Part 1 of a 2-part series A high percentage of officers leave law enforcement after they’re involved in a shooting. Suspects who try to kill officers are usually drunk, drugged, or deranged. When multiple cops are in an armed confrontation, they’ll likely experience “contagion fire” and blast off a wild fusillade of rounds. In matters...Read More
Looking for guidance on a protocol for Excited Delirium calls? A recently updated training bulletin from San Jose (CA) PD might be a good starting point. “It’s the closest thing to a policy on the subject that I’ve been able to find,” says Wayne Schmidt, executive director of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, the organization...Read More
Researchers have now identified a specific brain chemical that appears to influence how well you’ll perform under stress and how emotionally resilient you’ll be after a critical incident. The more you have of this powerful ingredient, called neuropeptide Y (NPY), the better off you’ll likely be when your life is on the line. “Maybe somewhere...Read More
Does your agency encourage you to nap on duty? Probably not. But your department might get better performance and you might be safer if regulated snoozing was permitted, according to well-known trainer and consultant Tom Aveni, head of the Police Policy Studies Council and a Technical Advisory Board member of the Force Science Research Center...Read More
An association between fatigue and faulty judgment in life-or-death situations is dramatically drawn in a recent review by the National Transportation Safety Board of airline accidents and near misses. “Even though the Board’s report concerns air traffic controllers, law enforcement officers, too, risk disastrous consequences from the effect of sleep deprivation on brain function,” Dr....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
Part 1 of a 2-part series Civilians who judge the reasonableness of your use of force, whether they’re members of the media, of a review board, of a prosecutor’s staff, or of a jury, are likely to bring a welter of highly distorted beliefs to the process because they’ve undergone thousands of hours of “training”...Read More
Two perspectives on law enforcement’s role in the violent human meltdown known as excited delirium faced off on National Public Radio recently, in broadcasts that have themselves become controversial. On one side in the 2-program report were 2 police critics, a staff lawyer with the ACLU and the director of a California “watchdog” group called...Read More
The latest round of experiments in the Force Science Research Center’s on-going “hit probability” study has produced preliminary findings with surprising and unnerving implications for LEOs. Among the new discoveries: Even “naive shooters,” untrained and unpracticed with handguns, are amazingly accurate in making head shots at close range, and tend to shoot for the head...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
