From Force Science Research Center: (Most list members are not employed
in law enforcement and I usually choose to share these items when they
have a broader range of application; this is why I did not share part 1
of this series. Of particular interest in part 2 are the three
paragraphs starting with the one subtitled "The lesson could be
life-saving.")
Force Science News #92
In this issue:
What the new study of shootings of unarmed suspects means to you
Part 2 of a 2-part series
[Editor's note: In Part 1 we reported on a ground-breaking new study by
researcher Tom Aveni on why and under what circumstances officers shoot
suspects who end up not to be armed. Here we offer some of the
significant implications of Aveni's findings. Aveni is founder of The
Police Policy Studies Council and serves on the national advisory board
of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato.]
As we detailed in Part 1, Tom Aveni's unique study confirms that
shootings of unarmed subjects during police confrontations typically do
not result from racial bias by the officers involved. Instead, such
controversial, "mistake-of-fact" events occur because certain
"compelling" behavior by suspects leads officers to believe they are
about to be attacked and, under tremendous time pressure, they shoot
"preemptively" to defend themselves, before the presence of a deadly
weapon can actually be confirmed.
Aveni's findings about the dynamics of these situations have important
implications for officers, trainers, shooting investigators,
administrators, and police defense attorneys. In an exclusive interview
with Force Science News, he explained some of the practical conclusions
to be drawn from his data. For a comprehensive report of Aveni's study,
"A Critical Analysis of Police Shootings Under Ambiguous Circumstances,"
go to: www.theppsc.org.
Officer safety. One of the interactive videotaped scenarios Aveni used
in testing more than 300 officers from 6 law enforcement agencies
involves what looks like a mugging-in-progress that a patrol officer
happens upon late at night. The apparent perpetrator suddenly spins
toward the camera (the "responding" officer) with something in his hand.
Often in the testing he was shot-although the object he held in some
scenarios was revealed to be a police ID wallet with metal badge.
The lesson could be life-saving: If you get involved in an arrest while
off-duty or working undercover and are challenged by an arriving officer
who doesn't know you're a cop, react with great caution and no sudden,
energetic moves. Aveni's research established that the unarmed subjects
most likely to be shot during his study were those who turned toward an
officer abruptly and quickly, sank into a crouch, and thrust clenched
hands up from waist level as they spun around.
Hand posture is critical. "Even with rapid movement, an open hand is
perceived as much less threatening because it is almost immediately
recognized as empty and thus weaponless," Aveni says. "A clenched hand
exudes ambiguity. It is much less likely to be view innocuously,
especially in the context of possible criminal activity." In debriefs
after the testing, more than 70% of the officers said their decision to
shoot was influenced by a suspect turning toward them with "something"
in his or her hand.
Most important: follow the responding officer's directions.
"Noncompliance with verbal commands," Aveni says, "was one of the most
consistent factors" cited as a precursor to a shooting decision. "From
that frame of reference, potentially aggressive actions made
subsequently by a suspect would understandably be perceived as threatening."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research
Center, agrees. "In the friendly-fire cases I'm familiar with,
noncompliance was the primary factor in an off-duty or undercover
officer getting shot.
"In a sense, the officer becomes a victim of a treacherous psychology.
Although the responding officer is not aware of the plainclothes
officer's status, the challenged officer is thinking of himself as part
of the law enforcement team. In that mental state, he may ignore
commands because he does not perceive them as relevant to someone 'on
the same team.'
"To guard your safety in such a situation, you need to consciously force
yourself to view the setting from the perspective of officers arriving
with little concrete information."
Training. Officers from the best-performing agency in the study shot
unarmed subjects 24% of the time. The other agencies had "frequency"
scores of nearly 40% or more, with participants from one agency shooting
nearly half of the unarmed suspects they confronted in the scenarios.
"These distinct differences," Aveni states, "seem directly attributable
to training.
"The agency with the lowest percentage of officers shooting unarmed
suspects apparently had the most rigorous scenario-based training
regimen. Virtually every participant from that agency had been through
one or more force-on-force training sessions in the previous 12 months.
