Metro Jacksonville

http://www.forcescience.org/fsinews/2005/03/are-cops-wild-in-the-streets-new-study-says-no-way/



ARE COPS WILD IN THE STREETS? NEW STUDY SAYS NO WAY!

To hear some of the media and activist police critics tell it, American cops are “out of control,” running rampant in an “epidemic” of unjustified use of force.

But in an ongoing study that has been underway now for more than three years, Dr. Darrell Ross, an associate professor in the CJ department at East Carolina University, is nailing down facts that prove just the opposite is true.


In reality, Ross insists, officers’ use of force is miniscule in the totality of police-citizen contacts. Force incidentsâ€"both lethal and nonlethalâ€"actually are down by significant percentages in recent years. And the oft-repeated accusation that police deliberately and discriminatorily target racial minorities in employing force is not substantiated when important contextual information is taken into account.

Why does the myth of extensive and excessive use of force persist? Partly, Ross suggests, because certain powerful political agendas and philosophical orientations depend on it. Partly because important, relevant social forces are not properly understood or reported. And partly because of the nature of modern media.

“People try to show a trend by taking one incident and magnifying it,” Ross told Force Science News, and the practice of tv shows infinitely replaying videotape “loops” of isolated police violence makes the atmosphere on the street “look worse than it is, like the police profession is in a conspiracy to beat people up.

“This is not to say we have never had officers who cross the line of brutality. We’ve had countless examples, just as other professions have their unethical members. But not at the level that the myth says. The truth is that police use of force, including deadly force, is less than it used to be by far.”

As a law enforcement trainer, CJ educator and expert witness with more than 20 years’ experience, Ross had grown wearily familiar with the accusatory broadsides leveled at American policing regarding use of force. At the latest ASLET training conference, he itemized a laundry list of these allegations, including claims that “police brutality is systematic,” that police “use more force than necessary,” that police “discriminately use excessive force against minority groups,” that police willfully and regularly “violate citizens’ 4th Amendment rights” and so on.

What finally motivated Ross to launch his study was the book “Police Brutality,” an anthology of essays edited by journalist Jill Nelson about the “crisis” of police “misconduct,” the “persecution” and “murder” of blacks by officers, and the disreputable behavior of “the fuzz” on the “battlefront” of the streets. The tenor of this material, coupled with “police brutality” reports by activist groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, seemed so vastly “ill-informed and ill-conceived” compared to Ross’ personal experiences that he determined to discover and document the truth.

To date, he has compiled and analyzed an extensive amount of pertinent data, including more than 220 lethal force and 60 less-than-lethal force studies, innumerable articles and reports, 35 years’ worth of government crime-trend statistics, 26 years of officer-felon shooting data and 3,500 civil liability cases (among them more than 300 that he has been involved in as an expert witness).

In an interview with Force Science News, he discussed some of his key conclusions:

â€"First of all, it’s important to understand that between 1978 and 2003, the U.S. population age 13 and older grew by about 47,000,000 people. The police population in that period increased by about 235,000 officers. Yet despite a civilian population growth that is about 200 times that of law enforcement growth, police shootings have not increased. Indeed only a tiny percentage of police-citizen contactsâ€"holding steady at about 1%â€"involve police using force of any kind. Even in arrests, use of force occurs only in about 3%.

â€"From 1968 to 1975, an average of 483 persons per year were shot dead by police rounds. That average has dropped significantly since then. Overall, the annual average of lethal shootings is down 33% since 1968. Shootings by police that inflict injury but not death have decreased by 20-22%, Ross says. He credits a drop in violent crime, more restrictive court rulings (notably Tennessee v. Garner), better training and decision-making by officers and the availability of more less-lethal force options, including OC, Taser and beanbag ammunition.

â€"Police shootings are related to UCR violent crime trends. Both tend to be highest in crime- and violence-ridden “hot spots” within a city. These areas are “catalysts” for officers being called and using force to deal with the situations they encounter there, Ross says. Like it or not, the areas with the highest concentration of violent crimes predominately are black. “Shootings are related to community safety and crime in the community,” Ross explains. In fairness, “you can’t ignore that and look at police shootings in a vacuum. If you don’t consider factors like this you aren’t looking at the true nature of the statistics.”

