Activist critical of police undergoes use of force scenarios

PHOENIX (KSAZ) -- We've seen protests all across the country after police officers have been accused of shooting people who aren't armed.

But what would happen if one of those protesters looked at what it's like to wear a badge, and be put in a life or death situation.

Jarrett Maupin has been very vocal during the recent protests, leading marches on the Phoenix Police headquarters after officers shot an unarmed man who reportedly fought with them.

He agreed to go through a force on force training with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and went through three scenarios where you have to decide to shoot, or not to shoot.

Scenario one is a call of a man casing cars in a parking lot. Maupin approached the man and started asking questions. The suspect in the drill shot Maupin, who was asking him what kind of car he drove. It happens that fast.

FOX 10 asked him when he thought it was time for him to address the scenario with the use of force. "When he came to the back of the vehicle and started hiding, I could sense something was wrong," said Jarrett Maupin.

Scenario two is a call of two men fighting. "What's going on today gentlemen, what are you doing?" he said. He fired at the suspect in the scenario.

FOX 10 asked him why he shot the suspect. "Hey, he rushed me... I shot because he was in that zone, I didn't see him armed, he came clearly to do some harm to my person," said Maupin. "It's hard to make that call; it shakes you up."

Scenario three was a call about a possible burglar walking down the street. Maupin gets him on the ground, but the suspect is not complying. "I need you to keep your hands up sir, I need to check that's in the waistband," he said.

There were no shots fired, but the suspect did have a knife in his waistband.

FOX 10's Troy Hayden went through the scenarios too, without seeing what Maupin did.

It was the same results for both of us; things happen so fast. FOX 10 asked Maupin what his biggest take-away from the exercise will be. "I didn't understand how important compliance was, but after going through this; yes my attitude has changed, this happens in 10-15 seconds. People need to comply for their own sake," said Maupin.

FOX 10 would like to thank the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office for helping us with this story.

Ferguson Shooting: Why did the officer not shoot Brown in the legs?

Many people innocently ask why Officer Wilson did not shoot Michael Brown in the legs. The answer could stretch for pages. More succinctly, a couple handfuls of reasons:

1) This ain't the movies

2) Most police do not fire their weapons much. Most are not great shots.

3) The officer would have to be an incredible shot to be crazy enough to fire wounding shots.

4) Nearly all firefights are "stress shoots." The other guy is moving. Heart pounding. Often breathless. Officer Wilson in Ferguson had just been punched in the face during a wrestling match for his pistol, according to Wilson.

5) Bullets that miss can hit someone else.

6) You always are low on ammo. Do not waste a single bullet.

7) Time spent reloading is dangerous

8) I have seen many people shot who kept fighting. Shot with weapons far more powerful than any officer's pistol. Many police and combat troops have seen this and will verify.

9) Police and Soldiers never train to shoot to wound. (None that I know of.) Technically, officers will say they shoot to stop the threat but this is legal semantics. They are trained to fire center mass. All combat shots are center mass of any hittable part of the target. If you see only a foot, shoot the foot. If you see a chest -- aim for the middle. If the officer is pointing his pistol at someone, he is one click away from going lethal to stop the threat. There is no in between. I have never seen a target at any military, police or civilian range, that designates legs as a target.

10) This ain't the movies.

During the firefight at the link below, I was photographing when two people were shot a total of seven times. Two men, shot seven times. The US Soldier was shot three times. The al Qaeda man was hit four times with an M4 at point blank.

After the US Soldier was hit three times in front of me, he continued to fight well and fire at the al Qaeda, who was also shooting back.

Soon, another US Soldier joined battle and hit the al Qaeda terrorist four times from just a few feet away. The al Qaeda man was still standing trying to shoot. One shot took off a testicle. The M4 held by the US Soldier ran out of ammo. Our Soldier dropped the M4 and tackled the al Qaeda man. Despite being hit four times, al Qaeda man then engaged in aggressive hand to hand combat. I must grudgingly give the al Qaeda man credit. He fought very well even when badly shot.

Again, this ain't the movies. When officers or troops shoot, they must shoot center mass, or to kill.

Some people may say there are no comparisons between combat in war, and police combat. Ballistics and bodies are the same. The idea of shooting someone in the legs or hands is a western movie fairytale.

