From Force Science Research Center:
Force Science News #68
March 26, 2007
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HOW MANY OF THESE FORCE MYTHS DO YOU BELIEVE?
HOW ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO JUDGE YOU?
Part 1 of a 2-part series
Civilians who judge the reasonableness of your use of force, whether
they're members of the media, of a review board, of a prosecutor's
staff, or of a jury, are likely to bring a welter of highly distorted
beliefs to the process because they've undergone thousands of hours of
"training" based on fantasy rather than the "seething ferocity and
violence" of street-level reality.
The perpetrators and victims of these misconceptions "do not understand
or appreciate the physics and dynamics of how force works," says Det.
Cmdr. Jeffry Johnson of the Long Beach (CA) PD, author of a recent
insightful report on force mythology. This "can lead to serious
problems" because the same real-life force incidents that are viewed by
law enforcement as perfectly reasonable may be seen by many gullible but
influential civilians as unreasonable and excessive, "particularly in
high-profile or video-taped" encounters.
"Police officers often forget that most people do not share their
experience and knowledge of how force works," Johnson writes.
Moreover, as Johnson can testify from harrowing personal experience,
otherwise savvy officers themselves sometimes unwittingly buy in to some
of the common civilian delusions. And this can lead to potentially
dangerous expectations, confusion, and loss of confidence in the midst
of life-threatening confrontations.
What's needed, Johnson believes, is for the policing profession to work
more diligently to educate the public--and itself--about force truths,
while simultaneously reasserting its rightful role as interpreter and
arbiter of what constitutes reasonable force applications.
Johnson's report, titled "Use of Force and the Hollywood Factor," first
appeared in the Journal of California Law Enforcement. You can read it
now in its entirety on the website of Americans for Effective Law
Enforcement:
http://www.aele.org/law/2007-04MLJ501.pdf
Twenty-five years ago, public perceptions about LE force were "not a
major issue," Johnson writes, because "few people had seen an actual
use-of-force incident." If a force application was scrutinized, "it was
normally done on the basis of a police report or witness testimony." He
told Force Science News, "People didn't see the starkness and ugliness
of force. And it is ugly. There's no way you can make it pretty."
Beginning with Rodney King, the increasingly ubiquitous video camera has
effectively taken "the force incident off the cold, sterile pages of the
police report and brought all of its seething ferocity and violence into
the living rooms of the general public," Johnson notes.
This has produced core conflicts between unappetizing street truths and
the sanitized depictions with which people have been indoctrinated since
childhood by movies, TV, and now video games. People "truly believe they
understand" how force works and should look, based on the thousands of
fictional versions they've seen, Johnson explains. "Many also base their
ideas of the rules, laws, policies, and morality that govern police
force" on these same perceptions. But...they're dead wrong.
Johnson identifies 3 predominant Hollywood myths impacting the public
view of force reasonableness:
THE DEMONSTRATIVE BULLET FALLACY.
In other words, bullets vividly demonstrate when and where they strike a
human target because the subject "will jerk convulsively, go flying
through windows [or] off balconies, or lose limbs, and there will
immediately emerge a geyser of blood spewing forth from his wound....
This concept is reinforced by various firearm and shooting magazines
that discuss and propagate the idea of handgun 'knockdown power' and
'one-shot stopping power.'"
Johnson experienced this myth first hand as a patrol officer the night
he and his partner were threatened by a shotgun-toting, PCP-fueled
hostage taker. "I was shooting with a .45-cal. Colt revolver, a gun I
thought would blow him off his feet, and nothing happened. I put 4
rounds in him - broke his femur and penetrated his heart - but there was
no movement I could see and no blood. It was extremely traumatic. I
thought the only way I could stop him was to put a round in his head,"
which Johnson, a master shooter, managed to do with the last bullet in
his cylinder.
Other officers with similar experiences have told him how startled and
stressed they were when their expectations of instant stopping proved
false in the middle of a gunfight.
On the other hand, officers sometimes react to receiving fire "based on
how they believe the dynamics of the force should work rather than how
they actually do." For example, the Secret Service agent who famously
took a .22-cal. bullet for President Reagan "jerked quite noticeably as
he observed the bullet strike him in the lower torso." Johnson has seen
the Demonstrative Bullet myth "even among armorers and range officers,"
he told FSN.
In reality, as an FBI report on the subject put it, "A bullet simply
cannot knock a man down. If it had the energy to do so, then equal
energy would be applied against the shooter and he too would be knocked
down. This is simple physics, and has been known for hundreds of years."
Indeed, "the 'stopping power' of a 9mm bullet at muzzle velocity is
equal to a one-pound weight (e.g., a baseball) being dropped from the
height of 6 feet," Johnson writes. "A .45 ACP bullet impact would equal
that same object dropped from 11.4 feet. That is a far cry from what
Hollywood would have us believe.
"[U]nless the bullet destroys or damages the central nervous system
(i.e., brain or upper spinal cord), incapacitation...can take a long
time," easily 10-15 seconds even after a suspect's heart has been
destroyed. "[T]he body will rarely involuntarily move or jerk, and
usually there is no...[readily evident] surface tearing of tissue. Often
there is no blood whatsoever....[A]n officer can easily empty a full
17-round magazine before he or she observes any indication of
incapacitation." With more than one officer
shooting, "that total may reasonably increase exponentially." This
contrasts sharply to the "'one-shot drop' mentality the movies have
created."
