From Force Science Research Center:
Distractions and aggressive subjects; what a new study and past
experience tell us
Force Science News #79
August 24, 2007
Researchers from the University of Kentucky confirmed recently what
skillful cops have known for years: well-timed, well-crafted
distractions can derail difficult suspects from violent intentions.
The researchers tested this theory with drunks, but according to
behavioral scientist Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force
Science Research Center, their findings are relevant to a wide variety
of tough-to-handle subjects, including the drug addled, the mentally
ill, and the emotionally distraught or irate. Lewinski teaches
distraction techniques in the law enforcement program at Minnesota State
University-Mankato.
"Distraction works well if you can pitch it right," he says. And in an
interview with Force Science News, he offers some practical guidelines
for doing so.
[Please note the opportunity at the end of this report to share
distraction strategies that have worked for you and that could be
helpful to other officers.]
First, the Kentucky study:
THE PREMISE.
With an assistant, Dr. Peter Giancola, a psychology professor at U.K. in
Lexington, recruited 48 healthy male social drinkers between 21 and 33
years old, to test the hypothesis that well-timed distraction can help
curb violence associated with intoxication.
As LEOs well know, "acute alcohol consumption is [often] related to
aggressive behavior," Giancola states, with "alcohol involved in about
50 per cent of violent crimes." According to a psychological theory
called the attention-allocation model, drunkenness narrows a person's
field of attention so he or she "can really only focus on one thing at a
time." In hostile situations, drunks who are inclined toward violence
tend to focus on provocative, aggression-facilitating stimuli rather
than on inhibitory cues, Giancola says.
Of course, not everyone becomes aggressive when they drink, he explains.
"Many people become sleepy and happy. So, this theory only works for
people who already have traits that put them at risk," such as
impulsiveness, irritability, and a personal acceptance of violence (the
belief that "beating my wife and kids is a good thing, because it keeps
them in line," for example).
"Alcohol doesn't make you do different things," Giancola says. "It just
allows what is already inside you to come out. It takes the brakes off."
THE TEST.
Giancola and his associate used a laboratory computer-game simulation to
determine whether distraction might help defuse volatile, alcohol-fueled
conflicts, such as bar brawls, by diverting drunks away from provocative
cues. He claims this was "the first systematic test of the
attention-allocation model" as it relates to intoxication and aggression.
Half of the Kentucky test subjects were given alcohol-spiked orange
juice that brought their average BAC reading to 0.10. The other half
were given a placebo drink and remained sober. All engaged in what they
thought was a computer game that measured their reaction times against
those of an unseen "competitor." When the test subjects supposedly
"lost" a speed drill, they received a mild electric shock. When they
"won," they could deliver a shock to their opponent. A subject's
physical aggression was determined by the intensity and length of shock
he chose to deliver.
To simulate distraction, half the drunk subjects and half the sober
group were told to perform an "important" memory test during the game
and were promised a cash reward if they did so successfully. This
involved remembering the sequence in which small squares randomly
appeared on the computer screen and clicking on them in the proper order.
THE FINDINGS.
Both the intoxicated and sober groups experienced a decline in reaction
time when they had to tend to the memory-task distraction. However, the
sober subjects "had sufficient attentional resources to attend to both
the distracting and the provocative stimuli." They showed about the same
level of aggression as sober subjects who were not distracted by the
memory test.
There was significant difference, though, between the distracted and the
nondistracted drunks. The former exhibited far less aggression than the
latter. Giancola concluded that being mentally diverted left the drunken
subjects with "less cognitive space [in their attention capacity] to
house and process hostile cues."
With further testing, the researchers found that the degree of
distraction is important. If the attempted diversion is too mild, it
won't attract enough of the subject's attention. If it's too intense or
confusing, it "might engender more aggression due to frustration,"
Giancola reported.
Lewinski concurs that distraction can be a valuable tool in curbing
aggression. "On the street, it can work not only with drunks but with
sober people who are emotionally aroused," he says. "If you can capture
their attention and pull them away from whatever is stoking their
agitation, you may be able to get them to work with you instead of
blowing up on you."
Distractions come in 2 varieties, he explains: physical and psychological.
PHYSICAL DISTRACTION.
In the physical realm, Lewinski recalls a veteran Minneapolis officer
who wore a powerful lifeguard's whistle on a thin thread around his
neck. When he walked into a heated domestic or a bar fight where the
players were "intensely emotionally engaged" and paying no attention to
him, he'd let loose a shrill blast of the whistle and yell, "Everybody
out of the pool!"
"People couldn't intentionally ignore him when that sudden, loud whistle
blew," Lewinski says, "and he added a little humor with the pool
command. Together, they were enough to break through the subjects'
emotional barrier and get attention focused on him and off the
escalating agitation."
Similarly, officers sometimes find that flicking room lights on and off
during a nighttime domestic, for example, can be "a powerful
attention-getting technique," Lewinski says. "Subjects are distracted
from their battle temporarily, trying to figure out what's going on."
A physical distraction may even help you connect with delusional or
hallucinating subjects. He cited a study conducted on psych wards in
Michigan that discovered that attendants could often break through a
patient's psychotic shell by clapping loudly and simultaneously shouting
at them "while maintaining a calm demeanor. The noise shifts their
attention and the calm appearance suggests that someone non-threatening
is there to work with them."
Sometimes your challenge will be to eliminate physical distractions that
compete with you for a subject's attention. Examples:
. "A loud radio can be especially distracting and agitating to
people who are drunk or drugged," Lewinski says. "Get it shut off, along
with the TV."
