Why we flinch

Why do we flinch? Is it possible to use the natural flinch as a protective or offensive measure?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcPpQ1XUBj8

Revisiting the "21-foot rule"

From Policemag.com

The Tueller Drill is often evoked as justification by officers after a shooting…But is it scientifically defensible?

http://www.policemag.com/channel/weapons/articles/2014/09/revisiting-the-21-foot-rule.aspx

NJ Officer stabbed; suspect sho after attempted gun grab

Full story here:
http://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/7612367-NJ-cop-stabbed-suspect-shot-after-attempted-gun-grab/

Support Darren Wilson

IMHO: I think we should all purchase one of these and show support and to send a message officers are people too who should be able to show support for each other. If people choose to be offended at the sight of these bracelets, that is their decision and problem. I also think that this police chief should seek employment elsewhere; maybe as a wet-nurse somewhere.

http://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/7608410-Ferguson-police-barred-from-wearing-I-am-Darren-Wilson-bracelets/

Suspect shot after stabbing two officers

http://www.policeone.com/edged-weapons/videos/7595755-Terror-suspect-killed-after-stabbing-2-Australian-officers/

Great class at CGC

Another great Civilian class last night. While most people were out at dinner, the movies or a club... This group of hard-chargers were learning and honing self-protection skills.

Man beheads woman in OK

Good job for the CCW holder/former LEO for taking swift action and neutralizing the threat. I am sure he wished he could have acted sooner...

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/09/muslim-beheads-woman-in-oklahoma-grocery-store-after-failing-to-convert-her/

Body Cams: from ForceScience

10 limitations of body cams you need to know for your protection

A special report from the Force Science Institute

The idea is building that once every cop is equipped with a body camera, the controversy will be taken out of police shootings and other uses of force because "what really happened" will be captured on video for all to see. Well, to borrow the title from an old Gershwin tune, "It Ain't Necessarily So."

There's no doubt that body cameras--like dash cams, cell phone cams, and surveillance cams--can provide a unique perspective on police encounters and, in most cases, are likely to help officers. But like those other devices, a camera mounted on your uniform or on your head has limitations that need to be understood and considered when evaluating the images they record.

"Rushing to condemn an officer for inappropriate behavior based solely on body-camera evidence can be a dicey proposition," cautions Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute. "Certainly, a camera can provide more information about what happened on the street. But it can't necessarily provide all the information needed to make a fair and impartial final judgment. There still may be influential human factors involved, apart from what the camera sees."

In a recent conversation with Force Science News, Lewinski enumerated 10 limitations that are important to keep in mind regarding body-camera evidence (and, for the most part, recordings from other cameras as well) if you are an investigator, a police attorney, a force reviewer, or an involved officer. This information may also be helpful in efforts to educate your community.

1. A camera doesn't follow your eyes or see as they see.

At the current level of development, a body camera is not an eye-tracker like FSI has used in some of its studies of officer attention. That complex apparatus can follow the movement of your eyes and superimpose on video small red circles that mark precisely where you are looking from one microsecond to the next.

"A body camera photographs a broad scene but it can't document where within that scene you are looking at any given instant," Lewinski says. "If you glance away from where the camera is concentrating, you may not see action within the camera frame that appears to be occurring 'right before your eyes.'

"Likewise, the camera can't acknowledge physiological and psychological phenomena that you may experience under high stress. As a survival mechanism, your brain may suppress some incoming visual images that seem unimportant in a life-threatening situation so you can completely focus very narrowly on the threat. You won't be aware of what your brain is screening out.

"Your brain may also play visual tricks on you that the camera can't match. If a suspect is driving a vehicle toward you, for example, it will seem to be closer, larger, and faster than it really is because of a phenomenon called 'looming.' Camera footage may not convey the same sense of threat that you experienced.

"In short, there can be a huge disconnect between your field of view and your visual perception and the camera's. Later, someone reviewing what's caught on camera and judging your actions could have a profoundly different sense of what happened than you had at the time it was occurring."

2. Some important danger cues can't be recorded.

"Tactile cues that are often important to officers in deciding to use force are difficult for cameras to capture," Lewinski says. "Resistive tension is a prime example.

