Part 1 of a 2-part series The first group of law enforcement professionals certified to apply the concepts of Force Science to use-of-force investigations has now hit the streets. More than 100 students, representing agencies from England, Belgium, Ireland and the U.S., attended the first ever four-day Force Science Certification Course conducted recently in London....Read More
When a 52-year-old man-shirtless, coked up and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds-lunged at Shannon Brady and her partner with a “serious” folding knife in the cramped kitchen of a small adobe house in Santa Fe, she was prepared to react. She shot him dead. What she hadn’t anticipated or trained for was what happened after the...Read More
The rumor bouncing around various law enforcement listservs piqued Cmdr. Michael Richards’ curiosity. Street gangs in California, the story went, were training members to shoot cops at night by aiming for the highly visible patch of white T-shirt exposed above the top of many officers’ vests. “The Triangle of Death,” posters to the listservs called...Read More
2 of a 2-Part series Editor’s Note In Part 1 we reported on a ground-breaking new study by researcher Tom Aveni on why and under what circumstances officers shoot suspects who end up not to be armed. Here we offer some of the significant implications of Aveni’s findings. Aveni is founder of The Police Policy...Read More
1 of a 2-Part Series The story is a frequent staple of the evening news. An officer shoots and kills a minority subject who turns out to be…unarmed. Protests explode, and the familiar litany is again asserted: racial bias by the cops underlies many of these inflammatory events. Now a new study by a member...Read More
Don’t have the money for a bells-and-whistles training simulator? Don’t have the time for realistic live role-playing? Despair not! If you have paper and pencils and a reality-based imagination, you can still prepare your officers to react immediately with good decisions in life-or-death crises, according to Dr. Laura Zimmerman, a research psychologist whose insights into...Read More
When the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its landmark case Graham v. Connor that force used by law officers must be “objectively reasonable,” Sam Faulkner had a question: What’s “reasonable”? The Court provided “no definitive answer regarding what a reasonable officer is or does,” says Faulkner, an instructor at the Ohio Peace Officers Training Academy...Read More
[View this article with photos on PoliceOne.com] A technique for “working smarter rather than harder” to restrain unusually strong, combative subjects was described by an advisor to the Force Science Research Center at a recent international conference on in-custody deaths that featured presentations by nearly 20 of the world’s leading authorities on excited delirium (ED)....Read More
Officers from nearly 60 departments in Maryland have begun using a research-based “lethality assessment” checklist in hopes of preventing homicides and suicides that might otherwise evolve from heated domestic disputes. As part of their intervention at domestic calls, officers put a quick series of pointed questions to the apparent victims (usually females) in these incidents....Read More
The latest profile of who commits crimes in schools and what weapons are involved has emerged from a new study by the FBI’s Crime Analysis, Research & Development Unit. Some surprises and some reinforcements of prevailing beliefs are documented in the report on offenses and offenders in U.S. schools, colleges, and universities during a recent...Read More