On any given fall Saturday, Daniel Richard may be found officiating in one of fourteen historic Big Ten football stadiums. Ranging from Piscataway, New Jersey, to Lincoln, Nebraska, Daniel, a Head Line Judge, joins a team of eight officials charged with safeguarding the integrity of each game. To perform at this level, these officials must...Read More
(Editor’s note 3/28/2022: This article was edited to acknowledge the competing approaches to video review during use of force investigations, update citations, and clarify the IACP’s 2014 model policy language and position paper. Force Science recognizes that the memory-enhancing value of watching videos must be balanced against the risk of memory corruption and the need...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
In 2013, Force Science News shared the story of a Grover Beach (CA) police officer who was fired after attempting to use his Taser on a kidnapping suspect. After forcing entry into a garage, officers found the man sitting in a car with the baby in his arms. With only the light from his Taser...Read More
The problem of officers failing to activate recording equipment before or during a force encounter can be a thorny one with multiple potentially negative consequences. But a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit has tried to push the issue to a new and radical extreme. The incident in question began in the snowy, predawn hours of...Read More
What if there was a social media page where police agencies could post video from body cams, along with detailed explanations of what’s happening in the footage? What if police trainers and other law enforcement experts could engage with curious civilians in a rational and reasonable dialogue about videos posted to social media? Imagine the...Read More
A favored tactic of plaintiffs’ attorneys in civil suits is to cast doubt on an officer’s credibility by emphasizing errors in the officer’s recall of details about the critical incident at issue. Now a major new study by a Force Science research team provides unequivocal scientific support for the fact that erroneous memories of life-threatening...Read More
Part 1 of a 2-part report Police Atty. Scott Wood was absorbed in his son’s high school football game that Friday night, so he missed the two calls to his cell phone until half time. Then he listened to the voice mails that hurled him into one of the nation’s most explosive officer-involved shootings. A...Read More
Getting maximum value from video of a controversial use-of-force encounter may require more than just viewing raw footage as it comes from the camera. In fact, three extra steps are often the keys that allow investigators and other interested parties to unlock critical secrets “hidden” in recordings that may not be evident at first glance,...Read More
An officer’s job termination, based largely on discrepancies between his description of a physical encounter and what a Taser camera recorded, has been reversed by a California judge, thanks to the efforts of an attorney and an expert witness with Force Science credentials. Ofcr. Santino “Sonny” Lopez of the Grover Beach (CA) PD, the president...Read More