. Flashing red lights on your squad car "often have the same
effect. If you can turn them off without jeopardizing your safety, that
may help you gain and keep a subject's attention."
. Dogs and little kids "are terrible distractions when you're
trying to work with parents. Getting them into another room or into the
care of a neighbor or some other responsible person will help free the
adults to concentrate on you."
PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRACTION.
The key to psychologically shifting a subject's focus is hitting on a
distraction that is important to them, "something that's enough to
influence them," Lewinski says. "Otherwise, you may confuse them, anger
them, and make the situation worse. You will appear to be uncaring or
not listening to what's concerning them."
Say you're in a private residence, trying to deal with a mother whose
son has been caught up in troubles with the police. She's becoming "more
and more agitated about what you're doing to her child. Allowed to
continue working herself up, she could become violent.
"If you see athletic trophies in the room or pictures of the son in a
sports uniform, you might acknowledge these mementoes and try something
like this as a distraction: 'We're talking about the trouble your son's
in. I know he's also been a good boy. Can you tell me about that?'
"This is something important to her. It may deflect her from her
agitation and help you establish enough rapport to get back to the
problem on a more logical and influential basis. Certainly it's likely
to be more effective than trying to distract her by talking about your
bowling scores, which have no importance in her life."
In contacts that eventually erupt in violence, "officers often miss that
the subject is escalating emotionally through self-agitation. They're
not sensitive enough to recognize this and proactively intervene to ease
the situation and it just gets worse.
"Good officers, by contrast, start reading the level of a subject's
emotional intensity from the beginning of the encounter and are always
looking for cues to psychological strategies that might help control the
situation."
For example, if you're dealing with a drunk who's starting to get worked
up but is still at a relatively low level of agitation, you might tell
him that you need to know all the addresses where he's lived for the
last 5 years, Lewinski suggests. "This can be a challenging intellectual
task for someone in an altered state, and may fully consume his
diminished mental capacity."
On the other hand, subjects displaying a high emotional intensity-a
couple bent on tearing each other apart in a domestic dispute, for
instance-"may require a distraction that's much more visceral. You might
say, 'Just a minute. I know you have children. Before we get into your
situation, can you tell me if your kids are safe and where they are?'
This distraction is likely to be important to them and offers an
opportunity to calm them a bit while they respond."
One officer, sensing that an agitated suspect was building toward a
physical attack on him, diverted the suspect by asking him how he
thought other kids would taunt his children at school the next day if
got himself on the news that night for assaulting a police officer.
"There are many reasons people may want to cooperate with you," Lewinski
observes. Sometimes an apt distraction at the very beginning of a
contact can keep the interaction on an even keel throughout. Lewinski
offers these real-life examples:
. When officers in one Canadian province stopped individual bikers
from a gang known to be troublesome, they found that they encountered
less hostility when they started their face-to-face contact by admiring
the violator's motorcycle and getting him to discuss its attributes a
bit-including its ability to "go really fast." Often they could segue to
this pertinent question: "How fast do you think you were going just
now?" "By then, they'd built enough rapport to defuse the situation a bit."
. When Lewinski worked with Arizona patrol officers on a project
involving the mentally ill and homeless, he always carried water and
fruit in his car. "Drinking mostly alcohol and caffeine, these subjects
are usually dehydrated, and they don't eat much," he explains. "You can
distract them by asking if they're hungry or thirsty, and while they're
engaged in eating they're calming down. You come across as a caring
individual, and when you start talking about the problem they're having
or presenting, you're seen as less threatening." Similarly, in cold
climates "you can frisk them and then invite them to sit in your car and
warm up for a few minutes, then engage in the problem that brought you
to the scene."
Obviously, such ploys should be reserved for times when they seem to be
strategically to your advantage; your job isn't social work. And in some
situations, there won't be time to attempt distractions; immediate
physical intervention may be necessary to establish control.
Remember, too, that distractions don't always work. Lewinski recalls a
case in which officers were dispatched to a house where a man was
randomly firing a deer rifle from the screened-in front porch. Later it
was learned that he was experiencing an emotional meltdown over the
recent death of his father.
Once the officers persuaded the distraught suspect to put the gun down,
they gathered around him and worked at calming him down. Noticing a
magnificent elk's head mounted on the porch wall, one officer directed
the subject's attention to it and asked him about it, thinking to
distract him from his grief. Turned out it was a prize bull the dead
father had bagged and probably the most iconic relic he'd left behind.
The subject went ape all over again.
"Sometimes, it's just the cut of the cards," Lewinski admits. "But good
distractions have proven successful enough that they're worth trying in
appropriate circumstances. Just be prepared with other options in case
they fail. Nothing works perfectly all the time."
NOTE: We'd like to hear about successes and failures you've had with
distractions. Your experiences could be helpful to other officers in
critical situations. Just shoot us an email at
[email protected] and
we'll print a representative sampling in a future issue of Force Science
News.
=====
For another summary of the University of Kentucky study, see
"Distraction Can Defuse Drunken Violence" [Read it now.] A full copy of
Dr. Giancola's study, "Alcohol and Aggression: A Test of the
Attention-Allocation Model," is available for a fee in the July 2007
issue of Psychological Science, archived here.
Find the next training course near you:
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LE Training Academy, Virginia Beach, VA Oct. 2, 2007
Winning Extreme Encounters: From Street to Court
Northwest Wisconsin Tech College, Green Bay, WI Oct. 10, 2007
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================
--
Stephen P. Wenger
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
