision must be made.

"Time and distance is something that few people appreciate," said Fawcett. "If you're going 10 miles an hour, that's 15 feet per second. Ten miles an hour is a jog. So if somebody's 15 feet away with a knife in their hand, you have less than a second to deal with it. But most people look at the headline and go, 'Oh, the person was 20 feet away. Ohmigod, why didn't the officers do something else?'"

"The other thing to remember is we train average people [to be police officers]. We train your sister, brother husband, mother, father. They don't come with 33 years of martial arts experience.

"Some of them haven't seen a real gun until they get into policing. Some of them have never even tasted their own blood because someone punched them in the mouth."