Calibre Press Street Survival Newsline - 08-07-08

Seven critical and sometimes controversial questions regarding officer-involved shooting investigations—ranging from when to conduct the officer’s interview to whether he should be allowed certain aids to enhance his memory—are addressed in a new online report posted by a leading educational organization serving law enforcement.

The document, published by Americans for Effective Law Enforcement (AELE) in its web-based Monthly Law Journal, is an amalgam of outright recommendations, apparent best practices, and the consensus of recognized experts in human memory and psychology.

Titled “Administrative Investigations of Police Shootings and Other Critical Incidents: Officer Statements and Use of Force Reports,” the document can be accessed in full by clicking here.

“This report is an excellent summary of the progressive, informed thinking of the day on key OIS issues,” says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato and a prominent authority on officer-involved shootings. “Obviously, departments have to make their own decisions regarding these issues, but AELE has provided cogent, precise information that will help them make the wisest choices.”

In addition to documentary footnotes throughout the report, author Wayne Schmidt, AELE’s executive director, who is an attorney and a former police officer, lists 87 additional references—articles, books, court decisions, model policies, studies—that can be consulted to explore the issues in greater depth. Links are established in the report to most sources.

Although concise—AELE’s conclusions themselves cover less than 6 pages—Lewinski believes the findings “encapsulate the best scientific and procedural opinions that we currently have.”

Here are the questions addressed, along with the essence of the answers AELE provides:

1. What information needs to be obtained from an officer who has killed or wounded a suspect, before the officer is placed on paid, administrative leave?

“[T]he first question a supervisor should ask is whether anyone needs medical attention,” the report states. “The supervisor should then inquire if any suspects have fled and could pose a danger to others.”

The report notes that IACP policy recommends that initially “only minimal, preliminary questions should be asked about the incident.” For example, the Los Angeles Police Dept., which Schmidt says conducts “comprehensive, scientific” OIS investigations, calls for supervisors to obtain a “Public Safety Statement” before involved officers leave the scene (provided their medical condition permits, of course). This statement should include:

•Type of force used
•Direction and approximate number of shots fired by officer(s)/suspect(s)
•Location of injured persons
•Description of outstanding suspect(s), direction of travel, time last seen, known weapons
•Description/location of victims/witnesses/evidence
•Other information necessary to ensure officer/public safety and assist in apprehension.

“[W]hy an officer resorted to deadly force…should be learned later,” the report says.

2. How long should investigators wait before formally interviewing an officer who has used deadly force?

“In no case should a formal interview be conducted in less than 24 hours, even if the officer is willing to participate,” the report emphasizes. “It is better to wait 48 to 72 hours before conducting the interview.”

In a “Concept and Issues paper,” the IACP has acknowledged that an officer’s memory of a shooting event may be affected by perceptual, auditory, and visual distortions, the AELE points out, as well as by a “shock disruption period” that may last from a few minutes to a week or more but usually lasts 2 to 3 days.

“An officer’s recall can improve during this period,” the report states. Behavioral evidence suggests that sleep can assist in that improvement.

Even then, the report says, “Many officers will never remember some of the details of a critical incident. As noted by the IACP, that does not necessarily mean the officer is lying or trying to conceal information. He could have experienced the normal perceptual distortions that commonly occur during moments of peak stress.”

While acknowledging that there are “advantages to both” individual debriefings and group interviews, the report states that “Memory recall can improve when the interview is in a group setting.” Dr. Alexis Artwohl, a former police psychologist and an advisor to the Force Science Research Center, is cited:

“[M]any officers are not fully aware of their own memory and perceptual distortions until they are confronted with evidence that their memories and perceptions are not as complete and accurate as they had previously thought.

“[O]fficers enjoy the benefit [in group debriefings] of finding out what really happened overall and how their own version might differ from the big picture due to memory gaps, memory distortions, distance distortions, perceptual distortions, etc.”

4. Should officers be allowed to be accompanied, at the interview, by an association representative or attorney?

“It is good practice to allow officers to be accompanied by legal counsel, whether privately retained or engaged by a union or association,” the report states. “A refusal to allow the presence of counsel undermines agency morale.”

As for having a union rep present: “In most states, if an officer is a member of a bargaining unit, he or she is entitled to the presence of an association representative at a non-criminal interview if there is a possibility that disciplinary action can result.”

5. Who should complete the Use of Force Report: The involved officer(s), the field supervisor, or a member of the incident investigation team?

“One advantage to writing a single comprehensive report, completed by a supervisor or a member of the incident investigation team, is to frustrate the ability of a plaintiff’s lawyer to point out inconsistencies between courtroom testimony and multiple reports written by each involved officer. This is particularly true when a report incorporates site diagrams, asks about distances, lighting conditions and other environmental information,” the AELE posting advises.

However, IACP Model Policies call for individual narratives after a force incident and management has “an obligation to seek the truth and to impose disciplinary actions for misconduct.”

Consequently, AELE suggests that “a good practice” would be to “require each involved officer to write a narrative of the incident, which can be attached as an addendum to the master report filed by the incident investigation team.”

6. Should the involved officer(s) be allowed a walk-through before giving an interview to investigators?

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7. If there are videotapes, should the officer(s) review them before or after the formal interview?

“Incredibly, some news media representatives and community activists have suggested that allowing officers to view tapes before an interview (or completing a use of force report) facilitates untruthfulness,” the AELE document states.

Schmidt told Force Science News he does not understand how viewing a tape can help a deceptive officer lie better.

More reasonably, to quote the document, “a walk-through and a viewing of videotapes will improve an officer’s recall and lead to a more reliable interview and report.”

Litigation consultants have “strongly urged” that walk-throughs themselves “should NOT be videotaped because they often reveal an officer’s perceptual distortions, and these [may be] used by plaintiff’s counsel to support a claim of untruthfulness.”

In a concluding section, the AELE report notes an IACP recommendation that “officers re-qualify with their firearm after a period of mental recovery—to insure that they are mentally capable of resorting to deadly force again, if necessary.”

Also, “officers must be retrained in policy and procedures within 3 weeks following a shooting.” As the report notes, “It is not just embarrassing, it is costly when a jury learns that an officer cannot correctly recite his agency’s use of force policy and does not remember any details about the last time he was trained on the use of force.”

Finally, the report exhorts mayors, managers, police chiefs and sheriffs to “exercise restraint, even when activists claim police genocide and cover-ups. …[U]ntil the evidence proves otherwise, officers should be respected as professionals and treated as victims, not as aggressors or criminal suspects” after a shooting or other crisis event.

“Part of AELE’s educational mission is to stimulate discussion,” Schmidt told Force Science News. “There will be some people who won’t like this report, although it represents the best conclusions to be drawn from the information available. We’d like to hear from them, as well as from others who have opinions or experiences to share.”

AELE is well known for its training seminars, as well as for its monitoring of court decisions in police-related cases, its publications, and its amicus curiae briefs in support of the law enforcement community.

One of its upcoming programs, on “Lethal and Less-Lethal Force,” deals across 3 days with the issues raised in its report, as well as other legal, psychological and biomechanical aspects of officer-involved shootings.

Among the faculty will be Dr. Lewinski and Dr. Artwohl, as well as Greg Meyer, a member of FSRC’s advisory board and formerly a captain with LAPD.

A free AELE RSS news feeder to keep you up to date with legal developments in law enforcement can be added to your tool bar here.