â€"Given their representation in the general population (about 15%), blacks are disproportionately shot by police. But that figure is changing. In 1978, 49% of suspects shot by officers were black. By 2003 that had fallen to 34%. It’s relevant to note that there also is a racial disparity where the commission of violent crime is concerned. For example, “African-American males are eight times more likely to commit homicide than whites,” Ross points out. This involvement in violence and other behavioral choices make them more likely use-of-force targets. “The lifestyle of people who get shot is generally different from those who don’t. You can’t overlook that. Disparity in shootings does not equate with ‘discrimination’ in shootings.”

â€"The race of the players in use-of-force scenarios is changing. The incidence of white officers killing black suspects has dropped since 1978, while the incidence of white officers killing white suspects is increasing. Most often black suspects are killed by black officers. All of this “dispels the myth of cops picking only on a certain race” when force is used, Ross says. “Research over the last 30 years repeatedly shows that lethal force used by police is NOT racially motivated.”

â€"As to the charge that misguided police tactics provoke force encounters, Ross found no evidence of a pattern in which “the officer ‘created’ the danger and/or situation in which lethal force was required, nor did the officer take a ‘poor position’ that placed the officer in a situation necessitating the use of lethal force.”

â€"Where both lethal force and nonlethal force are concerned, Ross’ research confirms that the measure of force officers decide to employ is “highly associated” with the degree of suspect resistance. In other words, force is not just arbitrarily and unjustly delivered. Indeed, he found that officers “routinely use lower forms of force than what could have been justified” (deploying OC, for example, when a baton or a neck restraint could have been employed). A significant indication of the move toward lower levels of force is a decline in the use of impact weapons and a corresponding rise in the use of pepper spray, Ross says.

â€"As to the claim of widespread “brutality,” Ross cites the federal DOJ’s Use of Force Survey (1996 and 2000), the largest study of its kind ever made. Of all the hundreds of thousands of police-citizen contacts in which force of some kind was used, fewer than 1% of uses were considered excessive. In 68% of arrests, the subject did not sustain any injury, and in another 25% only a cut or bruise occurred. In fact, officers in force encounters are more likely than suspects to suffer an injury that requires hospital treatment!

Ross believes it’is important for officers, trainers, administrators and friends of law enforcement to “do what we can to get the word out” about his findings and “set the record straight.” He also urges these additional recommendations:

1. Government entities and their insurers need to continue to “fight to win” questionable lawsuits based on exaggerated abusive force allegations. Officers can help in this effort by writing “a lot better reports” of force incidents, he says.

2. The trend toward greater sophistication in police training needs to be accelerated. He specifically advocates “dynamic, scenario-based” training through role-playing and use of simulators that helps officers “make better decisions” and drive inappropriate uses of force “down even further.”

3. Departments should review and revise use-of-force policies that may create confusing, no-win situations for officers. For example, he says, some agencies still insist that officers use “only the minimum force necessary” to make an arrest or control a violent offender. This unnecessarily opens the door to “coulda/shoulda” criticism where officers’ actions are second-guessed, Ross saysâ€"because it is not the standard stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Graham v. Connor. The Court established a standard of “objective reasonableness,” which allows for broader flexibility in the realistic context of unpredictable, fast-evolving, complex dynamics that so often characterize force encounters.

“It’s vitally important that the public be informed about the issues Dr. Ross’ research addresses,” says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. “If myths are not dispelled, they are believed, and that means people will believe cops are as violent as movies and other media often make them out to be. Once that belief prevails, then the risk is that even totally professional force encounters between officers and subjects will be interpreted as inappropriately violent.”

Some of Ross’ findings are reported in the journal Law Enforcement Executive Forum for Jan. ‘05. The article is titled: “A Content Analysis of the Emerging Trends in the Use of Non-Lethal Force Research in Policing.” Copies can be ordered on line at: http://www.ptb.state.il.us/ForumJournal/current.shtml

Ross also teaches a 16-hour block on “The Myths and Realities of the Police Use of Force,” which can be adapted for shorter conference presentations, with training implications included. He can be reached at (252) 328-4203 or via email at rossd@mail.ecu.edu.

Research?  There is a lot of research available:

http://www.forcescience.org/fsinews/2006/12/new-findings-from-fbi-about-cop-attackers-their-weapons/




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I. NEW FINDINGS FROM FBI ABOUT COP ATTACKERS & THEIR WEAPONS

New findings on how offenders train with, carry and deploy the weapons they use to attack police officers have emerged in a just-published, 5-year study by the FBI.