"You can usually tell when you touch a suspect whether he or she is going to resist. You may quickly apply force as a preemptive measure, but on camera it may look like you made an unprovoked attack, because the sensory cue you felt doesn't record visually."

And, of course, the camera can't record the history and experience you bring to an encounter. "Suspect behavior that may appear innocuous on film to a naive civilian can convey the risk of mortal danger to you as a streetwise officer," Lewinski says. "For instance, an assaultive subject who brings his hands up may look to a civilian like he's surrendering, but to you, based on past experience, that can be a very intimidating and combative movement, signaling his preparation for a fighting attack. The camera just captures the action, not your interpretation."

 3. Camera speed differs from the speed of life.

Because body cameras record at much higher speeds than typical convenience store or correctional facility security cameras, it's less likely that important details will be lost in the millisecond gaps between frames, as sometimes happens with those cruder devices.

"But it's still theoretically possible that something as brief as a muzzle flash or the glint of a knife blade that may become a factor in a use-of-force case could still fail to be recorded," Lewinski says.

Of greater consequence, he believes, is the body camera's depiction of action and reaction times.

"Because of the reactionary curve, an officer can be half a second or more behind the action as it unfolds on the screen," Lewinski explains. "Whether he's shooting or stopping shooting, his recognition, decision-making, and physical activation all take time--but obviously can't be shown on camera.

"People who don't understand this reactionary process won't factor it in when viewing the footage. They'll think the officer is keeping pace with the speed of the action as the camera records it. So without knowledgeable input, they aren't likely to understand how an officer can unintentionally end up placing rounds in a suspect's back or firing additional shots after a threat has ended."

4. A camera may see better than you do in low light.

"The high-tech imaging of body cameras allows them to record with clarity in many low-light settings," Lewinski says. "When footage is screened later, it may actually be possible to see elements of the scene in sharper detail than you could at the time the camera was activated.

"If you are receiving less visual information than the camera is recording under time-pressured circumstances, you are going to be more dependent on context and movement in assessing and reacting to potential threats. In dim light, a suspect's posturing will likely mean more to you immediately than some object he's holding. When footage is reviewed later, it may be evident that the object in his hand was a cell phone, say, rather than a gun. If you're expected to have seen that as clearly as the camera did, your reaction might seem highly inappropriate."

On the other hand, he notes, cameras do not always deal well with lighting transitions. "Going suddenly from bright to dim light or vice versa, a camera may briefly blank out images altogether," he says.

5. Your body may block the view.

"How much of a scene a camera captures is highly dependent on where it's positioned and where the action takes place," Lewinski notes. "Depending on location and angle, a picture may be blocked by your own body parts, from your nose to your hands.

"If you're firing a gun or a Taser, for example, a camera on your chest may not record much more than your extended arms and hands. Or just blading your stance may obscure the camera's view. Critical moments within a scenario that you can see may be missed entirely by your body cam because of these dynamics, ultimately masking what a reviewer may need to see to make a fair judgment."

 6. A camera only records in 2-D.

Because cameras don't record depth of field--the third dimension that's perceived by the human eye--accurately judging distances on their footage can be difficult.

"Depending on the lens involved, cameras may compress distances between objects or make them appear closer than they really are," Lewinski says. "Without a proper sense of distance, a reviewer may misinterpret the level of threat an officer was facing."

In the Force Science Certification Course, he critiques several camera images in which distance distortion became problematic. In one, an officer's use of force seemed inappropriate because the suspect appears to be too far away to pose an immediate threat. In another, an officer appears to strike a suspect's head with a flashlight when, in fact, the blow was directed at a hand and never touched the head.

"There are technical means for determining distances on 2-D recordings," Lewinski says, "but these are not commonly known or accessed by most investigators."

7. The absence of sophisticated time-stamping may prove critical.

The time-stamping that is automatically imposed on camera footage is a gross number, generally measuring the action minute by minute. "In some high-profile, controversial shooting cases that is not sophisticated enough," Lewinski says. "To fully analyze and explain an officer's perceptions, reaction time, judgment, and decision-making it may be critical to break the action down to units of one-hundredths of a second or even less.

"There are post-production computer programs that can electronically encode footage to those specifications, and the Force Science Institute strongly recommends that these be employed. When reviewers see precisely how quickly suspects can move and how fast the various elements of a use-of-force event unfold, it can radically change their perception of what happened and the pressure involved officers were under to act."