Scenario-based training was evident in the other departments, too, but
it seemed much more intermittent. That's the only factor that clearly
stood out from all others."
"The role of training cannot be emphasized enough," Lewinski stresses.
"The more practice an officer has, the faster he or she is able to jump
to important elements of a situation and read them accurately. The
highly trained officer knows what to look for amid a situation that may
seem chaotic to lesser-trained ones. This includes better anticipating
what a suspect's movements will be and more quickly determining what
reaction is necessary.
"Good training also produces better emotional control. The highly
trained officer tends to make better decisions because he can focus on
what he needs to do rather than on reacting impulsively or emotionally,
such as recoiling or freezing up from fear."
Even within the confines of the study, Aveni says, repeated exposure to
challenging scenarios seemed to have an impact. "Participants were more
likely to shoot in their first scenario than in their second, and more
likely to shoot in the second than in the third, even though the scenes
were randomly sequenced, with no consistency in the apparent crime
depicted or in the order in which armed or unarmed subjects were presented.
"There are serious training implications in this since officers seem to
begin to become a bit less impulsive with more scenario exposures."
In analyzing videotapes made of officers' responses, Aveni noted other
issues that, as a trainer, you may want to evaluate in your own program.
. A vertical barricade was provided for officers to use as "cover"
while addressing the testing scenarios. Most of the officers took
advantage of it, but "there was a wide degree of variance in how early
or late in each scenario they elected to use cover and to what degree
they used it effectively. Many participants exposed far too much of
themselves" from behind the barricade.
Lewinski observes: "Training needs to place more emphasis on teaching
officers how to make better use of cover and also on how to assess cover
earlier in their contacts. In the midst of a life-threatening
action-reaction incident is not the time to start thinking about cover."
. "Many participating officers were seen 'covering-down' on
suspects with their muzzles pointing directly at 'center mass,' " even
though they had not yet made a decision to shoot. "This may diminish
reaction time by about one-tenth of a second," but it produces "serious
trade-offs" that bear consideration, says Aveni, a firearms expert who
has trained more than 12,000 law enforcement and military personnel.
"A handgun presented to eye level occludes vision of almost everything
from the suspect's sternum down," he explains. "A suspect's hand and arm
movement are then difficult to impossible to discern. There might be
serious threat identification issues with this approach.
"Also by truncating reaction time by elevating the muzzle before
committing to fire, you also truncate the amount of time available to
stop an erroneous 'threat reflex' impulse. So truncated reaction time
can be a double-edged sword.
"Recent trends in active-shooter training have led to SWAT tactics
trickling down to patrol officers, including the 'muzzle-dominance'
technique. But we need to remember that this runs contrary to the
universally embraced firearms safety protocol of never pointing your
weapon at anything you're not willing to destroy."
. Aveni also advises that the currently popular concept of "stress
inoculation" in training be "approached with caution. A disproportionate
number of 'aggressive' training scenarios may begin influencing
reactions in officers akin to 'fear-biting' in K-9s.
"Scenario-based training should be geared toward 'conflict resolution,'
not just gun-fighting skills. It should proportionately reflect the
duties and conflicts your officers are most likely to encounter on the
street. You may not want your officers to be 'warriors' per se, but they
must be rational decision-makers."
Lewinski adds: "A vital emphasis of stress inoculation must be on
developing emotional control and better decision-making, not just on
improving physical performance skills. If that isn't at the core of your
program, you're missing the key value of this type of training."
Departmental Policy. "Policy has been much touted as a means of
moderating undesirable behavior," Aveni points out, but his research
suggests that "it is investment in training that yields the best
results." The agencies in his study showed wide differences in the
proclivity of their officers to shoot unarmed subjects, yet there
generally were "no substantive differences" in their policies regarding
use of deadly force.
One agency had a restriction others did not. That department requires
its personnel to complete a use-of-force report whenever they unholster
their handguns. Some officers from that agency "literally waited to draw
until they came under fire" in scenarios where the offender shot at
them. "A common response in debriefing younger, less experienced
officers was that they were concerned about having their personnel files
reflecting frequent usage of force when in reality 'force' was never
used," Aveni says.
