Force Science News #23
July 11, 2005
www.forcesciencenews.com
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free, direct-delivery subscription, please visit forcesciencenews.com and click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
info@forcesciencenews.com.
=======================================
STUDY REVEALS IMPORTANT TRUTHS HIDDEN IN THE DETAILS OF OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTINGS
Ideas for research projects can germinate from the least likely moments, as when a student asked Firearms Trainer Tom Aveni if he'd ever visited the ACLU's website. He hadn't ("Why would I even want to go there?"), but out of curiosity he did.
There in a section dedicated to "police abuse" he read a statistic he regarded as probably exaggerated: that 25 per cent of all law enforcement shootings involve unarmed suspects. That launched him on a long and continuing quest for more details about officer-involved gunfights that has turned up a series of surprising--and disturbing--findings.
Not only did the ACLU statistic turn out to be not as far off as he imagined but Aveni has made other unexpected discoveries--pertaining especially to hit ratios, low-light shootings, multiple-officer confrontations, mistaken judgment calls and less-lethal technology--that have convinced him police firearms training needs a significant overhaul.
"There's little resemblance between what we train officers for and what they actually encounter on the street," he told Force Science News recently. "There are glaring deficiencies in the way cops are prepared for what turn out to be fairly typical circumstances in gunfights."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, says that by pursuing "important and different kinds of questions," Aveni has produced "valuable new insights into officer-involved shootings." His findings are expected to provide "a cutting-edge demographic foundation" for upcoming research projects at FSRC that hopefully will result in "profound changes in law enforcement training in the future."
An ex-cop with 23 years' training experience, Aveni now heads the Police Policy Studies Council, a research, training and consulting corporation based in Spofford, NH, and is a member of FSRC's National Advisory Board, as well as a busy expert witness in police litigation. Like other trainers, he says, he "made a lot of assumptions that are not true" until his research provided "an epiphany for me" about some of the nuances of police shootings.
He was struck first by how tough it is to find out anything meaningful on the subject from law enforcement agencies. Most don't compile detailed data on their shootings, fearing in some cases (perhaps rightly) that it would be misinterpreted and misused by the media and "agenda activists" if available. Of the few departments that do collect deadly force information, "even fewer freely share it," Aveni claims. If they don't outright suppress it, they tend to present it in bare-bones, "sterilized table formats" that have no standardized consistency and that "make detailed analysis difficult." Aveni observes: "The devil is in the details, and the details of police shootings have always been lost."
After refusals to cooperate by a variety of agencies, he finally was able to secure 350 investigative narratives of officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County, CA. These concerned incidents experienced primarily by L.A.
County Sheriff's deputies, plus cases investigated by LASD for smaller municipal agencies, across a 5-year period.
Aveni spent more than 6 months dissecting that material according to different variables. That information, combined with limited statistics he managed to obtain related to shootings on other major departments, including New York City, Baltimore County (MD), Miami, Portland (OR) and Washington (DC), has allowed him to spotlight a number of deadly force subtleties that have not been so thoroughly examined before.
For example, it has long been believed that officers overall have a dismal
15-25 per cent hit probability in street encounters, suggesting truly poor performance under the stress of a real shooting situation. Actually, this figure, while essentially true in the aggregate, is markedly skewed by certain shooting variables, Aveni found.
During a 13-year span, the Baltimore County PD, which Aveni regards as one of the best trained in the country, achieved an average hit ratio of 64 per cent in daylight shootings-not ideal, but clearly much better than commonly believed. In shootings that occurred in low-light surroundings, however, average hits dropped to 45 per cent, a 30 per cent decline. The data from Los Angeles County (LAC) reveals a somewhat comparable 24 per cent decline.
"Until this research," Aveni says, "performance has never been accurately matched to lighting conditions," even though as many as 77 per cent of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. Some departments tally "outdoor" versus "indoor" shootings, but most appear not to precisely differentiate between low-light and ample-light events, despite the preponderance of shootings during nighttime duty tours.
