The latest study by the Force Science Institute has produced 2 surprising findings of importance to trainers, street officers, and police attorneys: Some suspects lying flat with hands hidden under chest or waist can produce and fire a gun at an approaching officer faster than any human being on earth can react to defend himself;The...Read More
If you are angry when you confront a suspect, are you more likely to mistake a cell phone or other nonthreatening object in his hand for a gun? Recent findings from university-based research suggest that indeed is the case. Through a series of time-pressured experiments, a behavioral science team at Northeastern University in Boston discovered,...Read More
Part 2 of a 2-part series A Governor’s Task Force in New York recently issued a 147-page report on police-on-police shootings in which it emphasizes that “unconscious race bias” may be a compelling factor when out-of-uniform officers, working plainclothes or taking some law enforcement action off-duty, are mistaken for life-threatening criminals and are shot dead...Read More
Part 1 of a 2-part series The first comprehensive nationwide survey of mistaken-identity, “friendly fire” fatalities in law enforcement has been completed by a governor’s task force in New York, unearthing a wealth of informative and useful data but raising a controversial specter that “unconscious racial biases” against minority officers may influence some of these...Read More
Is it true that an old standard of first aid training—attending to Airway, Breathing, and Circulation (bleeding) in that order when treating injured parties—is now obsolete? In a report about downed-officer rescues published in Force Science News [Transmission sent 3/16/09], Dr. Matthew Sztajnkrycer contended that when caring for downed officers, ABC should be reversed to...Read More
Surprising preliminary results from a survey about responses to downed-officer rescues suggest it may be more practical to modify training and equipment related to this high-intensity field challenge than to try changing officers’ instinctive responses. “Officers appear to view risk in this situation very differently than would be predicted based on studies of risk in...Read More
Over the last 6 months, Dr. Matthew Sztajnkrycer, a “SWAT doc” from Minnesota, has exposed some 150 officers to this stressful and revealing training exercise: A patrol officer, answering a domestic violence call, is shot down as he exits his unit. Officers responding to 911 calls from the scene observe him slumped in a seated...Read More
Foreseeing a proliferation of suicide bombing attacks in the U.S., a homeland security planner for the Delaware Dept. of Transportation has drafted a “unified framework” for first-response operations that he believes will eliminate inconsistencies and inadequacies currently hobbling law enforcers in defending effectively against a favored weapon of terrorists. The plan is a core component...Read More
Force Science National Advisory Board member and award-winning law enforcement author Chuck Remsberg has just released a ground-breaking new officer-survival book, Blood Lessons: What Cops Learn From Life-Or-Death Encounters, which offers major training opportunities regarding traumatic use-of-force confrontations. Published by Calibre Press, a subsidiary of PoliceOne, for whom Remsberg serves as a columnist and senior...Read More
You wouldn’t expect a spin-off of National Geographic magazine to have much content related to officer survival, but the August issue of National Geographic Adventure delivers just that in a surprising 1-2 punch. First is an article about how sudden fear and stress affect perception and performance, which draws largely from studies of street officers...Read More