See the bullets fly and the men fight:
https://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm

 Jihadin wrote:
How much training does one get before it gets label "Militarization"

 djones520 wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
How much training does one get before it gets label "Militarization"

And read the story that Whembly linked to. Even those who get that training will freeze in the face of danger.

There is no amount of training that will truly prepare you for such situations, no training other then real life experience. And we see how officers who get that real life experience tend to get treated...

 Asherian Command wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
How much training does one get before it gets label "Militarization"

And read the story that Whembly linked to. Even those who get that training will freeze in the face of danger.

There is no amount of training that will truly prepare you for such situations, no training other then real life experience. And we see how officers who get that real life experience tend to get treated...

Well unless that training is basically experience.

Otherwise I agree. Except certain people and certain attitudes they have might stop them or allow them to react. You see it quite often between different people some actually do react differently.

 Jihadin wrote:
DJ. Always remember this when your over there. When the bullets fly training will take over.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I'm never surprised just what adrenaline, determination and insanity can make a human survice, a shot to the testicle?

 djones520 wrote:
I just don't know how I'd react when the stakes are real...

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I'm never surprised just what adrenaline, determination and insanity can make a human survice, a shot to the testicle?

 djones520 wrote:
One of my training schools was taught by some pretty combat experienced Florida Guard 11B's. Well, I was one of the last classes going through, since they were closing the school down , and they were talking about trying to find other full time work.

These were guys with CIB's, multiple purple hearts, years in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc... and the only job they could find was police work. It was really sad, but a lot of places out there won't hire Infantry who've seen combat. Even the other branches won't touch them. The PTSD issues and the like. It scares folks.

 Jihadin wrote:
The stigma of PTSD does make it hard.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
The stigma of PTSD does make it hard.

I never understood that stigma TBH. Does it make them unreliable Workers?
Or why people auto-assume just because you where in the military, you have PTSD

 d-usa wrote:
There have been a few studies done on the "quick, make a decision, shoot or don't shoot" scenarios. And they have found that black subjects were always shot quicker than white subjects, independent of the race of the person doing the shooting.

Cops hesitate more, err less when shooting black suspects, study finds
According to findings from a research team’s innovative experiments, officers are less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites

Oct 13, 2014
With the turmoil in Ferguson (MO) the latest example, activists and many reporters would have us believe that police officers are prejudicially “trigger happy” when dealing with black suspects.

But a scientific study from Washington State University-Spokane suggests just the opposite. In truth, according to findings from the research team’s innovative experiments:

• Officers were less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites — 25 times less likely, in fact
• And officers hesitated significantly longer before shooting armed suspects who were black, compared to armed subjects who were white or Hispanic

“In sum,” writes Dr. Lois James, a research assistant professor with the university’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology who headed the study, “this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions.

Old View
In the past, based largely on incident report analyses and simplistic laboratory experiments, various researchers have concluded that in making deadly force decisions police are strongly influenced by the race or ethnicity of suspects, “independent of criminality.”

In the 1970s, this perspective was memorably captured in one researcher’s statement that “the police have one trigger finger for whites and another for blacks.” Another claimed that the “disproportionate” number of police shootings of blacks (according to DOJ figures, they are four times more likely to be shot by police than whites) “strongly suggests racial discrimination on a national basis” in law enforcement.

But James points out that it is difficult if not impossible to ferret out racial bias as a decisive factor in shootings from the incomplete and occasionally questionably accurate information included in most incident reports. And the laboratory experiments suggesting bias, she says, commonly “bear almost no resemblance” to real-life deadly force encounters.

For example, a typical research method has involved subjects sitting before a computer and viewing flash pictures of black and white “suspects” paired with weapons or “neutral objects” such as wallets or cell phones. The subjects must respond to these images by pressing “shoot” or “don’t shoot” buttons. Racial bias is then inferred by whether participants are “consistently quicker to shoot armed suspects of a particular race” and by whether decision errors tend to be greater for one race than for the other.

This process lacks what James calls “external validity” — that is, it doesn’t come close to reflecting real-world circumstances, and thus its conclusions are of limited value. “[T]he complex process involved” in deciding to shoot or not shoot and then actually firing a gun is “dramatically different” from the simple reflex of pressing a button, she writes.

Her study involved a more sophisticated, “immersive” approach.

Enhanced Testing
Along with civilians and military personnel who were tested independently, 36 patrol officers and deputies from the Spokane area, all of them white and most of them male, were selected as volunteer subjects for her research. They ranged in age from 31 to 43 and had at least five years on the job.

