An inconvenient truth
Use of force policies must be short, simple and trained into the DNA of officers. Consider this.
Sergeant Babysitter has been terrific at talking about everything under the sun but your shooting. Unfortunately, you can think of nothing else. The friendly chatter is actually distracting. You know that in too short of a time you will be talking to an investigator and into a digital recorder in great detail about what happened. The problem is, in all honesty, you don’t know for sure exactly what did happen.
You have been trying to put it together in your mind, but it is difficult. While still in a state of shock, you were segregated from your fellow officers and spirited away from the scene by Sergeant Babysitter. You looked back out the window as he drove you away, and you could see a surprising amount of blood flow from the suspect’s head, its red color in sharp contrast to the pale sidewalk cement. The flashing lights from the RA gave a surreal glow to the blood. You could tell by the unhurried actions of the ambulance crew that the suspect had already expired.
Now you sit in the captain’s office with Sergeant Babysitter per LAPD officer-involved shooting protocol awaiting the Force Investigation Division investigators. Your mind is reeling trying to understand the events of the incident and put them in perspective.
You remember that it had started out as a traffic stop. What was the violation? Somehow you cannot remember. Does it matter? As you approached the car, the suspect looked directly at you and then hit the gas pedal and sped off. You ran back to your car, jumped in just ahead of your partner, and sped after him. Your partner had just picked up the radio mic to go in pursuit when you rounded a corner just in time to see the suspect crash into another vehicle in the intersection.
You do not remember seeing the suspect exit the wreckage, but you have a clear mental picture of him running south between the houses. Then you are running after him. Did you go Code 6? Did your partner call an ambulance? You are struggling to remember.
The foot pursuit was fast, but short. You remember mental images of the suspect scaling a fence. You remember how he hit the ground on the other side awkwardly. He seemed to be holding something in his waistband. You remember the feel of the cold steel of the fence on your hands as you go over. You remember the jar of your feet as you hit the ground. You remember the sound of your heavy breathing. You remember flashes again of the suspect running down an alleyway. You can remember the feel of your gun in your hand, but you have no memory of drawing it from your holster.
Then things really get confusing. You have strong memories in freeze-frame. The suspect turned toward you with a strange expression on his face. His hand melded against his waistband. The flash of something shiny. The strangely muffled sound of shots. Slow-motion impressions of the suspect falling. A strange out-of-body feeling. The shouts of your partner breaking through into your consciousness. De-cock! De-cock! A jumble of radio broadcasts. Other officers arriving. Handcuffing. The appearance of Sergeant Babysitter. The drive back to the station that seemed to last forever.
You struggle to put it together. Sergeant Babysitter is watching you closely. He is truly concerned about your welfare. It is hard to tell that you are in custody and not free to leave. You know that your future rides on the investigation that follows. Why did you shoot? That will be the question. Why did you shoot? The cold honest answer is that you do not know. You cannot remember making the decision to shoot.
The great false premise
When the investigation starts, it will focus on the question of why the shooting officer fired his or her weapon. The unspoken premise is that the firing of the weapon was a conscious, deliberate decision. All of the forensics, witness statements, scene diagrams, ballistics, autopsies, measurements, photographs and tactical expertise will focus on whether the shooting (i.e., decision to shoot) was justified.
The Department will, within the next few months following the shooting, arrive at an official opinion as to whether the shooting was justified, and discipline the officer, up to and including termination, if it finds insufficient reasons for the officer to shoot.
The District Attorney will examine the facts surrounding the shooting and decide whether or not to file criminal charges against the officer. If it finds insufficient reasons for the officer to shoot, jail for the officer is a distinct possibility.
There will probably be a lawsuit and a jury will receive evidence on the circumstances of the shooting, and they will be tasked with deciding if the officer committed a tort when the officer fired at the suspect. And if the jury finds guilt, the City, and possibly the officer, will pay big bucks.
In short, all of society, from your employer to a jury of your peers, will judge you on the premise that you made a conscious decision to shoot the suspect. A premise that is all too often false. All of science, including fingerprinting, blood-spatter analysis, forensics, physics, ballistics and countless other scientific techniques will be consulted to judge you. Only one scientific field will be completely ignored, and that is psychology.
Psychologists have studied the brain under stress and have understood how it reacts for years. However, the medical truth is inconvenient. It is inconvenient because it frustrates those who want to attach blame to the officer. Whether it is the Department, the District Attorney, the plaintiff’s attorney, or all those special interest folks out there that grease their skids with police abuse rhetoric. But inconvenient, or not, it is the truth. Proven medical truth.
