"The number of shots is no barometer of whether something was reasonable or unreasonable. It sounds flippant, but if there were 10 shots fired perhaps nine weren't enough and 11 would have been too many," said Fawcett.

"Without knowing what the person was doing, you really can't say. You also have to ask why the police were there in the first place.

"People look at outcome. If you watched the whole movie and you know how the movie ends, it's very easy to see the foreshadowing. You have to remember that the officers in this movie didn't know how it was going to end ... while there may have been moments where they might have interceded differently and changed the outcome, they didn't know how the movie was going to end.

"The other thing to remember is that bullets disappear in bodies. You don't get sprays of blood like in Hollywood. You may not even know that you've hit the person because when you fire bullets into clothing you often can't see the hole. If the person's behaviour doesn't change you might not know you hit them.

"And again, you have to remember that a lot of officers never touched real guns until they were in training. It's possible that officers in these sorts of situations don't have a lot of confidence in their abilities. And the first thing they do is assume they missed."