TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT
POLICE SHOOTINGS
By
Charles Remsberg
The Police Marksman - Nov/Dec 2004
In his 23 years with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office, Homicide Lt. Joe
Hartshorne has heard plenty of naïve questions. One that especially
troubled him was asked after a deputy shot and killed a suspect who drew
on him with what turned out to be an unloaded revolver. A lawyer who
served as a civilian reviewer asked the deputy, Why didn't you just
look in the cylinder and see that the gun was empty before you shot And
that, Hartshorne notes, was from someone sitting in judgment of cops'
decisions. So many people seem to think that shootings by the police
are murders and that in homicide we cover up the murders. Now, thanks
to Hartshorne's determination to correct such dangerous thinking,
there's less risk that fanciful notions will trump harsh reality when
it comes to assessing extreme encounters by the LASO.
In August 2004, he and Mike Bumcrot, a retired Detective sergeant with
similar commitment who consults with the department on criminal
investigations, assembled a special audience of 250 in the council
chamber of a Los Angeles suburb to hear some eye-opening revelations
about the dynamics of deadly force. Included were lawyers who defend
officers in civil litigation, district attorneys, representatives of the
county's Office of Independent Review and the Risk Management Bureau,
medical examiners, coroner's field investigators, training officers,
homicide detectives, IA, major crimes investigators and invited guests
from other local and federal law enforcement agencies-a veritable
congress of those whose opinions count after officer- involved
shootings.
To guide them through the truths of lethal confrontations, Hartshorne
and Bumcrot recruited the leading researcher of the practical aspects of
police use of force. Dr. Bill Lewinski, a specialist in law enforcement
behavioral psychology and a member of The Police Marksman national
advisory board, has spent more than two decades identifying and
scientifically documenting the mental and physical aspects of
life-threatening encounters-particularly action/reaction times and
movements. For the first time, his work has established precise
measurements, to hundredths of a second, of the speed with which
suspects can attack and the disturbing extent to which officers are
trapped behind the reactionary curve in responding. His surprising
discoveries, ranging from why some assailants end up shot in the back
to why officers can't immediately stop shooting once they've
neutralized a threat, have made him one of the nation's most
sought-after expert witnesses in controversial police defense cases.
In June 2004, Dr. Lewinski established the nonprofit Force Science
Research Center at Minnesota State University Mankato to expand his
unique experiments, to attract other researchers to the field and to
inform peace officers and civilians alike about little-known and
little-understood realities of the street. The latter mission was the
focus of his appearance in Los Angeles. Civilians, as well as veteran
law enforcement personnel, left the council room acknowledging they'd
learned things that impacted upon officer-involved shootings that
they'd never known before. In Hartshorne's opinion, Dr. Lewinski's
hours-long presentation, financed from LASO's narcotics forfeiture
funds, . . . should be duplicated in agencies across the country. Bill
explained phenomena that we thought existed but didn't understand and
couldn't define. There have been times when an officer would explain
what happened in a shooting, but the physical evidence didn't seem to
support his story. You knew he was telling the truth but you didn't
know how to explain it. Now we understand what could have happened. And
we have science to back us up.
To ease the civilians into the world of the police, Dr. Lewinski began
his presentation by showing examples of tunnel vision, or what he calls
the funnel of concentration-a phenomenon with which most officers are
sorely familiar. First he screened a compilation of video clips from
baseball games in which outfielders were so riveted on catching a ball
arcing toward them that they ran into walls, into each other and into
spectator railings- oblivious that they were anywhere near such
hazards. One, having caught a ball and intending to throw it to a
baseman, hurled it into the head of an umpire standing not five feet
away-directly in his line of sight but unseen until too late. Is there
any doubt these players would have avoided doing what they did, or
modified it, if they could have known the out come Dr. Lewinski asked.
A second tape showed a leopard stalking a group of warthogs. Focused
upon a vulnerable juvenile, the big cat charged toward it only to be
T-boned by an adult pig the leopard didn't see countercharging from the
side. Instantly, other warthogs s warm in and repeatedly gore the cat
before they angrily pursue it once it manages to leap free. Imitating a
lawyer badgering an officer after a surprise attack, Dr. Lewinski asked:
So, Mr. Leopard, how many pigs assaulted you What was each pig doing
just before the alleged attack Mr. Leopard, please recreate in detail
what you did during this encounter. He continued, There is an illusion
that we see every thing and see it clearly. Actually we have good vision
only within five to seven degrees of the center of the eye.