Among other things, the data reveal that most would-be cop killers:

â€"show signs of being armed that officers miss;

â€"have more experience using deadly force in “street combat” than their intended victims;

â€"practice with firearms more often and shoot more accurately;

â€"have no hesitation whatsoever about pulling the trigger. “If you hesitate,” one told the study’s researchers, “you’re dead. You have the instinct or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re in trouble on the street….”

These and other weapons-related findings comprise one chapter in a 180-page research summary called “Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers.” The study is the third in a series of long investigations into fatal and nonfatal attacks on POs by the FBI team of Dr. Anthony Pinizzotto, clinical forensic psychologist, and Ed Davis, criminal investigative instructor, both with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, and Charles Miller III, coordinator of the LEOs Killed and Assaulted program.

“Violent Encounters” also reports in detail on the personal characteristics of attacked officers and their assaulters, the role of perception in life-threatening confrontations, the myths of memory that can hamper OIS investigations, the suicide-by-cop phenomenon, current training issues, and other matters relevant to officer survival. (Force Science News and our strategic partner PoliceOne.com will be reporting on more findings from this landmark study in future transmissions.)

Commenting on the broad-based study, Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, called it “very challenging and insightfulâ€"important work that only a handful of gifted and experienced researchers could accomplish.”

From a pool of more than 800 incidents, the researchers selected 40, involving 43 offenders (13 of them admitted gangbangers-drug traffickers) and 50 officers, for in-depth exploration. They visited crime scenes and extensively interviewed surviving officers and attackers alike, most of the latter in prison.

Here are highlights of what they learned about weapon selection, familiarity, transport and use by criminals attempting to murder cops, a small portion of the overall research:

WEAPON CHOICE.

Predominately handguns were used in the assaults on officers and all but one were obtained illegally, usually in street transactions or in thefts. In contrast to media myth, none of the firearms in the study was obtained from gun shows. What was available “was the overriding factor in weapon choice,” the report says. Only 1 offender hand-picked a particular gun “because he felt it would do the most damage to a human being.”

Researcher Davis, in a presentation and discussion for the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, noted that none of the attackers interviewed was “hindered by any lawâ€"federal, state or localâ€"that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws.”

FAMILIARITY.

Several of the offenders began regularly to carry weapons when they were 9 to 12 years old, although the average age was 17 when they first started packing “most of the time.” Gang members especially started young.

Nearly 40% of the offenders had some type of formal firearms training, primarily from the military. More than 80% “regularly practiced with handguns, averaging 23 practice sessions a year,” the study reports, usually in informal settings like trash dumps, rural woods, back yards and “street corners in known drug-trafficking areas.”

One spoke of being motivated to improve his gun skills by his belief that officers “go to the range two, three times a week [and] practice arms so they can hit anything.”

In reality, victim officers in the study averaged just 14 hours of sidearm training and 2.5 qualifications per year. Only 6 of the 50 officers reported practicing regularly with handguns apart from what their department required, and that was mostly in competitive shooting. Overall, the offenders practiced more often than the officers they assaulted, and this “may have helped increase [their] marksmanship skills,” the study says.

The offender quoted above about his practice motivation, for example, fired 12 rounds at an officer, striking him 3 times. The officer fired 7 rounds, all misses.

More than 40% of the offenders had been involved in actual shooting confrontations before they feloniously assaulted an officer. Ten of these “street combat veterans,” all from “inner-city, drug-trafficking environments,” had taken part in 5 or more “criminal firefight experiences” in their lifetime.

One reported that he was 14 when he was first shot on the street, “about 18 before a cop shot me.” Another said getting shot was a pivotal experience “because I made up my mind no one was gonna shoot me again.”

Again in contrast, only 8 of the 50 LEO victims had participated in a prior shooting; 1 had been involved in 2 previously, another in 3. Seven of the 8 had killed offenders.

CONCEALMENT.

The offenders said they most often hid guns on their person in the front waistband, with the groin area and the small of the back nearly tied for second place. Some occasionally gave their weapons to another person to carry, “most often a female companion.” None regularly used a holster, and about 40% at least sometimes carried a backup weapon.

In motor vehicles, they most often kept their firearm readily available on their person, or, less often, under the seat. In residences, most stashed their weapon under a pillow, on a nightstand, under the mattressâ€"somewhere within immediate reach while in bed.

