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From Force Science Research Center: (FSRC seems to have lagged in
posting its "transmissions" to its online archive.)
Force Science News #53
September 8, 2006
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center,
a non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free,
direct-delivery subscription, please visit www.forcesciencenews.com and
click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected].
=======================================
In this issue:
I. Ask the experts: Answers to readers' questions
II. Why cops aren't always wrong in "suspicious" shootings
III. Force Science Seminar coming up fast! Register now!
I. ASK THE EXPERTS: READERS SEEK MORE INFO ABOUT SHOOTINGS
WITH QUESTIONS THAT MAY BE ON YOUR MIND, TOO
Recently S/Sgt. Robert Jenks of the Jackson (MI) PD submitted this
inquiry to Force Science News: Should an officer who has been involved
in a shooting be shown an in-car video of the confrontation? What effect
might this have psychologically?
Also Lt. Chip Dull of the Sacramento County (CA) SD asked us about
action/reaction times in "likely scenarios we would face out on the
street." Specifically: Is there reliable research on how long it takes a
suspect to retrieve and fire a gun from underneath clothing? How about
an offender drawing from his waistband when he's facing away from you,
then spinning around and shooting or reaching around and firing as he
runs away?
We put these questions to experts associated with the Force Science
Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Here are their
responses:
Regarding the advisability of sharing videotape of a shooting with the
officer(s) involved, "the best gauge is to ask each individual officer
if he or she wants to see the tape and when," says Dr. Alexis Artwohl, a
police psychologist who serves on FSRC's National Advisory Board.
In her experience, "most officers prefer to see the tape and could
benefit from it" in terms of psychological adjustment and memory
enhancement. "Memory gaps and distortions are a normal part of any
sudden, high-stress event, and most individuals involved have a strong
desire to find out what really happened."
Ideally, Artwohl believes officers should have a chance to review
videotape and other relevant physical evidence "before giving their IA
and criminal-investigation statements." Viewing such evidence "will
often help officers give a more accurate statement of what happened. In
fact, all witnesses could benefit from any evidence or other cues that
help trigger their memories and fill in gaps."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, FSRC's executive director, agrees but points out that
some departments may resist sharing evidence with involved officers.
Indeed, he has been involved as an expert witness in several cases in
which officers were denied an opportunity to see video of their
incidents and then were charged criminally when their statements
included inconsistencies with the objective record.
"It depends on an agency's investigative philosophy," he explains. "Does
the department view the officer as a possible 'perpetrator' of a violent
act and if so are investigators looking for ways to catch him in
discrepancies that could suggest lying and wrongdoing on his part? Or do
they view him as a conscientious professional caught in circumstances
that forced him to use deadly force as he is trained to do, and if so is
their aim to establish as fair, comprehensive and impartial a picture as
possible of what actually took place?
"As human beings, we are not cameras that record everything that occurs
in our presence. We see and select information, and after a
high-intensity event like a shooting it is normal to have memory gaps
and distortions. These reflect the narrowed focus and selective
attention that inevitably occur during an encounter.
"Officers need to know what the object record shows so they can put
their memories into a reasonable context and report on the occurrence
accurately. This does not mean they want to lie or twist the facts.
"For example, if an officer fires because he believes a suspect is
threatening him with a gun and it turns out that there was no gun,
seeing a video of the confrontation may help him understand why he had
the impression that he did. He can then present more detail in his
statement to explain his perception and give the most accurate report
possible.
"Showing an involved officer a video of an incident can have the same
benefit as a walk-through review before he gives a formal statement.
It's one more device for 'mining' an officer's memory for maximum recall."
Artwohl includes this reminder in her response to S/Sgt. Jenks: While
"most officers who are treated decently do well after a shooting, it is
still important that they have access to a therapist they like and
trust" as part of debriefing the experience. Preferably a session with
the therapist
should take place "within 24-72 hours after the event and before the
officers give any statements. They should be encouraged to see the
therapist again if at any point they have issues or further questions.
"The agency should pay for these sessions, but it is essential that it
be understood by all parties that the officer, not the department, is
the therapist's client. The therapist needs to have privileged
confidentiality and should provide no information to the department. Nor
should these sessions have anything to do with a fitness-for-duty
evaluation."
As to Dull's questions about action/reaction times, Lewinski points out
that documenting such human performance variables has historically been
a core component of FSRC's research.
Currently, FSRC researchers "are testing the motion time of drawing a
gun from underneath clothing," he reveals. Previously, FSRC studies have
shown that an "average" suspect with his hand on a firearm and the
weapon clear of any obstruction or clothing can draw and fire from a
waistband or pocket in .25 seconds. This compares with the average
officer being able to draw from a Level II holster and complete an
aimed/pointed shot with arm extended in about 1.75 seconds.