Too often officers' judgment is questioned when it appears they have
fired "too many rounds" at a suspect, Johnson charges. He recalls the
controversial case of Amadou Diallo, at whom 4 NYPD officers shot 41
rounds, resulting in "serious rioting, public protest," and criminal
charges against the officers. A medical examiner testified that Diallo
was still standing upright when most of the fatal rounds hit him. "Do
you think an understanding of the Demonstrative Bullet Fallacy might
make a difference in the way the public views such incidents?" Johnson
asks.
THE CODE OF THE WEST.
"From the earliest days of filmmaking, Hollywood has instilled in us
that there is an unwritten code that all good guys must live by,"
Johnson writes. "The code may not always make much sense in the real
world, but it has created an implied expectation for real law
enforcement." He cites 9 examples related to force, including:
--Good guys never have the advantage. "[F]ate places them in hopeless,
outgunned situations from which they ultimately triumph." With this
mind, how can an officer reasonably strike, pepper spray, or shoot an
unarmed suspect?
--Good guys are always outnumbered. "The image of the lone hero facing
numerous villains is pervasive in the movies. The real-life spectacle of
numerous officers standing over a suspect, attempting to control him
(e.g., Rodney King) just feels wrong, based on this standard."
--Good guys are never the aggressor. Yet in real life, "officers must
often be the aggressors to maintain control."
--Good guys never shoot first or throw the first punch. In real life, an
officer "must anticipate a suspect's actions" and not wait until
"incapacitated by a bullet or knocked unconscious by a punch." To
effectively control a volatile situation, an officer may need to take
down, electronically neutralize, or even shoot a suspect before the
subject has shown any physical aggression. "[T]his will always look bad
to untrained" observers.
--Good guys will always outlast bad guys in a fight. Actually, an
officer has only "a short time--maybe a couple of minutes--to gain
control of a suspect before the officer's energy is spent, placing him
or her at a dangerous disadvantage." Officers in a protracted struggle
may need to use "increasing levels of force...the closer they get to
their fatigue threshold." Once that threshold is reached or passed
without the resisting
suspect being restrained, "the officer may easily be overcome, then
injured or killed."
--Good guys never shoot a person in the back. "This may be the
best-known and most oft-quoted Code of the West...proof that the
shooting was unjustifiable and unreasonable." Yet there are "a myriad of
scenarios in which an officer is perfectly justified in shooting a
suspect in the back," including the situation in which a suspect
presents a frontal threat to an officer then turns to run away just as
the officer reacts.
"The reality is a gunshot wound to the back only proves where the bullet
struck. It provides no more evidence of culpability than does a gunshot
wound to the front, side, big toe, or anywhere else," Johnson declares.
VIOLENT POLICE - VIOLENT BUSINESS.
This final myth has officers flying "from call to call shooting and
beating people" and causes one to "wonder how Hollywood cops ever get
caught up on their paperwork," Johnson writes.
"The fact is, [real] police rarely use force." Statistically, law
officers "do not use force 99.9639%" of their calls for service.
Further, in only a fraction of all cases where force is used--about
0.2%--do officers use deadly force. "And it is still true that the vast
majority of officers (even in major cities) never fire their weapons on
duty.
"The fact that law enforcement uses force so sparingly should be
highlighted as a sign of success," Johnson argues. "Yet if Hollywood,
the nightly news, and some vocal activists are to be believed, one would
think the police shoot and beat people as often as they start up their
black and whites."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research
Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, discusses the damaging
impact of myths on officers' physical, emotional, and legal survival in
his Force Science seminars, and he concurs with Johnson's conclusions
about the dangers of the Hollywood Factor.
"It is not an exaggeration," he told FSN, "to say that many officers
receive more training from Hollywood by a thousand-fold than they do
from any force instructor. To cite just one consequence, the dangerous
tactic of holding your handgun up beside your head while searching a
building or making entry--the so-called Hollywood high-guard--is not
taught by any academy I know of in this country. But cops do it because
they're been 'instructed' to by TV and movies.
"Some officers have been so convinced of their invulnerability by
Hollywood depictions by that they've been unwilling to do the realistic
training necessary for their survival in a showdown." And, as Cmdr.
Johnson points out, even the most dedicated officers are at risk in the
legal arena after a use of force because many of the civilians who are
in position to judge their actions believe they know much more about
officer-involved shootings than they actually do, thanks to Hollywood
brainwashing."
Lewinski explains that one of FSRC's important goals is to educate the
public about the true dynamics of force encounters. In Johnson's
opinion, that's a goal LE itself also needs to be more proactive in
pushing.
Police managers can no longer afford to "allow the untrained, often
misinformed public to be the final judge of what constitutes reasonable
police force, particularly in high-profile incidents, without insisting
on even a rudimentary understanding of force dynamics," he insists. Nor
can they afford to continue allowing "the community to maintain
unreasonable and conflicting expectations of its law enforcement officers."
He addresses some strategies for action in Part 2 of this 2-part series.
[Our thanks to Wayne Schmidt, executive director of Americans for
Effective Law Enforcement, for tipping us to Cmdr. Johnson's provocative
report.]
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--
Stephen P. Wenger
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
