Is the Psychology of Deadly Force Ready for the Courts?

https://undark.org/article/psychology-deadly-force-ready-courts/

by sohkamyung • 8 years ago

44 60 8 years ago

chmod775• 8 years ago

Seems to be missing the fact that if you are unable to handle stressful situations you have no business being a police officer in the first place.

Becoming a police officer is akin to stating: "I will approach confrontations level-headed and try to deescalate" and I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well.

vorpalhex3• 8 years ago

Nobody is prepared to handle life-or-death stressful situations. Training at least makes those experiences less terrible, but the only life-or-death stress response you have born in you is your fight-or-flight meant to ward off primarily large predators.

lostmyoldone• 8 years ago

I don't know about that, while there might be some kinds of life-or-death situations that nobody can handle, there seems to be plenty of people that is as capable of handling some life-or-death situations better than I handle grocery shopping.

aqme282• 8 years ago

Sure, no one is fully equipped to handle the moment of their death, but that's not what is being talked about here.

Training should equip officers for the not-uncommon case when a suspect has a knife but is otherwise nonthreatening.

trhway• 8 years ago

For example there are medical tests for pilots and other professions where the lives depend on sound mental and physical health of the operator. The same should be for police - can't handle the stress, got overflooded with stress hormones so that mental function drops below threshold - you dont get the right to kill.

Carrying the gun knowing that stress severe impairs your perception and executive function means negligently putting public in danger akin to drunk driving.

alistairSH2• 8 years ago

My similar thought... isn't this an argument to disarm police officers? If their brains turn them into killers, take away the tool they use to commit the killing. Police isn't even one of the top-10 most dangerous jobs - they're beaten out by auto service supervisors (not even the guy with the wrench!) and airline pilots.

dsfyu404ed3• 8 years ago

they're beaten out by auto service supervisors

Being a supervisor where work involving heavy equipment is happening is can be more dangerous because you're not as familiar with all the heavy equipment around you and depending on how much of an ass you are or aren't your team might not be comfortable speaking up when you do dumb things. It definitely depends on the supervisor though.

That said, the numbers don't lie. Policing is not nearly as dangerous as it is made out to be.

alistairSH2• 8 years ago

I'm sure police officers receive training to that end as well

You would be mistaken in that assumption. Police in the US receive a fraction of the training provided to their counterparts in Germany and the UK. This is across the board, all types of training. They receive even less deescalation training, and in fact sometimes receive the exact opposite (training akin to "police as warrior").

btilly2• 8 years ago

Given the replication crisis, is psychology ready for much of anything?

Yes, I admit that this is snarky, but it is also uncomfortably true. There is good evidence that things said by psychology that also fit common sense are probably true. However things said by psychology research studies have a good chance of being false. And things concluded by individual psychologists upon a chain of research based on those studies should be viewed with significant skepticism.

This will change when psychology can get from their current 50% replication rate (on a good day) to having a significant body of established research that we have good reason to believe is about 90% likely to be replicable. Until then I'd advise against placing too much trust in anything that it says which you can't find independent reason to believe.

SpikeDad3• 8 years ago

You have hopes that psychology is a robust enough science that it can improve it's replication rate? Not sure there's evidence of this at all.

btilly2• 8 years ago

Yes, I have hope that psychology is trying to replicate what they thought were established results. After a few rounds of that we'll have a limited body of knowledge that has been successfully replicated enough that, despite the overall replication rate, we can trust those results.

Once that body of reasonably certain psychological observations is established and starts growing, it will be possible to make some statements about psychology with a high degree of confidence. But whether that coalesces into a paradigm about how to understand people that turns it into a recognizable science is another story.

porpoisely• 8 years ago

You aren't being snarky. There has been lingering questions about the field of psychology and social science in general for a very long time.

Paraphrasing Richard Feymann, he called social science a pseudoscience until proven otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

And after all these years since his interview, we are still waiting. This is one of the reasons why some have placed their hopes on neuroscience being the science of the brain and mind.

pjc505• 8 years ago

The key question is: is the "stress" argument ever going to be successfully deployed to exculpate someone who, in a stressful situation with a weapon, shoots a police officer?

No, of course not. The American use of deadly force by police is far in excess of other first-world countries, and it has become a deadly part of the culture war. Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.

tylerflick• 8 years ago

Various people have commented that the US troops in the occupation of Iraq had more restrictive rules of engagement.