"If the suspect's weapon is obstructed by clothing, the method of
clearing the obstruction will impact on the time to pull the weapon,"
Lewinski says. In studies directed by firearms expert Ron Avery, a
member of FSRC's Technical Advisory Board, "we are currently testing
subjects pulling guns from concealment or a covering garment to fire
with some element of aiming."
Preliminary findings indicate it is not unusual to get 3 rounds fired
under these circumstances in 1.25 seconds, with good hits on target
(head or center mass) at less than 15 feet, Lewinski reports. "Some
slower subjects are taking more than 1.5 seconds."
Interestingly, this study so far is also finding that the more
inexperienced a subject is with a firearm, "the greater the likelihood
that they will attempt a shot to the head at close distances."
In answer to Dull's question about spinning and shooting or running away
and pointing, "the average time to do this and get a shot in the general
direction of the target is a quarter-second, with the fastest being
9/100ths of a second," Lewinski says. "This does not involve an aimed shot.
"If you do the math, we have confirmed the obvious: Action beats
reaction almost every time in almost any combination you want to put
together. That's why good tactics and use of cover are key elements in
surviving a gunfight."
II. WHY COPS AREN'T ALWAYS WRONG IN "SUSPICIOUS" SHOOTINGS
A strong message about deadly force encounters that critics of the
police, as well as investigators and prosecutors, need to hear is sent
in a feature article that appeared this summer ['06] in "The Scene," the
journal of the Assn. for Crime Scene Reconstruction.
The article, authored by Drs. Jeffrey Bumgarner, Bill Lewinski, and Bill
Hudson of the Force Science Research Center and Minnesota State
University-Mankato, reports details of 4 classic research experiments
concerning reaction time conducted under the auspices of the FSRC with
102 officers of the Tempe (AZ) PD.
These ground-breaking studies have been essential in documenting that an
officer's defensive reaction is almost invariably slower than a
suspect's life-threatening action, that a suspect presenting a
face-to-face threat can legitimately end up shot in the back because of
this reactionary lag, and that an officer may involuntarily continue to
shoot after a threat has ended because the decision to stop takes time
for his brain and body to
process.
The science behind these conclusions is carefully and clearly explained
in the article. And this information is important to understand, the
authors argue, because most academics, other civilian critics of police,
and even many investigators and prosecutors tend to believe that every
"suspicious" law enforcement shooting results from an officer's
malevolent intent.
"There is an apparent reflex to find the police at fault in almost any
circumstance," the authors observe. Critics commonly "presume
improperness and excessiveness unless the evidence clearly demonstrates
otherwise.
"Consequently, when the physical evidence at first glance appears to
contradict the account given by the 'offending' police officer, there is
almost never an extension of benefit of the doubt to such officers. Nor
is there an assumption that a rational explanation which supports the
officer's account might exist and is awaiting discovery." Instead,
violence by police is regarded as "an avoidable tragedy that can be
significantly
reduced if police organizations and individual officers would get their
acts together."
In fact, "many incidents involving the apparent misuse of force by
police officers can be explained by the realities of human psychological
and physiological limitations. Police officers cannot be expected to
defy biological and physical laws as they perform their duties. To
require...flawless reaction of police officers in the field is to ask
the impossible. And to send officers to prison when they fail to do the
impossible is a most grievous injustice.
"Only through deference to scientific research," like that reported from
the Tempe studies, "may we begin to understand how at least some deadly
force encounters play out...."
The article is well worth reading and passing along to others who need
to understand its content or who may benefit from it.
It's called "An Examination of Police Officer Mental Chronometry"
(chronometry refers to how quickly the human mind and body can react to
stimuli). The subtitle ("I Swear...I Don't Know How I Shot Him in the
Back") and the article itself are much less academic. The report appears
in the July 2006 issue of The Scene and can be accessed at:
http://www.forcescience.org/articles/mentalchronometry.pdf
III. FORCE SCIENCE SEMINAR FAST APPROACHES!
Less than 3 weeks remain before the presentation in Santa Clara, CA, of
"The Force Science Seminar: Winning Extreme Encounters from Street to
Court."
Mailed-in registrations must be received by Sept. 22. After that,
reservations must be made by phone to save you a place for the program,
which will be given Sept. 27 by Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of
the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
Running from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., the seminar will cover the latest
ground-breaking findings from FSRC about deadly force
confrontations--unique information you need to know to survive,
investigate or defend controversial law enforcement shootings.
Lewinski will take the mystery out of a broad spectrum of
little-understood issues, including how suspects often end up shot in
the back, why officers may unavoidably "overkill" their attackers and
how memories of high-intensity events can most effectively be probed in
fair, neutral and comprehensive investigations.
Approval of the course for training credit is pending from California POST.
To register by mail before Sept. 22, please send check for $195 per person
payable to the Santa Clara Police Dept. to:
Sgt. Stacy MacFarlane, Training Mgr.
