If you have read the San Francisco Police Crisis Intervention Team 2020 Police Commission Report, you would be forgiven for thinking there was a misprint. Of the nearly 50,000 annual crisis-related calls for service, the San Francisco Police used force only 51 times. That’s a use of force rate of 00.1%. Even with 2800 people...Read More
Enter the police profession and risk higher divorce rates, alcoholism, suicide, PTSD, and early death. At least that’s what they told us at the academy. I’m not convinced this is actually the case, but it is easy to believe when we watch fellow officers gain weight, lose health, drink more, sleep less, increase cynicism, and...Read More
The Force Science Institute has completed three new studies on the speed and movements associated with armed assaults. Dr. Bill Lewinski explained: “The goal of our research was to obtain highly accurate measurements to further explore the findings of our earlier studies. Where we once measured movement speeds in the hundredths of a second, we...Read More
Editor’s Note: Studying performance errors in policing can be difficult for researchers who cannot ethically replicate the dangerous conditions present in lethal force encounters. To overcome this limitation, researchers routinely consider evidence derived from other professions and industries (e.g., aerospace (Airbus), aeronautics (NASA), pharmaceutical, occupational safety and health, medical, industrial engineering, and transportation). Recent events...Read More
To participate in police-reform discussions, it’s helpful to appreciate the multiple incentives driving the movement. Some believe that the police are members of a racist system and that violent criminals are merely responding to years of systemic oppression. Others believe that the police provoke violence or simply don’t do enough to avoid it. In either...Read More
Where civic leaders embrace “progressive reforms,” such as “equity,” “social justice,” and the “dismantling of systemic racism,” it is no longer obvious that the training, education, and experience of police officers will play a central role.Read More
Ideally, police reform will involve the careful translation of research (knowledge) into practice. The American Society of Evidence-Based Policing recently made this case in Process for Translating Research to Practice, citing the requirement for collaboration between researchers and police practitioners.1 It’s this process that ensures reform proposals are not the product of untested ideas, intuition,...Read More
Editor’s NoteWhen investigators contacted the Force Science Institute (FSI) to consult on the Daniel Holtslander case, Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of FSI, identified inconsistencies between the suspect’s version of the assault and the available forensic evidence. Notably, the position that the suspect claimed to have been in during the assault (lying face up in...Read More
Officers know that “hands kill” and that they should “watch the hands.” These well-founded concerns are what prompt demands for suspects to “show me your hands!” The irony is that an order to “show me your hands” or “take your hands out of your pockets” may invite the same movement from a compliant suspect as...Read More
In our last article, Honest But Not Accurate, we rejected the idea that an officer’s memory was the equivalent of a video recorder. We cautioned that inconsistencies between an officer’s memory and a video recording could result from human performance factors and are not necessarily evidence of intentional deception. But even in cases without video...Read More