A multiple-officer shooting, in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement, has an even greater influence on hit probability, Aveni discovered.
According to the LAC data, when only one officer fired during an encounter, the average hit ratio was 51 per cent. When an additional officer got involved in shooting, hits dropped dramatically, to 23 per cent. With more than 2 officers shooting, the average hit ratio was only 9 per cent--"a whopping 82 per cent declination," Aveni points out.
Multiple-officer shootings, Aveni told Force Science News, are three times more likely to involve suspects with shoulder weapons than single-officer shootings. This tends to "increase the typical stand-off distance," he says. Many of these confrontations also embody fast-changing, chaotic and complex circumstances. These factors, Aveni believes, help explain the negative impact on accuracy.
Aveni also discovered a correlation between multiple-officer shootings and number of rounds fired.
With LAC shootings involving only one officer, an average of 3.59 police rounds were fired. When 2 officers got involved, the average jumped to 4.98 rounds and with 3 officers or more to 6.48. "The number of rounds fired per officer increases in multiple-officer shootings by as much as 45 per cent over single-officer shootings," Aveni says.
Again, he judges distance to be a likely factor. "A higher volume of fire may be used to compensate for the lower hit ratio as distance increases,"
he speculates. He believes the highly violent nature these events often present may be influential, too. Anecdotally bunch shootings appear to encompass "many of the barricaded gunman scenarios, drawn-out foot and vehicular pursuits, subjects experiencing violent psychotic episodes, gang attacks and encounters involving heavily armed suspects," such as the infamous FBI Miami shootout and the North Hollywood bank robbery street battle.
"Emotional contagion," where officers fire merely because others are shooting, is almost certainly an element of at least some multiple-officer shootings, Aveni concedes. But the extent of this assumed influence is difficult if not impossible to document. Certainly the claim, sometimes made after high-profile group shootings, "that cops are firing their weapons empty in panic, is not supported by the facts," he stresses.
July 11, 2005
www.forcesciencenews.com
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free, direct-delivery subscription, please visit forcesciencenews.com and click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
info@forcesciencenews.com.
=======================================
STUDY REVEALS IMPORTANT TRUTHS HIDDEN IN THE DETAILS OF OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTINGS
Ideas for research projects can germinate from the least likely moments, as when a student asked Firearms Trainer Tom Aveni if he'd ever visited the ACLU's website. He hadn't ("Why would I even want to go there?"), but out of curiosity he did.
There in a section dedicated to "police abuse" he read a statistic he regarded as probably exaggerated: that 25 per cent of all law enforcement shootings involve unarmed suspects. That launched him on a long and continuing quest for more details about officer-involved gunfights that has turned up a series of surprising--and disturbing--findings.
Not only did the ACLU statistic turn out to be not as far off as he imagined but Aveni has made other unexpected discoveries--pertaining especially to hit ratios, low-light shootings, multiple-officer confrontations, mistaken judgment calls and less-lethal technology--that have convinced him police firearms training needs a significant overhaul.
"There's little resemblance between what we train officers for and what they actually encounter on the street," he told Force Science News recently. "There are glaring deficiencies in the way cops are prepared for what turn out to be fairly typical circumstances in gunfights."
Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, says that by pursuing "important and different kinds of questions," Aveni has produced "valuable new insights into officer-involved shootings." His findings are expected to provide "a cutting-edge demographic foundation" for upcoming research projects at FSRC that hopefully will result in "profound changes in law enforcement training in the future."
An ex-cop with 23 years' training experience, Aveni now heads the Police Policy Studies Council, a research, training and consulting corporation based in Spofford, NH, and is a member of FSRC's National Advisory Board, as well as a busy expert witness in police litigation. Like other trainers, he says, he "made a lot of assumptions that are not true" until his research provided "an epiphany for me" about some of the nuances of police shootings.