Santa Clara PD
601 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95050
For information or to make reservations after Sept. 22, contact: Reba
Warren at 408-615-4861 between 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Pacific time, Monday
through Friday. You can pay at the door with cash or check, but YOU NEED
TO MAKE AN ADVANCE RESERVATION before the day of the program.
The seminar will be presented at the Intel Corp. Auditorium, 3600
Juliette Ln., Santa Clara, CA (convenient to the San Francisco and San
Jose international airports). Check-in will begin at 7:45 a.m.
For more details on program content, intended audience and lodging, see
the Special Notice from FSRC, transmitted 8/19/06. Go to:
http://www.forcesciencenews.com/home/detail.html?serial=51
Force Science News #54
September 22, 2006
In this issue:
I. CELL PHONE STUDIES SHED LIGHT ON HOW OFFICERS' MEMORIES WORK IN SHOOTINGS
II. LAST CALL FOR SANTA CLARA SEMINAR
III. CLARIFICATION ON SHOOTING TIME
I. CELL PHONE STUDIES SHED LIGHT ON HOW OFFICERS' MEMORIES WORK IN SHOOTINGS
Are there similarities between a driver on a cell phone and an officer
in a shooting?
You bet! claims Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force
Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. And 2
independent studies offer fresh insights into the parallels, which may
help officers defend themselves in controversial force encounters.
Lewinski has long maintained that in any life-threatening confrontation
an officer's perceptions and memories are influenced more by what his
attention is focused on during the conflict than by what actually passes
before his eyes. Investigators, review boards, prosecutors and others
assessing the officer's decision making and later recollections need to
take this into account, Lewinski insists, rather than expect infallible
judgment and comprehensive recall and then suspect criminal culpability
when shortcomings emerge.
Research findings reported recently at a meeting of the American
Psychological Assn. in New Orleans support this position. "The fact that
the studies involve drivers using cell phones is not what's important
here," Lewinski stresses. "What matters most are the principles
involved, and those can reasonably be applied to officers in shooting
situations."
One study involves a series of experiments conducted by psychologist
David Strayer and others at the University of Utah, who sought to learn
more about the relationship between cell phone conversations and the
phenomenon called "inattention blindness"--not seeing things you look at
because your brain is more intensely focused on something else.
Strayer and teammates monitored male and females subjects in a
sophisticated driving simulator and recorded how their performance while
engaged in conversation on a cell phone compared to their "driving"
without any cell-phone distraction.
First let's look at the findings, then we'll relate them to a shooting
situation.
Among other things, Strayer's research confirms:
--Drivers are much more likely to rear-end the car in front of them when
talking or listening on a cell phone in heavy-traffic situations. This
is because their perception of and reaction to vehicles braking in front
of them are slowed when they're on the phone. Drivers in the study
tended "sluggishly" to hit the brakes later and, if a collision was
avoided, to hold the brake pedal longer than they did when not occupied
with a cell
conversation. Indeed, a twenty-something's reactions when engaged with
the phone equated to what would normally be expected of a 70 year old.
--Cell phone use significantly impairs memory. As the subjects "drove,"
digital billboards appeared beside the simulated roadway. In a surprise
quiz afterwards, drivers were able to recall more thoroughly and
accurately those signs they had passed while they were not having a
phone conversation. As the researchers put it, cell phone chatting
induced "failures of visual attention"--that is, inattention
blindness--to objects
encountered in the driving scene.
--This is true not only for what passed in the subjects' peripheral
vision. Cell phone conversations "reduce attention to objects even when
drivers look directly at them," the researchers found. Billboards seen
when the subjects were engaged in phone conversation were less than half
as likely to be remembered than those that appeared when the drivers
were not on the phone.
Because the cell phone involved in the Strayer experiments was a
hands-free model, the documented interference with perception and memory
could not have been caused by manual manipulation of the phone itself.
Instead, the researchers concluded, the significant "disruptive effects
of cell phone conversations...are due...to the diversion of attention
from driving to the phone." That is, the brain makes a shift away from
an external, visual focus related to driving to an internal cognitive
concentration required for the phone conversation, with the result that
much of what was "seen" did not actually register.
The brain has a limited capacity for attention, Strayer explained, so
whatever is siphoned off by the cell phone is subtracted from attention
to driving. He says that being engaged on the phone cuts in half a
driver's measurable brain activity in a key area of the brain needed for
tracking traffic conditions.
While on a cell phone, drivers can be "as blind to a child running
across the street as to a Dumpster beside the road," Strayer says.
If a cell phone conversation is distracting enough to induce significant
inattention-blindness, Lewinski observes, "imagine the distraction
potential of suddenly being confronted with a situation in which your
life is in jeopardy, as an officer in a shooting would be. If you are in
that kind of emotionally driven scenario, focused on the threat and on
saving your life, you will necessarily have a diminished capacity to
take in and remember other details about the scene."