The reason our officer in the above fictitious scenario cannot remember making a conscious decision to shoot is because he did not make any decision at all. And that truly is inconvenient.
Anatomy 101
You consciously decide how fast to walk. You do not consciously decide how fast your heart beats. The autonomic nervous system handles this chore. Unless you are some kind of Zen master, you have no conscious control of the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomicnervous system is divided into two functional halves: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. These are basically on/off switches to your bodily functions.The autonomic nervous system is where your “fight or flight” system lives. The autonomic nervous system swings into action whenever the brain perceives a threat to survival, resulting in an immediate discharge of stress hormones, which are designed to prepare the body for “fight or flight.” This activation is automatic and virtually uncontrollable.
The response to the threat never reaches the conscious brain. Nonessential bodily functions are immediately shut down and vital bodily functions necessary for survival receive a large dose of chemicals designed to throw them into overdrive. In other words, a big adrenaline dump.
An individual’s reaction is largely dependent on individual training. A trained officer with access to a gun, when under the influence of the autonomic nervous system, will involuntarily react to stimuli interpreted by the brain as life-threatening by shooting at the source of the threat. It will not be a conscious decision to shoot. It will not be a conscious weighing of the tenets of Department policy. It will not be a mulling over of the ethical considerations of using deadly force. It will simply be an involuntary reaction dictated by the autonomic nervous system. End of story.
To make matters worse, the very chemical dump that contributes to survivability of the body contributes paradoxically to the death of the officer’s career or personal freedom. Vision is affected by these chemicals, resulting in tunnel vision. Hearing is distorted. Sensory overload frustrates long-term memory. Freeze-framing one image causes the brain to miss other images. Time distortion is common. All of these distortions fill the officer’s subsequent taped interview with inaccuracies and conflicts. These inaccuracies and conflicts will be exaggerated and trumpeted by those with an agenda, to show that the officer is lying and covering up his or her true motives for needlessly shooting this poor suspect who is now portrayed as obviously in the act of surrendering and on the brink of changing his criminal ways.
From a medical standpoint, if one wants an accurate interview concerning the facts of a high stress use of force, the worst thing you can do is subject the officer to a detailed, digital recorded interview of what occurred before the brain has had a chance (through a night’s sleep) to process the information received in the sensory overload environment of the fight or flight response.
The LAPD protocol manages to do everything wrong from the medical point of view. The officer is segregated, held for hours and extensively interviewed even if exhausted by the adrenaline dump and lack of sleep. Then the conflicts in the officer’s statement are highlighted in the final report, which is subsequently made available through subpoena, or otherwise, to whomever wants to attack the officer’s actions.
And when the officer is attacked, the great false premise will be in the front ranks. Everything will be analyzed on the basis of the validity of the “decision” to fire the weapon. The fact that there was no decision will be ignored – ignored to the ultimate demise of the officer’s career, or even freedom.
Legal defense 101
In law school, you will come across this quote: “When the law is against you, attack the facts. When the facts are against you, attack the law. When the law and the facts are against you, attack the cop.”
When involved in a serious use of force, the LAPD protocol puts you at every disadvantage to repel the “attack the cop” section of the above quote. It is up to you to countermand as much of the disadvantage as possible. Get experienced representation. Do not waive any of your rights. Do not make any voluntary statements. Think before you speak. In other words, hear warning bells. Take use of force investigations seriously, the career you save may be your own.
Involuntary reaction or moral decision?
This psychological reaction to stress is mainstream medical knowledge. The LAPD protocol needs to be changed to reflect the realities of obtaining accurate information retrieval from officers who have gone through the terror of life-threatening situations.
The blame needs to be shifted from the officer, whose system has been triggered into survival mode, to the suspect whose actions have caused the officer’s system to switch to survival mode. In other words, if a suspect wants to run, or fight, instead of complying with an officer’s lawful order, the suspect runs the risk that he might trigger the officer’s autonomic nervous system and be shot. There is a decision that was consciously made in our scenario. It was the conscious decision the suspect made to flee on contact from the officer. Maybe that is the decision society should concern itself with, not the officer’s psychological involuntary response.
Use of Force Policy should be constructed around the realities the officers on the street face every day and the science that exists on high-stress human reactions, not on the media-driven political tsunami created by anti-police activists, armchair generals, think tanks, talking heads and those gifted with 20/20 hindsight. Use of Force Policy must be short, simple and trained into being second nature. Anything else sets an officer up for failure.
Be legally careful out there.
