“Engineering Resilience” Into Split-Second Shoot/No Shoot Decisions: The Effect of Muzzle-Position

2020 ◽  
pp. 109861112096068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Taylor

The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility of engineering resilience into the split-second decision environment police officers face during potential deadly force encounters. Using a randomized controlled experiment that incorporated a police firearms training simulator and 313 active law enforcement officers, this study examined the effects of muzzle-position – where an officer points their weapon – on both officer response time to legitimate threats and the likelihood for misdiagnosis shooting errors when no threat was present. The results demonstrate that officers can significantly improve shoot/no-shoot decision-making without sacrificing a significant amount of time by taking a lower muzzle-position when they are dealing with an ambiguously armed person – a person whose hands are not visible.

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodger E. Broomé

Abstract Police officers must be able to make an accurate appraisal of a lethal encounter and respond with appropriate force to mitigate the threat to their own lives and to the lives of others. Contemporary police deadly force training places the cadet in mock lethal encounters, which are designed to simulate those occurring in the real lives of law enforcement officers. This Reality Base Training (RBT) is designed to provide cadets with experiences that require their reactions to be within the law, policies and procedures, and ethics while undergoing a very stressful, emotional, and physically dynamic situation (Artwohl & Christensen, 1997; Blum, 2000; Grossman, 1996; Miller, 2008; Murray, 2006). Three police cadets provided written accounts of their deadly force training experiences in the RBT format. The descriptive phenomenological psychological method was used to analyze the data and to synthesize a general psychological structure of their experiences. The results reveal the perceptions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors reflecting the role of consciousness and psychological subjectivity in the participants’ understandings and decision-making in the simulated situations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Taylor

Police shootings have become one of the most “visible and controversial” aspects of the criminal justice system . Yet, very little empirical effort has been devoted to understanding the underlying systemic vulnerabilities that likely contribute to these tragic outcomes. Using a randomized controlled experiment that incorporated a police firearms simulator and 306 active law enforcement officers, this study examined the effects of dispatch priming on an officer’s decision to use deadly force. The findings suggest that officers rely heavily on dispatched information in making the decision to pull the trigger when confronted with an ambiguously armed subject in a simulated environment. When the dispatched information was erroneous, it contributed to a significant increase in shooting errors. The results contribute to a broader understanding of officer decision-making within the context of police shootings and introduce the theoretical concepts of cognitive heuristics and human error to the research on police use of deadly force.


Author(s):  
Wendi Pollock ◽  
Natalia D Tapia ◽  
Deborah Sibila

The death of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 again left people asking why U.S. police officers so commonly resort to the use of deadly force when interacting with Black individuals. The current article proposes that media, combined with cultivation theory and social cognition concepts may create implicit biases that are potential contributors to this problem. Police officers have a greater vulnerability to these biases because intake of crime-related media positively predicts their interest in selecting law enforcement as a career. Other predictors of an interest in working in law enforcement, and implications of these findings, are discussed.


Author(s):  
Andrey Koblenkov

The article is devoted to the analysis of the legal consequences of incompetent actions of police officers in the use of firearms. The author assesses the circumstances and consequences of the use of firearms by law enforcement officers against offenders.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Виктория Владимировна Зорина

Статья посвящена проблеме владения сотрудниками полиции нормами современного русского литературного языка. Результаты выполнения задания, направленного на применение правил склонения фамилий (морфологические нормы), показали, что сотрудники правоохранительных органов-обучающиеся факультета профессиональной подготовки испытывают определенные затруднения. Полученные данные возможно учитывать при планировании и отборе упражнений для занятий по дисциплине «Русский язык в деловой документации. Культура речи». The article is devoted to the problem of police officers ' proficiency in the norms of the modern Russian literary language, in particular morphological ones. The results of the task aimed at applying the rules of declension of surnames showed that law enforcement officers-students of the faculty of vocational training experience certain difficulties. The obtained data can be taken into account when planning and selecting tasks for classes in the discipline " Russian in business documentation. Culture of speech".


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Shjarback ◽  
Edward R. Maguire

This study tests whether violence directed toward American law enforcement has increased in the wake of events in Ferguson, Missouri, in summer 2014. Using monthly data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) reports (2010–2016), we carried out time-series analyses to examine trends in nonfatal assaults on police officers in a sample of 4,921 agencies. Neither injurious nor noninjurious assaults on officers increased following Michael Brown’s death in August 2014. The findings are robust across a variety of model specifications and estimation techniques, providing little evidence of a “War on Cops” through 2016. The study adds empirical rigor to an ongoing national debate based largely on speculation/anecdotes. The impact and potential consequences of the current climate for officers’ perceptions of safety/risk are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan E Kruis ◽  
Jaeyong Choi ◽  
Richard H Donohue

Researchers have suggested that provider-based stigma of substance use disorders is one barrier to fighting the opioid epidemic. Yet, to date, virtually no study has examined provider-based stigma among law enforcement officers who are on the front line of the opioid crisis. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by assessing provider-based stigma toward opioid-using persons among a sample of 208 police officers working for departments located in the Northeastern Region of the United States. Results show that officers hold relatively high levels of stigma toward this vulnerable population, as measured by perceptions of dangerousness, blame, and social distance; however, comparatively, officers hold less fatalistic views toward this group of persons. Additionally, our multivariable analyses indicated that officer rank, support for the disease model of addiction, and beliefs about the demographic characteristics of a substance-using person are significantly associated with provider-based stigma among officers. Potential policy implications are discussed within.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 020120
Author(s):  
Vitaliy Omelyanovich

Background Psychological and psychiatric support of work activity of law enforcement officers is an inalienable component of the effective and professional operation of the system of internal affairs bodies. Improvement of this work is impossible without increasing the effectiveness of the psychological selection of candidates for work. Method Methods of research were "Freiburg personality inventory" (FPI) - Option «B», «Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory» – MMPI. The study group included 158 respondents: 79,1 % (125 people) of men and 20,9% (33 people) of women. To analyze the results obtained, we used the methods of descriptive statistics, frequency analysis, and Kendell rank correlation. Results Particular attention should be paid to the fact that while comparing the scales of the diagnostic scales of the FPI and MMPI technique, it would be logical to expect the presence of correlations between the scales similar in their diagnostic orientation to such correlation links neither within the male or female gender it was not found (τ-b ≤0,17;p ≥0,06). This unexpected fact, as well as the lack of systematic and gender-wide universality of the revealed correlation links between the indicators of the FPI and MMPI methods, point to a rather serious content heterogeneity of these psychological tests. Conclusion The results of the analysis do not provide an opportunity to justify the FPI test for wide use in practical activities for the professional selection of law enforcement officers.


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