Complicating this, most shootings occur when our vision is poorest-at
night or in low- light surroundings. In 70% of shootings, officers were
operating in light conditions that equate with them being close to
legally blind. With the public, there is a rush to judgment about police
shootings. They want to narrow the circumstances down to a few facts
that provide easy answers. Actually, these are very complicated
situations. I am not a cop apologist. Officers should be held
accountable-but only for what they can control. His research is devoted
to understanding and documenting how lethal encounters really do unfold
in terms of human psychology and biomechanics.
Immediate vs. Imminent Threat
Attorneys and activists often assert that cops shoot first and ask
questions later. Dr. Lewinski demonstrated that officers must take
preemptive action in order to adequately defend their lives. If they
wait until they actually see a suspect's gun pointing at them, it's too
late. Exhibiting outtakes from scores of studies he has done on action
vs. reaction and the lag time between the two, Dr. Lewinski drew
sobered responses even from veteran firearms trainers in the crowd.
Time- coded video of a slightly built woman who had never before handled
a handgun revealed that she could draw from her waistband and fire
faster than the average officer could react from a wide variety of
'ready' positions. Only .07 seconds elapsed from the time her gun was
visible until she shot. Reacting officers were not able to beat her
when they had to draw (average time 1.5 seconds) or even when their
weapons were out in a low- ready position, a close-ready, a belt tuck,
a 'Hollywood high guard,' a behind-the- leg 'bootleg' position or
'freed up' in an unsnapped holster. Indeed, trained officers are even
slower responding from a bootleg position or with a holster unsnapped
than in drawing a holstered weapon. In some positions, the lag time was
mere fractions of a second.
But if you think this is a mouse turd in the real world, you're wrong,
Dr. Lewinski stated. From most positions, especially if an officer has
to visually confirm a threat, you'll have a round coming at you before
you can react. Just one second equals four rounds from a Glock. Still,
he recently encountered an opposing expert witness, a lieutenant from a
major department, who swore in court that his officers were held to the
standard of not shooting until they see a gun pointed at them. In other
words, they must face a clear, present and immediate deadly threat or
shooting is not justified by department policy. More realistic is what
Dr. Lewinski calls the imminent threat standard. This involves an
officer's reasonable belief that a potential threat is beginning to
unfold that may culminate in his being placed in lethal jeopardy. This
would include shooting on the basis of furtive movements. Laws in most
states accept the imminent threat standard, Lewinski said. But as
evidenced by the lieutenant's testimony, some departments choose
(unrealistically) to set their standards higher than state law.
Shot in The Back
Much can happen between the moment an officer decides to shoot and his
bullet actually makes impact. Although the time span may only be
measured in microseconds, it's long enough for what motivated the
officer to fire to change radically. A suspect facing an officer and
pointing a gun at him, for instance, can turn and start to run away.
That movement-going from a threatening, frontal stance to a running,
square back presented to the officer-can take as little as .14 seconds
according to Dr. Lewinski's experiments. That is half the time it took
for the fastest officer in his studies to react to a simple auditory
cue to stop shooting-auditory cues consistently produce faster reaction
times than visual cues. In a real-life situation, the officer is highly
unlikely to even realize the change is taking place. If he does,
there's not enough time for his brain to process that information and
stop him from completing his trigger squeeze. The inevitable result is
one or more rounds striking the suspect in the back. That looks, in
turn, as if the officer has committed an illegal execution.
After several time-coded videos confirming the startling speed at which
gun- wielding suspects can turn, Dr. Lewinski walked the audience
through a much- publicized case from Los Angeles in which an officer
fatally shot an actor in the back during a loud-party call. In that
case, featured on 48 Hours, the lawyer for the dead man's family,
Johnny Cochran, said it was ridiculous for the officer to claim that
the suspect turned away at the critical moment before the bullets hit
him. He couldn't turn around and get his back to the officer in the
time it takes to shoot! Cochran insisted. But Dr. Lewinski, engaged by
LAPD, used his research to prove otherwise. Unable to shake his
evidence during a six-hour deposition a week before trial was
scheduled, Cochran's team backed away from taking their $5 million
lawsuit to court and accepted a nuisance settlement to drop the matter.
