The Informant

For his 1991 book Homicide: A year on the killing streets, author David Simon (of the Wire fame) spent a year shadowing a shift of homicide detectives, who were occasionally called upon to investigate shootings by police officers. In this passage, he describes an officer-involved shooting of an unarmed man by Detective Scotty McCown in Baltimore, Maryland:

“A heavily armed nation prone to violence finds it only reasonable to give law officers weapons and the authority to use them. In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with .38-caliber Smith & Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academic firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer’s judgement, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time. It is a lie. It is a lie the police department tolerates because to do otherwise would shatter the myth of infallibility on which rests its authority for lethal force. And it is a lie that the public demands, because to do otherwise would expose a terrifying ambiguity.”

That ambiguity is essentially the difference between a “justified” police shooting and an unquestionably “good” one. An officer’s use of force, including lethal force, is considered “justified” if it complies with the standard set forth in a Supreme Court case called Graham v. Connor. Meaning it must be “objectively reasonable”–if an officer felt threatened, did they respond in a reasonable manner? A “justified shooting” in other words, may very well not be the result of exemplary police work–it may be a “good shooting,” it may be a “bad shooting,” but likely, it falls somewhere in between. Moreover, Simon indicates, a person most people would consider a “good officer” might commit a “bad shooting” and vice versa.

According to Sergeant Michael Nevin, who investigates police shootings for the San Francisco Police Department, a major factor in determining whether an officer is likely to use force is not necessarily in their personality or personal biases. It’s how they respond to stress. How they respond to a bad situation, whether real or perceived, in which they or a member of the public could be harmed. Which is why many police departments have embraced a use-of-force curriculum based on inoculating police officers to stress. San Francisco’s is no exception: cadets undergo hours of training in a “simulator”–essentially a movie screen that depicts various scenarios. Cadets are armed with batons, an empty pepper spray canister, and unloaded guns that electronically track where and when they’re shot.

In any situation, an officer has a very small time frame to come to an understanding of what’s happening and make a decision as to what to do. According to Nevin, in a situation that awakens fear–like one where it’s dark, there’s shouting, and someone appears to have a metal object in their hand–a person’s sympathetic nervous system takes over. This is the part of the brain that prepares a person for a violent encounter–the heart rate speeds up and blood goes to the muscles. A sort of tunnel vision also kicks in, narrowing the officer’s field of vision and preventing him or her from seeing things and remembering things that might be important.

So say a suspect, 21 feet away, is coming towards an officer, yelling and holding something that the officer takes in as a knife, at an accelerating speed. The officer has somewhere between 1.5 seconds (if the person is moving fast) to 5 seconds (if they’re walking at a leisurely pace) before the person reaches him or her. According to Nevin, it takes about 1.7 seconds for a police officer to unholster and shoot. By the time an officer does fire a round, the suspect may have already dropped the object they were holding, and have their hands in the air. If the officer shot, was it a justified shooting? It depends on the officer’s perception at the time–if the officer thought he or she was under attack and acted in accordance, then likely it was justified.

Was it a “good” shooting? Totally different question, and one that doesn’t always have an answer.

From their perspective, law enforcement and researchers who work with law enforcement are a bit baffled that the general public doesn’t seem to understand how difficult it is to make the objectively right decision in a high-stress situation, if such a decision even exists. Take this 2008 study by researchers at Cal State-Fresno, where forensic psychologists put members of the general public through use-of-force simulators similar to the one SFPD uses. Civilians were quickly shown photographs of suspects in various environments, holding various objects, and told to press a button if they felt the need to use force:

“The majority, of civilian respondents demonstrated very low capacity for distinguishing weapons from innocuous objects in context, even under ideal viewing conditions. However, respondents were in general personally willing to fire on what appeared to be an armed perpetrator, even if that “perpetrator” held a power tool rather than an actual weapon. In contrast, the vast majority of respondents was unwilling to accept a shooting response to the same situations on the part of police, even when the situations in question were rated by experienced police officers as absolutely requiring a shooting response to prevent loss of life.”

Another element in the equation is the officer’s expectation of being threatened–their assumption that a suspect has a weapon or wants to attack them. A 2005 paper by the Police Policy Studies Council, talks about the increasing use of fear as a tactic in police training to alert police to their own vulnerability. The shift, the paper says, came after the 1970 slaying of four California Highway Patrol officers in Newhall, who had not been sufficiently prepared when two men started shooting at them:

“Many of the changes in mindset and methodology that transpired in the years following Newhall were positive, and long overdue. However, perhaps as an outgrowth of watching so many reenactments of how police were being slain, fear had become a pervasive and compelling training and marketing tool. By the late 1980s and 1990s, it appeared as though the use of fear as a motivational tool was instilling paranoia in many officers. This created a training paradox. Was there a way in which police trainers could somehow regulate the level of fear being generated by ‘realistic training’ so as not to transform officers into ‘fear biters.’”

Stress inoculation, it seems, straddles those impulses to variously scare and calm new recruits: officers will encounter situations where their lives are in danger, where they’ll feel fear, their hearts will speed up, their vision will narrow. But if they’ve seen the situation before, even in a simulated environment, maybe they’ll be able to override those physical reactions to a degree, maintain their calm, and maintain a clearer vision of the situation and whether force is strictly necessary.

The science behind stress inoculation serves as an explainer of sorts for why certain things happen: why a suspect may have been shot in the back by a police officer; why a video camera captured a suspect apparently putting their hands in the air as they were shot.

So the real question for policy makers to consider is, does the move toward this sort of training indicate that police departments have accepted that officers are only human, that bad decisions happen and will happen and the only thing we can do is reduce the mistakes? Or is it simply a well-intentioned but dressed-up way of making police shootings more palatable to the general public, department lawyers, and the officers themselves–in other words, preserving the “myth of infallibility” that Simon wrote about?