Almost all carried when on the move and strong majorities did so when socializing, committing crimes or being at home. About one-third brought weapons with them to work. Interestingly, the offenders in this study more commonly admitted having guns under all these circumstances than did offenders interviewed in the researchers’ earlier 2 surveys, conducted in the 1980s and ’90s.

According to Davis, “Male offenders said time and time again that female officers tend to search them more thoroughly than male officers. In prison, most of the offenders were more afraid to carry contraband or weapons when a female CO was on duty.”

On the street, however, both male and female officers too often regard female subjects “as less of a threat, assuming that they not going to have a gun,” Davis said. In truth, the researchers concluded that more female offenders are armed today than 20 years agoâ€"”not just female gang associates, but female offenders generally.”

SHOOTING STYLE.

Twenty-six of the offenders [about 60%], including all of the street combat veterans, “claimed to be instinctive shooters, pointing and firing the weapon without consciously aligning the sights,” the study says.

“They practice getting the gun out and using it,” Davis explained. “They shoot for effect.” Or as one of the offenders put it: “[W]e’re not working with no marksmanship….We just putting it in your direction, you know….It don’t matter…as long as it’s gonna hit you…if it’s up at your head or your chest, down at your legs, whatever….Once I squeeze and you fall, then…if I want to execute you, then I could go from there.”

HIT RATE.

More often than the officers they attacked, offenders delivered at least some rounds on target in their encounters. Nearly 70% of assailants were successful in that regard with handguns, compared to about 40% of the victim officers, the study found. (Efforts of offenders and officers to get on target were considered successful if any rounds struck, regardless of the number fired.)

Davis speculated that the offenders might have had an advantage because in all but 3 cases they fired first, usually catching the officer by surprise. Indeed, the report points out, “10 of the total victim officers had been wounded [and thus impaired] before they returned gunfire at their attackers.”

MISSED CUES.

Officers would less likely be caught off guard by attackers if they were more observant of indicators of concealed weapons, the study concludes. These particularly include manners of dress, ways of moving and unconscious gestures often related to carrying.

“Officers should look for unnatural protrusions or bulges in the waist, back and crotch areas,” the study says, and watch for “shirts that appear rippled or wavy on one side of the body while the fabric on the other side appears smooth.” In warm weather, multilayered clothing inappropriate to the temperature may be a giveaway. On cold or rainy days, a subject’s jacket hood may not be covering his head because it is being used to conceal a handgun.

Because they eschew holsters, offenders reported frequently touching a concealed gun with hands or arms “to assure themselves that it is still hidden, secure and accessible” and hasn’t shifted. Such gestures are especially noticeable “whenever individuals change body positions, such as standing, sitting or exiting a vehicle.” If they run, they may need to keep a constant grip on a hidden gun to control it.

Just as cops generally blade their body to make their sidearm less accessible, armed criminals “do the same in encounters with LEOs to ensure concealment and easy access.”

An irony, Davis noted, is that officers who are assigned to look for concealed weapons, while working off-duty security at night clubs for instance, are often highly proficient at detecting them. “But then when they go back to the street without that specific assignment, they seem to ‘turn off’ that skill,” and thus are startledâ€"sometimes fatallyâ€"when a suspect suddenly produces a weapon and attacks.

MIND-SET.

Thirty-six of the 50 officers in the study had “experienced hazardous situations where they had the legal authority” to use deadly force “but chose not to shoot.” They averaged 4 such prior incidents before the encounters that the researchers investigated. “It appeared clear that none of these officers were willing to use deadly force against an offender if other options were available,” the researchers concluded.

The offenders were of a different mind-set entirely. In fact, Davis said the study team “did not realize how cold blooded the younger generation of offender is. They have been exposed to killing after killing, they fully expect to get killed and they don’t hesitate to shoot anybody, including a police officer. They can go from riding down the street saying what a beautiful day it is to killing in the next instant.”

“Offenders typically displayed no moral or ethical restraints in using firearms,” the report states. “In fact, the street combat veterans survived by developing a shoot-first mentality.

“Officers never can assume that a criminal is unarmed until they have thoroughly searched the person and the surroundings themselves.” Nor, in the interest of personal safety, can officers “let their guards down in any type of law enforcement situation.”