Extra Shots
To the media and other civilians, it looks like vindictive overkill
when an officer continues to shoot even though a suspect has been
neutralized. Dr. Lewinski's work shows that this is more likely to be a
matter of immutable reaction time. In studies with the Tempe (AZ) Police
Department, he established that once the average officer in the midst
of a committed, intense effort to save his life perceives a stimulus to
stop shooting, it takes him an absolute minimum of .3 to .6 seconds to
process that information and back off. That means he's likely to
unavoidably make an additional two to three trigger pulls, firing extra
bullets after he determines that the shooting should stop. In his
research, Lewinski said he has encountered only three officers who,
once they had made the mental commitment to shoot, were capable of
interrupting that action the instant they wanted to. One of these did
so in a Minnesota city by jerking his gun off his assailant; he still
reflexively continued his trigger pull and sent a bullet flying into
nearby rush-hour traffic!
Someone asked about traditional training that taught officers to fire
two rounds then stop and assess. In Dr. Lewinski's opinion, this was not
acceptable in real- life gunfights. How many rounds are going to bite
you while you're assessing Moreover, in the excitement and surprise of
a sudden attack, an officer may not even hit his assailant with the
first two rounds. He cited one case in which a California officer fired
five fast rounds-all at less than five feet-and missed a suspect before
finally connecting on the next four. It is safer for an officer to
shoot and assess while he continues to fire than to shoot THEN assess.
Shell Casing Placement
One of the latest findings at the Force Science Research Center relates
to where casings ejected from a semiautomatic handgun fall during a
gunfight. This can be important in determining where a shooter was
positioned when firing. Traditionally, forensic experts have argued
that there is a predictable pattern of shell casing placement related
strictly to the type of gun and type of ammunition involved. In other
words, it's strictly a matter of mechanics. But when an officer in the
Southwest went on trial for murder recently, Dr. Lewinski determined
otherwise. The prosecutor argued that the officer was lying about where
he was standing relative to a supposedly threatening suspect when the
officer fired his single, fatal shot. A firearms examiner agreed,
pointing out that a 9mm Glock, like the officer was using, ejects shell
casings to the right rear. The casing from the officer's pistol was
found to the front left of the position he claimed, which suggested he
must have been standing in a spot where the suspect could not have been
a threat. Dr. Lewinski suspected that certainty of shell-ejection
patterning might be valid in static range shooting but not necessarily
so in a dynamic, real- life confrontation. In real gunfights, officers
may shoot while twisting, while falling down, while running and so on.
In carefully controlled tests, he and a research team determined that
brass placement varied, depending upon how a gun is angled and canted
when fired. When the gun was hel d in the same way the officer
testified he held it, 80% of the ejected casings fell, not to the right
rear, but in the front left quadrant, confirming that the officer could
have been positioned where he claimed. This finding was admitted into
evidence and the officer was eventually found not guilty. If ballistics
people do not take into account an officer's grip, angle and movement
when shooting, they can put a cop 15 feet away and in a vastly
different position from where he actually pulled the trigger by relying
on traditional shell casing ejection patterns. How he holds the gun and
moves with it turns out to be the most important factors in where
ejected casings land, according to Dr. Lewinski.
Memory Problems
After a shooting, an officer is often ordered to Tell us everything that
happened from start to finish and don't leave anything out. If he says
he can't remember some things, he's perceived to be lying because
people don't forget really significant, emotional events. Dr. Lewinski
explained that It's true they don't forget, but they will not remember
everything. There is memory loss in 100% of shootings. Legitimately,
officers may not recall 90% of what happened and they do not remember
an event as continuous action. They tend to remember in
chunks-specific, brief memories, fragmentary images. He cited an
Arizona officer he recently defended successfully who shot and killed a
woman trying to run him down with her car. The officer remembered only
three elements of the entire episode: the determined look on the
suspect's face, an image of her front tire quickly turning toward him
and her upper body as a target. The current neurophysiological model of
how the human brain works is directly opposite to the legal model which
expects full and accurate recall. The more an officer is pressured to
remember information missing from his memory, the more likely he is to
fill in the blanks with what seems logical or right. Supplying con
nectors between fragmentary recollections serves to answer
investigators' questions and is also a way, psychologically, to gain
control over the situation. Unfortunately, it takes only a few
repetitions of you telling what you think occurred for it to become so
locked in as memory that you could pass a polygraph on it, Dr. Lewinski
explained. This can set an officer up for a perjury charge when
documented evidence contradicts his version of events. Dr. Lewinski
cited research by Dr. Alexis Artwohl, a former police psychologist from
Oregon and a member of the FSRC's National Advisory Board, identifying
perceptual and cognitive distortions officers frequently experience
during extreme encounters. These include time distortions (the event
seems to occur in fast or slow motion), sound distortions (diminished
or intensified), tunnel vision, distorted visual clarity, automatic
pilot phenomena (the officers firearm suddenly appeared in his hand and
on target with no conscious memor y of how it got there), dissociation
(the sense of observing the event as an out-of- body experience rather
than as a participant), temporary paralysis, even vivid
hallucinations-one officer saw his partner's head blown off during a
confrontation even though the partner was not actually harmed. Some of
these things help us marshal our resources and focus our response to
survive while a shooting is taking place. But they can cause problems
when we are attempting to explain our actions afterward, Dr. Lewinski
explained.