That's a generalization. Certain areas of operation had different rules of engagement, which also changed over time. As a base though, if you could prove hostile intent, you were cleared for the use of deadly force.

dsfyu404ed3• 8 years ago

Hostile intent is still a much, much higher bar than "I was spooked" which seems to be the current requirement for cops to use deadly force.

turc16566• 8 years ago

Exactly. We've seen countless examples of "I thought he had a gun" and "I feared for my life" from cops. Can I shoot someone if I think they have a gun but, oops, it turns out I was wrong? I'd be fine, right? I'm sure I wouldn't face any serious consequences.

And therein lies the problem. There's a separate set of (lower) standards applied to the very people who are trained for this sort of thing and who are allegedly held to a higher standard.

CompanionCuuube4• 8 years ago

Can I shoot someone if I think they have a gun but, oops, it turns out I was wrong? I'd be fine, right? I'm sure I wouldn't face any serious consequences.

If the totality of the circumstances show that a reasonable person would believe that they had a gun and there was a threat to your life, then I would expect you not to have serious consequences in the form of criminal penalties.

gaius• 8 years ago

Must be awful to be an American cop... the gun, the body armour, the training, the radio to call for a SWAT team or an actual tank... and a woman in pyjamas terrifies you so much you have to shoot her https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond

SpikeDad3• 8 years ago

Interesting article. I wonder if there's evidence that the mindset of a police officer reflects the general public.

Sorry to have to generalize here but I've had a lot of exposure to police over my life as a volunteer EMT and an ex wife who's department was part of a police department. I have a lot of friends who are police officers.

They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.

Of course I have no idea if that's a selected behavior or something they learn during their time as police officers. I can certainly see how it's a beneficial behavior from a stress standpoint but we can see how it turns out with respect to these deadly force encounters.

I have a lot of respect for law enforcement but also personal knowledge enough that their decision making strategies are not like mine.

pjc505• 8 years ago

Well, if you had a gun and permission to shoot people for being "uncooperative" or "resisting" or "refusing to obey orders", you'd be right all the time too.

philwelch• 8 years ago

There's a cognitive bias where bad things stick out more than good things, which is helpful from a problem-solving perspective by helping you focus on problems that need to be solved, but it has a side effect where any job that involves dealing with the public leaves you increasingly convinced that the world is filled with people who are just plain awful at least in some respect. Of course, the world is filled with these people, but not to the proportion it seems. You just remember the bad a lot more easily than the good. Also, police officers tend to disproportionately deal with awful people anyway.

mc32• 8 years ago

In my youthful interactions with police, the sense I got was they were sure the knew the _law_ correctly. They didn't think they were always right outside of that, but they thought they were always right about the law and the events that unfolded (they might have been giving events their own interpretation to which they assigned certainty).

Now, of course, this is typically the meat of the matter when interacting with police, but I'm pointing out that outside of this space, in my experience, they did not presume more knowledge than your average person.

gnu8• 8 years ago

They have one thing in common (mostly) - they think they're right about every situation. I don't think the general public thinks the same way.

I’ve witnessed a similar phenomenon on HN, where we have no shortage of computer programmers who believe they have solutions for every problem in economics, medicine, politics, and so on. So it must be some sort of generalizable phenomenon.

edflsafoiewq• 8 years ago

This looks like nothing so much as the old determinist's "how can you be morally culpable when the outcome was predetermined by natural laws?" dusted off and dressed up with some psychology jargon.

intralizee• 8 years ago

I think the jury would have a better time first understanding predetermination & determinism, than the psychological jargon as you put it. Maybe psychologists have found a stigma against determinism by the free will thinkers and so they find the need to dress it up as something else.

markbnj• 8 years ago

It feels to me like the question of how humans react to life-threatening situations is less relevant here than the question of how humans judge what _is_ a life threatening situation. Are you in imminent danger of death if you encounter a teenager walking away from you in the middle of the street at night? I think most people would judge that situation to be non-life-threatening and I guess the jury in the referenced case agreed.

turc16566• 8 years ago

The real issue here is whether or not this same logic will apply to the average citizen. And we know it won't. Nor should it. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our actions with only very, very few exceptions that are already laid out in the law (i.e. temporary insanity, severe mental illness, etc.). It sounds like what is being argued for my Miller is that we expand the exception list in a big way. One that society likely will find unacceptable. Also, I'd be really curious to see if Miller wants to apply this same standard to everyone across the board. Because right now, if I shoot someone - even if in self defense - there's a good chance that I will be charged and have to defend myself in court to prove it was in self defense and a lawful act because the bar for me being apply to apply deadly force is very high.

