Madison police union president Dan Frei said less-lethal weapons can be useful when police have time to ensure an officer with lethal force can serve as back-up, and it’s “hard to say” if a sponge round would have been effective in DiPiazza’s case.

As for whether the new policy language would have changed police behavior in past shootings, he said: “They already were trained under these policies.”

Internal investigations of the officers involved in the fatal shootings did not find that any of them had violated the old deadly-force policy, and in an email, Chief Koval said that had the new policy been in place at the times of those incidents, the officers wouldn’t have violated that, either.

“These revisions would not have altered any of those previously investigated outcomes,” he said in an email. “The language in the current (standard operating procedures) was previously included elsewhere: either in MPD’s Code of Conduct, MPD’s Core Values, another MPD SOP, or in MPD/state of Wisconsin curriculum and training(s).”

“The result of any given situation is more heavily determined by the actions of the individuals that officers encounter than by any police policy or piece of equipment,” Palmer said.