Interviewing Techniques
God knows what. On the other hand, time to sleep is very important to
memory consolidation. You can remember about 30% more piec es of data
after you sleep. As you gain some psychological distance from a
traumatic event, your legitimate memories tend to get better and
stronger. He has no doubts about what he terms the most significant
element of an officer's factual recall of circumstances surrounding a
shooting. That's a non-threatening walkthrough at the scene with an
under standing attorney and without criminal investigators present.
After all evidence and evidence markers have been removed, the officer
needs to go back and see the setting without being afraid that
something he blurts out will come back to haunt him. If you go back to
the scene, you can remember a lot more about what happened. Lewinski
recommended that investigators with the proper skills conduct a
cognitive behavioral interview, This is a sophisticated interview
technique based on principles of clinical psychology and requires
special training. It involves placing an officer back in his shooting
experience mentally and walking him through what he remembers
frame-by-frame while encouraging him to use all his senses to stir his
recollections. Traditionally, Dr. Lewinski explained, we've been
regarded as thinking creatures who feel. Really we are feeling
creatures who have come to think. That's why tapping into emotions and
senses can greatly enrich the memory bank. Ideally, an officer's
statement should be videotaped, not written. It's important to see the
officer's face- the sorrow, the tragedy, the fear. You won't have to
ask if the officer was afraid, which cops will often deny. You'll see
it. Don't jump to understanding too quickly. I find that I misunderstand
most when I think I've got it. Keep your mind open and ask more
questions about what the officer means rather than forming a judgment
based on what he says initially. Effective interviewing requires a
tricky sensitivity to get an officer to clarify as much as he can about
what he remembers rather than pressing him to fill gaps in areas where
his memory is doubtful or nonexistent. You get as much information as
you can by probing what he has retained versus putting expectations or
demands on him to answer all your questions.
Future Expectations
Among future studies, Lewinski said the Force Science Research Center
is planning to investigate an important phenomenon called inattentional
blindness. This involves an officer neglecting to see things in high
stress situations that are plainly and directly in his field of view
because his concentration is overwhelmingly dominated by other stimuli.
Also on tap are leading-edge experiments regarding peripheral vision,
complex visual cues, how expectations affect the brain and reaction
time, effective distractions for delaying assailants' attacks, how
officers read cultural and contextual indicators, how much training is
necessary to develop competency, and much more. The FSRC's work will
soon be significantly aided by the donation of a finely calibrate d,
customized, $100,000 interactive judgmental training simulator by IES
Interactive Training of Littleton, CO. For trainers, the big challenge
ahead is adjusting tactics instruction to accommodate the realities Dr.
Lewinski's research is disclosing. Up to now, he said, we have based
training on logic and persuasion-what seems to make sense and what
articulate instructors have convinced us is right. We need to base it
on scientific research because we now know that what's true is not
always what seems most logical. Dr. Lewinski ended his presentation
with a private session for homicide investigators in which they were
invited to ask him questions about current cases. One investigator
commented afterward that I shared details of an incident where an
officer told me he was absolutely sure he had shot an armed suspect in
the chest-but the suspect was shot in the back. The deputy couldn't
figure it out. I know that Dr. Lewinski's explanation of what probably
happened will go f ar in helping to ease that deputy's mind. Reflecting
upon Dr. Lewinski's research, an attendee who asked not to be
identified said, We pay out some large sums of money in
officer-involved shootings that mirror the kinds of difficult-to-
explain situations Lewinski spoke about. After learning about his
research, there is absolutely no doubt this will change. The next day,
Hartshorne reported that the department was buzzing with discussion of
Dr. Lewinski's findings.
Bill's presentation was the best training I've seen in 25 years at
Homicide Bureau, declared Sgt. Bumcrot who is reputed to have
investigated more officer-involved shootings than any other detective
in the country. I sat in awe of his findings. We've already begun to
change some policies because of them. Dr. Lewinski can be contacted at
the Force Science Research
Center's web- site:
www.forcescience.com
