Final analysis of data gathered by the Force Science Research Center during a simulated shooting experiment has revealed important new findings about officers’ perceptions and recall that could bear significantly on OIS investigations. Among other things, the testing showed that: Officers tended to recount vastly more information about what happened when interviewed by investigators than...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
A case involving the stun-drive Tasering of a handcuffed arrestee was decided this month by a federal Court of Appeals panel in Florida, with some instructive language regarding what’s permissible in the handling of passively resisting subjects by an officer working alone. In assessing a deputy’s actions in delivering Taser shocks to an arrestee who...Read More
“Local law enforcers tend to believe that terrorists come from a long distance away to attack without warning in their jurisdiction,” says Dr. Brent Smith, director of the Terrorism Research Center at the University of Arkansas. “Officers often feel they are prey and that there’s nothing much they can do about it. We need to...Read More
How would you rank the relative risk for officers and suspects suffering injury from these 5 force options: Empty-hand control techniques Baton OC spray Conducted energy weapons (Tasers) Lateral vascular neck restraint. If you judged OC to be the “safest” and baton to be “most injurious” to both officers and offenders, you’re in agreement with...Read More
A first-of-its-kind, case-by-case study of in-custody deaths associated with TASER use has confirmed that the popular electronic control devices are by no means the dangerous and often deadly weapons that Amnesty International, the ACLU and media reports frequently suggest. Self-described as “kind of a nerd” who approaches tedious research as recreation, Chief Howard Williams of...Read More
Force Science students put their knowledge to use Part 2 of a 2-part series In Part 1 of this series we discussed the Force Science Certification course that was recently held in London, England. As part of that class, those who pursued certificates of completion were required to take a written test and participate in...Read More
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
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
