American Police are not systematically engaged in racially biased shootings. There is no epidemic of police shooting unarmed citizens, of any race. And, errors in police deadly force decision making (cases in which police shoot unarmed, non-attacking citizens) occur at a rate of about one in a million. And realistically, it’s probably much lower than...Read More
A federal appellate court has ruled that a sheriff’s deputy was justified in shooting dead the driver of a car heading toward him as a weapon, even though the deputy deliberately stepped into the vehicle’s path and stayed there when he had the opportunity to move aside. The 10th circuit Court of Appeals said the...Read More
Probably no single force event raises more questions, inflames more protests, and generates more misperceptions than the police killing of an unarmed suspect. Now, thanks to a new 437-page study published in book form, we know more about the circumstances that drive these fateful encounters and the lessons for training and street performance to be...Read More
Theories abound about how best to tell if a suspect is lying to you, short of hooking him up to a polygraph. But based on recently reported experiments, a Force Science advisor thinks one of the best ways to surface cues to possible deception may be simply to have the subject tell his or her...Read More
A new study of suicide by cop that is unprecedented in its breadth, depth, and detail reveals that these encounters are “shockingly” on the rise, explains specific ways that they differ from “regular” OISs, and establishes emphatically that they create exceptional threats to civilian bystanders, responding officers, and the subjects themselves. “The single most important...Read More
Part 2 of a 2-part series [EDITOR’S NOTE: In Transmission No. 68, sent on 3/26/07, we explored dangerous myths about police use of force that movies, TV, and video games have brainwashed civilians and some LEOs into believing. Our report quoted a provocative article by Det. Cmdr. Jeffry Johnson of the Long Beach (CA) PD,...Read More
An important new study examines officer-involved shootings from a different perspective, focusing not on what police bring to these encounters but on certain behavioral characteristics of the people they most often use deadly force against. The research, based on the shooting experiences of one large sheriff’s department in California, shows that subjects who are under...Read More
A New York state senator has introduced legislation that he says would force police officers using deadly force to try to shoot violent suspects in the arms or legs to stop them. His proposed law also requires that officers stop firing at an attacker as soon as a threat is neutralized, or face felony charges...Read More
Three new inventions have been created to advance research projects at the Force Science Research Center, which ultimately will help trainers and officers to improve street performance and save lives. Two of these were designed by Dr. Bill Hudson, deputy director of FSRC and chairman of the Computer and Electrical Engineering Dept. at Minnesota State...Read More
Ideas for research projects can germinate from the least likely moments, as when a student asked Firearms Trainer Tom Aveni if he’d ever visited the ACLU’s website. He hadn’t (“Why would I even want to go there?”), but out of curiosity he did. There in a section dedicated to “police abuse” he read a statistic...Read More