He was struck first by how tough it is to find out anything meaningful on the subject from law enforcement agencies. Most don't compile detailed data on their shootings, fearing in some cases (perhaps rightly) that it would be misinterpreted and misused by the media and "agenda activists" if available. Of the few departments that do collect deadly force information, "even fewer freely share it," Aveni claims. If they don't outright suppress it, they tend to present it in bare-bones, "sterilized table formats" that have no standardized consistency and that "make detailed analysis difficult." Aveni observes: "The devil is in the details, and the details of police shootings have always been lost."
After refusals to cooperate by a variety of agencies, he finally was able to secure 350 investigative narratives of officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County, CA. These concerned incidents experienced primarily by L.A.
County Sheriff's deputies, plus cases investigated by LASD for smaller municipal agencies, across a 5-year period.
Aveni spent more than 6 months dissecting that material according to different variables. That information, combined with limited statistics he managed to obtain related to shootings on other major departments, including New York City, Baltimore County (MD), Miami, Portland (OR) and Washington (DC), has allowed him to spotlight a number of deadly force subtleties that have not been so thoroughly examined before.
For example, it has long been believed that officers overall have a dismal
15-25 per cent hit probability in street encounters, suggesting truly poor performance under the stress of a real shooting situation. Actually, this figure, while essentially true in the aggregate, is markedly skewed by certain shooting variables, Aveni found.
During a 13-year span, the Baltimore County PD, which Aveni regards as one of the best trained in the country, achieved an average hit ratio of 64 per cent in daylight shootings-not ideal, but clearly much better than commonly believed. In shootings that occurred in low-light surroundings, however, average hits dropped to 45 per cent, a 30 per cent decline. The data from Los Angeles County (LAC) reveals a somewhat comparable 24 per cent decline.
"Until this research," Aveni says, "performance has never been accurately matched to lighting conditions," even though as many as 77 per cent of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. Some departments tally "outdoor" versus "indoor" shootings, but most appear not to precisely differentiate between low-light and ample-light events, despite the preponderance of shootings during nighttime duty tours.
A multiple-officer shooting, in which more than one officer fires during a deadly force engagement, has an even greater influence on hit probability, Aveni discovered.
According to the LAC data, when only one officer fired during an encounter, the average hit ratio was 51 per cent. When an additional officer got involved in shooting, hits dropped dramatically, to 23 per cent. With more than 2 officers shooting, the average hit ratio was only 9 per cent--"a whopping 82 per cent declination," Aveni points out.
Multiple-officer shootings, Aveni told Force Science News, are three times more likely to involve suspects with shoulder weapons than single-officer shootings. This tends to "increase the typical stand-off distance," he says. Many of these confrontations also embody fast-changing, chaotic and complex circumstances. These factors, Aveni believes, help explain the negative impact on accuracy.
Aveni also discovered a correlation between multiple-officer shootings and number of rounds fired.
With LAC shootings involving only one officer, an average of 3.59 police rounds were fired. When 2 officers got involved, the average jumped to 4.98 rounds and with 3 officers or more to 6.48. "The number of rounds fired per officer increases in multiple-officer shootings by as much as 45 per cent over single-officer shootings," Aveni says.
Again, he judges distance to be a likely factor. "A higher volume of fire may be used to compensate for the lower hit ratio as distance increases,"
he speculates. He believes the highly violent nature these events often present may be influential, too. Anecdotally bunch shootings appear to encompass "many of the barricaded gunman scenarios, drawn-out foot and vehicular pursuits, subjects experiencing violent psychotic episodes, gang attacks and encounters involving heavily armed suspects," such as the infamous FBI Miami shootout and the North Hollywood bank robbery street battle.
"Emotional contagion," where officers fire merely because others are shooting, is almost certainly an element of at least some multiple-officer shootings, Aveni concedes. But the extent of this assumed influence is difficult if not impossible to document. Certainly the claim, sometimes made after high-profile group shootings, "that cops are firing their weapons empty in panic, is not supported by the facts," he stresses.