It's important to note that while that attitude has "demonstrable
occupational safety implications," Aveni's research established that
their slowness to unholster "didn't seem to influence the overall
judgment" of that agency's officers. As a group, they had the second
highest rate (44%) of shooting unarmed suspects.
Aveni observes: "Even the best intentions have demonstrable occupational
safety implications."
Aveni believes his study results support the "almost universal embrace
of the 'imminent threat' standard in deadly force policies," in contrast
to the more restricting and currently less popular "immediate threat"
standard. However, he expresses concern that under pressure to diminish
the frequency of shootings, policy-makers may be tempted to unreasonably
tighten the limits of "may-shoot" situations.
Given the prevalence with which officers in the study "found themselves
firing at suspects only after the suspect had already turned and fired
at them," Aveni suggests that a "practical and altogether reasonable
interpretation" of what an officer might do when, for instance,
confronted by a noncompliant robbery suspect, would be to preemptively
shoot as the suspect initiates a turning motion toward the officer.
"This will likely be construed as 'controversial' in some quarters," he
admits, "but this study's findings certainly suggest that such latitude
is both reasonable and necessary" for an officer's protection.
Investigations. The study offers some perspective on the current "raging
controversy about whether officers should be permitted to view dash-cam
video of their incident before being compelled to provide an oral or
written statement to agency investigators," Aveni says.
In his project, participants could review their videotaped responses
before completing a debriefing form. All wanted to see the footage in
which they had used deadly force, but they were typically less
interested in revisiting encounters in which they did not shoot.
Interestingly, "when they did not review a video replay of their
performance, they usually had difficulty remembering many of the
situational and behavioral elements that had been embedded in the
scenarios," Aveni says. This resulted in their incompletely answering
questions on the debrief form that were linked to important elements in
the scenarios.
"At the time they were 'confronting' suspects in the scenarios, they
usually had to make their shooting decisions in less than one-third of a
second," Aveni says. "They had difficulty remembering everything they'd
been exposed to in such compressed, intense time periods" unless they
had a chance to see the action replayed in a calmer setting.
"We might assume that what an officer is able to process consciously and
then recall unaided may be a mere fraction of what he or she has
processed subconsciously. Obviously, there are implications in this for
real-life officer-involved shooting investigations."
Indeed, Lewinski says, this is why FSRC supports officers being shown
videotape from dash-cams and Tasers and also returning to the scene of
shootings with their attorneys to experience walk-throughs, "provided
that the goal is to impartially mine the officers memories and not try
to entrap them with what they can't recall."
A significant number of participants said that the time of day or
lighting conditions depicted in the scenarios may have played a role
when they decided to shoot, Aveni notes. By design, all test scenarios
were filmed under low-light conditions "to increase realism and incident
ambiguity." To what extent an officer in a troublesome confrontation
"can accurately discriminate a handgun from a cell phone, flashlight, or
wallet held by a suspect at night is a source of concern," Aveni says.
He recommends that investigators "seriously consider taking detailed
light measurements" when a low-light officer-involved shooting has
occurred because the amount of illumination available "may have a direct
bearing on an officer's visual acuity during an extreme encounter."
Officer defense. Aveni hoped from the beginning that his study would
help to better define how a "reasonable officer" might act in uncertain
circumstances that result, ultimately, in the shooting of an unarmed
individual. With the data now in and minutely analyzed, he believes his
findings do just that and that they may "radically alter the manner in
which police use of deadly force is examined in the future" by review
boards and in court in many "contentious" shootings.
"The officers and agencies that participated in this research are
representative of good law enforcement professionalism. The
officers-reasonable men and women-were placed in the kinds of situations
from which mistake-of-fact shootings commonly evolve.
"The results have great exculpatory value. They clearly identify the
variables that prompt officers to shoot in tense, rapidly evolving,
uncertain circumstances, and those factors put the burden for what
happens right where it belongs-squarely on the suspect's behavior.
"If a subject does the wrong things at the wrong time, a reasonable
officer is likely to pull the trigger, believing his own life to be in
peril."
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================
--
Stephen P. Wenger, KE7QBY
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
