Is the Psychology of Deadly Force Ready for the Courts?
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Sorry to have to generalize here but I've had a lot of exposure to police over my life as a volunteer EMT and an ex wife who's department was part of a police department. I have a lot of friends who are police officers.
They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.
Of course I have no idea if that's a selected behavior or something they learn during their time as police officers. I can certainly see how it's a beneficial behavior from a stress standpoint but we can see how it turns out with respect to these deadly force encounters.
I have a lot of respect for law enforcement but also personal knowledge enough that their decision making strategies are not like mine.
Now, of course, this is typically the meat of the matter when interacting with police, but I'm pointing out that outside of this space, in my experience, they did not presume more knowledge than your average person.
I’ve witnessed a similar phenomenon on HN, where we have no shortage of computer programmers who believe they have solutions for every problem in economics, medicine, politics, and so on. So it must be some sort of generalizable phenomenon.
The rules are already very different for cops in the current state of affairs. They already have every advantage and already face extremely low odds of being charged. As the article mentions, only 96 officers have been charged since 2005, which is ridiculous. We've seen a lot of absurd cases that were major news where officers weren't even charged. Sure, I would bet that the overwhelming majority are totally legitimate. But I also think there are way too many that go un-charged.
And I'd bet my life (no pun intended) that this same logic will definitely not apply to the average citizen if they shoot another citizen. And I'd bet my child's life that this logic would never, ever, ever be used in defense of a citizen if they had the gall to shoot (gasp) a police officer.
We the people bear some responsibility for this situation of officer shootings. Juries routinely either fail to indict in the grand jury or acquit if it actually goes to trial far too often. And these jurors themselves do not apply the same standards that would apply to the rest of us.
Accounting for population difference, on a per capita basis US police officers shoot citizens at a rate 37 times more frequently than the UK. Now, you can either choose to believe that the US has 37 times more serious violent crime that would justify that level of violence by cops. Or you can choose to believe there is a problem with US the way US police go about their business.
The UK is not a good example, since it is one of the few countries where most cops don't have guns.
This means that the average risk / threat an officer may encounter in otherwise routine situations are quite different than the UK, which has very strict firearms policies, since they decided to ban almost all firearms in 1988 / 1997.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/there...
In the last five years, between the two of them: someone tried to run the officer over with a truck in a dark alley, a man pointed a shotgun at the officer's head from a few feet away (while carrying three guns and 400 rounds of ammo, and having previously fired several rounds through a house wall), a fleeing criminal pulled to the side of the road and opened fire at the officer, and while responding to an officer who had been shot in the woods, were ambushed by the suspect, who killed the officer next to him, and sent my acquaintance to the hospital for a month.
And I don't even live in a high crime area of country!
But this is the important anecdote: https://www.wrdw.com/content/news/Diabetic-man-has-episode-t...
A diabetic man became hypoglycemic and confused, he led the police on a car chase and was then manhandled by two officers after he crashed into a ditch. He would like changes in protocol and can only pussyfoot around the real issue, police brutality, because everyone agrees that he deserved a beating. Or something. As is usual, there is nothing to see here, district attorney sides with the cops.
Whatever anecdotes one has, citizens are more at risk from the police than the other way round.
Also, with 100+ million guns in the US, violent crime overall is down substantially over the last several decades. We're at 40 year lows in violent crime. This includes violence against officers. More interestingly, violence of police against citizens is at 40 years highs. All while gun sales have soared over the same period.
I agree unarmed police may be a stretch, but countries like Switzerland (where every home has a gun) or Estonia (which has CCW laws similar to some US states) don't see the same level of police shootings even with armed police.
They also don't enforce every little law with force. They'll often just warn people to not smoke/drink in public, have people shake hands after a small bar fight with no injuries, and generally focus on restoring order rather than locking people up. If someone drives off, they run the plates or use CCTV, dashcam footage, or helicopters to track the driver rather than engage in dangerous chases.
Their entire model is "policing by consent"[1] and an American cop would eat their service revolver if they were told they had to approach a yelling homeless man and say "Hi there, is something bothering you? Can we connect you with a social worker?" rather than demand compliance then tase them.
I suspect if you picked Germany or Australia or any of the other "normal" countries where cops do have guns, the stats would look more like the UK than the US. Partly because they too have better procedures.