The simple fact is that this is only one of a lifetime of subjects of study for Police Officers.  It is not just a late night internet discussion but a matter of life and death.

http://www.forcescience.org/fsinews/2007/03/how-many-of-these-force-myths-do-you-believe-how-about-the-people-who-judge-you/


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 publicâ€"and itselfâ€"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 himâ€"broke his femur and penetrated his heartâ€"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.

“Unless 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:

â€"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?

â€"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.”

â€"Good guys are never the aggressor. Yet in real life, “officers must often be the aggressors to maintain control.”

â€"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.

â€"Good guys will always outlast bad guys in a fight. Actually, an officer has only “a short timeâ€"maybe a couple of minutesâ€"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.”

â€"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 usedâ€"about 0.2%â€"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 entryâ€"the so-called Hollywood high-guardâ€"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.”

Part 2 from the last post:


http://www.forcescience.org/fsinews/2007/04/how-to-combat-myths-that-muddle-force-confrontations-part-2-of-a-2-part-series/


HOW TO COMBAT MYTHS THAT MUDDLE FORCE CONFRONTATIONS
Part 2 of a 2-part series

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In Transmission No. 68, sent on 3/26/07, we explored dangerous myths about police use of force that movies, TV, and video games have brainwashed civilians and some LEOs into believing.

Our report quoted a provocative article by Det. Cmdr. Jeffry Johnson of the Long Beach (CA) PD, "Use of Force and the Hollywood Factor," which now appears in full at:
http://www.aele.org/law/2007-04MLJ501.pdf.

In this continuation of our report, Johnson argues what's necessary to counteract these misconceptions, which can negatively impact how officers react in life-threatening situations and how their actions are judged by civilian evaluators.]


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“After a high-profile use of force, more civilians than sworn personnel are going to be judging your actions,” Johnson told Force Science News. As members of review boards, prosecutors’ staffs, juries, and the media, they’ll determine what’s reasonable and therefore justified and what’s unreasonable and therefore criminal.

“A very thin line” often separates the good from the bad, and drawing it properly demands realistic knowledge of the true dynamics of force challenges and applications in street confrontations.

Unfortunately, Johnson writes, “simple fair-mindedness coupled with the experience of watching a lot of cop shows does not qualify a civilian to analyze force incidents.” As things now stand, “much of the community is quite frankly unprepared to judge police force….

“No one is suggesting that police agencies take a step backward and exclude or discourage [civilian] involvement and input.” But, Johnson argues, agencies do need to launch aggressive educational campaigns to better assure that civilian influences are grounded in a solid understanding of valid force principles.

Specifically, he offers this strategy for LE administrators:

1. “The first target should be civilians who already have a direct hand in judging force incidents.” These include personnel boards, force review commissions, prosecutors, and the like.

Their education “does not need to include extensive weaponless defense training, practical firearms instruction, endless scenarios, case law and statutory law review,” Johnson explains. “But it is critical they understand what reasonable force should look like.”

During a single 8-hour presentation, say, critical training elements could “include a force options explanation (i.e., force continuum or paradigm), basic laws of arrest, role-playing, Hollywood Factor misconceptions, review of police force statistics and data, and a question-answer session.” It would also be effective to include “components like firearms tactical simulation training or police ride-alongs” as reality checks.

2. Apart from educating these “official” civilians, “build a cadre of trained people who will come to your support” after a significant force incident.

“This is key,” Johnson says. In a controversial, high-profile case, “you’re going to have a lot of people descend on your town or arise from within it with an agenda. They’ll be eager to ‘explain’ video of the incident to the public” in a way that’s likely to be much different from your experienced interpretation. Having respected voices from outside your department who can knowledgeably challenge distortions can be invaluable.

3. Seize opportunities to educate the broader general public, including the media, through such venues as community academies, town hall meetings and forums, neighborhood watch groups, and other civic and faith-based gatherings. “Non-cops are very interested in the police world,” Johnson says. Even in a 2-hour presentation, much can be done to dispel force myths, like those mentioned in Part 1 of this series. “Mix in some videos from ‘Cops’ and let people see things as they really are.”

At the scene of a force encounter, assuming there’s time and that you’re not dealing with a hostile crowd, it may pay dividends to “take a few moments and explain to civilian witnesses why you did what you did,” Johnson suggests. You may be able to blunt the impact of “something that doesn’t look right by their standards” and get them to better understand that “using force isn’t about being sporting but about establishing control in a dangerous situation.”

Similarly, if you had to lay hands on a subject but ultimately didn’t arrest him, a few words of calm explanation may help forestall a bitter misunderstanding.