8. One camera may not be enough.

"The more cameras there are recording a force event, the more opportunities there are likely to be to clarify uncertainties," Lewinski says. "The angle, the ambient lighting, and other elements will almost certainly vary from one officer's perspective to another's, and syncing the footage up will provide broader information for understanding the dynamics of what happened. What looks like an egregious action from one angle may seem perfectly justified from another.

"Think of the analysis of plays in a football game. In resolving close calls, referees want to view the action from as many cameras as possible to fully understand what they're seeing. Ideally, officers deserve the same consideration. The problem is that many times there is only one camera involved, compared to a dozen that may be consulted in a sporting event, and in that case the limitations must be kept even firmer in mind.

9. A camera encourages second-guessing.

"According to the U. S. Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor, an officer's decisions in tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving situations are not to be judged with the '20/20 vision of hindsight,' " Lewinski notes. "But in the real-world aftermath of a shooting, camera footage provides an almost irresistible temptation for reviewers to play the coulda-shoulda game.

"Under calm and comfortable conditions, they can infinitely replay the action, scrutinize it for hard-to-see detail, slow it down, freeze it. The officer had to assess what he was experiencing while it was happening and under the stress of his life potentially being on the line. That disparity can lead to far different conclusions.

"As part of the incident investigation, we recommend that an officer be permitted to see what his body camera and other cameras recorded. He should be cautioned, however, to regard the footage only as informational. He should not allow it to supplant his first-hand memory of the incident. Justification for a shooting or other use of force will come from what an officer reasonably perceived, not necessarily from what a camera saw."

10. A camera can never replace a thorough investigation.

When officers oppose wearing cameras, civilians sometimes assume they fear "transparency." But more often, Lewinski believes, they are concerned that camera recordings will be given undue, if not exclusive, weight in judging their actions.

"A camera's recording should never be regarded solely as the Truth about a controversial incident," Lewinski declares. "It needs to be weighed and tested against witness testimony, forensics, the involved officer's statement, and other elements of a fair, thorough, and impartial investigation that takes human factors into consideration.

"This is in no way intended to belittle the merits of body cameras. Early testing has shown that they tend to reduce the frequency of force encounters as well as complaints against officers.

"But a well-known police defense attorney is not far wrong when he calls cameras 'the best evidence and the worst evidence.' The limitations of body cams and others need to be fully understood and evaluated to maximize their effectiveness and to assure that they are not regarded as infallible 'magic bullets' by people who do not fully grasp the realities of force dynamics."

Another great class today

Tactical Knife Options - Lakewood PD

Another great TKO class. Had LEOs from Lone Tree PD, Broomfield PD, State Parks, Lakewood PD, Aurora Marshals, and Auraria PD. Awesome group of enthusiastic professionals. Thank you!

Training in the Virgin Islands

St. Croix Police Training

Great training with TAC*ONE Consulting, Joe Deedon, Robert, Chris, and John. Over 200 officers on the island. We rotated groups through from Tactical Knife Opitons, ground tactics, TEMS, and range time... Only scratching the surface. We will be back later this year...

 

 

Concentration and Tactical Decision Making…

Concentration and Tactical Decision Making…

The ability to concentrate and focus under stress is essential to the LE professional. Yet, knowing the importance of this skill is different than being able to do it. Understanding the dynamics and physiological impact of Combat-Stress is the least trained; yet most important aspect of Combatives training.

Studies show that the on-duty milieu demands that warriors perform simultaneous, complex tasks in extreme environments with little room for error. Advances in weapon systems, computer aided technology and more interactive/responsive tools will continue to evolve. This will place a premium on attention-capacity, decision-making processes, and motor-control in order to recognize and maximize the viability  and advantages of these technologies.

At any given moment an officer’s five senses (don’t forget about the 6^th-etheric sense) takes in 11 million pieces of information/raw-data. However, the officer can only process 40 pieces of info at any given moment. Concentration skill training and honing becomes more and more important. Take skills training into the “affective” domain as well as the psychomotor and cognitive…

ForceScience Update

Success story: Cops 2, Plaintiffs 0 in excessive force lawsuits
Part of a periodic series

Sgt. Thomas Ovens, an officer in the state of Washington, had scarcely hung up his diploma from the Force Science Certification Course when, in quick succession, he was called on to help defend two major lawsuits against police.