Psychologist Paul Atchley of the University of Kansas, coauthor of the
second study, agrees.
Atchley's team is conducting a series of experiments designed to gauge
how the emotional content of cell phone messages impacts on attention.
In an early phase of this research, reported in New Orleans, subjects
heard and responded to sets of words with positive connotations ("joy,"
for example) as well as those with negative associations ("cancer" and
"terrorist," for instance).
Both word-sets caused distraction and a decrease in attention, Atchley
told Force Science News, but a decidedly greater impact was caused by
the negative words. He plans next to test the effect of full
emotion-laden conversations. But his findings to date suggest that
"threatening associations" take the most pronounced toll on perception
and memory.
"If mere exposure to negative words produce this effect," Atchley says,
"without question law enforcement officers in a life-threatening
situation will find their ability to attend to peripheral information to
be significantly reduced.
"Officers have a tough situation in trying to grasp and retain
everything that is happening" in a shooting situation because "when
something doesn't grab your attention you won't have a memory for it. It
simply is not in your brain at all.
"People think that when you have your eyes open, you see the whole world
around you. But in fact the brain has the capacity to process only a
limited amount of information from the environment." In stress
situations, the "window of attention" may be only about the size of your
fist, or less.
Lewinski cites a case he was involved in as an expert witness in which
an officer was struggling on the ground to control the hand of an
offender that was digging into his waistband--going for a gun, in the
officer's snap judgment. A videotape of the incident revealed later that
the officer's partner at that moment seemed to be beating the suspect
with a flashlight.
The first officer claimed he was unaware of this, and was fired for
"lying." From interviewing the officer, Lewinski contends that in
reality he experienced inattention-blindness and legitimately could not
report on his partner's actions because he was so intensely riveted on
controlling the perceived threat to his own life that his brain screened
out whatever else was occurring.
"This issue of what officers are able to report on and testify to keeps
surfacing over and over," Lewinski says. "People are astounded by what
officers insist they can't recall.
"Investigators need to do everything they can to properly mine an
officer's memory after a high-intensity encounter. But they also need to
realize that human memory has its shortcomings. It is unconscionable to
hold officers accountable without taking science into consideration.
"Yet the disturbing truth is that cops are being charged, sued and fired
because they can't 'see' things their attention is not focused on. In
other words, because they can't do the impossible."
The studies by Strayer and Atchley, he hopes, will help skeptics see the
light.
[For more information on the cell phone experiments, consult the paper
"Cell Phone-Induced Failures of Visual Attention During Simulated
Driving" by David Strayer, Frank Drews and William Johnston, available at:
http://www.forcesciencenews.com/visuals/strayer.pdf
Atchley's study has not yet been published. ]
II. LAST CALL FOR SANTA CLARA SEMINAR
You can still reserve space for the presentation next Wed. [9/27/06] in
Santa Clara, CA, of "The Force Science Seminar: winning Extreme
Encounters from Street to Court." But DO NOT mail in your registration
and payment from this point forward. Call to say you're coming but plan
to sign in and pay (cash or check only) at the door.
The program, featuring Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the
Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato,
will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Intel Corp. Auditorium, 3600
Juliette Ln., Santa Clara. Checkin will begin at 7:45 a.m.
To reserve space, call: Reba Warren, 408-615-4861 between 7:30 a.m.-4:30
p.m. Pacific time, weekdays. The program is sponsored by Santa Clara PD.
For details on program content, intended audience and lodging, see the
Special Notice from FSRC, transmitted 8/19/06. Go to:
www.forcesciencenews.com/home/detail.html?serial=51
See you there!
III. CLARIFICATION ON SHOOTING TIME
In our last Transmission [#53, sent 9/8/06], reference was made to
experiments at the Force Science Research Center in which the fastest
subject was able to spin and shoot in 9/100ths of a second.
Reader Cary Young, project coordinator for the Texas Police Corps,
wrote: "I have been teaching firearms for 30 years and there is no way a
human being can draw a weapon, turn and fire in 9/100ths of a second. Is
this a misprint?"
Executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski responds: "We did not mean to imply
that drawing from a holster was involved. The question concerned
spinning/turning and shooting or getting a weapon up and firing while
running away. All our tests were done with a weapon already in hand and
we were only measuring the time to bring the weapon to a position where
a fleeing offender could shoot at an officer. We marked the time from
the beginning of the first unobstructed movement of the weapon to the
discharge.
"Of course, as Cary Young points out, drawing from a holster takes a lot
more time and any obstruction to the draw or time for sighting would add
to the time involved. Sorry for the confusion."
================
(c) 2006: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints
allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected]. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of
The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at
Minnesota State University, Mankato.
================
--
Stephen P. Wenger
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