“There are always going to be people you can’t reach, no matter what you do. The media will always want to show the ugly videos. But you can balance them by educating people who want to understand and want to have confidence in the police. It’s going to take work, but you can make inroads.”

4. Police managers “must not be shy or apologetic about the fact that the real force evaluation experts come from within [LE] ranks. Just as an experienced surgeon is the best person to judge another surgeon’s incision and technique where there is an allegation of malpractice, so an experienced police officer and force expert is most qualified to judgeâ€"or at least offer a forensic analysis ofâ€"a force incident,” Johnson writes.

“This is no great insight,” he admits. But much of the LE community has been “so intensely scrutinized and brow-beaten”â€"not to mention horrified by riots, civil unrest, and angry protest sparked by major force incidents in recent yearsâ€"that “we’ve backed away from force issues.

“We somehow abdicated our role as the experts on what’s reasonable force so we wouldn’t look brutal or insensitive to the community. This created a vacuum, and critics of the police and people with agendas have filled it.”

Johnson stresses: “This issue should not be trivialized….

• f course individual officers and police agencies need to be willing to submit to scrutiny. However, the scrutiny must be fair, and based upon an objective standard.”
  
  Police managers should not be “fearful to assert their expertise, as if in doing so [they] will appear less objective and risk their own political survival.” An agency certainly should not ignore a bad shooting, he emphasizes, “but you should not be reluctant to assert reasonableness. You have to be able to say, ‘We did it right and it’s ok and here’s why.’”
  
  5. “Finally,” Johnson writes, “police officers must also be educated…. [T]hey are not immune from the effects of the Hollywood Factor. A failure to fully appreciate these misconceptions can result in serious injury….
  
  “[D]o you think it is important for an officer to appreciate that when he shoots a suspect, the reaction will likely be very different than what he has seen all his or her life on television? Such training is currently not provided in most academies or advanced officer training.”
  
  For their own safety and to convey accurate information “to the community they contact on a daily basis,” officers need to be “aware of the laws and mechanics of force. Cops need to understand more about what a gunfight is really like, including what physiological changes they go through.” (This, incidentally, is a primary mission of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato and of the Force Science seminars conducted by executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski.)
  
  Also officers need to be better schooled in describing force encounters in their reports, Johnson says. For example, the “fatigue threshold,” when you’re “suddenly out of gas and most vulnerable in a struggle,” is rarely mentioned, yet can be a vital factor in justifying an escalation of force if you feel you are approaching a dangerous level of exhaustion, Johnson points out.
  
  “Documenting the hell out of” the suspect’s actions and what you were experiencing can be essential to recreating a picture of a force encounter “from the perspective of the officer on the scene,” part of the standard for assessing reasonableness established by the Supreme Court’s landmark force decision, Graham v. Connor.
  
  Without proactive educational measures inside and outside of agencies, the polarizing disconnect between police and public perspectives about the reasonableness of force seems destined only to get worse.
  
  The mythic distortions embedded in the civilian mind by the entertainment industry are likely to become “progressively more severe and graphic each year in order to maintain the public’s interest and ensure box office profits,” Johnson writes. At the same time, public exposure to disturbing real-life images of police force will increase.
  
  With cameras in police cars, on street corners, on TASERs, in cell phones, and no doubt soon on guns, “there will be very few incidents in the future that won’t be on tape,” Johnson told FSN. “We’re going to see more and more encounters where we have to explain what we’re doing.”
  
  The longer Hollywood’s force myths go unchallenged, the harder those explanations will be.
  
  [NOTE: One dramatic step toward public education will be the recently announced National Law Enforcement Museum, a 90,000-sq.-ft. facility scheduled to open in 2011 in Washington, DC, under sponsorship of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Emphasizing interactivity, the museum's highlights will include a "judgment simulator," where visitors can "make split-second decisions on the use of lethal and less-lethal force," and a "Cop Critique Theatre," where real-life LEOs will offer "insightful commentary about their fictional colleagues on TV and in the movies." For detailed information and a virtual tour, check out: http://www.nleomf.com/TheMuseum/museum.htm.]
  
  

Wondering what the purpose of all this is, save to defend JSO from ignoramuses who clearly have not read the scads of available research (and yet somehow have managed to have negative experiences with JSO 9 times out of 10).  Elucidate?

Perhaps :)