Armed with a Glock 21 modified to fire a laser beam, the officers one at a time were exposed to a series of at least 10 “highly realistic and arousing” scenarios in a high-definition deadly force judgment and decision-making simulator in WSU’s Simulated Hazardous Operational Tasks laboratory. The equipment permitted precise determination of shot placement and millisecond measurement of shot timing after a threat appeared.

The life-sized scenarios were randomly screened from a pool of 60 one- to two-minute episodes based on actual encounters in which officers have been killed or assaulted. They were filmed in “naturalistic” environments and included disturbance calls, arrest situations, crimes in progress, suspicious person investigations, and traffic stops — the biggest killers of cops. They ranged in “situational difficulty” from “intermediate” to “journeyman,” depending on variables such as the number of people involved, the speed at which action unfolds, and suspect demeanor, intoxication, and deceptive behavior.

Black, white, and Hispanic suspects appeared in the scenarios proportional to their involvement in actual attacks on officers, as compiled in FBI statistics. Suspects were unarmed in about a third of the scenarios.

The key responses that the researchers tested were reaction time and shooting “errors” (in this case, shooting unarmed individuals or failing to shoot armed suspects). James emphasizes that the officer participants had no reason to believe they were being tested for racial or ethnic bias. The issue of suspect race or ethnicity was not raised during the officers’ preparation, and no Ferguson-like, racially charged event was recently in the news that might have overly sensitized them to that concern.

Unexpected Results
Given the prevailing stereotype that cops are unduly harsh toward black suspects, James acknowledges that the outcome of the experiments was “unexpected.”

• Reaction time. Her findings reveal that officers took “significantly longer” before they shot black suspects than white suspects. Civilians and soldiers in the study also took longer to shoot blacks, but the hesitation by officers was roughly twice as long as that of the civilians. The delay before shooting was particularly noticeable in the most complex scenarios.

In contrast, there was “no significant difference in reaction time between shooting Hispanic suspects and White suspects,” James reports.

“Our primary finding that participants were more hesitant to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects is in direct contrast to prior experimental findings that participants are significantly quicker to shoot Black suspects,” she writes.

• Decision errors. Where officers made errors in James’s study, they were “less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects,” she writes. Indeed, “we calculated that participants were 25 times less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than they were to shoot unarmed White suspects.” Again, this was a significantly greater multiple than was recorded for other groups in the study.
Unarmed suspects were most likely to be shot in journeyman scenarios (the most difficult), and there was “no significant difference between the likelihood of shooting unarmed Hispanic suspects and unarmed White suspects,” the researchers found.

Moreover, the officers did not fail to shoot armed white suspects any more frequently than they failed to shoot threatening suspects who were black or Hispanic.

“These findings are also in direct contrast to [earlier researchers] who found that participants were more likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects and fail to shoot armed White suspects,” James noted.

These results revealed that racial bias did exist in the officers’ reactions to the scenarios, James writes — ”but in the opposite direction that would be expected from prior experimental studies.” Her tests “showed significant evidence of bias favoring Black suspects, rather than discriminating against them.”

A “potential explanation,” she speculates, may be a “behavioral ‘counter-bias’ “ or “administrative effect”; that is, an extra caution by officers against impulsive reactions to black suspects because of “real-world concern over discipline, liability, or public disapproval.”

[Although not relevant to the researchers’ primary concerns, James’ team also recorded something that was not surprising: Compared to the civilian volunteers, “police and military participants had better shooting accuracy, fired faster follow-on shots, were far more interactive with the scenarios (for example, shouting at suspects: ‘drop your weapon or I will shoot!’), and had superior command presence....”]

Future Research
James considers her research to be a pilot study and as such she plans to expand it numerically and geographically before feeling confident that the findings can be extrapolated to sworn law enforcement generally. In work that is already underway, she hopes among other things to investigate whether this finding is replicated across larger and more diverse law enforcement samples, and if so, to “determine whether bias favoring Black suspects is a consequence of administrative measures (e.g., education, training, policies, and laws), and identify the cognitive processes that underlie this phenomenon.”

Meanwhile, the existing study, published in print last year under the title “Results from experimental trials testing participant responses to White, Hispanic and Black suspects in high-fidelity deadly force judgment and decision-making simulations,” can be accessed in full for a fee at the website of the Journal of Experimental Criminology. Click here to go there.