In one case, officers with a large department in Eastern Washington shot and killed a home invader who had assaulted a woman, stabbed a family dog with a "large" knife, tried several times to stab an officer, ignored verbal commands at the end of a foot pursuit, and, still brandishing his bloody edged weapon, turned and charged toward officers after a TASER had failed to bring him down. His survivors claimed that the volley of rounds officers fired at him was excessive and fatally violated his civil rights.

In the other case, a sergeant and his city from Western Washington were named in a federal excessive force suit after the sergeant briefly deployed a TASER against a neighbor who challenged officers while they were trying to subdue an elderly suicidal subject. A district court initially dismissed the case on summary judgment, but on appeal the 9th Circuit appellate court ruled that the suit should go to trial, and Ovens became a key expert witness for the defense when the matter finally played out back at the district level.

"These were the first major cases I've been involved in where I applied material from Force Science since attorneys began calling on me for expert witness work 13 years ago," Ovens told Force Science News. In both cases, he was able to use concepts he learned in the certification course about how human beings perform under stress to explain and justify the actions of the officers involved.

And in both cases, his input was regarded as pivotal in winning victories for the police.

DUEL OF EXPERTS. With more than two decades on the job and experience as a trainer since 1993, Ovens had testified in previous cases in federal and state courts on a gamut of issues, including patrol procedures, tactical operations, and use of force. In the Eastern Washington case, his principal assignment was to evaluate the pre-trial opinion of an expert for the plaintiffs, a former major crimes detective recently retired from a sheriff's office after nearly 30 years in law enforcement.

To subdue the aggressively resistant home invader, two of several officers responding to the incident fired four rounds each, striking him four times. In her analysis, the plaintiff's expert agreed that seven of the shots were justified. But, she argued, the final, eighth round was "objectively unreasonable and unnecessary force."

That round was the fatal one, striking the suspect in the neck and causing blood to "immediately" pour out of his throat and mouth. It was excessive, the expert asserted, because it struck when the assailant had dropped the knife, fallen to the ground, and was "already impaired from the previous three gunshot wounds to his body." At that point, she declared, "the serious level of threat had been removed."

TIME TO STOP. Drawing on his recent Force Science training in his written response, Ovens pointed out that "there are physiological and cognitive limitations to officer performance during a deadly force encounter."

Among these is the Force Science research finding that when officers are firing rapidly in a high-stress, life-threatening confrontation, "in the time it takes for an officer to perceive that the threat has been stopped, decides to stop shooting," and then is able to actually stop, "the average officer will [involuntarily] have fired two additional shots." In other words, just as it takes time for an officer to start shooting once a threat is perceived, it takes time to stop once there's recognition that circumstances have changed.

Noting how quickly officers can pull the trigger under maximum urgency, Ovens estimated that all eight shots probably were "fired in less than one second from the time of the first shot." In that drastically compressed time frame, he explained, for the officers to have perceived that the suspect had dropped the knife, was falling, and was neutralized and to then cease firing would have been "physiologically impossible."

For good measure, Ovens used information from his certification training to address other key issues that seemed likely to arise as the case progressed. Among other things, these included reasonable time-and-distance parameters for dealing with edged-weapon threats, action-reaction realities that impact officer behavior, mental "schemas" or patterns that guide decision-making under stress, and modern standards by which officer actions should be judged.

In all, his assessment of the reasonableness of the officers' use of deadly force covered nearly 20 pages.

OUTCOME. "The officers in this case did a great job," Ovens says. "I was able to come in after the fact and use Force Science principles to support them."

The result: Shortly after Ovens's report was submitted to defense attorneys and reviewed via the discovery process by opposing counsel, the plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their lawsuit. "The case was dismissed with no finding of any wrongdoing whatsoever on the officers' part," Ovens says.

TASER CONTROVERSY. In the Western Washington case involving the controversial Tasing of a meddlesome neighbor, Ovens' courtroom testimony focused on a subject that's explored in depth in the certification course, Recognition-primed Decision-making (RPDM).