The rules are already very different for cops in the current state of affairs. They already have every advantage and already face extremely low odds of being charged. As the article mentions, only 96 officers have been charged since 2005, which is ridiculous. We've seen a lot of absurd cases that were major news where officers weren't even charged. Sure, I would bet that the overwhelming majority are totally legitimate. But I also think there are way too many that go un-charged.

And I'd bet my life (no pun intended) that this same logic will definitely not apply to the average citizen if they shoot another citizen. And I'd bet my child's life that this logic would never, ever, ever be used in defense of a citizen if they had the gall to shoot (gasp) a police officer.

We the people bear some responsibility for this situation of officer shootings. Juries routinely either fail to indict in the grand jury or acquit if it actually goes to trial far too often. And these jurors themselves do not apply the same standards that would apply to the rest of us.

Accounting for population difference, on a per capita basis US police officers shoot citizens at a rate 37 times more frequently than the UK. Now, you can either choose to believe that the US has 37 times more serious violent crime that would justify that level of violence by cops. Or you can choose to believe there is a problem with US the way US police go about their business.

adrianratnapala2• 8 years ago

Accounting for population difference, on a per capita basis US police officers shoot citizens at a rate 37 times more frequently than the UK.

The UK is not a good example, since it is one of the few countries where most cops don't have guns.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

Then take Germany. They have guns but in 2011 (only number I could find) 85 shots were fired during the whole year by all cops.

turc16566• 8 years ago

I get your point, but I have to disagree. The fact that the UK can have its officers not carry by default and armed officers only show up for the most extreme situations is a testament to how they are conducting their operations. They had only five deaths in 2017 due to officer shootings. Four of those were terrorist attacks. So their response time is good enough to stop terrorists with lethal force while also not resulting in extra civilian deaths and still keep their beat cops gun-free.

pjc505• 8 years ago

The UK did, however, have a full troops-on-the-streets state of emergency in Northern Ireland for 30 years, complete with carbombings and firing on demonstrators; it would be interesting to compare the numbers for that with US policing.

(Last time I ran the numbers, 70s Belfast was overall less dangerous than 80s Detroit, but someone else can do this one)

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 8 years ago

The real issue here is whether or not this same logic will apply to the average citizen.

The big difference is that the average citizen has the ability/expectation to flee dangerous situations. For example, if I saw a crazy guy with a knife, I call the police but otherwise make sure I stay far away. In situations where the average citizen doesn’t have that expectation (for example in their own home) US law also generally gives them the benefit of the doubt regarding deadly force against a home invader. Now as a society , if we had police who avoided dangerous situations at all cost, it would not be very helpful. We as a society need people who are willing to intervene in dangerous situations, and so as a society we have in the past given them the benefit of the doubt regarding how they deal with what they perceive as immediate dangers to their lives.

MrMember• 8 years ago

The police in the US have no legal duty to protect people, and several Supreme Court cases have affirmed this.

dsfyu404ed3• 8 years ago

The current system has two sets of rules, one for cops, one for everyone else. It's like how in medieval Europe a knight would be justified if he cut down a normal person in circumstances where a normal person could not engage in violence against another normal person. That's all fine and dandy (I'm being sarcastic when I say that) except that out current societal norms and laws prohibit double standards like that. This is just an attempt at bastardizing science and law in order to uphold the double standard when what we really need is to apply the same standard to police use of force as we do to normal people

onemoresoop• 8 years ago

Dr. Laurence Miller: "His fee as an expert witness in cases that require travel is $10,000 per day of testimony"

I don't know how Mr Miller gets to be an expert witness but it seems to me that Law Enforcement pays him quite well to be in the business of being a witness...

CompanionCuuube4• 8 years ago

Hint: it's those letters in front of his first name.

Is the Psychology of Deadly Force Ready for the Courts?

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