(Last time I ran the numbers, 70s Belfast was overall less dangerous than 80s Detroit, but someone else can do this one)
The big difference is that the average citizen has the ability/expectation to flee dangerous situations. For example, if I saw a crazy guy with a knife, I call the police but otherwise make sure I stay far away. In situations where the average citizen doesn’t have that expectation (for example in their own home) US law also generally gives them the benefit of the doubt regarding deadly force against a home invader. Now as a society , if we had police who avoided dangerous situations at all cost, it would not be very helpful. We as a society need people who are willing to intervene in dangerous situations, and so as a society we have in the past given them the benefit of the doubt regarding how they deal with what they perceive as immediate dangers to their lives.
If a police officer or department develops a reputation of running from danger, there are going to be at least societal consequences for them.
Yes, I admit that this is snarky, but it is also uncomfortably true. There is good evidence that things said by psychology that also fit common sense are probably true. However things said by psychology research studies have a good chance of being false. And things concluded by individual psychologists upon a chain of research based on those studies should be viewed with significant skepticism.
This will change when psychology can get from their current 50% replication rate (on a good day) to having a significant body of established research that we have good reason to believe is about 90% likely to be replicable. Until then I'd advise against placing too much trust in anything that it says which you can't find independent reason to believe.
Once that body of reasonably certain psychological observations is established and starts growing, it will be possible to make some statements about psychology with a high degree of confidence. But whether that coalesces into a paradigm about how to understand people that turns it into a recognizable science is another story.
Who knows what it means when I answer the question "How depressed am I" with 5?
Paraphrasing Richard Feymann, he called social science a pseudoscience until proven otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
And after all these years since his interview, we are still waiting. This is one of the reasons why some have placed their hopes on neuroscience being the science of the brain and mind.
Becoming a police officer is akin to stating: "I will approach confrontations level-headed and try to deescalate" and I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well.
Training should equip officers for the not-uncommon case when a suspect has a knife but is otherwise nonthreatening.
A knife is a deadly weapon. Even a non-deadly strike from a knife means a loss of organs (lung puncture, liver intrusion), limbs, facial tissue, eyes, etc. If someone is threatening with a knife (attacking cop cars, etc), especially if they are not acting entirely sanely, they are an active life-or-death threat and yes, you might absolutely be walking into the moments before your death.
Even if you have a gun, you have at best a few heartbeats to make a judgement call if they decide to lunge for you. Especially if your firearm is in it's holster, in the time it takes for an attacker to lunge at you, you need to:
1. Establish a positive grip on the firearm
2. Defeat any safety measures on the holster (snaps, buttons, interlocks)
3. Clear the holster with a duty sized firearm
4. Draw firearm to combat position
5. Secure off hand grip to firearm
6. Obtain sight picture
7. Check target and backstop
8. Squeeze trigger
The person who intends to kill you meanwhile needs to do the following:
1. Lunge forward with knife angled outwards
If it's available in your area, I recommend taking a use-of-force seminar and seeing how well you do with the above kind of scenario.
Yes, it'd be great if cops could bear hug everyone into submission, but that's not the reality of the situation.
Carrying the gun knowing that stress severe impairs your perception and executive function means negligently putting public in danger akin to drunk driving.
Being a supervisor where work involving heavy equipment is happening is can be more dangerous because you're not as familiar with all the heavy equipment around you and depending on how much of an ass you are or aren't your team might not be comfortable speaking up when you do dumb things. It definitely depends on the supervisor though.
That said, the numbers don't lie. Policing is not nearly as dangerous as it is made out to be.
You would be mistaken in that assumption. Police in the US receive a fraction of the training provided to their counterparts in Germany and the UK. This is across the board, all types of training. They receive even less deescalation training, and in fact sometimes receive the exact opposite (training akin to "police as warrior").
No, of course not. The American use of deadly force by police is far in excess of other first-world countries, and it has become a deadly part of the culture war. Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.
That's a generalization. Certain areas of operation had different rules of engagement, which also changed over time. As a base though, if you could prove hostile intent, you were cleared for the use of deadly force.
And therein lies the problem. There's a separate set of (lower) standards applied to the very people who are trained for this sort of thing and who are allegedly held to a higher standard.
If the totality of the circumstances show that a reasonable person would believe that they had a gun and there was a threat to your life, then I would expect you not to have serious consequences in the form of criminal penalties.
Police officers have guns, and I suspect some minorities might reasonably fear for their lives when confronted by the police... I'm sure the bar for 'reasonable' fear is much higher for civilians.
A DA can also make cases against police, it's just that they don't think a reasonable case can be made and that they could win. Just as you said. Do you think DAs bring every self-defense case to court?
I don't know how Mr Miller gets to be an expert witness but it seems to me that Law Enforcement pays him quite well to be in the business of being a witness...