The plaintiff was quietly watching TV at home with his wife one spring evening when they were distracted by a ruckus outside. Police had arrived next door to deal with an 80-year-old man, reportedly armed with a gun, who had run a hose from the exhaust of his car into one of the windows and was trying to commit suicide.

Efforts by four officers and a sergeant to get him out of the car and handcuffed had resulted in his being Tased twice. He was being held on the ground, "moaning in pain" with his hands under his body, when the plaintiff hurried out of his house and approached the scene, demanding to know "What are you doing to Jack?!"

Officers yelled at him to "stop" and to "get back" from them. He did stop, "frozen with fear," but didn't retreat. The sergeant started to warn him that he would be Tased if he didn't leave, but then discharged his TASER before completing the warning. The sergeant ended the TASER exposure after just two seconds. The man fell, in "excruciating pain, paralysis, and loss of muscle control."

In remanding the case for trial, the appellate court in a split decision had ruled that Jack's "concerned" neighbor had "engaged in no behavior that could have been perceived...as threatening or resisting." Consequently, "the use of non-trivial force of any kind was unreasonable."

In a written analysis and in his testimony, Ovens explained that the volatile situation at hand had been far from benign. "A suicidal subject by definition is homicidal and may decide to kill someone else before killing themselves," he stated. As the officers attempted to control this uncertain and rapidly evolving encounter, the intruding neighbor was a potentially dangerous distraction.

"In the middle of a struggle with an armed suicidal subject is not the time or place to answer the plaintiff's inquiry," Ovens explained. "He interposed himself where he had no legal right to do so and where common sense dictates he not interfere."

Given the circumstances, his mere proximity "could reasonably be interpreted" as threatening, and his Tasing was "a reasonable force option."

RPDM. Much of Ovens' trial testimony focused on RPDM, which is explained in detail during the certification course. Basically, this involves a decision-making shortcut that the brain takes in selecting responses in high-stress, time-pressured situations.

Up against an urgent, ambiguous, dynamic confrontation where critical information may be missing, an officer doesn't have the luxury of considering a range of control options and rationally analyzing the pros and cons of each. Instead, the brain is forced to quickly grasp whatever assessment cues are available and in microseconds scan through past encounters to try to match them to a familiar pattern, and then seize upon an immediately available response that has proved effective in similar circumstances.

The result may not be ideal, but under the circumstances it can be reasonable, given what the officer knew before acting.

The sergeant being sued for excessive force, Ovens explained, could not have known the plaintiff's orientation and intent. But from past experience and training, he would have recognized the violent potential of an angry, disruptive individual who was failing to retreat from a dangerous situation despite commands. For the sergeant to Tase him briefly to prevent a chance of escalation was well within the realm of reasonableness at the time this incident took place.

VICTORY. The plaintiff had hoped to be awarded more than $1,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages and attorneys' fees, Ovens says. But in the end, the jury didn't see it the plaintiff's way. In a verdict decided last April, the jurors instead exonerated the sergeant and gave the plaintiff exactly...zero.

Defense attorneys told Ovens that his contributions were influential in both these cases. Ovens, in turn, shares the credit with Force Science. "The certification course gave me the ability to test the plaintiffs' theories and see what's really true scientifically and to explain how officers decide what to do in time-pressured environments," he says.

“When cops face off with knives…”

See the full PoliceOne.com story below:

http://www.policeone.com/edged-weapons/articles/7541487-Trending-topics-When-cops-face-off-with-knives/

Denver Officer nealy disarmed- citizens protect her

Training with a secondary deadly force option (duty-knife) could have provided an very viable, effective option. It is awesome some citizens jumped in, but we cant count on that...

“Hamper attempted to grab officer Thompson's firearm whil...e striking her in the face.”

#weaponretention, #tacticalknifeoptions, #selfprotecton, #fliptheswitch

Read the story here:

http://www.9news.com/story/news/local/2014/09/08/2-citizens-help-dpd-officer-after-vicious-beating/15302931/

 

Two Training Slots open/available

Open Slots:
We have two slots available for the upcoming LE Tactical Knife Options-basic user course hosted by the Lakewood Police Department on Wednesday 24 September...

Message me for details on how to register. cqctactics@msn.com